‘I had been married once, screwed that up, too. Then this woman came along who I’d known for years and suddenly, click! In love.’ Alison applied another strip. ‘But as I say, I messed it up.’ He pouted. ‘What about you? You said you were a nurse.’
‘In the army. I was a soldier first, then trained as a nurse.’
‘Oh — I was a Marine as a kid.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘And… go on,’ he encouraged her.
‘I met my husband in the army. It was a short marriage. He was killed in Afghanistan when his unit were trapped in a village and the population came out and beat them to death.’ She peeled another strip and placed it over the wound.
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Six years, give or take.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Shit happens.’
Flynn’s brow furrowed. ‘Is Ginny your daughter? I noticed a photo…’
‘She’s Robert’s daughter from his first marriage, Robert being my husband. We’re kind of inseparable and when I left the forces and came up here, she tagged along. She’s a good lass. There.’ The final strip was applied and smoothed down, fully closing the wound. ‘You still need to go to A amp;E. It’s a while since I patched anyone up.’
Flynn touched it gingerly. ‘Seems like a good job.’
Their faces were only inches apart.
Henry had completed the custody record. Separately he jotted down on a scrap of paper some notes which would form the basis of his arrest statement. When he’d done that, he phoned through to control room and spoke to the Force Incident Manager, brought him up to date. An incident log had been started from his previous call and Henry was keen to keep things updated, mainly to cover his own back.
During the course of the conversation with the FIM he was told that Rik Dean was trying to get a message through and could Henry call him back as soon as possible.
Henry gave Rik a call to his mobile, but it went straight through to voice mail. Henry left a short message, then sat back as a wave of exhaustion swept through him like the tidal bore on a river. He looked at Callard, attached by the plastic hoops to the central heating system. He had fallen asleep for a while, but had woken himself with a loud snore and was staring uncomprehendingly at Henry.
Don’t spew and don’t piss your pants, Henry thought, recalling the days when he’d been a custody officer, one of the toughest jobs in the police, and one of the most unpleasant. Henry had cleaned up a lot of shit in his time.
‘It’s not over,’ Callard growled thickly.
‘What’s not over?’
‘Tonight… more to come.’
‘Meaning?’
But Callard just closed his eyes and was instantly asleep again.
Fending off the urge to kick him repeatedly, Henry stood up slowly, his limbs and muscles screaming with annoyance. All they wanted to do was curl up and go beddy-byes, as did his brain. The phone rang. He grabbed it.
‘Superintendent Christie.’
‘Henry — what the hell’s going on?’ Rik Dean demanded to know. ‘I’ve been trying to contact you for hours.’
‘I’m trapped in the middle of nowhere with a dead cop, a nutter with a shotgun and a sus ex-cop, so I hope what you have to tell me is important, Rikky boy.’
‘Uh — dunno then.’
‘Spit.’
‘You know I went to speak to Calcutt after the trial?’
Henry screwed up his face, trying to recall. It seemed such a long time ago, but he remembered Calcutt, the professional killer, had asked to speak to Henry after the trial had ended. Henry, eager to get away, had delegated the job to Rik, then promptly forgotten about it. Calcutt, he reflected, suspected of being hired by none other than Jonny Cain to whack a rival. The only thing the trial had proved, and all that was needed, was that Calcutt had killed Deakin. The ‘why’ had never been established because Calcutt had admitted nothing. Henry tensed. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, big dos, little dos, I only actually got to see him on remand at Manchester prison today. He spoke — actually spoke! Said he knew he was screwed, was going down for life and wanted to unburden himself.’
‘Bollocks,’ Henry said in disbelief.
‘Exactly,’ Rik said. ‘And he told me nothing, except for one thing.’ Rik paused dramatically. ‘He said the world he operates in is very cloistered, y’know, Assassins Anon, and there are only a handful of people who do what he does and they sort of know each other-ish.’
‘The point, Rik.’
‘Told me that the person who hired him, the identity of whom we’ll never know, had hired someone else to do some more dirty work.’
Henry waited for the revelation. It never came. ‘And?’
‘That’s it. Reading between the lines, he’s telling us that Jonny Cain has hired a hit man to whack some other guy.’
Henry soaked this up. ‘Nothing else? Just teased us like that?’
‘Yes. Calcutt said that if he told us anything else, he would end up dead in prison.’
Henry thanked Rik and hung up slowly, churning this new information. He sighed deeply, knowing that, interesting as it was, it probably had no bearing on what had happened or what was happening in the village on this snowy evening. But it was interesting, needed to be borne in mind.
Callard was asleep, groaning, snoring obscenely. Henry went out of the office to find Flynn.
The cough snapped the moment between Flynn and Alison. They jumped back from each other to see Henry standing at the bathroom door, a scornful expression on his face.
‘When you’ve finished,’ he said, his voice brittle.
Alison ran her thumb across the butterfly strips on Flynn’s wound, then gathered the medical kit together, not looking at Henry.
Flynn grinned triumphantly.
‘Callard’s asleep,’ Henry said. ‘I will go and speak to Jonny Cain. Do you think you can look after him?’
‘Not my problem,’ Flynn teased him.
‘I know, but if you don’t do it, I’ll be stuck here watching him all night and I’ll miss the chance to collar one of the country’s biggest drug dealers.’ Alison spun to look at Henry, shock on her face at this revelation. ‘And you were so desperate to nail him way back when, so I don’t want to miss the chance, yeah? Even if he only gets roped into this as a witness, at least we’ll have some hold over him.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Alison stood up. ‘I’ll run you back down to the Owl,’ she said to Henry, who hid a smirk when he saw Flynn’s crestfallen face.
FIFTEEN
Even for a senior detective, actually coming face to face with a top-notch criminal was a rare treat. Such people were usually only spoken to — and usually by lower-ranking detectives — when all the background work had been done and it was time to move in. Only then did the cop and criminal, hunter and prey, come into contact.
After Felix Deakin had taken the bullet that parted his hair, and Jonny Cain had walked free from a murder trial when all the other potential witnesses gave thought to their own futures — then suddenly developed severe memory loss — it was pretty obvious that Cain had ordered the hit on his rival. Even when Calcutt, the hit man, had been arrested, the link to Cain was never proved despite the lengthy investigation. Cain, of course, was interviewed but Henry did not meet him, did not carry out the interviews. That had been left to Rik Dean and other detectives on the team. It proved to be a useless exercise, but one that had to be carried out. It was simply going through the motions, knowing that unless he held up his hand and said fair cop and confessed, he would be walking.
The cocky man had even presented himself at a police station for interview, with his solicitor, knowing that he would be laughing all the way to liberty. He had been relaxed, smug, confident, constantly saying, ‘I just don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and even gave Rik Dean a kiss-wave goodbye when he strolled out of the cop shop.
Nailing Cain would have been great, but Henry was nothing if not pragmatic. As such, he decided to back off in the knowledge that in the future, Cain would do something that would seal his own fate. Plus, Cain was a Serious and Organized Crime Agency target and it was up to them now. Henry was an SIO and had his own workload to deal with.