He could not tell… in his mind he was still visualizing how to use that till and asking an imagined customer to enter his PIN number.
Then he remembered… Liz wasn’t saying goodbye, she was saying, ‘See you later. I have to be in work by eight. I finish at four today… can I see you tonight?’ Flynn remembered saying yes, absolutely. He also remembered the night. And smiled contentedly. And he looked along the skirting board again at that small object wedged under it.
He yawned and flipped on to his back, still smiling. A paramedic. Fancy. He’d always liked paramedics… he kept smiling and remembering… and then his face creased into a frown as he suddenly realized what the object was underneath the skirting.
In disbelief he scrambled off the bed and scuttled along the floor and tried to prise the object out from where it was by using his thumb and forefinger to grip it. He couldn’t quite… He cast around and saw Alison’s car keys which he grabbed and using the ignition key he started to gently tease the object out. It was tightly stuck in there, but eventually it came out with a pop and rolled a few inches across the floor like a dice. Flynn stared at it, then picked it up, sat back on his naked bottom, and held it up to the light filtering through the curtained window, like it was a precious diamond.
It wasn’t a gemstone, though. It was a tooth. A premolar with a gold filling.
SIXTEEN
As Flynn was frowning at the tooth and twirling it around between his fingers, Henry Christie was pulling up on the driveway of Harry Sunderland’s house on the banks of the River Lune at Halton.
For five and a half hours, Henry had slept soundly — the culmination of exhaustion and exertion. He had risen as fully rested as possible — he rarely slept more than six hours anyway — and had a shower, kissed a sleepy Alison, and set out on the road in the Vectra for what he knew would be a hell of a day, one way or the other. He was relishing it.
His journey took him, once more, past the point where his Merc had been forced off the road. He stopped for a couple of minutes, got out of the pool car and stood by the roadside, hands on hips, considering just how lucky he had been to survive, first the accident, then what happened after.
He didn’t dwell on it, although the horrendous bureaucratic repercussions yet to come did weigh heavily on him.
A man had died, killed in self-defence and quite deservedly so, but one could never predict what a coroner or the CPS might conclude from it. Henry knew that Steve Flynn had done absolutely the right thing, others might be swayed to think differently. Henry knew there was going to be a mighty judicial battle ahead. But he was up for it.
He arrived at Sunderland’s house just a short time later.
The room in which Flynn had spent the night was the first-floor store room above the chandlery and he had made room for the makeshift double bed between various stacked boxes and equipment. The bed had gone on the only space on the floor.
Still naked and holding up the tooth, Flynn glanced around the room.
He shivered, placed the tooth down and decided to get dressed, so he pulled on his clothes and started to rearrange the room.
The support unit search team had already arrived, together with a dog handler, Henry was pleased to see. These kinds of cops were a keen bunch, very professional, and Henry had a lot of time for the specialists.
The sergeant from the previous night approached him with two brews in hand from the urn that the support unit always seemed to have with them on their travels, topped up with boiling water from some source or other. It seemed to Henry that the job description for the sergeants must include having the skills, abilities and resourcefulness of a spiv.
‘Took a chance, boss,’ he said, handing Henry a Styrofoam cup. ‘Coffee, milk, no sugar… real coffee, by the way.’
‘Nail on head, Dave. Cheers.’ Henry took a sip of the drink and it tasted wonderful in the circumstances. For some reason he had never had a bad brew whilst out on a police operation.
‘We’ve already started,’ the sergeant updated Henry. ‘In the house and I got the dog man in just to have a quick skim along the river bank with Fido and also to work out how best we can fingertip-search it later and to see if there’s any likely point at which Mrs Sunderland might have gone in. I dunno,’ the sergeant said, ‘maybe signs of a scuffle of something.’
‘Sounds good,’ Henry said, pleased they’d got things going so quickly. He sipped the coffee and two things happened simultaneously: his own mobile phone rang and the sergeant was called up on his PR.
Henry flipped open his phone.
The sergeant turned away and said, ‘Go ahead,’ into his radio.
Before Henry could finish saying his name, the voice at the other end of the phone said immediately, ‘Henry, it’s Rik — you need to get yourself down here pretty fuckin’ quick.’ It was Rik Dean calling from Blackpool police station.
‘Why, what’s going on?’
‘High-falutin’ briefs putting pressure on the custody sergeant and the divisional chief super is what is going on! Where the hell’ve you been? I’ve been calling you for the last hour.’
Henry said calmly, ‘Just tell me what’s happening, bud.’
‘These two — Sunderland and Barlow — are walking unless you can convince the custody officer and chief super otherwise… there’s talk of unlawful arrests and all sorts of shit, so you need to get here, Henry.’
‘I’ll be at least half an hour at the soonest,’ Henry said, now feeling bile in his throat. Solicitors and a chief superintendent up and about at this time of the day did not bode well. He had one of those horrible in-body feelings, where the sensation was like all the blood was draining out of his legs. He threw his coffee onto the driveway. ‘Is the chief super there?’
‘No, he’s in a conflab with these solicitors and I’ll tell you, they’re two smooth fucking reptiles.’
‘What’s their beef?’
‘Uh — speculative arrests, neither man should have spent a night in custody. They should have been bailed. You’re not working quickly enough — like, y’know, going home for the night.’
‘The chief super’s falling for that?’ Henry said in amazement.
‘He’s dithering, I know that. They turned him out at five this morning.’
Henry spun as he thought quickly. ‘Tell him not to let them go. I’ll be there as soon as I can and in the meantime get him to call me and I’ll try and speak to him. I’ve got his number. Oh, why are you there so early?’
‘I came in early to clear some of my paperwork,’ he said.
‘OK.’
The sergeant had had a shorter conversation over his radio and was waiting for Henry to finish.
‘Boss?’ he said quickly.
‘What?’
‘Dog man down by the river — his dog has found something.’
Henry waited for the revelation, encouraging the sergeant with his body language.
‘A Wellington boot… and there’s something in it.’
‘What?’
‘A camera-phone.’
Henry had been on the point of rushing off to deal with the custody office emergency in Blackpool, but he knew five minutes wouldn’t change anything. ‘Let’s go see.’
He traipsed after the sergeant across the wide lawn of Sunderland’s garden, onto a path winding through some rhododendron bushes which then sloped down to the river which was running high and fast. Henry could imagine someone falling in and instantly being swept away to the coast and drowned.
The dog man, a support unit constable and the German shepherd dog, full name LanConBertie, were clustered by a bunch of low-growing bushes, chattering.
‘What’ve you got?’ the sergeant asked them.
‘It’s behind there,’ the dog man said and led Henry and the sergeant around the bush where, seemingly tucked out of sight, was a lone pink-and-grey polka-dotted cut-off Wellington boot, for the left foot.