It was a tricky balancing act.
Particularly with the Costain family.
O’Connell joined him and they went to the front door.
The house was actually two semi’s knocked into one, previously council owned, but now private. They had been big houses to start with — four bedrooms, semi-detached — and now the house was effectively a mini-mansion on a council estate. Henry knew it had been bought for a knock-down price because no one else wanted to buy houses on this estate, one of the most deprived in the country.
Henry paused at the door and rubbed his eyelids.
‘I sense hesitation,’ O’Connell chirped from behind.
‘You always hesitate before knocking on this door.’ The sound of laughter came from within. The music pounded away, an incessant, never changing beat. Henry raised his knuckles and rapped loudly. No one answered, so he turned his fist sideways and beat the door again, competing with the bass drum. Briefly the music turned down, then reverted to its original volume. Henry then kicked the door, which was flung open moments later by a teenage girl holding a bottle of WKD. She looked wild and unkempt, and was wearing a mini-nightie, had black hair that looked as though it had exploded in ringlets, mascara that made her look like a nocturnal bird and nothing on under the nightwear, leaving nothing to Henry’s imagination.
‘Fuck d’you want?’
Henry had no idea from which section of the family this girl belonged, but she was definitely a Costain. She had the looks and attitude.
‘I need to speak to a grown-up.’ He said, flashed his warrant card and said, ‘Police.’
She was an achingly pretty girl and reminded Henry of an actress from a film adaptation of a D.H. Lawrence novel he’d seen years ago and almost forgotten. That said, she
sneered contemptibly at Henry’s ID.
‘Like I said, fuck you want?’ She started to close the door, but Henry stepped up like an old-fashioned door-to-door salesman, jammed his foot in the way, and surprised her.
‘I want to speak to an adult,’ he reiterated, now standing only inches away from her scantily clad body. She smelled of alcohol, sweat, cigarette smoke and cheap perfume — a heady mixture, no doubt. Behind her, the living room door opened and a male appeared, several years older than the girl. He was smoking and drinking from a beer can.
‘What’s going on, babe?’
‘This cop,’ she said, ‘yeah, wants to speak to an adult…’ She jerked her head in Henry’s direction.
Henry took a steadying breath. It was never — never — easy at this household. It consisted of numerous relatives claiming descent from Romany gypsies and therefore stealing and hatred of authority ran in their blood. It was their default position. However, the Costains went far beyond simple theft. They were like a mini-Mafia family that existed by theft, yes, but also burglary, drug dealing, intimidation and violence. The Costains had a very firm grip on the estate, controlling much of the drug trade and acting as fences for stolen property. Henry had a very chequered history with them.
‘The first thing I’ll do,’ Henry said, ‘is exercise my lawful right to enter this property and rip the plug out of your hi-fi system, because you are causing a breach of the peace. Next, I’ll arrest you both for obstructing me, and then I’ll look into under-age sex.’ Here he gave a meaningful look to the young man. ‘And then, maybe, I’ll do what I came to do — which doesn’t involve arrests or anything like that.’
‘Oh just piss off… I can’t be arsed with cops,’ the girl said, unimpressed by Henry’s threats. She put her weight behind the door, crushing Henry’s trapped foot.
He uttered a gasp of pain, pushed back hard, caught the girl, sending her staggering back down the hall, where she tripped over her own feet, lost her footing and thumped on to her backside in a very unladylike manner, revealing all.
The young man fronted Henry with aggression, but Henry gave him a withering, daring stare and a tiny shake of the head, and growled, ‘If you’re over twenty-four you have no defence to having sex with an under-age girl.’
The lad’s face dropped.
‘What the friggin’ ’ell’s going on down there?’ a huge, booming voice bellowed from the top of the stairs. A man large enough to carry the voice came down a few steps from the landing in a silk dressing gown, his black curly hair in disarray. He saw Henry. ‘You, you fucker.’
‘Good morning,’ Henry said, ‘I need to have words with you urgently, please.’
It was old man Billy Costain, the ruthless patriarch of the family, the ruler of the roost, the father of at least seven Costain children, including Rory.
The estate known as Shoreside was one of the most dispossessed, dangerous and crime ridden estates in the country. Many houses were boarded up, others frequently damaged by rampaging gangs. Residents tried desperately to be rehoused. Unemployment was about eighty-five per cent. Drugs were rife. Gang feuds were a constant. A row of shops within the estate was now a pile of rubbish. Cops, generally, patrolled in pairs.
Henry knew it was a very complex social scenario, a build-up of issues over many years and although he couldn’t actually blame the Costains for the downfall of society on Shoreside, it was families like them — feral, ruthless and without conscience — that played their part and thrived, whilst other, decent, law abiding ones suffered greatly.
And the master of all the Costain strategies and tactics was now sitting opposite Henry in one of the two living rooms in the interconnected home they owned. Billy Costain was head of the family, although describing him as an old man was not really accurate. He was about sixty-two, but still big and strong, a physical force to be reckoned with. He had a fearsome reputation as a pub brawler that age hadn’t diminished.
The family’s claim to be descended from gypsies could have had a grain of truth to it. Certainly they had the looks of stereotypical gypsies and no doubt there was some of those genes in their bloodline. In fact their main ancestors were Irish, having come across to the north of England in the nineteenth century to make a living as navvies, digging canals and laying railways.
Henry could not be sure when they came to Blackpool, but he knew they’d been here for at least thirty years and in that time had caused the police a mega headache from generation to generation.
What none of the family knew was that Billy’s oldest son, Troy, had been an informant for Henry for many years. Henry had used him mercilessly after he had once arrested him and found that he suffered from severe claustrophobia and could not bear being in a cell. It drove him completely mad, terrified him, and Henry used this knowledge and the threat of incarceration in order to get Troy to pass him information. Unfortunately, Henry had used Troy once too often and the lad had ended up being murdered by a top-line crim Henry was investigating — and the Costains were still seeking answers about how and why Troy had met his untimely end.
Henry glanced around the room. It was plush and well-fitted to the extreme, with a huge L-shaped sofa, a massive TV on the wall with surround sound, a state of the art hi-fi and many expensive looking pieces of garish pottery. He took in all the opulence, juxtaposed against the lack of employment and visible means of support.
‘You, pal,’ Costain said, jabbing a finger at Henry, ‘are the kiss of death to my family.’ His jowls wobbled. He looked at Keira O’Connell. ‘But you’re a bonny thing, lass. You a cop, too?’