The plane touched down twenty minutes ahead of schedule. The tailwind had assisted passage, but the flight itself had been beset by turbulence and the seat belt signs had been lit for most of the journey. Most of the passengers were mute and a little afraid, despite attempts by the cabin crew to keep up spirits.
The small, ill-looking man in row 39, seat E — the window seat — hardly moved throughout the flight. He’d positioned himself at an unusual angle against the side of the plane, tucked in tightly, facing the window. He smiled wanly at the couple in the seats next to him, then closed his eyes and slept.
On landing he waited for most of the other passengers to leave the plane before tugging out the small piece of hand luggage he’d stored under the seat in front of him. Then he rose slowly and stiffly, and tried to disembark without drawing attention to himself.
It worked. No one had taken much notice of him. No one would really remember him, which was as it should be. He walked out unchallenged through the terminal building after showing his British passport to a bored and tired looking customs official.
Normally the interior of the plane would not have been so thoroughly cleaned. If it had been a straight turn around, the cabin crew would have done a quick once-through and without much care.
As it was, the plane had reached its resting place for the night and therefore a proper cleaning crew entered and worked their way methodically through it.
When a cleaner reached seat 39E, she stopped suddenly, puzzled at first by the dark stain on the seat and seat back. It was big, not the normal food or drink stain she usually came across. She beckoned over a colleague and both women inspected the stain closely, then looked knowingly at each other.
In unison, they said, ‘ Si, la sangre. ’
Blood.
NINE
A sour-faced, very exhausted Mark Carter sat defiantly in an interview room at Blackpool police station. His arms were folded and he glared up at the camera positioned high in one corner that recorded his movements. Having attended the station voluntarily he had not been arrested, but he knew it was probably only a matter of time.
Not that it worried him. He’d done nothing wrong, but there was always a problem demonstrating innocence to cops. They always worked on the assumption that you were guilty and worked backwards from there, making the jigsaw fit around that. At least that is what Mark Carter believed they did. Fit you up because it was easier than unearthing the truth.
He jerked his middle finger up at the camera lens and mouthed a word that didn’t need a lip reader to translate.
Henry’s morning had been hectic. Up at six thirty after a fitful night’s sleep exacerbated by severe indigestion: note — order chicken curry in future because that never made him feel bad. He had showered speedily and was walking into the station just after seven, trying to focus his mind on the day ahead.
He met Rik Dean in Rik’s office just off the main CID office, where they sat down over a strong filter coffee and bacon sandwiches to organize the hours that lay ahead. They worked on to-do lists, wanting to miss nothing, and get the inquiry into Natalie Philips’s murder kick-started. Henry was aware that some of the momentum had been lost already because he’d got involved in yesterday’s motorway mayhem. He wanted to pick up speed and get a well-briefed team out there knocking on doors, making people who knew Natalie feel very uncomfortable. He knew how crucial the first seventy-two hours of a murder investigation were — and that had now been whittled down to forty-eight hours.
By nine he had screamed and bawled at too many people. Not something the ‘old’ Henry had been prone to do, but since Kate died he’d discovered he was far less patient with people who dragged their feet. Anyway, it seemed to work that morning and something resembling a murder inquiry was coming together. Search and forensic teams were at the scene outside the crematorium, six pairs of detectives were responding to various ‘actions’ that had been generated and house-to-house enquiries were underway in the area around the crematorium.
There was a slight problem in that the location of the murder was actually just over the border in another division, but Henry wasn’t too concerned about it. Natalie was a Blackpool girl and it was more than likely her death was associated with people she knew in Blackpool, so Henry had decided to run the job from the resort.
He was desperate to find the last person to see Natalie alive and his early theory was that it was probably somebody in Blackpool. At the back of his mind, he hoped it wasn’t Mark Carter.
Henry sat back and stretched. Everything ached. Joints cracked and creaked. He felt his age and he scoffed contemptuously at whoever said the fifties were the new thirties.
Next task was to get the Murder Incident Room — MIR — up and running with the necessary staff in it and to get the murder book up to date.
The phone on Rik’s desk rang. The DI scooped it up. ‘Right, thanks, yeah… in an interview room… if he tries to leg it, arrest him… uh-huh… murder… be down, say five minutes. Cheers.’ Rik hung up and looked across the desk at Henry. ‘Well would you credit it?’
‘Mark Carter?’ Henry guessed as though he could read Rik’s mind. He hadn’t mentioned the phone call he’d got from Mark.
Rik nodded. ‘You a mind reader or something?’
The boy was almost eighteen now, old enough to be interviewed without any parent or other responsible adult being present. Not that he had a parent or anyone else that was interested in his welfare. No father, dead mother, jailed older brother, dead sister; Mark was pretty much alone in the world.
‘Good of you to come in willingly, Mark,’ Henry said.
‘There was a choice?’
‘Ultimately, no.’
Mark shrugged. ‘So here I am.’
‘We want to talk about you and Natalie, as you know.’
‘So you said yesterday.’
‘Why did you run?’
‘Because, Henry, you always bring me bad news. You always fuck with my mind and it’s always best to avoid you.’
‘Yet you rang me?’
Rik gave Henry a puzzled sideways glance.
‘Only because you’d have nicked me if I hadn’t — and because I have nothing to hide.’
‘You and Natalie went out together?’ Henry asked.
‘A bit.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Nowt to tell. We went out for while, then we split.’
‘Mutual decision?’
‘Are they ever?’
‘I thought you were smitten with Katie Bretherton.’
Mark screwed up his face. ‘Not now. It’s all over.’
Henry studied Mark, seeing a much older, time-scarred lad than the one he’d first met. He was spotty now, had acne, was sprouting hair all over, looked unwashed and frankly a bit of a mess.
‘What do you do other than work at KFC?’
‘College.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Astrophysics,’ he laughed bitterly. Henry waited, then Mark relented. ‘A course in motor vehicle technology.’
‘Oh, good lad.’
‘Yeah, right. I’m going to be a grease monkey. Ho-di-hey!’ He set his face hard at Henry. ‘What about Natalie?’
‘You tell me.’
‘We went out, we split up.’
‘Did she dump you?’
Mark blinked and Henry thought, yes… another person either leaving or dumping him. Not one person has stayed with him, poor sod. Mark nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Duh — because I wanted a steady relationship and she didn’t. She was a bike and liked being ridden — or didn’t you know that?’
‘A bike as in…?’
‘Shagged left right and centre,’ he said crossly, his body language leaking a touch of rage.
‘So you screwed her too?’ Rik Dean piped up at this point, leaning forward on the table. Up to then he’d sat silent, just shot Henry the occasional quizzical look.
Mark’s mouth snapped shut. His head rotated slowly to Rik, his eyes dead.