Rider merely smiled at her and raised his eyebrows.
The doorbell rang.
Jacko, who’d been restocking the bar, sauntered away to answer it while Rider pointed out a few more things to Isa.
A few moments later, Jacko was back, flustered.
‘ Cops,’ he said.
Rider closed his eyes despairingly as he remembered something. The bell rang again.
He dashed behind the bar, reached under the counter, rummaged for a second and pulled out the gun he’d commandeered from Curly. He shoved it into Jacko’s hands who held it like he’d been given a dog turd.
‘ Take that upstairs and hide it — hide it somewhere they won’t find it, just in case they want to search the place. Well, go on, go on!’ He shooed Jacko away. ‘Make yourself scarce, Isa.’
‘ What do they want?’ she asked wide-eyed, the sight of the gun having thrown her.
Rider did not reply. He turned and walked to the front door, grating his teeth angrily, swearing at the thought of Conroy. Today was becoming like one of the good old days, and the sad thing was, annoyed though he was by the whole debacle, he was quite enjoying it, in a sick, perverted sort of way.
After Henry had finished at the zoo, he made his way back to the mortuary. Dr Baines, the pathologist, didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already guessed. The girl had died from multiple stab-wounds. Anyone from a total of forty could have been the fatal blow.
Baines promised a written report as soon as possible. That meant anything up to a week because of workload.
Henry thanked him, waved goodbye to Jan and gloomily returned to the office, where he immediately sought out FR His boss was in the murder room set up for the newsagents job, in deep conversation with Tony Morton. Henry had to wait to step in.
FB looked blandly unconvinced when Henry said he wanted a full team on the beach corpse.
‘ Sorry Henry, this takes priority in terms of manpower and resources.’ He flicked his hands at the incident room. ‘The sordid little murder of a junkie who was probably on the game and deserved what she got doesn’t even rank.’
Anger bubbled up inside him at these crass remarks, but he managed not to punch the living daylights out of FB.
‘ She actually deserves as much as anyone,’ he replied calmly.
FB gave one of his famous sneers and said, ‘That’s as maybe, but the reality is you’re gonna have to manage this one as best you can with the resources available — i.e. whoever’s left in the office.’
‘ They’re all on this sodding job. Can I have Derek Luton back?’
‘ Nope — you’ll have to make do.’
‘ Jesus,’ Henry uttered under his breath.
FB relented slightly. ‘Tell you what. I’ll give you one HOLMES terminal and an operator to go with it.’
‘ Big fuckin’ deal,’ Henry snapped.
‘ Don’t push it, Henry,’ FB warned him.
‘ Overtime budget?’
FB laughed.
And that was that.
In the CID office, the Support Unit Sergeant who had been leading the team searching the beach for evidence was waiting. He handed a small black leather-clutch bag with a gold clasp and shoulder strap triumphantly to Henry.
The find cheered Henry.
Eagerly he cleared his desk top, spread out a sheet of polythene and opened the water-sodden bag, emptying out the contents. He had been hoping that there would be something in here to give him a quick lead, even though there was nothing to suggest the bag even belonged to the dead girl.
And the contents of the bag were, at first glance, going to be of no use whatsoever in solving the murder.
A crumpled packet of Benson amp; Hedges cigarettes, three left in, a plastic throwaway lighter and a syringe with a rusty needle. Everything soaked in sea-water, the cigarettes being not much more than tobacco mush.
‘ Fuck,’ said Henry, disappointed, but not completely surprised.
It would have been nice to have tipped out a driving licence and passport with her name on and a diary detailing her most recent acrimonious split with her latest lover who had threatened to kill her
… but it was not to be.
He tipped the cigarettes out of the packet then carefully ripped out the gold paper innards. Nothing.
He looked closely at the lighter, flicked the mechanism and found it worked. It gave him nothing else.
Neither did the syringe. Inside it, though, looked to be the crystallised remains of some controlled substance.
He turned the bag inside out, finding the black nylon lining to be ripped, he probed with his fingers into the space between the lining and the bag. Nichts.
‘ Don’t suppose you found anything else?’ he asked the Support Unit Sergeant hopefully.
Negative.
Shit.
Despondently Henry picked up the bag again and twirled it around between his hands. He looked through it once more… and saw something. Tucked into the bottom corner of the mirror pocket, folded several times, was a small piece of paper.
Very easy to miss, he reassured himself.
He pulled it out, holding it tentatively between finger and thumb, laid it out on the desk. It was sodden, almost to the point of disintegration.
Using the tip of a ball-point pen he unfolded it, trying not to tear it. He ended up with a triangular piece of paper which could have been the corner of a page, possibly a telephone directory. Some words — thankfully in pencil- were written on the paper and quite legible. An address — a house number and a street name, but no town specified.
Henry made the assumption it was Blackpool.
Ten minutes later, together with another detective, he was pushing his way through the main door of a block of flats in South Shore, about to do one of the things he most enjoyed doing: knocking on doors.
It looked a likely place, and although he tried not to stereotype people, he could well imagine the dead girl to have lived in such surroundings.
He rapped his knuckles sharply on the first door he came to and looked around whilst waiting for a reply.
The hallway, which reeked of cat piss, was littered with uncollected post, milk bottles — empty, unwashed — and a baby buggy. Oddly enough, no cats were to be seen. Henry glanced over his shoulder at the tubby Detective Constable who was accompanying him. ‘See, told you. They all smell the same, these places.’
The detective, Dave Seymour, nodded. ‘I know, boss.’ He was an experienced officer with more years on the CID than Henry and only a couple to go before retirement.
Henry raised his hand to knock again just as the door opened reluctantly — but only as far as the flimsy security chain allowed. Henry could easily have put his shoulder to the door and burst through.
Behind the door stood a thin, pale-faced female holding a screaming baby to her flat chest. Her eyes were red raw, sunken. One of them bore the remnants of a nasty-looking green bruise. From inside the flat came the sound of a TV turned up to a high volume.
She clocked the two men as detectives straight away.
‘ What do you want?’ she asked cautiously, appraising them.
‘ We’re investigating a death,’ Henry told her, having to raise his voice to compete with the baby-TV combination. ‘Could we have a word, please? Inside.’ He showed his warrant card.
‘ I don’t know nothin’ an’ I haven’t done nothin’,’ she said nervously, juggling the baby up and down. The child picked up her tension and the volume from its lungs increased by several decibels.
‘ We’re just after some information, that’s all,’ Henry informed her. ‘We won’t keep you long — honest.’ He smiled.
She tutted, put the door to, unhooked the chain and let the two detectives come into her living accommodation. It consisted of three tiny rooms: a bed/living room with a mattress covered with grimy sheets in one corner, a couple of big, second-hand armchairs and a good quality TV set on top of a small cupboard; a minuscule bathroom, and a kitchen with a three-ringed cooker, sink and no fridge. In overall area, the flat was no bigger than a small towing caravan but was much less luxurious.