‘Right … we’re due for a briefing at eight this morning, but do me a favour and turn out DI Roscoe and DS Debbie Black. Ask them to meet me at the MIR at Blackpool as soon as. Send a copy of the message from North Yorks to the MIR, too, will you?’
‘Will do.’
‘And thanks for letting me know.’
Henry got dressed in the walk-in wardrobe, spinning dangerously around as he pulled on his M amp;S Y-fronts and socks, trying not to disturb Kate too much and probably not succeeding terribly well. He crashed out of the wardrobe to find her up on one elbow staring crossly at him.
‘Sorry,’ he said, bending to kiss her. ‘Could be a long one, this.’
‘I gathered. Just keep in touch, OK?’
‘Yep.’ He snuck out of the bedroom and down the stairs. He felt his face. He had showered when he got in from changing the tyre and shaved at the same time, as he had thought something like this might happen. He didn’t want to be rushing round so he had prepared himself for the eventuality, like the good boy scout he had never been. If only he could have got some decent sleep, the plan would have worked quite well. As it was, he was well groomed but feeling no better than before, and his leg still hurt and his eye throbbed. Before leaving the house he helped himself to two Anadin Ultra capsules and pocketed the rest of the packet now that his hospital supply had been consumed. Stocked up for the day with pain relief.
Stepping out of the front door gave him a flashback to all those years ago when he was a sprog in the job, when work seemed to be an endless round of early shifts and night duty; one way or another he had been awake at some horrendous time of day. He was glad those days were long gone and he genuinely felt sorry for some of his contemporaries, who after twenty-five-plus years of coppering were still PCs working shifts. Poor bastards. Most people he had joined with had moved away from that, but there were still some sad ones left who looked ill, drawn and desperate to retire.
He breathed in deeply at his second early start on the trot, and walked across to his car on the drive, parked next to Kate’s Toyota Yaris. He sat in the driver’s seat of the Mondeo, wondering how he was going to get time to get to a tyre repair place when, just as he was about to insert his key, something made him sit up straight, furrow his brow. Something he’d seen. But he wasn’t quite sure what.
After a moment of cogitation, he got out and inspected the car and saw it.
It began at the headlight cluster on the front wing and finished at the backlight cluster. One long, continuous line: a deep gouge from front to back. He bent down and looked closely at it, touching it.
It was deep. Not superficial. All the way through each layer of paint to the metal below. Probably made by a screwdriver or a key.
He stood upright, hands on hips, speechless. He walked round and checked the rest of the car, but that was the only scratch.
‘Bastards,’ he hissed angrily. ‘Who the …?’ Actually, he immediately had a very good idea; not necessarily who had committed the damage, but why it had been done. The corruption investigation in GMP. The police car he’d used during the investigation had been damaged a few times during the course of his time there as he unearthed a web of criminality and upset a lot of nasty people. Obviously the game was now being carried on to his home turf.
A cold, nervous shiver ran through him.
A serious and worrying development, maybe having implications for his family.
Henry wracked his brain, wondering if he had missed seeing the damage last night during the wheel change. It could be that it had happened elsewhere, not on his drive at home. It was possible he’d missed it last night … and with that thought of reassurance, he pulled away from home and headed to work, but only after he’d got down on his hands and knees and checked the underside of the car for a bomb.
Sunday is never a good day to get food in a police station, as canteen facilities are usually nine to five weekdays and Saturdays. Henry stopped off at a little cafe he knew of old in South Shore and ran in for a bacon sarnie and hot tea in a large plastic cup, which he then drove to the nick with. He hurried to the MIR, where he devoured his breakfast feast, scoffing the last mouthful as the two bleary-eyed female detectives slobbed sleepily into the room.
‘Progress?’ Jane asked, rubbing her eyes.
He held up a copy of the message from the FIM which he had printed off. ‘Young girl missing from North Yorks … doesn’t look good.’ Jane took the paper and scanned through the message. ‘I’d like you both to go over to Harrogate and do the necessary with the police and the family over there. We need to see if we can get a DNA match with our body. We’ll fast track everything.’
‘I thought I was crime scene manager,’ Jane whined. ‘They don’t go gallivanting around.’
‘They do if the SIO says they do,’ Henry retorted coldly, but seeing her stiffen, he relented. ‘We won’t get a full team on to this tomorrow and I’d like to get as much as poss done today. I don’t want any feet dragging on this one … and it’s a trip out, isn’t it? Harrogate’s lovely.’
Jane did not reply.
Debbie looked at him, a smile playing on her full lips, the lips Henry had kissed not many hours previously.
‘Do we get chance of breakfast before we go?’ Jane asked sourly.
‘There’s a couple of Little Chefs on the A59,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘Get an all day breakfast.’
‘Right,’ she said haughtily, getting the message. She turned to Debbie and Henry could feel the friction between the two of them, something he could not understand. But then again, the older and wiser he got, the less he seemed able to get to his head around women anyway. ‘You ready to go?’ Jane said.
Debbie nodded and they left Henry, a lone figure amongst the blank computer screens.
Time to tell Sharky, aka Dave Anger, about the new development — if he didn’t already know, Henry thought cynically.
Most of the morning was procedure-driven, ensuring that the staff he had were briefed and tasked and that everything that should be in place for a murder enquiry would be by Monday. He was under no illusions about the job he had to do, being the leader of the team, providing the investigative focus, coordinating and motivating the team, being accountable for every facet of the enquiry whilst managing a whole host of resources to maximum effect. There was no place for a loner in such a set-up, though the use of initiative was always encouraged.
He knew it was absolutely necessary to go through all the correct procedures even though he was confident that the arrest of George Uren was not far away. However, Henry still found that when he got five minutes breathing space he retreated to his office and did some doodling on a pad. He wrote: ‘Why + when + where + how = who?’ Standard SIO thinking. It was pretty obvious that Uren and A. N. Other constituted the ‘who’ of the equation, but Henry was certain that all the other bits would need to be addressed in depth, particularly the ‘why?’, even after Uren had been locked up.
There was also something else he did not want to forget, and that was the fact that he was originally heading an investigation into a series of sexual assaults on young children and the discovery of the body in the boot had spun that off at a tangent. He knew he had to bear this in mind and keep his thinking open. It would be a tragedy if he pinned his hopes on George Uren to be the offender for those offences and then find out he was wrong. If the two strands came together and Uren confessed to these crimes, that would be great, but Henry wasn’t banking on it.
There was something altogether more sinister and brutal about the death in the car. He knew that sex offenders usually committed increasingly terrible offences, but was this one step too far? Or was it just a natural progression? Who could tell? The last offence committed in the series of abductions had been nasty, almost fatal, so maybe this was the next phase. The use of incendiaries to set fire to the car was strange, too. How many people used incendiaries? If nothing else, it was such an unusual MO that if they were used in other crimes, a link could be quickly established, hopefully.