The corridor outside his office was quiet. A light shone out from an office at the far end, otherwise there was no sign of habitation. This did not mean that no work was going on. At present, including the murder Henry had been dealing with at Blackburn, the SIO team was involved in six on-going murders and assisting at least a dozen enquiries into other serious crimes.
Henry’s pounding headache had subsided. The drive from Blackburn to HQ with the car windows open had relaxed him, given him time to chill with David Gray on the CD. He could have done with a strong drink, but the days of having alcohol on police premises were long gone. He settled for a cup of water from the cooler, which he took back to his office.
After completing his housekeeping chores by about 9.45 p.m. he decided to call it quits for the day without feeling too guilty about it. The thought of the king-size bed and his warm ex-wife was very appealing. As he stood up, stretched and creaked, ready to head off, he heard steps approaching slowly down the corridor. Henry peered round his office door and smiled when he saw Detective Chief Superintendent Bernie Fleming, the head honcho of the SIO team. Henry admired him greatly, both professionally and personally. Although he was a career detective, Fleming was not narrow-minded and had a good head for strategy on his shoulders. He had supervised some extremely complex murder investigations in his time and been successful on every one. He was holding a thick box file and a video-cassette tape.
‘Henry, I thought it was you. Result?’
‘Coughed it. . court tomorrow.’
‘Well done,’ Fleming said with genuine feeling. ‘Off home now?’
‘Yep.’
‘Can I just give you these before you go?’ He held out his hands. ‘Bit of a pressie for the new kid on the block,’ he added slyly. ‘A cold case I’d like you to review.’
Henry took the file and video eagerly. ‘Thanks, Bernie.’
‘Fancy a swift one at the Anchor before you hit the road?’
Fleming asked hopefully.
Henry declined with a sad shake of the head. ‘Love to.’ He shrugged. ‘But y’know. .?’
‘Yeah, no probs,’ Fleming said with a trace of disappointment. Henry knew that the Chief Super did not have anyone to go home to and felt slightly mean at refusing the offer of a drink. Now that he did have someone to go home to, he was not going to jeopardize the relationship.
Fleming trudged back down the corridor towards his office and Henry watched him go. Then he glanced down at the thick package and video in his hands. Cold-case review was one of the functions of the SIO team, it involved looking again at unsolved murders and other serious crimes which came under their remit. This was the second one Henry had been given since joining the team two months before. The prospect of it excited him. He was very tempted to open the file there and then, sit down and start work on it. But that would have been as bad as going for a drink with the boss. That was another condition of the package with Kate: come home when you can.
He called her from the office phone and announced his imminent departure.
Twenty-five minutes later he was sitting next to her in the lounge of their house on the outskirts of Blackpool, sipping Blossom Hill red, discussing each other’s day. They hit the sack at just gone eleven, both bushed. They cuddled and kissed for a while but did not make love and fell asleep quickly.
About 4 a.m. Henry woke up groggily, dying to pee. After relieving himself, sleep would not return. He tossed, fidgeted, began to sweat and could tell he was affecting Kate, though she did not wake up. Eventually frustration got the better of him: there was no point staying in bed. He slid out, wrapped his dressing gown tightly around himself and stepped quietly on to the landing.
He checked on his daughters, Jennifer and Leanne, soundly asleep in their rooms. Good kids, good to be back with them. . almost back with them. He experienced that overwhelming sense of love he always felt when he was with them, then sneaked downstairs, knowing exactly why he could not sleep.
He had brought home the cold-case review.
It had been a frenzied attack. The girl had been mercilessly beaten, battered to death by an assailant who had lost total control. Blood had splashed everywhere around the dingy basement flat — floors, walls, ceiling — indicating she had been pursued relentlessly through the premises, desperately trying to defend herself from the onslaught.
Her life had come to an end in the tiny, grubby bathroom. Here, it seemed, she had been cornered by her killer. Trapped. Her head had been repeatedly smashed on the rim of the toilet bowl until she died from massive internal bleeding in her brain. Her face was a gory, unrecognizable pulp. The killer had probably continued to pound her head against the toilet long after she had died.
She had been found on her knees, slumped over the toilet, her head hanging into the bowl as though she might have been vomiting. It was estimated she had been there for forty-eight hours. And if that was not bad enough, rats had gnawed her buttocks, legs and feet.
Henry sighed. His nostrils dilated. He rubbed his gritty eyes. He paused the crime-scene video, holding it on a framed shot of the dead female’s bare back — she was completely naked — which was latticed by a network of wheals, abrasions and cuts. She was thin almost to the point of emaciation, resembling an inmate of a concentration camp. Not that her gauntness had prevented her from being a prostitute. Semen from four different men had been found inside her during post-mortem.
Henry pressed the stop button on the remote control and the TV screen went blank. He had seen enough for the time being. He took his mug, stood and walked quietly through the silent household into the chilly conservatory. The house backed on to agricultural land and a pale dawn was approaching. He gazed across the field and jumped with pleasure when he saw a big dog fox bouncing through the grass. Then it was gone. Elated by the sight, he sat on one of the cane chairs, shivering a little and holding his hot mug of tea between the palms of his hands, drawing heat from it into his body.
He placed the mug down on the glass-topped coffee table, reached out and flicked on the fan heater, gazing unseeingly into the garden. He sighed again, interlocked his fingers behind his head, but did not allow his mind to go blank. His inner concentration was absolute as he tried to imagine himself as a fly on the wall at the scene of the particularly brutal and senseless murder he had been asked to review.
This thought process was a vital part of the job of the murder detective: making assumptions, constructing hypotheses to be tested, retested and most probably discarded en route to the truth. Then maybe one or two lines of enquiry eventually turning up information, facts, evidence, and then, hopefully, a suspect.
There was not much to go on here. The flat the girl had died in was located in a poor area of Blackpool’s North Shore. It could easily be accessed directly from the street down a set of steps from the pavement. This, unfortunately, meant that visitors or customers, or the killer, could come and go without having to enter the main building above, which was a large terraced house converted into a warren of tiny flats. The main point about this, and what made it particularly frustrating from a police point of view, was that people could enter her flat unobserved and very quickly. All they had to do was slip in from the pavement.
At the foot of the steps the front door was almost hidden from view from anyone who happened to be passing. It opened into a tiny vestibule and from there into a bed-sitting room. This was meagrely furnished with a three-quarter-width camp bed, adequate in size for the business of prostitution, some cheap chipboard units and an old, but comfortable-looking settee. There was a portable TV in one corner of the room which looked quite new. The room was lit by a single bulb swinging on a bare wire from the damp ceiling and a lamp on a unit next to the bed. Curtains, worn and frayed, were drawn across dirt-streaked windows, giving the room, at best, a very grainy-grey light.