Backlash

Twenty-Two

At 3 p.m. on Wednesday there were perhaps two hundred and fifty people gathered outside the Berlin Hotel. To Henry, who hated stereotyping, they all looked much like peas from the same pod. Mainly males, aged between sixteen and twenty-five, heads shaven, wearing denims, T-shirts and Doc Marten boots with their jeans tucked in the tops. Their T-shirts bore logos promoting hatred and racism. Their tattoos — and there were many — spread the same message. They were the epitome of the right-wing movement in Britain. Henry hated the sight of them. They made his face curl with distaste, but more sadly, he wanted to punch them.

The street was sealed to traffic while these people were allowed the privilege of getting themselves ready to march up to the Winter Gardens to coincide with a march coming in from the opposite direction led by gay-rights activists.

Despite pleas from many quarters, both marches would be allowed to proceed. Such was the nature of a democratic society.

‘I feel the same,’ Donaldson said, seeing Henry’s expression.

‘They make me feel physically sick,’ Henry said. ‘Come on, let’s do it.’

They pushed their way through the gathering protesters who were just starting to clear their throats and practise their chants, winding themselves up in the process. By the time the two officers were in the middle of the crowd, their ears were ringing with, ‘Kill the gay twats! Kill the gay twats!’

Martin Franklands was sitting in the front window of the hotel, looking out onto the street from the dining room. This gave him an elevated view of proceedings. In spite of reassurances not to worry, his insides were constantly gurgling and churning over. He knew he was out of his depth and was struggling to handle the emotional backlash of the two things in which he had been involved over the last day.

Although he supported the ideals of the movement, he was not a true man of action. He was a thinker and a writer. His job was to prepare pamphlets and newsletters, to help in the back room with the admin, to look after the accounts, to be a gofer. He was quite happy to lend his voice to demonstrations, such as this afternoon’s show of solidarity (although, he had to admit, the two hundred or so people who had shown up was a pretty poor turn-out). But that was all. He was the one who did a runner if things turned nasty. He was quite happy to tell Paki bastards to get back home and screw his face up into that peculiarly nasty trademark thuggish look of the right wing, but if challenged, he would run a mile.

He had been suckered in by Vince Bellamy, the manipulative tyrant.

Franklands had seen Bellamy do this to other people: set them up and then use them. He had vowed not to get caught like that, but had failed. So now here he was, shitting himself every time a new face showed up, expecting to be locked up at any moment, watching, always watching — and now seeing. He saw them coming. Two biggish guys, easing their way through the crowd with no great problem. No way intimidated by the crush of people surrounding them, yet obviously not a part of the protest.

Franklands made them immediately: cops.

Suddenly everything inside him turned to jelly: flesh, bones, blood. It was inevitable this would happen, that the cops would come knocking. One of their undercover guys had been battered to death, of course the cops would come. They had to. And if they smelled a rat, they would be relentless: they would come back again and again. Bellamy had said to keep cool if it happened — say nothing, give nothing, deny, deny, deny. Let him handle them. Do not worry. Easier said than done, especially now that they had shouldered their way through the crowd and were walking purposefully up the front steps of the hotel. Two mean-looking bastards.

The remaining bouncer, Higgins, stepped in front of them, stopping them from entering the hotel. Higgins had been the one who held the undercover man while Longton first set about him and here he was, chatting casually with two other policemen. Franklands despised Higgins, hated his bullying ways, but also envied his poise under the circumstances because, surely, he must now be kacking bricks talking to the cops, no matter how laid back he appeared to be.

Franklands had been right. They were definitely police. One of them, the thinner one, flashed his badge and warrant card. At first Higgins remained firm until the cop stood nose to nose with him and demanded to come in then he backed down.

The cop looked tired, mean and irritable, itching to punch someone in the jaw. Though he was of a smaller build than Higgins, who was a towering shit-house of a bloke, he came over as being harder and tougher and, backed up by the beefier, more filled-out guy with a crew-cut, they made a formidable pair. People would only mess with them at their peril.

They brushed cockily past Higgins, who eyed them dangerously, and entered the hotel through the glass doors.

Franklands was on the verge of wetting himself.

‘I don’t know what this will achieve,’ Donaldson whispered to Henry as they approached the reception desk.

‘Nor do I, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.’

‘Female’ was not a completely apt description of the woman behind reception. She looked more like a man on a building site only with breasts and the irony was not lost on Henry. He knew right-wingers hated men who dressed up like women, but, almost by default, they had got one living among them.

She was as big as Higgins, and not much better looking. Her blonde head was shaved (another irony, Henry thought, these people seemed to mirror the ones they despised) and each ear had a cluster of gold and silver studs fixed to its outer perimeter. She wore a low-cut T-shirt, tight fitting so her bulges were not disguised. Her tattoos were numerous, with the obligatory ‘CUT HERE’ on a blue dotted line across her throat (I wish, Henry thought), down to the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ across her knuckles. The best visible tattoo, though, was Adolf Hitler’s face on the downward slope of her huge left breast, and a woman’s face on the other. Henry assumed it was supposed to be Eva Braun but did not know enough about German history to recognise her.

Trying to prevent himself from cracking into laughter, the first chuckle he would have had in a while, Henry dug out his badge and warrant card again, both housed in a natty leather wallet, and said, ‘DI Christie, Blackpool Central.’ He thumbed to his companion. ‘This is my colleague, Karl Donaldson.’

‘And to what do I owe the pleasure?’ she asked, voice as smooth as gravel being flung off a shovel.

‘Vince Bellamy, please.’

‘Dunno where he is.’ She shrugged her big shoulders unhelpfully and Hitler and his lover seemed to chat to each other with the wobble of her breasts, something Henry found to be vaguely obscene. ‘Like what you see, luvvie?’ she asked Henry, who for a moment had seemed transfixed by the sight.

‘It has merit,’ he grinned, ‘but I’d rather be looking at Vince Bellamy.’

‘As I said, sweetie, don’t know where he is, but I know a man who might — ’ She pointed across the foyer to the double-doored entrance to the dining room where a man was sitting by the window, watching them.

Franklands gave a silent scream as the two cops turned to look in the direction in which the receptionist’s finger was pointing. The silly, stupid bitch. She was telling them where he was.

The smaller of the two detectives, smaller being six foot two as opposed to six foot four, thanked her with a nod. They started to walk towards the dining room.

It was only the timely appearance of Adolf Hitler that gave Franklands the break he needed.

Hitler strutted from the rear of the hotel into the foyer, surrounded by a team of four leather-jacketed bodyguards with jeans and laced-up Doc Martens, stopping Henry and Donaldson dead. He was a perfect replica, from the grey uniform, the swastikas on his arms, the belt and shoulder strap with the Luger pistol in a holster at his hip, hat tucked under his left arm, down to the shiny black jackboots, the shock of black hair down his forehead and the comical moustache under his nose. He went past them, raising his right arm in a lazy Nazi salute and a ‘Heil’. It was all they could do not to respond.

He went through the front door of the hotel and appeared on the top step as though at the Munich Olympic games, flanked either side by the bouncers. He raised his right arm and extended it. A roar of approval emanated from the crowd.

Henry and Donaldson, fascinated, moved to the door for a better view. Both were shocked and sickened to witness a sea of extended hands raised towards Hitler and a chant starting of ‘Heil Hitler.’

It would have been a farcical spectacle had it not been so utterly abhorrent and nauseating.

‘I see he’s still got his pulling power,’ Donaldson commented.

‘I wonder if it’s Bellamy. Andrea said he did quite a good Hitler.’

One of the bouncers handed the Hitler lookalike a loud hailer. He began to address his glorious followers.

‘Shit,’ said Henry despondently.

‘There’ll be tears at bedtime,’ Donaldson predicted.

With overwhelming sadness, Henry turned away. ‘Let’s have a word with this guy anyway-’ He did not manage to complete the sentence because the man they had been directed to see was legging it down the corridor towards the rear of the hotel.

Contrary to what most police officers would like to believe, running away from a cop is not an offence, unless the person already happens to have been arrested. But doing so, whether guilty, innocent or plain stupid, is like a red rag to a bull. Very few cops are able to resist the challenge of the chase because as soon as someone is on their toes, a police officer’s body gets an input of energy and the pursuit is on.

It was a conditioned response in Henry. Almost before he knew what he was doing, or why he was doing it, he was after Franklands. American cops are no different: Karl Donaldson was with him all the way.

Franklands hared down the corridor and burst through the double swing doors into the kitchen. A couple of female cooks and two young girls skivvying looked up from their tasks with disinterest as he ran past them, nippily side-stepping all objects in his way, heading for the exit door at the far end.

‘Oi,’ another woman cook yelled. ‘Fuckin’ watch it.’ She manoeuvred a huge pan of cabbage in water towards the gas stove.

The doors crashed open again. Henry and Donaldson burst through as Franklands reached the exit.

The cook — a big woman — with the cabbage pan in her hands immediately put two and two together. She knew Franklands was a hotel guest, but had never seen either of the two men who were chasing him. Without a second thought she heaved the pan up and hurled the contents at the chasers, then swung the pan at Donaldson’s head because he was the nearer of the two. He ducked the intended panning, but neither he nor Henry could avoid the dousing in water and uncooked cabbage.

Henry ran on, undeterred. Donaldson took a quick moment to jam the palm of his hand into the woman’s large round face and send her sprawling backwards against a rack of pans. Then he was past her.

The exit door led into a storeroom with an emergency fire door at the far end of it. Franklands threw himself at this door, slamming down the locking mechanism. He swung outside onto a metallic landing at the top of a set of fire stairs which dropped down into the back yard of the hotel. He flew down the steps, clattering into the yard which was full of junk.

Henry and Donaldson hit the metallic landing as Franklands got to the yard door and spun into the alleyway.

‘Fuck, he’s fast,’ Henry panted, grabbing the fire-escape rail and sailing down about a dozen steps, touching down and then taking off again for the next ten, hitting the ground running. As he turned into the alley, Franklands, as ever it seemed, was about to go out of sight, running towards the promenade.

Now that the two officers had a clear run, Donaldson, fitter and faster than Henry, powered into the lead, stretching out, totally confident of catching the man.

Franklands, without looking and without any thought for his own safety, or any tactics for avoiding his pursuers, ran straight across the road onto the inner promenade. Miraculously, not a single car came close to whacking him. It was only when he realised where he had run to did it dawn on him that he had made a bad tactical error. He was out in the open expanse of the promenade and it felt as big and wide and exposed as the Serengeti because it gave him nowhere to hide.

When the two cops emerged from the alleyway on the opposite side of the road, Franklands knew he was beaten. There was a hundred metres between himself and them but it was no advantage out here. He was trapped in the open and he knew it.

But there was a way out. It was trundling towards him at an aristocratic 10 mph from the north. Franklands headed towards the tram. This was his only means of escape and all his focus was on its approach.

If the cops caught him he was as good as dead anyway. He did not have the experience or resolve to hold out under questioning, he would blab everything because he was weak and pathetic. And if he did, Bellamy would ensure that somewhere along the line, he died. He had that power. Geri Peters was a case in point. She had been in police custody, yet Bellamy had been able to get to her. Not personally, but her death had been his doing.

The tram loomed larger. It was slow-moving but would provide a quick death, crushing his head with exceptional efficiency.

Franklands judged how best to do it. It would have to be a last-second thing. Make certain the driver did not suspect it was about to happen. He looked at the front of the tram. It was only ten metres away. Franklands gritted his teeth and did not think of the pain. His focus was now intense, like looking down a telescope backwards. A pulsing, throbbing noise seemed to surround him. Five metres. The metallic sound of the tram on its tracks grew louder.

Now! Throw yourself under, just behind the safety guard. Do it, you soft bastard, he yelled to himself.

The tram, only inches away, passed in front of him.

Franklands stood there, head bowed, crying.

Donaldson grabbed him and yanked him away from the track and shook him. ‘You idiot, you could’a killed yourself.’

‘That was the idea.’ Franklands sobbed. He rubbed his eyes. The tram had gone. The sound surrounding him receded and became background noise. ‘I wish I’d had the courage.’

‘Jesus, you scared the hell outta me,’ Donaldson confessed.

Franklands raised his chin. Henry came onto the scene, breathing heavily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Franklands bleated, ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t kill him. I was there when it happened, but I didn’t kill him.’

Henry stood back an inch, not quite knowing what or who Franklands meant. However, he was canny enough not to ask which would have shown ignorance and given Franklands a get-out clause. ‘Who did kill him?’ Henry asked.

‘Higgins and Longton. Longton was the one who really kicked him, stomped on his head.’

‘Where exactly did it happen?’

‘There, down there.’ Franklands pointed along the promenade to beyond Central Pier. Now Henry knew. He gently placed a hand on Franklands’ drooping shoulders and said, ‘You’re under arrest on suspicion of murder.’ He cautioned him to the letter, then called up for some transport. While they waited for the van to come, they quickly searched Franklands — regular police procedure. While doing this, Henry said to Donaldson, ‘Wedge of thin end the — please arrange those words into a well-known phrase or saying.’

Andrea Makin hung up the phone as Henry and Donaldson entered the CID office. Henry had booked Franklands into the custody system and done all the necessary evidence gathering, such as seizing clothing and taking fingerprints before slamming him into his en-suite accommodation, leaving a constable on suicide watch outside the cell as per force instructions for persons arrested on murder raps.

Makin was red-eyed. She smiled sadly at the two men. ‘That was Jack’s wife — she lives in London. I’ve arranged transport for her to come up here as soon as possible to identify him, but with two kids to sort, and the time of day — ’ she checked her watch: 5 p.m. — ‘she won’t be up here before morning.’

‘How did she take it?’ Donaldson asked.

‘With resignation, almost as though she was expecting it.’ Makin rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘Like all families of undercover cops. Anyway,’ she tried to brighten up, ‘how has your afternoon been, guys?’

She noted their reaction to this question.

Henry gave a modest shrug. ‘I think we’re well on the way to catching Jack’s killers.’

‘Really?’

‘Yep.’ But now it was Henry’s turn to look depressed. ‘Having said that, I don’t know if we’re any closer to Jane Roscoe or Mark Evans.’

He sat down heavily on a spare chair. Donaldson perched on the corner of the desk. At the far end of the room a phone rang, picked up by one of the detectives on duty.

‘Or my bomber,’ Donaldson said despondently. ‘The president will not be pleased.’

‘Henry? What extension is that?’ the detective across the room called. Henry peered at the phone on the desk and gave him the number. ‘It’s for you,’ the DC said, transferring it across.

‘Henry Christie.’

‘DI Harrison from Cheshire.’

‘Oh, hi,’ Henry said, expecting nothing.

‘Got to hand it to you, Henry, I think you got the bastard!’

‘Sounds like you are in deep pooh-pooh,’ PC Standring, the constable on suicide watch, said to Franklands conversationally. Standring, the officer who had dealt with Kit Nevison, had now been given the task of baby-sitting the alleged murderer and was actually getting a little brassed off with getting the shitty jobs. However, this was a fairly interesting one and he had been listening to Franklands’ stream of consciousness ramblings, trying to pick out any useful gems for the investigating officers to use in interview. Franklands had moved on to wittering about the murder on the promenade, making Standring prick up his ears. Theoretically there should be no conversation between them, but it was a difficult situation to be in and not say something.

‘You can say that again,’ Franklands came back, ‘and the rest.’

‘Why, what else have you done?’ Standring could not resist posing the question, but he did it almost with feigned disinterest.

Franklands had been sitting on the edge of the cell bed. He stood up abruptly, knowing he had already said too much, but now that he had started to blab, he could not stop himself. It made him feel light headed, light chested and the feeling was just so fantastic.

‘What else?’ he said. ‘I planted that bomb.’

Shit, thought Standring.

‘I think I want to talk to the detectives now — and I want a solicitor.’ His face cracked. He started to cry.

It was all Henry Christie could do to stop himself leaping up and down, punching the air, planting kisses on everybody in sight.

He had nailed the bastard. Christ, he had done it — or at least a partial fingerprint found at the scene of a murder which should not have been there had done it. And it belonged to one of the inhabitants of Blackpool. It was not enough to be used in a court of law, but it was enough to go and effect an arrest.

David Brian Gill. Born 21/4/58 in Blackpool. The man had come to the attention of the police only once before at the beginning of the year when he had been arrested and cautioned for a minor public-order offence committed outside a pub in the resort. Despite the fact that there had been no prosecution because it was a first offence and not particularly serious, Gill’s fingerprints had been taken as a matter of course and then gone into the system, together with descriptive forms.

That was how he had been caught, from the only set of fingerprints taken.

Henry had a copy of the custody record in front of him relating to the time Gill had been locked up. There was a copy of the caution form with it. The descriptive forms which had been submitted to HQ were being searched for. With some pleasure Henry saw that the custody officer on the night in question was the inscrutable Dermot Byrne. PC John Taylor had been the arresting officer. Members of his new shift who had done a good job several months before, who had made sure everything was done and dusted for a minor offence, had played some part, subsequently, in the identification of a serial murderer. So simple. Yet it was the simple things that caught people.

Henry ran a hand over his face.

Outside on the streets Henry knew that the Hitler-led right-wing demonstration had come to nothing and everyone had dispersed. The conference had ended for the day, the PM having made his law and order speech to great acclaim and the home secretary his speech on immigration.

Henry thought about David Gill. Where the hell did he fit into this picture? Had he abducted Jane Roscoe and Mark Evans? Henry struggled to get his head round it all. Had they stumbled onto him from evidence provided by this ‘military type’ and therefore been unprepared for an encounter with a seriously dangerous man?

Gill’s address was not far away from Joey Costain’s. Roscoe and Evans could easily have walked to it, leaving their cars parked near to Costain’s flat.

Henry was eager to get going, to pull the guy in, but he wanted to do it properly and if possible involve Byrne and Taylor. It would be a nice thank-you for having done a run-of-the-mill job so well and could go some way to reviving Taylor’s spirits following his horrendous night when he’d let Geri Peters get murdered and been there when Joey’s body had been found. Poor lamb. Henry decided to wait until they came on duty at six.

Henry wanted to do it right. This included having a fingerprint expert on call as well as scientific teams on standby.

There was also the other issue of Franklands. He was Henry’s prisoner and he had a responsibility to deal with him as expeditiously as possible. If Henry went out on what could be a completely unrelated matter while his murder suspect lounged in a cell, very serious questions would be asked when the case got to court. Henry had an idea how this could be addressed.

He was sitting in Roscoe’s office again.

‘Well?’

Henry looked up sharply at the figure by the door. FB.

‘I hear things are moving.’

‘Yeah — but whether we’ll find Jane or Mark is something else.’

FB looked seriously exhausted. ‘Do your best, Henry,’ he said without energy. ‘Find them, please.’

‘I will.’

FB disappeared down the corridor.

Henry immediately went back to the papers on his desk. These now included the responses from all the police forces who had had similar murders to Joey Costain’s on their patches: Surrey, the Metropolitan and the West Midlands. He had not had the time to look at these yet and he thought this might be an opportunity to do it now. He took each one and read them carefully.

At first he saw nothing to link the crimes beyond the obvious similarity of the way in which the victims had been murdered. Beyond that there seemed to be no connection, but Henry instinctively believed there must be something. He wrote out the names of the victims on a blank piece of A4, listing them down the left side of the paper. Two victims were black. Their occupations did not seem to have any similarity. It was frustrating. Henry read the files again, concentrating on the background and interests of the victims.

Twenty minutes of hard reading and analysis gave him the answer.

Gill’s flat was on a small, dilapidated council estate where the number of vacant and derelict properties outnumbered the ones which were inhabited. It was in a small block of flats about six storeys high at one end of the estate with a complex of garages at the back. The flat was on a corner, reached by a concrete stairwell leading onto a walkway which ran along the front of the flats, past the front doors. A quick enquiry with the council had revealed Gill’s name on the rent book and that the rent was paid up to date, something which surprised Henry. Council records also showed that Gill rented one of the garages at the back.

Henry and Karl Donaldson sat in a beat-up unmarked Astra about a quarter of a mile away awaiting the arrival of backup before they hit the flat.

‘If we get this guy,’ said Donaldson, who was there only as an observer, ‘then tomorrow I’d like to try and catch my bomb-maker, pretty please. My president said I should.’

‘You and your president.’ Henry laughed. ‘But of course we can. Serial killer today, serial bomber tomorrow. Piece of piss.’

‘Ahh, such a quaint term — “piece of piss”,’ Donaldson remarked. ‘Called your ex-wife, yet?’ he asked, filling a gap.

‘Nope.’

‘Going to?’

‘Yep.’ Henry nodded. He checked his watch. ‘I wonder how Andrea’s getting on with Franklands.’ She had jumped at the opportunity to interview someone who might have been present at the murder of one of her officers; it gave Henry the space he wanted to go for Gill and hopefully get a lead on Evans and Roscoe.

‘They’re here,’ Henry said, glancing into the rear-view mirror. Dermot Byrne and John Taylor pulled in behind them in a plain car, civvy jackets over their uniforms. He gave a wave over his shoulder and moved off slowly. There was going to be nothing loud and flashy here. No blue lights, two-tones or screeching tyres. Just a slow approach, park quietly and trot slowly to the front door of the flat (there was no back door or exit, other than windows) then bust the door down, pile in and disable the suspect.

‘I don’t want you to get involved, Karl,’ he reiterated to Donaldson firmly. ‘You’re just here to watch the finest of the British police in action, OK?’

‘Gotcha.’ Donaldson smiled grimly. He picked up the sledgehammer which was wedged between his knees in the footwell. Henry laughed.

They parked a hundred metres away from the target premises, out of sight of it, and alighted. Donaldson, Byrne and Taylor slotted in behind Henry as he strode swiftly towards the flat. A minute later they were up the steps, and at the door.

Henry went to one side. Byrne the other. Donaldson and Taylor hung back. Henry tried the door handle which opened and they were inside.

On silent feet all four moved into the short hallway towards the living room. Henry gently opened the door. The back of the tatty settee was facing them and on the settee was a dark figure, totally engrossed in a game show on TV and also cranking up. A belt was wrapped round his left arm, tightened by pulling the end of it with his teeth and he was injecting the bulging vein on the inner elbow with a blood-filled hypodermic.

On a signal, Henry, Byrne and Taylor leapt on the guy. Henry focused on the needle, ensuring it presented no danger. It was over in a few seconds, the man did not have a clue what was happening and within moments he was cuffed, face down, arms up behind his back.

‘Turn him over,’ Henry said excitedly, wanting to see the man he believed had murdered so many people.

They did.

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ the man demanded to know.

It was Kit Nevison.

Henry was reluctant to take the cuffs off him. By negotiation and threat, Nevison’s hands were re-cuffed across his stomach for more comfort and he was allowed to sit back on the settee on pain of death if he caused trouble. The towering figure of Donaldson brandishing the sledgehammer just in the periphery of Nevison’s vision was sobering enough to keep him sitting there.

‘What are you doing here?’ Henry demanded.

‘I’ve come to see me mate, Davey. I haven’t seen him for months.’

‘David Gill?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you let yourself in?’

‘Yeah, got a key. Couldn’t find it for ages, then I found it today, so I thought I’d come an’ see ’im.’

‘Where is he, then?’

‘I don’t know. Told ya, haven’t sin him for months. I just woke up an’ thought I’d bob round and see if he’d let me in. He’s always bin good for a bit o’ junk.’ He nodded to the needle out of reach on the top of the TV.

‘What d’you mean, you thought you’d see if he’d let you in?’ Henry asked.

‘Er. . well. . I bin round once or twice recently an’ he told me to fuck off through the letterbox. I thought he were ill, like.’ Nevison looked confused. ‘What’s this all about, anyway?’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘No, I fucking don’t,’ Nevison said crossly. ‘Now unless you’re gonna lock me up for somethin’ I haven’t done, tek these fuckin’ things offa me.’ He held out his manacled hands.

‘I want David Gill for murder,’ Henry said, bending close to Nevison’s face. Nevison blinked and thought about the words. Then he was engulfed by racking laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Davey? Murder? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Soft bugger, soft as shite.’ Nevison roared. ‘He’s a fuckin’ namby-pamby veggie.’

His laughter continued unabated.

Henry stood up straight. He looked at Byrne who, together with Taylor, had done a quick visual search of the flat and found nothing. They shrugged.

‘Shit,’ he breathed. Then he had a thought. ‘Let’s check the garage.’

Kit Nevison was having a whale of a time now. Still laughing fit to burst, he followed the officers out to the garage. His handcuffs had been removed on the understanding that if he tried anything, or did a runner, he would be arrested on suspicion of burglary and possession of controlled drugs and that Donaldson would whack him across the back of his head with the sledgehammer.

The garage was in the middle of a row of about a dozen. Most of them were unused with broken and twisted doors or none at all. Only a couple, including Gill’s, had locked up-and-over doors on them. It was very well secured with padlocks on either side of the door. Without the necessary keys, the officers resorted to force. Donaldson, who was itching to get swinging with the sledgehammer, smashed the padlocks off with perfectly aimed blows.

‘Very good,’ Henry congratulated him. He pushed the top of the door and up it went. There was no electric light inside, so four torch beams criss-crossed the interior. Not much inside. A powerful motorbike with a helmet on the seat and a large chest freezer along the back wall.

‘Is the bike Gill’s?’ Henry asked Nevison.

‘Never sin it before.’

‘Don’t touch it,’ Henry instructed everyone. He recalled that around the time of Louise Graveson’s murder in Cheshire, a motorcyclist had been seen in the area. Henry walked round the bike and went to the freezer. Although Henry, in his married days, had had a chest freezer in the garage, it seemed odd to have one in this garage. It wasn’t as though it was an easy trip to get frozen food back up to the flat, especially in wet weather.

‘Is this his?’ Henry asked Nevison, pointing at the freezer.

‘Yeah — he, uh, sometimes does a bit of rustling.’

‘Rustling?’

‘Uh — yeah, gets lamb and stuff sometimes from a mate he has in Rossendale who works at an abattoir.’

‘Right,’ said Henry, unimpressed. ‘What about this motorbike?’

Nevison looked doubtfully at it. ‘No, his was a knackered thing. This is too new. That’s his van, though.’ Nevison pointed to a Transit van parked behind the flats.

‘OK,’ said Henry. He went to the freezer, tried to pull the lid up. It was locked and he could not budge it.

‘Sledgehammer,’ he called.

Donaldson responded. He lined himself up in front of the freezer, worked out the necessary upwards trajectory he would need and swung the sledgehammer, catching the freezer lock perfectly, springing it and making the lid fly open to reveal the contents inside, illuminated by a light in the lid.

Henry stared, horrified. The others crowded in behind him and looked over his shoulder.

There were several frozen legs of lamb and beef joints, obviously David Gill’s rustling booty — and there was also Mark Evans’ body, folded at the knees, lying on top of another body. The detective’s throat had been sliced open and copious amounts of blood had run and frozen over the body below. At first Henry thought it was Jane Roscoe, but on closer inspection he saw it was the body of a man.

‘Come and have a look in here,’ Henry said to Nevison.

Warily, the big man approached the freezer. Henry shone his torch onto the horror-frozen face of the man at the bottom of the chest.

‘Wauh — fuck,’ Nevison said, appalled and recoiling.

‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Davey — Davey Gill, me mate.’

‘Anybody got a hairdryer? I’ll never be able to get this guy’s prints while his hands are frozen solid like this,’ the scenes-of-crime officer shouted, leaning over the edge of the chest freezer. ‘Need to get a bit of thawing done.’

Police activity was intense in and around David Gill’s flat and garage. Lights had been erected to illuminate the garage. The macabre task of lifting Mark Evans’ frozen body out of the freezer had been carried out. He was now zipped up in a bodybag waiting for the hearse to turn up and take him to the mortuary.

Four hours since the discovery of the crime scene, Henry was still pacing up and down, directing operations. He stopped and watched as Evans’ body was carried out past him, the bag, literally, containing a stiff. Byrne and Taylor had looked at the other rigid body and neither had been able to identify it positively as David Gill, the man whom Taylor had arrested all those months before. Taylor said the corpse looked ‘familiar’, but seeing him frozen solid it was difficult to say yeah or nay. Cops at Blackpool dealt with thousands of lock-ups like Gill, and PC Taylor said he could hardly even recall arresting him. Byrne remembered cautioning him, but again, he was one of dozens he had dealt with that night in the custody office. Henry was waiting for a photograph to turn up but it could be a long wait. Photographs tend to enter the system with less precision than fingerprints, and it was not unknown for them to get lost or mislaid.

It seemed logical, therefore, to take the dead guy’s fingerprints and get the on-call expert to do some cross-checking. The first thing Henry wanted to discover was if the fingerprint found at the scene of the murder in Cheshire belonged to the dead man. If it did match, then it raised a whole bunch of questions. If it didn’t, then it raised a whole bunch more questions.

Henry decided to take it one step at a time. Make no assumptions, jump to no conclusions, just deal with facts.

‘Hair drier?’ a uniformed constable called out.

‘Over hair.’ The SOCO laughed.

The constable, who had scrounged the drier from a woman living nearby, handed it over. She would never have offered it had she known it was going to be used to defrost a dead man’s fingers.

Henry offered the fingerprint expert a seat in Roscoe’s office. The guy was called Lane and he was one of the constabulary’s top experts, twenty-two years of cross-matching loops and whorls and providing the evidence that had sent thousands of baddies to prison.

‘Tell me,’ Henry prompted.

On Lane’s lap were two sets of prints. One from the dead man in the freezer, one from the man arrested six months earlier, giving the name of David Gill.

‘They don’t match,’ he said flatly.

‘Is that your final answer, or do you want to phone a friend?’ Henry said.

‘The prints of the dead man in the freezer are not the same as the prints taken from the man who was arrested six months ago for a public-order offence. However, the partial print recovered from the scene at Cheshire matches the forefinger of the prisoner who gave his name as David Gill.’

‘So if the dead guy in the freezer really is David Gill, then who the hell do the prints belong to which were taken by PC Taylor?’ Henry pointed to the offending set. ‘Because they are the prints of a serial killer who, it would seem, has taken on David Gill’s identity after killing him — or something,’ he finished unsurely.

Henry was suddenly depressed. He felt nowhere further forward and believed that every minute now was wasted time and made it even more unlikely that Jane Roscoe would be found alive, particularly if the abductor knew that the police had found Gill’s and Mark Evans’ bodies.

Roscoe was dead. Henry was certain of it. But why wasn’t she in the freezer too?

Lane, the fingerprint officer, left.

‘It’s doing my head in, this,’ Henry said when he was joined by Donaldson and Makin. ‘How is it going with Franklands?’

‘Better than good. I’m going to arrange protected status for him. He was there when the two guys kicked Jack to death, but maintains he took no part in it, and I believe him. And he planted the bomb in the club. Both things were done on Vince Bellamy’s instructions. So Franklands is going to be a witness for us and one way or another, the demise of Hellfire Dawn is on the cards.’

‘Excellent.’

‘He also told me something else, which is very very interesting.’ Makin went on to tell this to Henry. It was fascinating stuff, but did not help Henry with his task.

When she had finished Henry asked her how she intended to take it forward and she said she had an idea, but added nothing more.

Which left Henry holding two sets of fingerprints which did not match and a puzzle that was beginning to stress him out.

He watched with distress as the clock ticked up to midnight.