Critical Threat

Ten

Henry was hard pressed to recall a time when he had been more exhausted, but the regular slush of adrenaline and/or caffeine pumping into his system kept him going through the night and into the morning, right up to the briefing with his Special Projects Murder Squad, now the ‘SPMS’ to the people in the know. It reminded Henry of something vaguely Roman.

Although his mind was a mush, he forced himself to present the bright-eyed bunch with the developments that had taken place overnight.

‘… but despite all that, this investigation continues until we ascertain whether or not Darren Langmead is Eddie Daley’s killer. Once we have done that, then, yeah, it’s over bar the paperwork, but we need to keep an open mind about it. Just because Jackie Kippax thought he killed Eddie doesn’t mean to say he actually did and we need to keep all lines of inquiry open.’

At first, the news of the shooting incident at the Class Act had deflated the team, but Henry’s belief that Eddie’s killer could still be at large reinstated their enthusiasm. There was something to aim for, not just a lot of paper sifting, which they did anyway.

Henry had managed to snaffle two cars from the HQ transport by sneaking into the office in the garage, purloining two sets of keys and then driving the cars to distant points of the car park so they would not be found that easily. He knew he could get into trouble for it, but he was past caring. The newly formed SPMS needed transport because he was intending to send them out to Blackburn to do some knocking on doors and digging around and there was no other alternative than to steal vehicles. He knew that the lack of staff numbers was a big drawback to the investigation, but he intended to achieve as much as possible in the short time he had left, by targeting them at a few important facets as he saw fit.

He dispatched two pairs and handed them car keys, sending them wide-eyed into the big, nasty world, and hoping they wouldn’t get into too much trouble. He deliberately held back the ex-detective Graeme Walling and the WPC with attitude, Jenny Fisher, to task separately. As they then departed, leaving Henry alone in the office, Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Anger entered, smirking.

Henry, lounging back in an office chair, purposely swung his feet up on to the desk and remained lounging. Anger sauntered over and balanced on the corner of the desk and adjusted his Gestapo-style spectacles.

‘The sick, lame and lazy murder squad, I understand,’ he said. Henry chose not to respond. ‘A bunch of seasoned incompetents, led by a major incompetent.’

‘Captain incompetent, if you don’t mind,’ Henry said, fancying a verbal joust. He was determined to stay calm.

‘Sounds like the job’s solved itself, which is a good thing. At least it means you won’t have egg all over your mush when you hand it over to a real murder squad after Friday — a team which, by the way, I’m starting to pull together now. As soon as the lovely Condoleezza Rice has gone, we’ll take over and start tying it up.’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Just make sure it’s all settled paperwork-wise, etcetera, etcetera … otherwise I’ll continue to humiliate you, even if you think you have Angela Cranlow’s ear.’

They glared at each other like a couple of savage dogs, each wanting to rip out the other’s throat.

Anger eased himself to his feet. ‘Good progress on your last case, by the way,’ he said, trying to rub a bit of salt in.

‘The TV appearance on Crimewatch?’ Henry chuckled. ‘You go on that programme when a job’s gone tits up, don’t you? And by the way, you look even porkier on the box.’

Anger chortled. ‘That could’ve been you,’ he taunted.

‘Nah … I would’ve solved it long ago.’

Anger breathed in unsteadily and Henry wondered if they would ever come to serious blows. He relished the thought of pounding Anger to a pulp, but knew it would never happen. And, regardless of his desire to stay cool, he was finding himself becoming more and more worked up by Anger’s presence and could not resist saying, though he knew it was childish, ‘In case it’s eating away at you, your missus does give good head.’ He immediately regretted it, particularly as Anger rushed him, grabbed his legs and with a remarkable burst of strength, tipped Henry backwards off the chair into the wall. He toppled off, catching his head on the rim of a metal wastebasket, caught napping by Anger’s speed.

Henry was quickly on his feet, ready to go for it, but Anger had already reached the door where he turned and growled, ‘You need to watch your balance, mate.’ Then he was gone.

Henry rubbed the side of his head, feeling ashamed of himself at falling to Anger’s primeval level. Not good.

Shaking his head in disbelief, he walked across to his office in the corner and sat behind his desk, determined to do some brainwork. Suddenly, though, his thinking became blurred with fatigue.

It was just after 10 a.m., so he swooped down to the canteen, constructed a crispy bacon sandwich from the self-service counter, washed it down with tea for a change, then felt himself begin to chill. He had about four hours before any of his team were due to report back and the post-mortems of Kippax and Langmead weren’t due to take place until after 5 p.m.

In the meantime, Henry knew exactly what he was going to do.

It was slightly strange and a little bit decadent to be easing himself into bed at ten thirty in the morning, but also fantastic. He had managed to appropriate one of the newly refurbished rooms in the student accommodation at the training centre, which even had an en-suite toilet and shower, a kettle and a TV. Truly luxurious in comparison to how the rooms were years before, when he came on courses. Then they were basic and uncomfortable and after a night on the razz the choice was either to pee in the sink in your room, or traipse all the way to the cold, tiled-floored toilets at the end of the corridor, then back again, shivering, possibly to find that the room door had mysteriously locked behind you. Henry had peed in many sinks in his younger days.

The sheets were crisp and cool and as he pulled the duvet over his head to muffle the sounds of the centre, he was soon asleep.

The reconstructed face of the murdered and horrendously burned female featured in Henry’s bleak dreams. He talked to her and she replied with tears in her eyes. The words were indistinct, but Henry could see the woman was happy, but worried at the same time. Then the torture came — the drowning, the strangulation, the beating, the flames and out of the fires emerged Dave Anger like a deranged phoenix who leapt into a Rover 75 and drove it at Henry, jarring him into reluctant wakefulness … but only for a moment before he slid back to sleep and the dream evaporated … until he found himself walking down a cell corridor, responding to the soft knocking of a prisoner in a cell. He opened the door, but the cell was empty … yet the knocking continued … until he realized it was not a dream and the tapping was coming from the other side of his own door.

He twisted, picked up his watch from the bedside cabinet and squinted at it. He had set the alarm for 1 p.m. … it was 12.45 p.m. He sighed — he could have had fifteen minutes more — and with a curse he rolled out of bed, putting his eye to the peephole in the door.

‘One second,’ he called. He massaged his face quickly, grabbed his trousers and dragged them on before opening the door to the deputy chief constable.

Underneath her trench coat, which she quickly removed, she was in full regalia, with all the ‘bird shit’ emblems associated with her rank on the epaulettes on her narrow shoulders and lapels, which seemed to weigh her down. She looked bright and fully awake, very well turned out and sweet smelling. Her eyes did a quick once-over of Henry’s bare stomach and chest, making him inhale quickly, suddenly devastatingly aware he had far too much loose skin and flab hanging around. Her eyes rose.

‘I thought I’d see how things were progressing,’ she explained. ‘I’ve got a short break before my next meeting.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Henry said, holding his left arm across his chest, feeling vulnerable. ‘It’s going all right,’ he began.

‘I know it is,’ she said throatily, her eyes sparkling with lust. She eased herself past Henry, her soft hands touching his arms as she moved him gently aside. He watched her as she switched on the TV, turning the volume up slightly, then turned back to face him. It was only a small room and there was very little distance between them. ‘Unfinished business,’ she said.

Her right hand went to the back of his neck, pulling him down to her and forcing her lips on to his. At first he resisted — slightly — but she tasted and smelled delicious and he couldn’t hold himself back. His arms encircled her and she crushed against him, her hands running up and down his naked spine, sending shocks through his nerve endings, making him shiver. Finally they broke apart, Henry almost bursting out of his trousers.

‘This is so dangerous,’ he said.

‘I laugh in the face of danger,’ she said mockingly, throwing back her head, exposing her neck. ‘And in case you hadn’t worked it out, I get what I want. My looks deceive people.’

She bit Henry’s left nipple, making him utter a tiny squeal like a kettle, then she divested herself of her uniform in what seemed to be a well practised manoeuvre. In a moment she was standing there in a functional white bra, frilly knickers and — completely amazing Henry — stockings and suspenders.

‘Dear God,’ he slavered.

She unhooked her bra and tossed it aside, then slid her hands into the waistband of his pants and drew him towards her, unzipped him and eased them down his legs, kneeling in front of him.

Not completely sure it hadn’t all been a dream, Henry grabbed a prawn mayo sandwich and coffee-to-go at the training centre canteen. He guessed there was a Race and Diversity course running because he recognized a transvestite and transsexual sitting together at one of the tables, then hurried back to headquarters. He was still wearing the clothes he’d had on for the last two days, but at least he’d had a shower and had quickly ironed everything in the laundry room before putting it all back on, hoping the steam would force a bit of freshness back into his gear. He had plans to dash home and get changed before this afternoon’s post-mortems.

Two members of the SPMS were waiting for him when he bustled, red faced, back into the Special Projects office. Graeme Walling and Jenny Fisher sat there patiently and he knew they knew. Everybody knew. He had just had amazing sex with the deputy chief constable in one of the rooms in student accommodation at the training centre. It was bound to be common knowledge. Not that it was unusual for cops to have sex in those rooms — they even sold condoms in the training centre shop, for God’s sake — but it was usually confined to young, horny probationers going wild or macho detectives on their initial CID course proving how manly they were. Not two high-ranking, experienced officers and in the middle of the day.

‘Hi guys,’ he said, flushed. ‘What news?’ Each waited for the other, until Henry said, ‘Jenny?’

Her task had been to liaise with the Telephone Unit to get details of the phone bills from Eddie Daley’s office. Simple enough on the face of it, and something the police did in a lot of cases, but it was usually a slow, bureaucratic process. Getting it done quickly was hard.

She held up a few sheets of paper. ‘Success,’ she said, smiling.

‘Oh, well done,’ Henry said genuinely. He saw her blush with pleasure and he guessed she probably hadn’t had many pats on the back before, that very simple motivational tool, rarely used by managers.

‘Eddie had a BT account from that office … and you were right,’ she said. Henry crossed to her and looked over her shoulder. Her finger pointed to a frequently dialled ‘0845’ number. ‘That’s the number for Orange pay as you go internet service. It used to be Freeserve.’

‘So he did have a computer in that office?’

‘Looks like it.’

Which confirmed Henry’s brainwave he’d had whilst looking through Jackie Kippax’s flat in the early hours. He noticed Jackie had a computer and it had suddenly clicked with him that a computer wasn’t something he had seen in Eddie’s office, yet he recalled Jackie telling him how much Eddie used one. It stood to reason, therefore, that someone carrying on the dubious profession of a gumshoe would have one in his office. Who the hell didn’t these days?

Henry had seized Jackie’s computer and then, with Bill, had driven the short distance to Eddie’s office over the shop and entered what was still a crime scene.

No computer.

But Eddie, being such a slob, never dusted and it did not take a mastermind to look at his desk and see the faint outline in the dust of a circular stand on which the monitor had rested. But there was no monitor, no keyboard, no computer, no wires and no printer.

Hindsight, being such a powerful tool, made Henry wish he had spotted this gap before; made him wish he had asked different questions of Jackie; made him realize, or at least guess in an educated way, that whoever had killed Eddie had also stolen his computer. Which begged the question, why? What was on the computer that was so precious? Was it something that pointed to the killer? And this was why he had tasked two of his team to find out if Darren Langmead had a computer, or if he had got Eddie’s computer stashed away somewhere.

Henry looked at Graeme Walling. He knew that Walling was a bit of a computer nerd and had given him Jackie’s computer and asked him to go plug it in somewhere and see what was on it. After all, it wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that Eddie also used Jackie’s computer. ‘What’ve you got?’

Before he could answer, the office door opened and Angela Cranlow came in, slid into a seat at an unused desk. She smiled encouragingly at everyone. ‘Don’t mind me.’

Her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail because she’d been unable to tame it back into a smooth bob after Henry had finished with her. She still looked the business, he thought.

‘I’ve been through her computer, as you asked.’ Walling indicated the computer on the desk at which he sat. ‘There’s some interesting stuff on it. Lots of visits to porn sites, some white supremacist stuff, BNP.’ Walling’s face creased with distaste. He beckoned Henry to stand behind him. He, Jenny and Angela took up a position behind him and Henry twitched as Angela tweaked his rear. ‘Let me just log in … there’s no security on this, by the way, no passwords, nothing … but that’s pretty usual for home computers.’

The computer was already switched on. Walling selected an icon from the desktop and double-clicked the mouse. The Orange Internet screen came up and he pressed ‘Connect’. The computer began to make the horrible screechy connection noises as the modem found the server and the Orange homepage appeared. Walling then went to the Google homepage and clicked the history button and allowed the cursor to hover over a website address.

‘Google is the main search engine used,’ Walling said. ‘Obviously it’s impossible to tell whether these searches were done by Jackie or Eddie,’ he explained. ‘I trawled through loads of stuff to see what had been visited and one thing sort of stood out. I mean, it was mostly rubbish, but when I started looking at the history pages I saw there had been a series of searches for doctors’ surgeries and health centres in London, which I found interesting.’

‘Why interesting?’ Angela asked.

Walling shrugged. ‘Anything a bit odd interests me,’ he said. Henry glanced at him and thought, A jack speaking, and knew that Walling should have been better looked after, should still have been a detective somewhere. Henry waited. Although curious, he knew there was nothing more annoying for a cop than to be interrupted in full flow, especially when the cop thought he was going to reveal something vital. Walling was on a little stage, the centre of attention, and needed his few moments of fame.

‘I went into every site visited and then dug into the sites as well. Just curiosity, really, but, like I said, it just struck me as odd and I assumed this was because of something maybe Eddie had been investigating. These searches, by the way, are about six months old. The history pages have never been wiped, so there was a lot of crap on it, if you’ll pardon my French. Most of the recent stuff doesn’t have any sort of pattern to it. People look at such rubbish.’

A yawn tried to break from Henry’s mouth. He held it back, his face rippling with the effort. He caught Angela’s eyes and she opened them wider, seductively. A quick memory of her straddling him on the single bed flitted in and out, her lovely boobs hanging just above his face. Hell, a deputy chief constable. What a coup! Not that there were many like Angela Cranlow. Mostly they were gnarled, angry looking blokes and the idea of sex with them, even from a female or gay perspective, was pretty bleak.

‘… So, I went on every site visited,’ Walling said, and in true dramatic fashion, revealed the best last, ‘and this is the one that’s the key.’

He clicked on it. The computer thought for a moment and then the connection was made, revealing the site of the Empress Medical Centre, Earl’s Court, London. The homepage showed a photograph of a newly built, single storey building which could have been any health centre anywhere in the country.

There was a menu on the right side of the page: general practitioners, the practice team; how to use the surgery: repeat prescriptions; services available to patients; well baby clinic; zero tolerance — violent patients; self treatment of common illnesses; useful telephone numbers; locums.

He moved the cursor over each one and most of them expanded into a sub-menu.

‘Mostly uninteresting stuff until we get to this one,’ Walling said. He clicked on the ‘locums’ icon. This produced a further list of names and he clicked on one, which opened into a photograph of an Asian woman by the name of Dr Sabera Ismat. ‘Ring any bells?’

All three observers peered closely at the photo.

Henry’s brow creased. The woman looked familiar and somewhere deep in his subconscious he believed he should know why, but he could not drag it up. She was a very attractive woman with sparkling eyes and an infectious smile, useful qualities for a doctor.

‘No.’ Henry looked at the other two. They shook their heads.

‘OK,’ Walling said, clearly relishing this. ‘What about this then?’

He clicked on the ‘minimize screen’ button and the photograph disappeared and the blue background of the desktop reappeared. He clicked through a number of programmes. ‘This is a programme that is used to download digital photos from a camera on to a computer to store them, view them, mess around with them, print them off — whatever. The photos I’m about to show you were put on about six months ago, according to the properties.’

‘I’ve got one on my computer I use for my holiday piccies,’ Jenny chirped up.

‘Yeah, they’re pretty common. There’s a lot of photos in this file, mainly of Eddie Daley and Jackie Kippax on holiday, by the looks of them. But this is the interesting one, filed under “Work”.’ He clicked on a file icon and a series of small photographs unfolded which focused in on a woman sitting at a table outside a restaurant, with some other people. Walling selected one and expanded it to full screen size. In it, the woman was laughing at something, her head thrown back, revealing her long, slender, dark neck. An Asian man was sitting next to her, smiling.

Henry’s mouth opened slowly.

It was a photograph of the woman doctor, Sabera Ismat.

But there was something on the photograph that had caught his eye, which made him go quite weak.

‘There’s about ten photos in this file,’ Walling said, ‘mainly of this woman sitting having a meal.’ He minimized the photo and clicked on a few more of them to prove his point. ‘It’s the locum.’ Walling did a bit of rearranging of the size of the frames and put two photos side by side, one from the health centre website and one of the digital photos. ‘Dr Sabera Ismat.’

He fiddled about a bit more and then worked his way back through the health centre website and clicked open the list of GPs, clicked on a name and opened one of the files. ‘Dr Sanjay Khan. Dr Ismat was sitting with this guy at the restaurant.’ He again minimized the screen and went back to the file with the downloaded digital photographs, picked one and enlarged it. It was a fairly grainy image of two people embracing. ‘The two doctors, I’d say.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Angela Cranlow said, quickly checking her watch. She was obviously short of time. ‘Why are you showing us these?’ She looked at Henry, puzzled.

Henry already knew why, but he still let Walling have the floor.

‘Aha,’ Walling said, sounding like a second-rate magician. He tabbed back to a better photograph of the couple at the restaurant. In the background was another pretty Asian lady. ‘One of Eddie Daley’s locate/trace jobs, don’t you think?’

‘What has this to do with Darren Langmead?’ Angela asked. ‘Like you said, these are six months old?’

‘Nothing at all, I’d say,’ Walling said. ‘Just hang on …’ Using the zoom tool on the programme, he focused in on the Ismat woman, bringing her closer and closer, moving down away from her face to her neck. ‘Now what do you see?’

Henry kept quiet.

Jenny said, ‘A necklace.’

‘Yep.’ Walling glanced over his shoulder, smiling at his audience. He reached for a piece of paper on the desk and flipped it over. It was a copy of Lancashire Constabulary’s latest intelligence bulletin, solely devoted to an update of the murder of the female found six months earlier near Blackpool, her body having been burned to a crisp. There was a photograph of the facial reconstruction and also of the unusual necklace, believed to have been worn by the woman, which had turned up when the conscience of the man who had found the body got the better of him.

The two women gasped.

Henry had already done his gasping internally.

The necklace on the bulletin was exactly the same one as around the neck of the woman in the photograph, an image, Henry assumed, that had been taken by Eddie Daley. Henry picked up the bulletin and held it alongside the computer screen, comparing the facial reconstruction to the actual face of the woman in the photo.

‘Pretty bloody good match,’ Walling said. He raised his eyebrows.

The implications of this sank in immediately. Henry placed a hand on Walling’s bulky shoulder, realizing that if he could get him a job as an operational detective again, he would have to lose some weight.

‘Brilliant,’ he said.

‘My office, now, Henry,’ Angela Cranlow said.

‘What’ve we got then?’ She was sitting on the business side of her wide desk, dwarfed by its size. Her back was to the window, which overlooked the playing fields at the front of HQ.

‘You know as much as I do,’ Henry pointed out. ‘Photos on a computer of a woman wearing a necklace similar to one found on the body of a woman who was murdered. I’m sure there’s more than one woman with a necklace like that.’

‘I don’t believe in coincidence, Henry.’

‘Me neither. And the necklace is supposed to be unique.’

‘So go on, hypothesize — or guess.’

He had been standing by the window, watching the rain that had started to lash mercilessly down. He moved to sit on the public side of the desk.

‘First assumption is that they are photos Eddie took and downloaded and that they were from a job he was working on.’

‘And the woman was subsequently murdered?’

Before following Angela to her office, Henry had taken a minute to jot down the dates on the computer. ‘According to the details on the PC, the website of the health centre was initially accessed three days before the dates the digital photos were taken — bearing in mind the dates on the photos could be manipulated.’ Angela nodded. ‘And the date that the body was discovered was one day after those photos were taken.’ Angela gave a twitchy gesture of her shoulders and hands, urging him to carry on. ‘So, if we suppose those computer dates are right, then it looks like Eddie may have had something to do with, or knew something about, her murder.’

‘Aren’t we jumping ahead of ourselves, slightly?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We don’t yet know if the woman in the photo is one and the same as the dead woman.’

‘True, and that needs to be established first, I’d say.’

‘How do you propose to do that?’

‘The Smoke.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

‘Wouldn’t a phone call suffice?’

‘I like the personal touch.’

‘Damn!’

‘What?’

‘I can’t go — Police Authority meeting. Can’t get out of it.’

‘I’ll go alone,’ he said, never having even considered that she would have gone down to London with him. ‘I’ll get Graeme to cover the post-mortems of Jackie and Langmead. He’ll be fine with that.’

‘You think this could be connected with Eddie’s death?’

‘Who knows? What I need to do is capture all this and start making some policy decisions … the first one being to establish whether or not this Dr Ismat is alive and kicking. If she is, then it’s going nowhere and it all means nothing and everything swivels back to Darren Langmead, I guess.’

Angela leaned her chin on a hand and gazed at Henry. ‘You’re the first man I’ve been with since my divorce … it was lovely, and risky. Hell of a combination.’

She leaned back, reverting to business, not giving Henry a chance to respond. ‘If this woman in the photos turns out to be the dead one, Dave Anger will have to be informed, you know.’

‘Let’s establish facts, first. It would be quite nice to hand it on a platter to him.’

‘Last laugh?’

‘I’m morally above that sort of thing.’

‘But morally bankrupt in all other areas?’

‘Probably,’ he said dubiously, and the thought rocked him.

6.15 p.m.: Preston railway station, about halfway down the west coast line between Glasgow and London Euston. A bitter wind blew down the tracks and swept along platform 4, making Henry shudder. He checked his watch, then the departure screen — his train was due to leave at 6.45 p.m. and was expected to be on time — then looked towards the station entrance.

‘Come on, love,’ he urged. ‘Ahh!’

He had spotted Kate hurrying across the footbridge spanning the platforms at the northern side of the station. He dashed up the pedestrian incline to greet her. She was loaded down with luggage. He pecked her cheek.

Over her left arm she had a zip-up suit carrier and she was pulling along a wheeled holdall, which Henry recognized as belonging to his youngest daughter, Leanne. Perched on top of the holdall, resting against the retractable handle, was a plastic carrier bag.

‘Hiya, sweetheart. Traffic was horrendous,’ Kate said, clearly flustered. She had been put under pressure by Henry’s request to get him some gear together and get across from Blackpool to Preston in time for his train. She took a deep breath and handed him the suit carrier. ‘Fresh suit, shirt and tie.’

‘Thanks.’

He took it and the holdall.

‘In there is a change of clothes for now — or whenever: jeans, T-shirt, socks, trainers and undies. Obviously I had difficulty packing the undies cos they’re so huge.’ She laughed and then gave him the carrier bag. ‘In here is your leather jacket, wash bag and the book you’ve been reading, which I thought you might want for the train.’

‘Great,’ he said, swallowing back a bitter taste of guilt.

‘I’ve only got twenty mins on the car park for free,’ she told him.

‘In that case, I’ll get changed on the train. Fancy a quick coffee?’

He was travelling business class at the expense of the firm, guaranteeing him a decent seat, waiter service and a bit of comfort as the Pendolino train whistled through the countryside, leaning on the curves. He sat back and tried to enjoy the journey, but his mind was awash with thoughts and feelings.

His stupid escapade with Angela Cranlow was high on the agenda. Then the barefaced cheek at having phoned Kate to ask her to rush and bring his stuff over to Preston and realizing that she did it without a moment of hesitation, murmur of dissent or a moan. She just did it because she loved him and nothing was too much trouble. She would have travelled to the ends of the earth for him. Just because she loved him.

He tried to get his head into the book she had thoughtfully brought along for him, a Simon Clark novel, but he couldn’t hold his mind to it.

It might not have been one of the world’s greatest partings, but he was unable to snap the picture out of his mind of Kate waving from the platform as he boarded the train and leaned out of the window as it drew out of the station.

‘Bastard,’ he said to himself, knowing for certain that the liaison between him and Angela had gone as far as it was going. His problem was he always went back for more, always fell in love. This time had to be different.

He ordered another free scotch and lemonade from a passing steward. He had declined the meal, which had not sounded appetizing, but had decided to avail himself of the free alcohol instead.

By Crewe he was on his third whisky, feeling warm and comfortable.

He would find somewhere to eat in London. Maybe even get room service at the hotel he’d been booked into by Angela’s secretary. He closed the book, then closed his eyes, knowing that if he fell asleep it would be impossible to miss his station, which was at the end of the line.

The hotel, often used by cops visiting London on business and one which Henry had stayed at a few times before, was the Jolly St Ermin on Caxton Street, around the corner from New Scotland Yard. It was a big, old, comfortable place, now owned by an Italian chain but nonetheless good, though not particularly cheap.

By the time the taxi dropped him off, he was wide awake again. After registering and then dropping his luggage off in his room and getting changed, it was just after ten and although his appetite had now deserted him, his desire for drink had not; he decided on a short walk to a half-decent pub.

He left the hotel and sauntered up to Victoria Street, strolling along until he found something that took his fancy. He rolled into a pub called the Bag o’ Nails about ten minutes later and went straight for a pint of London Pride, which hardly touched the sides.

In a seat by the window he watched a bit of London life go by, which wasn’t all that much different to Blackpool life, he guessed. After another pint and a bag of crisps, he stepped out to find that the bad weather from the north had tracked him.

Hunching down into his leather jacket he hurried back along Victoria Street, the rain increasing from a heavy downpour to a torrential tropical storm, completely drenching him within seconds. It hammered down like rods of steel, even hurt his head, and he knew he was in for a first-class soaking.

After a hundred metres he’d had enough. He ducked into a shopping precinct for cover whilst he waited for some abatement. He stood looking out, hands thrust deep into his pockets, his face a picture of pure misery. The weather seemed set for the night and he knew he would have to brave it sooner or later.

Behind him, in the shopping centre, came the sound of chatter, laughter and cutlery and the great whiff of garlic. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a restaurant with a paved area, many people chomping merrily away. His brow furrowed as he turned slowly, his eyes taking in what he was seeing. He walked into the centre and saw it was a Spanish restaurant. He stood and inspected it, a strange, unworldly sensation overcoming him. To his right was an Italian restaurant across the concourse, again with outdoor seating, albeit protected by the fact it was inside the shopping centre.

His head flicked back to the Spanish restaurant.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said out loud, and, ‘Una Cerveza por favor,’ the only Spanish phrase he knew by heart.