Critical Threat

Three

Six months later

As much as Henry Christie had been assured at the 3 a.m. briefing that his task, his responsibility, during the operation — codenamed ‘Enid’ — was probably the one with the least chance of risk associated with it, he could not help but feel just a little bit excited.

It had been stressed that his role was peripheral to the main operation and, more subtly, that he was there only to make up numbers; it was just that they needed someone of his rank to help out and because chief inspectors were thin on the ground for various reasons; the corporate barrel had been scraped and Henry had been found lurking in a crack like an ugly germ.

Obviously that had not been said out loud at the briefing, but Henry knew this to be the case. He had been called in because no one more suitable — preferable — was available and they needed someone of his rank to hang the blame on should something in his corner of the op go tits up. The ‘no blame culture’ that had been bandied about a few years before was now a dead duck, floating feet up in the water. Today’s climate of fear and failure in policing definitely needed scapegoats, hence Henry’s presence. If it all went well, then he wouldn’t even get mentioned in dispatches. It was one of the things that came with being someone who was considered too hot to handle, someone who nobody even wanted to be near enough to cattle-prod away.

But for once, Henry couldn’t care less, because for the first time in an eon, he was feeling enthusiastic.

It came not from the minor role, but from the feeling that had made being a cop so worthwhile throughout his long, often tortuous career. Here he was, sitting in a scruffy, battered police personnel carrier, kitted up to the eyeballs in protective equipment like a Jedi knight, in the dead of night, amongst a feral gang of Support Unit officers who belched, swore, farted, laughed and joked, and didn’t give a rat’s scrotum whether or not Henry was a chief inspector, because they knew they were good, the best. They knew their job and as soon as they stepped out of their van, they would leave the childishness and inappropriate behaviour behind and become cold, ruthless and professional whilst performing their allocated task. He’d once been on Support Unit and had been just the same.

It was 4 a.m. now. An east Lancashire dawn was just around the corner. The streets of Accrington were damp and silent and a dozen hairy-arsed bobbies were raring to go on the word of command.

What could be better than this?

Henry was back at the razor sharp end after months of lying fallow. A wonderful sensation. Out playing with the lads ’n’ lasses (there were two female officers in the back of the van and the rather butch sergeant next to him), just waiting for the nod via his earpiece. It was something he didn’t do enough of these days, rarely getting the chance to grubby-up his hands with day-to-day policing.

The buzz was incredible.

Just sitting in the front of the van on the bench seat with the sergeant squeezed between him and the driver. Biding time. When every other non-crim soul was tucked up in bed asleep, he was out on the streets.

He was even in uniform, wearing his public order overalls — which, if he was honest, he’d had to cram himself into, steel toe-capped boots and a flat uniform cap with the chequered band. The chief inspector’s model, of course, with a bit more padding for the brain than the plebs of lower rank were issued with. However, no matter what sort of police cap he wore, he always thought he looked more like a bus conductor because, for the sake of comfort, he always wore it tipped on the back of his head.

Here they were, waiting for the signal, all systems go.

Despite the air of flatulence, Henry could not mask his smile. In the next few minutes, a collection of size eleven boots and heavy metal, double-handed door openers would combine as his team for the night ‘front-and-backed’ a terraced house and then, as the doors flew off their hinges, they would pour in like wolves. Around the division, half a dozen similar raids were being choreographed concurrently, one of them being a fully armed incursion.

Terrorism was in the neighbourhood and this was the police response to it.

Henry’s smile became grim. How the world had changed, he thought sadly, wondering what would greet his team as they roared into the target address. His smile changed again, this time becoming twisted and sardonic, when he realized that if his one and only fleeting experience with the Security Services was anything to go by — and it seemed that most of the intel for Operation Enid (who the hell chose that name?) had come from MI6 — Henry’s raid could go one of a number of ways. Either it could be spot on as promised, or it could be completely the wrong address, or, worst case scenario, they’d barge into a highly dangerous terrorist cell hiding out in a booby-trapped house and get themselves either blown up, or shot to bits.

‘Excuse me, boss,’ the sergeant next to him said, interrupting his thoughts, ‘but are you OK?’

‘Yeah, yeah, why?’

‘It’s just you had a bit of a strange look on your face, that’s all.’

‘I’m fine.’ Henry folded his arms, tilted his head back and tried to relax. There was no point in fretting about anything now. What would be would be. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath through flared nostrils, exhaling slowly and thought, with more than a trace of bitterness, that whilst he was excited to be involved in Operation Enid, the reality was he would have much preferred attending the scene of some grisly murder or other. That was what he really loved doing. He truly believed he had found his niche as a senior investigating officer after years of bouncing around in various detective roles, but other people had other ideas. Obviously.

He was as sure as he could be that he had investigated his last murder.

And that irked him personally, because the key word was ‘investigated’, not ‘solved’. He hadn’t come anywhere near solving it, hadn’t even started investigating it properly.

He uttered a snort of contempt without meaning to, which he covered up with a cough when he opened his eyes and squinted at the sergeant, who was still giving him curious looks.

‘Sure you’re OK, boss?’

‘Yep, yep, fine.’

She regarded Henry as if he were strange.

The uncontrollable snort had been uttered as he had thought about that last murder six months earlier and how things had changed for him in the intervening time …

When he had discourteously flounced from the Race and Diversity training course, he had been eager to get to the scene of the murder, even though he had only the sketchiest of details. Because he believed he had been sidelined and given only dross to do, he was desperate to grab this one by the throat and make it his. He knew he had to get in there quick, take charge and stomp his identity on to the front of the policy book. If he dallied he knew there was the probability of some more favoured detective being handed the job by Dave Anger. He needed to ensure a fait accompli.

He had traded in his trusty Ford Mondeo after Dave Anger had trashed it and bought an almost new Rover 75, which was slotted into a tight space at the far end of the training centre car park. He rushed across the tarmac in a very ungentlemanly fashion, before manoeuvring it out of its spot and speeding out of the headquarters complex, slowing only for the road humps on the drive.

He arrived at the scene within half an hour, having managed to elicit more information en route: a burned body had been found on the edge of a piece of woodland not far from the Kirkham exit of the M55, junction 4. That was really all he needed to prepare himself. The rest he would discover on arrival.

Sitting, eyes shut, in the personnel carrier, Henry could still visualize the body.

He’d had a bit of a run of bodies that had been set alight. There had been the low-life Manchester drug dealer whose charred remains had been found just inside the Lancashire border; then, unconnected, the sad remains of a young girl in the back of a car in Fleetwood which had been torched when her abductors panicked. That had been the work of Louis Vernon Trent, who Henry had hunted down and who now languished in prison serving life following the successful Crown Court trial.

Now this one.

Henry had got results on the first two, but as he looked at what was left of his hat-trick, he had one of those queasy sensations that experienced investigators are prone to, telling him this was not going to be an easy one. No quick glory here, he thought. A hat-trick, maybe, but third time unlucky, too.

At least he could not fault the initial response of the uniformed officers. It had been done by the book. Nothing at all wrong in that. The first cops to arrive had actually done a great job.

As ever, priority had been given to identifying the crime scene itself. In this case it was far wider than just the area immediately around the body. Following directions given, Henry found the entrance to a farm track off the A583, about halfway between junction 4 and the small town of Kirkham. And it was from this entrance that the scene was protected. A few police cars were parked on the main road, including a Scientific Support van. Several white-suited people were hanging about as well as officers in uniform and a guy with a broken shotgun over his arm and a spaniel. Henry pulled in a hundred metres away and walked the rest on foot.

A man broke from the huddle and approached him. It was Rik Dean, a detective sergeant based in Blackpool, and well known to Henry. Rik was one of the good guys and Henry, seeing his potential several years ago, had assisted him to get on CID initially, but his promotion to DS was entirely Rik’s own doing. He was an excellent thief taker and was also proving to be an excellent supervisor, even if he did have an eye for the ladies which sometimes got him into warm water.

‘Henry — glad it’s you.’

They shook hands. ‘What we got, pal?’

Rik turned away from the road and looked across the fields. He pointed. ‘This track — it’s narrow, wide enough for one vehicle at most — leads up to those woods.’ His finger was aimed at what was basically nothing more than a copse in a hollow in the middle of a field, maybe two hundred metres from the road. ‘“Staining Woods”, they’re called. The track here leads to the edge of the trees and the body was discovered ten, fifteen feet inside the perimeter of the trees.’

‘Discovered by?’

‘Local guy hunting foxes on the land — with permission,’ Rik added quickly. ‘Literally stumbled over the body in his wellies. That’s him.’ He indicated the man with the shotgun and dog Henry had already noticed.

‘The body?’

Rik shrugged. ‘Burned to a crisp, almost to the point of breaking up, particularly the legs and arms. Looks like the local wildlife have been having a barbecue.’

‘Male, female?’

‘Hard to say, other than the body’s about five-six, slim, so fair guess is female. No other distinguishing features at the moment.’

‘Been here how long?’ Henry asked, aware he had constructed the question rather like that strange little creature in the Star Wars films.

‘Not too long. Day or so, probably.’

‘OK, let’s have a nosey.’

The lane, and the fields ten metres either side of it, had been cordoned off to preserve any evidence as this was the most likely route the person who had dumped the body would have taken. This meant that Henry — once attired in the obligatory white suit and wellingtons provided by the CSI guys — had to approach by a very circuitous route, through hedges, over dykes and across fields, before even getting to the immediate scene itself.

All this Henry approved of, though one of the things he decided to do as he tramped across a boggy patch was to widen the scene even more.

As Rik had said, the body was lying inside the woodland, in a small depression in the earth.

A tape had been slung from tree to tree around this part of the scene, preventing unauthorized access. A miserable looking PC with a clipboard ensured all details of people coming and going were recorded. A crime scene investigator was down near the body, photographing and videoing busily.

Henry didn’t want to get too close because the fewer who went up to it, the better. Once he was convinced that all the evidence that could be collected had been, then he’d have a closer look. He just wanted to become familiar with the scene, start drawing hypotheses, then pull back and allow the specialists and scientists to get on with their tasks.

‘From what we can gather from the guy who found her, the body had been lying face down in that hollow,’ Rik explained. ‘He’s apparently been chasing a fox on foot with the dog — who’s called Pepper, by the way. The fox has nipped into the woods and the guy’s run after it. The dog, by all accounts, just leapt across the body, while he tripped over it at a fair whack. He’s gone flying, dislodged the body, his shotgun’s gone spinning out of his hands, and he’s ended up on the ground face to face with a screaming skull. Scared the living crap out of him.’

‘Is he a suspect?’

Rik shook his head. ‘Nah … but he’s going to be interviewed properly shortly.’

‘Good — and the fox?’

‘Not yet managed to trace it,’ Rik said with a straight face, ‘but I’ve already got a team on it.’

Henry put his hands on his hips and surveyed the scene, turning away from the woodland and looking back towards the road, which was the main ‘A’ road connecting Blackpool to Preston.

‘Not a lot of cover,’ he mused. ‘Lots of passing traffic. But not many houses, either. You’d think a body on fire, anything on fire, would be noticed.’

‘Ahh — one thing I forgot to mention,’ Rik said sheepishly. ‘I was going to get round to it.’

Henry turned on him. ‘Go on.’

‘From the initial CSI inspection, it looks as though the body wasn’t actually set on fire here. There’s no evidence of burned ground. Looks like the murder took place elsewhere and the body was dumped here after.’

‘OK …’ He raised his face to the sky. Clouds scudded in from the east. The wind had an Irish Sea chill to it. ‘We need to get as much as possible from the scene, so let’s convene a scene conference now, then get the show on the road.’

Henry yawned and tapped his earpiece. Very little had been transmitted on it for the last few minutes and he wondered if something had gone wrong somewhere with the operation. Not that it was his problem. If it had to be chopped, as sometimes happened, he would just shrug and make his way home, slide in next to Kate and get up when he felt the urge, maybe not even bother turning in for work, have a day off, doss. It was something you could afford to do if you were supernumerary and nothing would fall apart even if you never even bothered showing up.

He checked his watch. The time had rolled on to 4.11 a.m. Already eleven minutes behind schedule. Well, there was a surprise. He rested his skull on the headrest, wafted away a particularly vicious fart, and allowed his mind to drift again …

The public mortuary at Blackpool Victoria Hospital reeked of smoke and burned flesh. Henry stood by a stainless steel dissecting slab, a surgical mask wrapped around his face, and looked down at the charred … thing … on the table that had once been, as he now knew, an adult female. He was wearing a surgical gown, too, hoping it would keep the tang of death off his clothes, though he knew it wouldn’t be a hundred per cent successful. He would need a shower and his suit would probably need dry-cleaning before it could be worn again. And the aroma would linger in his nasal passages. Next to him stood Rik Dean.

‘Done.’

The Home Office pathologist stood on the other side of the table, removing gloves and mask, revealing the face underneath.

Keira O’Connell was the locum pathologist standing in for the currently absent Professor Baines, a man Henry knew well. He had been initially disappointed that Baines wasn’t available. Apparently he was away on an international conference for pathologists in the Bahamas, concentrating on forensic dentistry, which was one of Baines’s big interests. Henry had to admit, though, that the temporary replacement was much better looking, even with her blonde hair scraped severely back off her face into a tight ponytail. Her face was round and sweet, yet her eyes, which Henry had studied over her facemask, were steel-cold grey and deeply intelligent.

O’Connell leaned on the table and inspected her handiwork as her assistant busied himself doing a tidy-up. It had been a nasty and gruesome task, extremely smelly, terribly unpleasant. Henry — the ‘new man’ who even did the ironing at home — despite his recent diversity training found himself hard pressed not to comment that this wasn’t the sort of job a woman should be doing. He refrained, mainly because he suspected that she would have stabbed him with a scalpel, and also because she had done a terrific examination which Henry had watched with a mixture of distaste and awe.

On the work bench behind her was an array of test tubes, plastic bags, swabs and trays containing specimens taken from the body which would require laboratory examination down at the forensic science lab.

‘Summary,’ the pathologist said in the staccato way in which she spoke. Her words were spoken clearly both for Henry and Rik’s sake and for the audio/video recording that had been made of the post-mortem. ‘Female, aged between twenty-five and forty. Difficult to ascertain the ethnic origin at this time due to the extensive damage caused by the fire which I would grade as fifth degree. She was set on fire whilst naked as there appear to be no traces of clothing on her. However, the fire was not the cause of death. She was set alight after death as the burns on the body show no signs of vital reaction.’

O’Connell turned away from the cadaver, which lay split open from neck to lower stomach. She stepped to the steel draining board on which the organs from the corpse had been laid out and examined. The display reminded Henry of a butcher’s shop he’d once seen on holiday in Tunisia.

She picked up the lungs and inspected them like a big, floppy book. Henry was always amazed at how large lungs were.

‘The lungs were filled with water, indicating the victim had inhaled water. They are wet and heavy, very pale and distended. No sign of any lung disease.’

‘So the victim was drowned?’ Rik asked.

‘Yes.’ Next she picked up the fist-sized chunk of muscle that was the heart. ‘Good, healthy heart, too.’ Then she moved to the brain which had been sliced open like a country loaf. ‘Severe bruising of the brain, causing much internal bleeding, indicating a frenzied attack with a heavy, blunt instrument.’ Next came the liver, slimy and difficult to hold. ‘Liver healthy.’

O’Connell glanced at the two detectives. ‘All in all, this woman was very healthy before she died. I would say she looked after herself well.’

She placed her hands on her hips and blew out, then turned. ‘The trachea had been constricted, indicating an attempt at strangulation, but neither the strangulation nor the beating killed her — it was drowning.’ She regarded Henry and pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows and tilted her head. ‘All in all, this woman has been subjected to prolonged and severe torture. She has been beaten and half-strangled and her head has been held under water until she died. She was then set on fire. Brutal, nasty.’

‘You can tell all this?’ Rik said.

She blinked and frowned at his stupidity. ‘And more … I’m a pathologist, so, death, as it says in some book or other, is my beat.’

‘As it is mine,’ Henry said.

‘Touche.’ She smiled pleasantly. ‘You don’t know who she is yet?’

‘No,’ Henry admitted. ‘No leads as yet. Gonna be a toughie, I reckon, unless we get lucky in the next few hours.’

‘Lucky?’ O’Connell said cheekily. ‘Why not get professional instead?’

‘They go together hand in hand. One begets the other.’

She did not look convinced and she was acting as though she did not have much time for Henry, or perhaps she was just being professional.

‘You want an opinion?’ she asked.

‘On me, or the deceased?’ He raised a flirty eyebrow.

‘The deceased,’ she said and Henry saw her hiding a smile.

‘Always welcome.’

‘It will be difficult to establish the ethnic origin, but there is a gold filling in one of her back teeth which could be helpful if you get the gold analysed. I say that because I actually think we are dealing with a woman of Asian origin here from what I can see of what is left of the bone structure in the face. A facial reconstruction could prove worthwhile.’

‘Asian?’ Henry said, surprised.

‘And if I’m right, you could be dealing with an honour killing.’

Henry’s heart sank a few centimetres in his chest. ‘An honour killing? Bugger.’

‘Just a gut feeling … I could be wrong, though.’

‘But I’d guess that’s not usually the case?’

This time O’Connell did not hide the smile. ‘No, not usually … now, if you’ll excuse me, the job’s not over until the paperwork’s done, if you know what I mean? I think you’ve probably got enough to progress your investigation. I’ll let you have the report and a copy of the DVD of the PM by tomorrow afternoon.’

Henry took the hint and started removing his mask as he and Rik walked towards the door. ‘Thanks, Doctor O’Connell …’

‘Professor, actually,’ she corrected him.

‘Thanks, Doctor Professor,’ he said. He stopped and looked at her. She shot him a look of amused contempt before returning to the organs. He and Rik went into the office next to the mortuary to hang up their masks and gowns.

‘You shameless flirt,’ Rik chided Henry.

‘Ah, but that’s all I do now,’ Henry said, his mind pondering what the next stage of the investigation would be. He was thinking about his ‘fast-track menu’: the list of things to do that included a combination of investigative actions which, according to the Murder Investigation Manual (which Henry could almost recite), ‘are likely to establish important facts, preserve evidence or lead to the early resolution of the investigation’. He needed to sit down somewhere quietly and jot stuff down in an exercise book which would hopefully get his grey matter on the road to solving the age-old problem of any murder investigation which the manual simplistically states as ‘who killed the victim?’ and the simple problem-solving formula of ‘why + when + where + how = who?’

Dead simple, and all made a bit easier if the victim is identified, although that should not in itself stall the investigation.

Henry had decided there would be a murder squad briefing at 8 a.m. the following morning at Kirkham police station, from where he would run the investigation, that being the nearest decent-sized cop shop to the scene. After that, at 10 a.m. there would be a press briefing — and then the work would really begin. He sent Rik off to start making some phone calls to get a squad together.

The mortuary office was quiet, so he decided to use this facility for a quick brainstorm. Henry had a pen and exercise book in his jacket pocket, which he spread open on the desk, and began blatting down his battle plan.

He was enjoying the process. Mind-mapping, flow-charting, jotting down single words to spark ideas, all designed to foster the thought process. It was a stage of the investigation he loved; those few moments when it was all his; the time before everyone else and their dogs stuck their noses into the pie; the stage when it was all pure and untainted. He felt a bit like a kid at school with a colouring book and crayons, writing with one hand, the other hand curled around to stop anyone else looking at his work.

It was engrossing work, too, and thirty-odd minutes later, he was sitting there staring into space seeking to get some inspiration from the wall in front of him.

There was a noise as the door opened behind him. This brought him back to reality. He twisted in the chair, half hoping to see Professor O’Connell — purely for professional reasons, of course — but caught his breath and sat bolt upright when he saw who it was …

Henry grunted and jumped out of his skin. He had dropped off to sleep, his chin bouncing down on to his chest, and had woken with a start and a shake of the head.

A ripple of giggles came from the back of the van as he sucked back the dribble from the corner of his mouth with a slurp. He looked sideways at the sergeant.

‘You might be mistaken for thinking I dropped off then,’ he said.

‘No probs, boss, we all need power naps occasionally.’ She yawned and stretched in the confined space. ‘Is this going to happen or not?’ She peered at her digital watch. ‘We should’ve gone in twenty minutes ago,’ which made Henry realize he’d actually been zonked-out for at least ten.

His eyes drooped with fatigue. ‘Dunno,’ he said, which was not the most earth-shatteringly incisive thing to say, but was about all he could muster at that time of day as he found himself suddenly very knackered. His brain was becoming spongy, starting to shut down.

In the personnel carrier the tittle-tattle had also waned as tiredness drew a veil over everyone. Which was not good, he thought; raiding a house with a possible terrorist connection should be carried out by officers who were on the ball, not ones who were dim-witted and sloth-like because they had become fatigued from waiting around. That bred mistakes.

He inhaled and exhaled deeply in the hope of getting some fresh oxygen into his bloodstream.

Dawn was creeping in more quickly. Soon it would be a gallop. The sky was starting to turn a pale grey; spots of rain clicked on the windscreen.

Unable to help it, and assisted by the slightly hypnotic effect of the rain, Henry’s heavy eyelids slid slowly closed even though he fought it valiantly …

It wasn’t Keira O’Connell entering the office. It was the bluff, angry figure of Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Anger and his sidekick, a DI called Carradine who had been seconded to FMIT recently and who, Henry knew, was the man that Anger wished to replace Henry with. All three of them went back a long way, but it was Anger and the DI who were best mates.

Behind them trotted a helpless Rik Dean, making tiny gestures to Henry with his hands and shoulders, which said, ‘Sorry.’ He looked pained.

Anger barged in, Carradine by his shoulder like a parrot.

‘Almost pulled a fast one there, Henry,’ was Anger’s opening gambit.

Henry swung the desk chair round, instantaneously on the defensive. ‘What do you mean?’

‘How did you get this job?’ Anger demanded.

‘What job?’

‘This murder!’

‘I was called out to it — it is on my patch, after all.’ He was responsible for covering Blackpool Division, on which the body had been found.

‘Well, you shouldn’t have been.’

‘Not my problem.’

‘You’ve been relieved of the job.’

The chair flew backwards on its casters as Henry shot to his feet. ‘What?’

‘You heard. DI Carradine is taking it on, so you can hand over everything to him.’

‘What?’ Henry was flabbergasted.

‘But there is some good news in it for you,’ Anger smirked. Henry waited, not daring to open his mouth lest what came out of it totally destroyed his career. ‘You’ve been transferred off FMIT as of today,’ Anger said, and let the words hang there for effect. Henry’s mouth dropped open with a little bubble of spit on his lips. ‘Yeah — transferred on to Special Projects at HQ.’ Anger smiled winningly. ‘Hadn’t you heard? No? I’m surprised FB hasn’t called you.’

Admittedly Henry knew he had a series of missed calls on his mobile which he had been studiously avoiding. One of them could have been FB.

‘But then again, why would he call you? It’s usually your divisional commander or department head who gives you that sort of news these days.’ Anger’s smile turned into a snarl. ‘Unfortunately, the transfer comes with a promotion to chief inspector, which completely mystifies me.’ He shook his head and looked as though this news was enough to make him vomit. ‘So you can get lost.’ The smile returned — venomously. ‘DI Carradine is now temporary DCI and despite the fact that I said you’d never make chief inspector as long as I’ve got a hole where the sun don’t shine, I’m a happy man. You know what I think of you, so I won’t go over old ground.’ He gave Henry a little wave.

Henry was tempted to knock the beam off Carradine’s face as he crossed the room, and was glad to see the DI cringe back slightly as he came within striking distance. Obviously Henry’s body language was pumping out ‘beware’ vibes. However, he did nothing nor said anything, but pushed past the three of them, getting a muted ‘Sorry, mate’ from Rik, and stalked into the corridor. He had only gone a few yards when Anger called, ‘Henry.’ He stopped abruptly and revolved slowly as Anger strolled up to him, a half-smile on his twisted lips.

‘You don’t seriously think you’d have won, do you?’ he said derisively. ‘I’m part of a gang, you know.’ His eyebrows arched. ‘You, on the other hand, are just a minion, a nobody, nothing.’

‘Whatever,’ Henry said.

‘So let’s let bygones be bygones, eh? There’ll be no need for us to cross paths any more. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Anger’s face froze. ‘I’ll fuckin’ crush you, Henry,’ he said almost conversationally, ‘if you don’t let this go. I promise you.’

‘Your little army going to do your bidding?’

‘I will destroy you if I have to.’

‘Oh, stop talking like Lex Luther. What you need,’ Henry said, ‘is an anger management course.’ It was something he’d been longing to say to the DCS, but when it came out it sounded limp and pointless under the circumstances.

‘I haven’t heard that one before,’ Anger said mirthlessly.

Even so, Henry made himself laugh as he turned and set off down the corridor again, head held high, feeling the pierce of Anger’s blazing eyes burning like lasers between his shoulder blades.

Outside in the car park it was cold and dark and all he wanted to do was scream at the moon.

Instead, he went and sat in his car, engine idling, heater blowing, churning it all over, wondering how best to progress. He wasn’t certain how long he sat there, but it was a good length of time — long enough for him to watch Anger, Carradine and Rik leave after, Henry guessed, their briefing from the pathologist.

A knock on the driver’s window made him jump. In his reverie, Keira O’Connell had somehow approached his car without him seeing her. She had tapped on the glass. He opened the window and she bent down to speak.

‘I noticed you sitting there.’

‘Yep.’

‘I can’t believe you drive a Rover 75,’ she mocked him. ‘Bit stereotypical, isn’t it?’

‘I used to be Mondeo man before this.’

There was beat of silence.

‘I believe you’ve been replaced.’

With a sigh, he nodded.

‘That was short lived.’

‘I’m afraid if I open my mouth I’ll say something I’ll regret and shock you. I’m presently biting my tongue so hard it might bleed.’

‘If you fancy a bit of a diatribe, I’m a good listener and I’m parched, too.’

‘Well, I’m not sure what one of those is, but I could do with letting off steam and I know just the thing for dryness — the Fox and Grapes just round the corner.’

Henry spent an hour in the company of the professor in the pub. During that time he selfishly overpowered her with an unrelenting barrage of his tales of woe and frustration. It was a tirade not designed to woo or even remotely impress a woman. All thoughts along those lines had been banished by his contretemps with Dave Anger anyway. Once again, Henry was furious with everyone and anything and Professor O’Connell sat opposite him like a patient sponge, soaking in everything he chucked at her with a wry smile and an occasional ‘Oh, no’ delivered at an appropriate moment. Even if she wasn’t interested, she gave the appearance of being so — at least for a while.

It was only when her eyes glazed over and she took a surreptitious peek at her watch that Henry realized she was probably bored rigid and he had missed an opportunity, should he have wished it to be one. He had broken the cardinal sin of seduction, or so he’d read in one of the tabloids recently: ‘Get them to talk about themselves, get them to laugh, and you’re on to a sure thing.’

Henry — so self-obsessed and selfish — had done neither. When she politely thanked him for the drink, then got up and walked — again, politely — out of his life, he kicked himself.

Losing my touch, he thought as he finished his pint, sidled back to the bar and ordered another Stella with a Jack Daniel’s chaser. He returned to his seat and found it had been snaffled, so mumbling and pulling his face, he squeezed himself into a corner with a chest-high shelf. He sipped his drinks, stone-faced and brooding, and even the thought of the substantive promotion did not appease him, though he had achieved the goal of pension enhancement.

‘Special Projects,’ he mused glumly. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ To the best of his knowledge it was a rag-tag bunch of individuals no one else wanted who were tasked to run projects no one wanted to touch.

Henry knew the writing had been on the wall for some time. Now it was confirmed: his career as a detective was over.

‘Fuck ’em,’ he said out loud, drawing looks of apprehension from other customers, several of whom made space for a bloke who was obviously deranged, a prime example of the social mistake that was ‘care in the community’.

Special Projects wasn’t so bad for anyone who enjoyed sloshing around in the ‘corporate pool’ — that sad bunch of people who had been shelved by the force. He was given a refurbished office in one corner of an otherwise open-plan office on the top floor of headquarters with no windows and lots of artificial light. From his enclave he could observe his new team. They consisted of a mixed bag who had, for various reasons (none positive), been thrown together after having been batted round from department to department and were generally, and often unfairly, referred to as ‘the sick, lame, lazy and loony’.

He tried not to compare them to the characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, because he felt tarred with the same brush.

Their work consisted of steering various projects from conception to completion — mostly tedious, unsexy ones, all about as dry as birdseed — as well as quality assuring operational orders.

As far as Henry was concerned, there was one saving grace: being a headquarters ‘shiny-arsed bastard’, he made sure his name was on as many call-out rotas for weekends as possible, which meant he could still keep in touch with the real world of policing and detectives.

Which was how he had ended up sitting in an increasingly stuffy personnel carrier at an unearthly hour in Accrington, waiting to raid a property which might, or might not, have some loose connection with terrorism.

He had received the phone call at 8 p.m. the previous evening. Knowing he was on the rota for that weekend, he had not drunk anything for almost forty-eight hours and was experiencing some dithery withdrawal symptoms as he sat down with Kate to watch the typical mind-numbing Sunday evening TV fare. That she was on her third glass of Blossom Hill red, and it looked like the bottle was going to be demolished and she was showing signs of becoming frisky, did not help matters. But he knew it would be the next evening before he could even think about having a drink. Sex, on the other hand, was a possibility.

In truth, the call-out was not totally unexpected. There had been rumours of a big Special Branch op, but as Henry was no longer part of the inner sanctum, that’s how they remained to him — just rumours.

The SB detective superintendent had telephoned to turn him out. The tone of the man’s voice made it clear to Henry that he was only making up numbers. ‘Someone’s gone sick, someone else is unobtainable and you’re the only one left, so you’ll have to do,’ the guy might as well have said.

But what the hell? It ensured he did not have to sit through a double helping of Coronation Street followed by some Sunday evening romantic drama that would have made him want to commit suicide.

An hour later he was at Blackburn Police Station, ill-fitting uniform, overalls and all, watching an SB briefing and trying to work out who the shady figures were lurking in the background. Spooks, he realized. MI5, MI6: the taskmasters of the Special Branch. When they cracked the whip, SB jumped.

Henry listened hard and critically and as much as it kicked his already bruised ego, he was glad he had been given a nothing job in the scheme of things.

‘Control to Echo Echo Two-Zero,’ the earpiece burst to life, making Henry jump awake. The call sign of his team.

‘Receiving.’ Everyone in the van stiffened with anticipation.

‘Green light, I repeat, green light. Understood?’

‘Understood — responding.’ Henry turned to the Support Unit team. ‘OK, folks, show’s on the road.’