Fighting for the Dead

TWENTY

It was two days before Ralph Barlow was released from hospital, where he had spent his time under police guard. He had punctured a lung in the pile-up, but it had been saved by the quick actions of the doctors in A amp;E at the Royal Lancaster Hospital.

It was also two days before the whiplash injury Henry had sustained when the Mercedes crashed into him kicked in bad. And although he moved as stiff as a kid’s robot, and was in agony when he moved at all, Henry could not be kept away from work. With Rik Dean, he waited for Barlow’s imminent arrival at Preston custody office, where it had been decided it would be best to lodge him under the circumstances, well away from any friends in high places.

He was back to being represented by a duty solicitor. Henry almost wished his fancy-pants brief was sitting by his side, but it was not to be.

Henry and Rik carried out the interview. After he had been cautioned and the introductions done for the tape, and he had been informed that the interview was being videotaped, Henry — sitting bolt upright, hardly able to move his neck without agonizing pain — said, ‘Ralph, one way or the other, I don’t expect this interview is going to be an easy one, but you have the choice to make it straightforward if you want to. Myself and DI Dean have seen the recording on the mobile phone and if you wish, we will project it up onto a screen and go through it second by second, pausing it and asking you questions about it as we go through it.

‘Just for the record, I am referring to a video recording on a mobile phone that was probably the property of Harry Sunderland, the other suspect in this case. It shows a murder being committed by three men clearly identifiable as you, Ralph Barlow, Harry Sunderland and a man we believe to be called Oscar Malinowski. The phone is passed round the three men who film each other as they kick and beat to death a young woman, who has yet to be identified.’

Henry stopped, let the words sink in, then said, ‘The choice is yours, Ralph.’

‘It’s all down to Harry Sunderland. It just got a bit out of hand

…’

‘Bad, bad people,’ Henry said. ‘You get involved with them and you pay the price.’

He looked at his mini-team — and to do so, he had to move his whole torso in order to keep the pain in his neck manageable. There was Jerry Tope, Bill Robbins, Rik Dean, and, of course, the team leader, Robert Fanshaw-Bayley. Slouched at the back of the office was the unofficial member, Steve Flynn. On the floor next to him was a holdall — hand luggage for his flight back to Gran Canaria later that day.

They were assembled in Henry’s office to update progress so far on what was proving to be a challenging investigation.

They all knew various bits of the story — other than Flynn, who knew what he knew, because, over the last six days, he had been doing what he came to the UK to do — help an injured friend and run a shop.

‘Where to begin,’ Henry said, shuffling various papers. He was sitting at his desk. To his right was a projector screen on the back wall. A laptop had been set up, connected to the data projector that was fitted to the ceiling.

A chorus of muted voices came, ‘Why not at the beginning?’

‘Ho ho,’ he said.

‘But keep it brief — I’m at the Police Authority in half an hour,’ FB said.

‘OK — still have a long way to go with this, but this is where we’re at now.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Background is that Harry Sunderland, leading businessman and Lancaster socialite, gets involved with a Russian crim in Cyprus dealing with cheap property and other criminal activity. Sunderland is a friend of Ralph Barlow, soon to be ex-DI of our parish, through golf and stuff like that. Sunderland was also matey with Joe Speakman, whose own son Tom was/is also friends with Sunderland, so much so that Sunderland set him up in business in Cyprus as an estate agent to sell on the property being built by the Russian crim, name of Oscar Malinowski. Barlow is a boozer and a gambler and a ladies’ man, always short of money, and Malinowski, a guy with an eye for the main chance, puts a deal to him: pinpoint new Range Rovers for him using PNC and get paid, in cash and in kind. And he would do the rest — i.e., send his lackeys over to steal the Range Rovers and get Sunderland to ship them across Europe in sealed containers for selling cut price to Range-Rover-mad Russkies. Good money for Barlow — two grand a car — and sex.’

‘How sex?’ Bill Robbins asked.

‘Range Rovers went one way, prostitutes and money came back another — and the girl on the camera phone was one of them. Barlow told us over a dozen girls were sent over, he and Sunderland used them and they were then sent on to brothels in Manchester and London run by Maltese gangsters, affiliates of Malinowski.’

‘The ebb and flow of capitalism,’ Jerry Tope noted.

‘Something like that,’ Henry said. ‘He and Sunderland got a kick out of beating up the girls, as it were, and videoing themselves doing it. Malinowski liked it too, and during one of his brief visits — accompanied by one of his girls — they start knocking her around but it went too far. They killed her. And this was above a premises that Sunderland owned in Glasson Dock at which the girls were housed for the short time during their transit, when they were used by Barlow and Sunderland, then sent on to the brothels.’

Bill Robbins frowned. ‘Didn’t they stand out in a place like Glasson? Not exactly Manchester city centre, is it?’

‘They were only there for a short time, two days at most, then they were gone — right under the radar. Then Sunderland sold the empty shop to Flynn’s friend, an ex-cop, who turned the place into a chandlery. It was only Flynn’s sharp eyes that saw the tooth and uncovered the actual crime scene — though what the hell his eyes were doing at skirting-board level, no one will ever know.’

Sniggers went round the room like a little Mexican wave.

Flynn spoke up. ‘Colin had loads of boxes stacked up there and just didn’t notice anything. It had been cleaned up, scrubbed and that, but if you looked I suppose you could tell. The tooth wedged under the skirting gave it away.’

The sniggers died. Each of them had seen the horrific video of three grown drunken men kicking a young girl to death and stamping on her face. At one point Barlow had even dragged her across the floor with his tie noosed around her neck. Rik and Henry had been forced to watch it over and over for professional reasons. The others had seen it once — and that had been enough.

‘It would seem that Jennifer Sunderland found the video for some reason. Maybe she was suspicious of her hubby anyway, and went through his stuff. We’ll not know until we find Harry, who has done a very good disappearing trick. She ended up in the river, but we can only surmise how that happened — but finding her Wellington boot in the garden — I don’t know,’ Henry said. ‘She could’ve been chased, she could’ve committed suicide — but whatever, she clearly wanted the phone to be found. I guess we’ll never know for certain.’

‘And Joe Speakman?’ Jerry asked. ‘What was his involvement?’

‘He had to investigate the murder of the girl, her body dumped in woodland near junction 34. My feeling is that he pretty quickly got a line on Harry Sunderland as being one of the suspects… his problem was that his son, Tony, was involved with Malinowski via the estate agency in Cyprus, and he was an acquaintance of Sunderland, too — and, although we’re still looking into it — he may have got a property at a knock-down price in Cyprus. I think he was pressured to drag his feet, ensure the investigation got nowhere. And that’s why he retired so suddenly. It wasn’t something he could do. He was a detective and finding himself in a position like that was untenable for him — so he went.’

‘Why kill him?’ Bill asked.

‘Because he couldn’t keep it bottled up. It was eating away at him. Joe spoke to Ralph — who he didn’t suspect of involvement in the murder — and said he was going to give Harry Sunderland an ultimatum — hand yourself in, or else. He was even going to come clean about the property deals in Cyprus. Big mistake. Ralph conveyed this to Sunderland, who spoke to Malinowski, who ordered one of his goons, who was in town to steal the newest batch of Range Rovers, to whack him — which is what me and Steve tripped over, dog and all. Then the deeply upset remaining goon came after me and Steve.’

FB inhaled all this. ‘The Speakman family have suffered greatly,’ he said.

‘Barlow can’t stop talking now, but he maintains he doesn’t know where Sunderland is, or Malinowski — but we think both might be in northern Cyprus.’

Henry would very much have liked to sit back and relax then, but he had to remain bolt upright like Lurch, the butler from the old US TV series The Addams Family.

‘And on top of all that, Headquarters Transport are very angry with me for not doing an oil check on that shed of a vehicle they let me have. Fortunately no one was injured in the pile-up caused when the bloody thing ran aground.’

FB rocked forwards on his chair. ‘I’m going to be speaking to Tom Gledhill later today,’ he announced. ‘That could be another retirement sooner rather than later.’

‘Mm,’ Henry said. He had discovered that Gledhill, the chief superintendent at Blackpool, had recently bought a house in Cyprus at well under market value, via Tom Speakman’s estate agency; a house built by a company that was suspected to be a front for Malinowski. ‘The two guys helping out Barlow, incidentally, were two more of Malinowski’s hoods, one in custody obviously, the other still at large. They were just low-level nothings.’ Henry paused and took a breath. ‘Have I missed anything?’

Bill Robbins said, ‘What about the tooth connection? Anything significant in that… you know, Jennifer Sunderland and the girl?’

‘Our Cypriot colleagues have been to see the dentist in question, who is legit, by the way. His records show that Jennifer was one of his clients, probably from when she spent time out there with Harry. She had some work done last time she was out there. As regards the girl, who we think was trafficked from somewhere in Russia, she was given treatment under what has turned out to be a false name. This dentist also happens to have Oscar Malinowski as a patient.

‘We’ve a lot of things to do, a long way to go with this,’ Henry said, ‘and you guys, plus a few more detectives, are going to be “it” for the foreseeable future. Any objections?’

They all shook their heads.

‘Good, that’s settled, then.’

‘Seriously, I would have driven you,’ Henry said to Flynn as they stood by the taxi that had arrived to take him to Liverpool Airport.

‘I don’t think so — you shouldn’t be driving yourself. You can hardly move.’

‘I know.’

The two men looked at each other.

‘Hey,’ Henry said and held out his hand. ‘Thank you.’

They shook.

‘Give my love to Alison,’ Flynn said.

‘I will. How is Colin, by the way?’

‘It’s looking pretty good, by all accounts. At least the pressure’s off them for the moment, even if I did destroy their boat and help myself to most of their stock — and turn their shop into a crime scene for a day.’ Flynn checked his watch. ‘Need to dash… this time tomorrow I’ll be out on that boat, reelin’ ’em in.’

‘Lucky you… maybe one day I’ll come out there.’

‘You’d be welcome.’

Henry watched the taxi disappear out of headquarters.

‘You know, not long before that man turned up I was thinking about you.’

It was hard for her to talk. The punches she had taken to the front of her face had broken every bone the knuckles had touched, the nose, both cheekbones, and had also dislodged four teeth and there was the chance that she would need her face reconstructing, but it would be impossible to tell immediately. There would be a wait until the swelling had subsided completely before any judgements could be made by surgeons.

Painfully, Henry leaned over the hospital bed, listening to Alison’s quiet words.

‘I was thinking how much I loved you, part of the reason being because you were so passionate about your work.’

She swallowed and her breathing juddered in her chest.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said inadequately. ‘This should never have happened.’ This was the first proper conversation they’d had in the last week, and Henry was dreading it.

‘No, it shouldn’t,’ she whispered and swallowed again. Her eyes were puffed up to the size of Kiwi fruits and much the same colour. Her injuries were terrible and when Henry had scrambled across the back seat of the Mercedes to her, he had thought she was dead at first.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said again.

‘It’s not your fault.’ Her lips hardly moved as she spoke, they were so swollen. He touched the back of her left hand, into which a drip had been inserted. It felt frail and cold. She might have said those words, but there was no way on this earth did Henry feel that it wasn’t his fault. It was. Intent, effect, all that crap. It had to be his fault and he was creased with guilt and worry.

‘Henry,’ she said, ‘Henry… listen to me.’ He leaned over even closer so his ear was only inches away from her lips. ‘It doesn’t matter… not to me, not to me… know why?’

‘No.’

‘Because I saw your face at the window when that man was showing me to you, at that house. I saw your face… and I knew…’

‘Knew what?’ The memory of that moment would be forever etched into Henry’s mind’s eye.

‘I knew you wouldn’t stop. I knew you’d come for me and not let them win. Sounds pretty corny, eh?’

‘No, sounds good. So…?’

‘Are we still in a relationship? Is that what you want to know?’

‘Are we?’ he asked, terrified of the answer.

‘Bet your arse, copper.’