Psycho Alley

SATURDAY
Two

‘Henry, it’s me, Jane. Sorry to wake you at this time.’

Henry Christie closed his good eye tightly and rubbed it, feeling woozy and confused. Kate had actually handed him the bedside phone, having answered it by reaching across him, then shaking him awake from a deep, drug-assisted sleep. He had not heard it at all, hadn’t even moved, even though the thing was only inches from his ear. He tried to look at the clock, focusing his uninjured eye, unable to do much with the one Jane had punched, which was swollen and caked up. It was five fifteen. At first Henry thought he’d been in bed over twelve hours, then his heart sank when he realized it was more like four. It was five fifteen in the morning.

His voice sounded disconnected to him when he replied, ‘It’s OK, what is it?’

‘I deleted your name from the scratch pad, put mine down instead,’ Jane explained, meaning she had amended the call-out rota at HQ comms so that her name was on first instead of Henry’s. Had she phoned to tell him that? Very nice and thoughtful, but …? ‘So they’ve called me out,’ she said.

‘Right,’ he said dubiously, brain groggy, not with it at all. He sat up slowly, the pain in his leg numbed by the strong analgesics doled out to him at A amp; E.

‘They’ve found the car.’ Henry did not respond to this statement. ‘The one Uren was driving, the Astra, the one that clipped you. Been found burned out.’

‘Oh great.’ To be one hundred per cent honest, he wasn’t completely interested. He wanted to be asleep. Desperately. ‘And? Have they caught him?’

‘No, but I presumed you’d want to turn out with me … I know we’ve had bog all sleep.’

‘Why do we have to turn out for an abandoned car?’

‘Because your instinct about Uren was on the button,’ she said.

‘Explain.’

Briefly, she did.

‘In that case, I’ll come. Are you en route to the scene?’

‘Er, sort of … if you look out of your window, you’ll see me.’

Henry stood up and staggered to the window with the cordless phone, pulled back the curtain and saw Jane outside in her car in the grey dawn looking up at him. Her mobile phone was clamped to her ear. She smiled and tinkled her fingers at him. He waved, dropped the curtain.

‘Be with you soon,’ he said and thumbed the end-call button.

Kate was propped up on one elbow, her pretty mouth twisted sardonically. She was wearing a long tee shirt bearing a slogan about how dangerous women can be when their hormones are in the ascent. Her hair was ruffled. She looked sleepy and gorgeous.

‘Mm?’ she said.

‘I know, I know,’ he said glancing down at his naked and rather sagging body. Too much time spent on long investigations wreaks havoc with diet and fitness regimes. There was a massive, ugly bruise which had spread in an oval shape around the outside of his thigh, almost up to his waist and down to his knee. It looked worse than it was, the A amp; E doctor had assured him, but it felt pretty bad just at that moment. He crossed the bedroom and began to dress, pulling on the exact same clothes he had divested earlier. When dressed he bent over and gave Kate a kiss, inhaling her intoxicating night body aroma which often drove him crazy. ‘See you later, honey.’

‘Ho-hum,’ she mumbled. ‘Don’t wake the girls.’ She flopped back into bed, asleep before Henry had even closed the bedroom door.

‘How did you explain the shiner?’ Jane asked with a smirk.

Henry shrugged. ‘Winged it.’

‘You do a lot of that, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Winging it. “Wing” could be your middle name. Henry “Wing” Christie.’ There was a brittle edge to her voice.

Henry stayed silent, his head resting, eyes closed. Jane gripped the steering wheel, her mouth twisted down with disapproval.

‘You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know,’ Henry said.

‘Do what?’

‘You know — work with me. You’ve got Dave Anger’s lug-hole … there’s no need for you to be working the same cluster as me, is there? You could influence him easily enough.’

‘I didn’t have any choice … we all got posted around the county when the SIO team became FMIT. As much as possible people were posted where it didn’t cause too much inconvenience.’ She shrugged. ‘I live in Fulwood. Not too much of a hardship to get into Blackpool down the ’fifty-five.’

‘Or Preston, or Blackburn, come to that,’ Henry pointed out. ‘Or is it that you’re still spying on me … Anger’s little mole?’ He squinted through his good eye.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, her neck reddening.

‘Whatever,’ he said tiredly, past caring.

Jane had driven from Henry’s house, down through Blackpool on to the promenade, then turned north, the sea on her left. The tide was a long, long way out and the clearing dawn was windless and tranquil, the weather having eased since last night. The huge expanse of beach looked for all the world like something from a glossy travel brochure. There were times when Blackpool actually looked beautiful, but Henry did not cast a glance to his right so as not to spoil the illusion. The tacky Golden Mile would bring anyone crashing back to earth. Instead he tried to imagine he was somewhere tropical.

‘Shit.’

Jane slammed on the brakes. Had it not been for his seatbelt, Henry would have been catapulted through the windscreen. He was literally jolted back to reality, brought back from his dreams of distant shores.

A scruffy black mongrel dog trotted across the road, a dirty look directed at Jane’s car. She had managed to avoid flattening it more by luck than judgement.

‘County dog,’ Henry remarked, referring to the semi-mythical creature which had been used ruthlessly as the explanation for many otherwise inexplicable police vehicle accidents: ‘It was a dog, Sarge, a big black one, came from nowhere.’

‘I didn’t see it coming … I was almost asleep,’ Jane admitted, sounding cross with herself. She set off again with a long exhalation of breath.

Henry sat up straight, aware that tiredness could get you killed. ‘Whatever happens today,’ he announced, ‘we’ll both take a couple of days off …’ But even as he spoke he had one of those pit-of-the-stomach premonitions that indicated to him there would be fat chance of that happening. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, hoping to keep Jane awake by way of discussion, ‘what else do you know about Uren’s car?’

‘Other than the body in the boot, you mean?’

She drove north through Bispham, then Cleveleys and up into Fleetwood. All charming, romantic-sounding names, Henry thought sardonically, rather like the names of the towns along Route 66. Jane threaded through the streets of Fleetwood and emerged at the roundabout where Henry had originally spotted Uren and his unknown companion in the Astra not many hours before. Just off the roundabout was newly-built superstore, next to which was Fleetwood’s well known retail outlet, Freeport, which sold brand names at much reduced prices. Henry had been there a few times as a customer, but in the many clothing stores on the site he had never yet found anything that actually quite fitted him. He always ended up back in Asda or Debenham’s.

Jane spun round the roundabout, now heading out of Fleetwood, Freeport on her left. Just beyond Freeport and a few large, untidy warehouses, she turned left into a service road which ran towards Fleetwood docks. This led through a series of tatty, run-down buildings which were once fish-packing sheds and other warehouses, all bearing the hallmarks of a once thriving fishing industry.

A couple of serviceable trawlers were berthed in the dock itself, but the quayside was littered with several rotting hulks of fishing boats which had once provided a living for the people of the town, together with huge chunks of unidentifiable scrap metal. The place looked and felt desolate, overseen by the ghost of a bygone age of profitability. Jane drove past a scrapyard, at the gate of which stood the classic, stereotypical scrapyard hound; a mean-looking mongrel, a cross between the Hound of the Baskervilles and Scooby-Doo, all bones and bollocks. Then there was a caravan storage facility behind high, chain link fencing.

After the dock, Freeport could be seen away to their left, and between was a newly refurbished marina in which was berthed an array of yachts and motorboats. Henry was struck by the juxtaposition, old and new, poor and wealthy, clean and shite. A microcosm of Lancashire, he thought.

Jane drove on. Out to their right was the mouth of the River Wyre. The road narrowed to a cracked, concrete track, then bore right towards the river itself. Ahead of them was a police van with two uniformed constables lounging tiredly against it. Jane drove up to them and stopped. She got out, flashing her warrant card. Henry stayed where he was, looking out across the estuary. With the tide out, huge, dirty-looking mud bars were exposed. The area was wild, rugged, quite barren, the silence broken only by the call of gulls.

Following a brief conversation, during which the officers pointed directions, Jane returned to the car, shivering.

‘Surprisingly cold out there.’

She continued the journey, taking the car along an ever-narrowing track, past the remnants of old buildings, their foundations now merely outlines in the earth, some areas of flat concrete, some bricks that had once been part of walls, reminding Henry of the remains of a Roman fort. Maybe one day this area would be of historical and architectural interest.

‘How far?’

‘Another hundred yards and this track stops, then we’re on foot. You up to it?’

‘Aye,’ he nodded.

Jane pointed. ‘Across that hillock, between those trees, then almost down to the edge of the river, apparently.’

Looking to where the track petered out, Henry saw two more vehicles, one a liveried cop car, the other plain, probably belonging to the on-call local detective. They were parked nose to tail.

‘Let’s stop here, walk the rest of the way.’

Jane stopped the car. She knew Henry liked to stroll up to major crime scenes from a distance: ‘With the sun at my back,’ he would say. He always thought that such an approach gave him and edge, although he could never quite qualify or quantify that with any tangible evidence. But as Jane knew, when dealing with a crime and any subsequent enquiry, gut feeling was not always to be sniffed at.

Henry climbed out stiffly, his leg hurting, his eye throbbing. It was cold out here at dawn, near the banks of the river, a cutting if intermittent breeze coming in from Morecambe Bay. They walked to the point where the track disintegrated and became part of the scrub; then they continued up the small hill Jane had pointed out between some trees. At the top of this rise they paused and took stock. The land ran away from them, harsh grass and scrub, then became muddy sand at the edge of the river, intercut by a number of narrow and, at that moment, waterless creeks. The tide being out, the main channel of the river was the only water to be seen as they looked up towards the big ICI works a mile or so north.

‘Beautiful,’ Jane commented.

‘Spooky.’ Henry was momentarily mesmerized by three more hulks of trawlers abandoned in the mudflats, lying there like the rib cages of some giant, mythical monsters. It all seemed very Dickensian, and if there had been mist or fog rolling in, Henry could have believed he was in the opening chapter of Great Expectations. He almost expected to see the fleeing figures of escaping convicts and hear the rattle of manacles.

Away to their left was where police activity was taking place. They made their way toward it. Three police officers were huddled together in a conflab near Uren’s burnt-out Astra, which had been abandoned there; two uniformed, the third a detective who, when she saw Henry and Jane approaching, broke away and came to meet and greet.

‘Hi, boss,’ she said to Henry. Her name was Debbie Black. She was one of Henry’s proteges, having worked with him when he was on CID at Blackpool. She’d done a spell on Child Protection and Special Branch; promotion to sergeant had brought her to Fleetwood, where she was a DS. She noted his eye and limp, but, diplomatically, said nothing. After acknowledging Jane with a curt nod, she said, ‘Not good, this.’

‘What’ve we got?’

‘Well, you circulated this car last night.’ She pointed to the Astra. ‘So our patrols have been keeping an eye out for it.’

‘Splendid,’ Henry said.

‘About an hour ago we got a call from a man walking a dog on the opposite side of the river.’ Debbie pointed across to Knott End. ‘Said he could see a car on fire here … Fire Service turned out and doused it down before we got here, then they popped the boot, hatchback,’ she corrected herself, ‘and found the body.’

‘Fire brigade been and gone?’ Jane asked.

Debbie nodded. ‘They got called to a house fire in Cleveleys, but they’ll be back.’

‘What are your initial thoughts?’ Henry asked. As much as he was eager to go rooting about, he liked to gather facts and opinions as he went along.

The DS shrugged. ‘If there hadn’t been the body, it’s a pretty normal run of the mill thing. Abandoned car gets torched. We get quite a few dumped here. It’s a popular spot for it. Another unusual thing is that the fire brigade said the car had been set alight with incendiaries of some sort, plus accelerant, probably petrol.’

‘Incendiaries?’ said Henry thoughtfully. ‘Unusual.’

‘Which route did the car take to get here?’ Jane put in.

‘Same way as all of us, we think, except that where the track disappears, he kept on driving. It’s bumpy, but driveable, until you reach the sand and mud, that is.’

‘Have you organized a search of the area yet?’ Jane asked.

‘Not yet. The lads’ve had a scout round, but nothing structured.’

‘Was anyone seen at the car?’

‘No.’

‘In the area?’

‘Nope.’

‘What’ve you done about securing the scene?’ Jane asked.

Debbie looked squarely at her. ‘I’ve only just arrived.’ If she’d said it any slower it would have been spelled out. The two women regarded each other coldly and a confused Henry decided it was best to step in.

‘Let’s have a look.’

Debbie spun haughtily and set off towards the Astra, Henry and Jane in tow.

‘You got some sort of downer on her?’ Henry hissed. ‘Why are you bustin’ her balls?’

Jane’s head turned and she gave him a cynical look. ‘Why are you defending her? Is she another of your conquests? I thought I was asking reasonable questions about crime scenes.’

‘Jane,’ he said bristling, ‘I have not shagged every policewoman in Lancashire, no matter what you might believe.’

‘Just two-thirds of them.’

‘And anyway, what business is it of yours?’

‘None, I suppose,’ she snarled.

‘Exactly.’

The vehicle, although still recognizable as a Vauxhall Astra, had been burned to a crisp. The fire had gutted it. Everything that could have been burned had burned. The tyres had melted. The seats were just springs and metal frames. The dashboard was a gooey mess, the windows molten glass. Henry had seen numerous torched cars and was not surprised to see how little remained, just a charred metal shell. Cars burned extremely well.

The hatchback was open. Henry assumed the Fire Service had done that, which was something to check on — and the body was inside there. Debbie Black led him up to the car and, keeping his hands in his pockets — an old, but trusted approach to a crime scene — he peered in.

Sometimes the brain does not immediately compute what it is seeing. For a fleeting moment, Henry’s mind needed to make some adjustments; rather like staring at one of those multi-patterned optical illusions that need to be stared at for a length of time before hidden, recognizable shapes emerge in 3D.

At first Henry could not configure what he was seeing. It looked like a black and brown, singed, burnt mess … and then a shape emerged; a head, body, arms, legs; a seared, scorched, distressing sight. And then the smell hit him: burned human flesh, instantly recognizable, once inhaled, never forgotten, forever remembered by the olfactory sense.

‘Jesus!’ Jane uttered, putting a hand to her mouth.

Henry turned to see her stagger away, hands covering her face, retching. ‘Make sure you puke a good long distance away,’ he called after her, rather cruelly.

He caught Debbie’s eye, who, under her breath, said, ‘Wouldn’t want to contaminate the crime scene, would we?’

Henry smiled, looked again at the body. It was a truly awful sight, but the real horror to Henry was that its size told him something that made him shiver inside, made his throat constrict. Obviously it would have to be confirmed by the pathologist and the post mortem tests, but there and then Henry would have bet a month’s salary that he was looking at the body of a young person. Maybe eight, ten years old, somewhere round there. What sex he could not tell. Not that it mattered. Henry’s tired eyes — or good eye — which had seen a multitude of deaths, became sad as he inspected the murdered body of a child … and he now realized why Jane had maybe reacted so badly. She too had seen enough death for anyone and was usually unaffected by it. But even the most hardened detective is moved by the death of a child.

‘You think this death is connected to the enquiry you’re running?’ Debbie Black posed this question as she drove Henry south towards Blackpool. After apologizing to Jane about his lack of sensitivity, a gesture received with a sneer of contempt, Henry had delegated the task of crime scene manager to her for the time being, much to her obvious annoyance. He had then commandeered Debbie Black and her car to run him back to the Major Incident Room (MIR) from where he had been running his inherited investigation. To be straight, he should have given the CSM job to Debbie, but Jane was making him feel uncomfortable, so his decision was purely personal. If called to account, he thought he could justify it professionally if necessary.

Now, with the Irish Sea to his right this time, Henry considered Debbie’s query. He blew out his cheeks, gave it some application of grey matter.

On his return from the Manchester murder/corruption enquiry, he had been given an investigation that had been going down the pan. Not, he was at pains to admit, that he’d been doing much better with it since taking over. Problem was that it had taken the police too long to see that there even was a problem, despite the much-heralded problem-solving approach Lancashire Constabulary claimed it took, so by the time Henry became the SIO, he’d inherited a mess.

The whole thing had begun some six months earlier, whilst Henry had been knee deep in corpses and bent coppers across the border.

The beginning of spring. Days growing longer. Kids staying out later, parents inside, or sat on patios, beers in hand.

There had been four attacks in one day around Blackpool, each more horrific and violent than the last.

Saturday lunchtime: the first attack, an attempted abduction. A man in a car, a young girl skipping along a street. The man stopped, asked the girl for directions. She was wary, though, despite being a tender eight-year-old. When he opened his car door and she saw his trousers were unfastened, his penis out, she screamed as he lunged for her. She evaded his outstretched hands and ran for home. The man and car disappeared and the descriptions obtained were poor.

The second attack, two hours later: same MO and same result. The child escaped unharmed, although the attacker did manage to drag her to him, but he disappeared empty-handed.

Two more attacks took place that day. The fourth was the most horrifying, but this time the man — if it was the same man — was on foot in a local park, not far from the seafront at North Shore. He made no mistake and grabbed a girl who was walking alone through the park. Within seconds he had bundled her terrified into the boot of his car and driven away. She was released three hours later after suffering a brutal sexual assault. Again, the police had little evidence — that the man had a silver car was about the best they got — and after an intense, but short-term enquiry, they got nowhere. The man went to ground. No arrest was made, but then again there were no more attacks. After a short period of hi-viz patrolling, police resources were channelled into more productive activities. Within a month, the attacks were all but forgotten, except by the victims and their families.

Six weeks later there were two more attacks on the same day — attempts, unsuccessfully, to entice young girls into a silver car by a man with his pants off and penis in hand. These were half-hearted attacks, less serious than on that first day, and it was assumed that they might not have even been committed by the same man. The only evidence linking the two days was the silver or grey car. The problem was that these were not unusual occurrences. A man driving around, flies undone, pants removed, approaching young girls, was the sort of thing that happened quite regularly, unfortunately.

Then nothing. Not one incident for three months.

Then he was back with a vengeance.

A Saturday morning in midsummer. One of the hot days. Scorching sun, people letting their guard down. Nothing bad was supposed to happen on such days, not in England, surely.

He struck hard and brutally.

The girl he abducted was found three hours later, left for dead in a grass verge next to a lay-by, having been strangled and raped. That she lived was a miracle.

It was only then that the police started to click the pieces of the puzzle together, realizing there was every chance they had a serial offender on their hands, someone who could possibly kill on his next outing. In a very short space of time an investigation team was cobbled together and a proper enquiry was underway. Better late than never. By judicious use of skilful bullshit and lies, they managed to avoid too much criticism from the local press, who were ever willing to kick the cops at every opportunity; internally there was some searching questions asked and a lot of arse kicking. A ferocious chief constable insisted on a result, or else.

The results did not come. The local DCI in charge of the investigation found himself miserably sidelined on to a neighbourhood policing project — shamed, basically — and replaced by the newly-returned-to-the-force Henry Christie.

For Henry, this was an unexpected and unwelcome development. He had known about the restructuring of FMIT and his transfer to Blackpool, but had not expected to be handed a poisoned chalice so quickly.

His first two days back in the force had been spent doing his defensive tactics refresher training, which included a great input on how to slap someone, which was both highly amusing and effective; there had also been a demonstration by the Firearms department of the taser stun gun, which was also impressive. On day three he was unwillingly helping out with promotion interviews at headquarters, forming one third of the panel assessing potential sergeants. This was not up Henry’s street, but he had only himself to blame; foolishly he had once volunteered to be trained to carry out recruitment and selection interviews in a moment of weakness several years earlier. Now it was payback time as he found himself press-ganged on to a panel asking inane questions to bright-eyed bushy-tailed constables who believed they had the qualities to be sergeants if they gave the answers the panel wanted.

He became so bored so quickly by the whole, dry, mind-numbing process that he started to apply his own assessment criteria. He started scoring highly if the candidate was female, blonde, slim and attractive, whatever they said in answer to his less-than-probing questions. Just so long as they had a modicum of intellect. His approach was soon spotted by the rather snooty other members of the panel, straight-laced, rod-up-the-arse HR types. He was quickly taken to one side and lectured to by a scary lady who threatened him, but could not actually really prove what he was doing. She looked as though she could have plunged a knife into him, which gave him a warm feeling inside.

‘You can always find someone else,’ he suggested, knowing she was well and truly stuck with him as all the other eligible high-ranking officers had scattered like cockroaches from a light when they saw this task coming up. Just like he would have done if he’d been pre-warned. However, he took heed of the dressing down and when he returned to the interviews he amended his criteria to be more inclusive: redheads, brunettes and blondes.

By three p.m. on the second day of interviews — Thursday of that week — having seen an average of three people an hour over six hours, he was mentally screwed and physically crumbling. The panel were taking a well-earned coffee break, Henry avoiding all small talk about human resource issues, when his mobile phone vibrated silently in his pocket as a text message landed … and by three fifteen p.m., having given his fellow panel members a cheery wave bye-bye, he was sitting in the chief constable’s office wearing a wary expression and wondering if he would be better off choosing blondes or brunettes. Also in the office was Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Anger, head honcho of FMIT. Even before conversation commenced Henry’s eyes roved the room in search of the metaphorical chalice, or was it the Sword of Damocles?

‘Henry,’ the chief constable began. He was sitting on one of the four low leather sofas arranged into a square, for those less formal gatherings. He leaned forward with his fingers intertwined, facing Henry who was on the sofa directly opposite. Dave Anger was on the one to Henry’s right. ‘I just want to say again that you and your team did a cracking job in GMP.’

‘Thanks, boss.’ The Chief did not hand out praise readily; mostly he insulted Henry, so Henry realized immediately he was being softened up, therefore remained on guard. In terms of the Manchester job, the Chief had actually headed it, though Henry had done the donkey work.

‘No point slacking now you’re back, though,’ he went on.

‘Hadn’t intended to. I’ve just redone my defensive tactics training and I’m involved in PC to PS interviews as we speak.’

‘Very commendable,’ he said insincerely. The Chief’s name was Robert Fanshaw-Bayley. Henry had known him for many years. FB, as he was known in the force (and it was not necessarily an affectionate term, because most people called him ‘Fucking Bastard’ behind his back), had spent virtually all his service as a police officer in Lancashire. He had been a career detective up to the rank of chief superintendent, then became an ambitious high-ranking chief officer, ending up in his present position quite swiftly after one or two deft career moves. Henry had worked for FB several times over the years and they had developed an unhealthy, one-sided relationship, one in which Henry’s skills were used and abused by a ruthless FB, often to the detriment of Henry’s well-being, mentally and physically. Henry had actually believed FB had gone a little soft on him, but that gentleness seemed to have gone up in smoke. Now he was back to normal, the pleasantness just an unexplained blip on an otherwise uncompromising bastard’s character; FB had resumed his role of devious, manipulative, scheming, result-driven git, and Henry guessed that FB did not possess a conscience.

Henry smiled stupidly from one high-ranker to the other, raised his eyebrows and waited for the punchline.

‘Dave and I have been talking … about you,’ FB announced. ‘And as you’re now pretty hot in terms of your investigatory skills, what with this GMP thing under your belt, we want those honed skills to be put to good use for this force now.’

‘Oh, save me the rhetoric. Cut the crap and cut to the chase.’ The words hovered on Henry’s lips, but were left unsaid. His eyes narrowed with suspicion, realizing he was definitely being set up for a stinker. ‘Oh dear,’ he did say, looking sideways at Anger. Anger had been fairly recently transferred into Lancashire from Merseyside to run FMIT. Despite his best efforts, he could not dislodge Henry as much as he would have loved to. With close-cropped grey hair and tiny round glasses, making him look like a fully-paid-up member of a Gestapo hit squad, Anger smiled venomously. Despite Henry’s success in GMP, Anger still did not give him the benefit of the doubt. It was something Henry could not understand; just what did he have against him? Whatever it was, it was about to be unleashed. Anger’s next step in his master plan to oust Henry off FMIT.

‘We want you to take on the enquiry into the child rape and attempted murder in Blackpool and the associated abductions,’ Anger said without blinking.

‘I thought Tom Banner was heading that.’

‘Was. As of now, you are.’

‘Does Tom know this?’

‘He’s gone on the neighbourhood policing project.’ Anger gave a twitch of his nose. ‘Good for his CV.’

‘Why me?’

‘Fresh perspective and all that,’ FB intercut. He knew Henry and Anger did not see eye to eye, that there was a palpable tension there. Once FB had been bothered by the clash; now he wasn’t. He had more important things to do than get involved with the petty squabbles of his subordinates. Rather like Pilate, he seemed to have washed his hands of the affair. He was chief constable, for God’s sake. ‘The investigation seems to have stalled, so we want you to take it on, and,’ — for some reason FB inspected his watch — ‘get a result within a month.’ It was said in an offhand, almost unimportant way.

A chill of fear rippled through Henry’s lower intestine. ‘A month? It’s been going on six months already.’

‘All the more reason to wind it up quickly. A lot of people are getting extremely twitchy about it and we want to be seen to be doing something,’ Anger said.

‘Hence me,’ Henry said glumly.

‘There is a carrot,’ FB announced.

‘Shock me,’ Henry said.

‘Substantive chief inspector. I’ll fix it.’

Henry was a temporary chief inspector which always had the possibility of being taken away from him. ‘And if I don’t get a result in a month?’

FB pouted. Anger half-shrugged. Neither seemed to have an answer.

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘Nope,’ they said in unison.

And so Henry inherited a major investigation getting nowhere which he secretly named ‘Operation Wank’, because he was sometimes just plain childish.

Henry sniffed, nostrils flaring, and turned to look at Debbie Black’s profile. She was a pretty woman in her mid-thirties, with oval eyes and a thick, meaty mouth. Henry half-recalled that she had separated from her husband, but couldn’t remember the exact details. Since she had posed the question, Henry had been mulling it over for so long that they had reached the multi-storey car park next to Blackpool Central police station, one level of which was leased for police use only, secured appropriately.

‘Good question,’ he said finally. ‘Does it have any connection?’

‘Taken you long enough to reply,’ she smirked.

‘Deep thinker, me.’

‘So?’ she queried, negotiating the car around the tight corners and high kerbstones of the car park. ‘What do you think? Connection or not?’

His shoulders jerked, a non-committal gesture. ‘Who knows? I don’t think I’ll be able to say until later in the day, but my gut feeling is that it’s not connected with the investigation into the abductions … or then again, it could be. Uren could be our man for both … maybe … vague answer, but it’ll have to do. I really want to get the scientific side boxed off properly, get the body identified and find the unpleasant Mr Uren PDQ.’

The MIR from which Henry had been running his investigation was situated on the fourth floor of the station. Henry and Debbie made their way to it by way of the lift and found the room, unsurprisingly quiet, devoid of personnel. Or, at least that’s what Henry thought until he saw a dark, bulky figure lurking behind one of the computer terminals. A man rose slowly as he and Debbie entered the room. Henry’s boss. Dave Anger.

He should not have been astounded. Although he had not personally informed Anger of the latest developments because he had not yet had time (or inclination, if truth be known), it was something very near to the top of his mental ‘To Do’ list. Henry guessed that Jane Roscoe may well have done the deed already in her capacity as Anger’s snitch, though Henry did not know for sure. And even though he did not know if this was truly the case, his feelings towards her hardened anyway. It confirmed to his slightly paranoid mind that she and Anger were still in league, Roscoe because he had dumped her and it still smarted; Anger because of some unknown, unfathomable reason that completely eluded him.

The two men faced each other across the computer terminals. Henry could see Anger looking at his injured face. Debbie hovered back behind Henry.

Anger addressed Debbie, speaking across Henry’s shoulder.

‘Leave us. Close the door behind you.’

‘Sir.’ Meekly, head bowed, she withdrew, confused by the tableau, leaving Henry with a man he had grown to hate. But why? Henry knew Anger wanted his chosen few on FMIT and Henry did not come into that clique, but that surely did not really explain the utter dislike.

‘What’ve you got, Henry?’

‘Abandoned car, body of a young person in the boot. Car was being driven earlier by George Uren, someone we wanted to question.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He tried to run me down.’

‘You get hurt?’

‘A bit.’

Anger looked disappointed that Henry wasn’t lying on a mortuary slab. ‘Are you the SIO?’

Strange question, Henry thought. ‘Yeah,’ he said unsurely.

Anger’s head rocked. His lips drew back, revealing his teeth. ‘Your job is to tell me about it all, I believe.’ He sounded supercilious and Henry half-expected him to lick the tip of his finger and mark a ‘one up to me’ in the air. ‘I’ve had trouble with you before about this, haven’t I? Not keeping me informed.’

‘I was actually going to give you a ring now … and anyway, it seems you already know about it, otherwise why would you be here?’

‘Pure chance, pure coincidence, Henry. I only know because I came in early to have a mooch, as is my wont.’

The temptation to say, ‘Yeah, right, pull the other one — that cow Roscoe told you, didn’t she?’ was strong, but Henry refrained as he was also a little gobsmacked by the phrase ‘as is my wont’. Did people still say that? Henry, who enjoyed words and sayings from yesteryear, thought it sounded quaint, but coming from Anger it was more like a threat.

The pause lengthened uncomfortably, until Anger said, ‘So? What else have you got? Time’s ticking, Henry.’

Henry could easily have reeled off the course of action he was going to take by quoting the chapter headings of the Murder Investigation Manual. Instead, he said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘OK,’ Anger conceded with a long sigh, but remained tight-lipped and lizard-eyed behind his round glasses. ‘But you keep me in the loop, Henry. That’s an order.’

‘I know my job.’

Anger nodded curtly, weaved past the desks and brushed past Henry on his way out of the MIR. Henry turned as Anger’s hand dropped on to the handle of the door. ‘What is it? What the fuck have I ever done to you?’

Anger stood still, his hand squeezing the handle tightly, knuckles white, blood vessels in the back of his hand risen. He looked across the room at Henry, their eyes clashing. Anger licked his lips. ‘I need team players on this squad, not loners, and definitely not people who are close to being nutters. One way or another, I’ll get rid of you, Henry … and, despite what the Chief said, if it’s in my power to prevent you being promoted at the same time, I will, believe me.’

‘Oh, I believe you,’ Henry whispered. But there was something else lurking behind Anger’s glinting eyes, something that told Henry that not the whole truth had been spoken. Dave Anger’s resentment towards Henry was far more fundamental than disliking Henry just because he might have been a loner or a nutter, neither of which accusations Henry would have accepted anyway. He certainly wasn’t a loner.

Anger left. A few moments later, Debbie came back, hesitance in her step.

‘Everything OK?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, just a bit of mutual appreciation,’ he smiled, making her chuckle. ‘Right, time for business.’

To be an effective SIO managing a murder investigation requires the juggling skills of a circus performer. There are so many things to think about and it is easy to forget important details in the morass of tasks and information which come in. He knew that his initial priority was to get as much from the crime scene as possible, as well as tracking down George Uren.

Despite his personal conflict with Jane Roscoe, he knew the crime scene was in safe hands. She would deal with it effectively. That left him to think about Uren and how best to track down and nail the bastard, because if this was done, it could very well be a quickly-solved murder investigation with a lot of kudos coming his way, something he was not unaware of.

Problem was, he didn’t know where the hell Uren was.

Henry picked up a copy of Lancashire Constabulary’s intelligence bulletin, known as ‘The Informer’. He looked at the black and white photograph and into the hard eyes of George Uren and then the bold headline underneath: ‘Dangerous High Risk Sex Offender at Large’. The text went on to say that some eighteen months previously, Uren was released on licence from Wymott Prison, near Leyland, to a probation hostel in Accrington. Uren had been sentenced to four years imprisonment for the rape of a six-year-old girl when he had been lodging with the girl’s family. ‘Uren,’ it went on, ‘has many convictions across the board and has warning markers for weapons and violence and drugs. He is extremely violent, especially towards police officers, and has previously stabbed an arresting officer in the chest.’ In large, black letters were the words, ‘HE SHOULD BE APPROACHED WITH EXTREME CAUTION.’

After a month at the hostel, he was reported missing and was therefore in breach of his curfew and consequently the conditions of his licence, and was subject to a prison recall.

It went on to describe his clothing and the man himself: six foot two, thirty-eight years old, usually clean-shaven but with a ponytail, with a dagger tattooed on his right forearm and the word ‘CUNT’ across the knuckles of his left hand.

He had not been seen since he absconded from the hostel.

Further warnings detailed that Uren, as well as being a threat to police officers, had also harassed police officers and their families following a previous investigation. He was on the sex offenders register for life.

Henry put the bulletin down and looked at Debbie Black. It had just turned eight a.m. and he felt, once again, as though he had been up for days. He picked up the sausage sandwich Debbie had brought him from the canteen and took a bite of what, at that moment, was the best meal he’d ever tasted in his life. He washed it down with strong, wonderful tea and energy surged through him, better than a shot of methadone.

‘We were just scraping the barrel with this one,’ he admitted, tapping Uren’s face with his index finger. ‘Nothing’s been heard of him for months and it was assumed he’d gone south, or abroad or something. Maybe he had … but then a sex offender was arrested a few days ago on an unrelated matter and during an Intel gathering interview, he mentioned he thought he’d seen Uren in Fleetwood recently, in a pub. That’s why we were in town last night … you look puzzled.’

Debbie’s brow was deeply furrowed. She sighed. ‘You said you’d never had any dealings with him before?’ Henry nodded, bit into his sarnie. ‘How did he know to run you down?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that one … maybe I’ve had dealings with the guy in the passenger seat.’ Henry wrapped his hand around his chin, his palm covering his mouth, munching food thoughtfully.

‘At least it’s a bloody good start to the job. You know who the prime suspect is, which is always a starter for ten.’

‘Yeah, I just need to corner the bastard now.’ He finished the sandwich, folding it without manners into his mouth, smiling at Debbie as he did so. She, on the other hand, bit delicately into the one slice of wheat-germ toast she’d bought for herself.

They grinned at each other.

Henry very quickly established an intelligence cell, a grand phrase for a lone detective constable heaved from the local Intel department, to start rooting into Uren’s background, to go through everything they could find on him from all agencies, and to start to piece together a crazy pathway that might lead to his door. At nine thirty a.m. he had managed to recall all the detectives who had been working with him the night before, scouring Fleetwood’s pubs, and had already briefed them to follow up some lines of enquiry as regards Uren’s burnt-out car.

Things had started to tick over, but Henry did not want to lose any momentum. He had a briefing booked for eleven a.m. for the murder team and uniformed officers and had arranged the post mortem for two p.m. Via the press office, he had already issued a holding statement to the media.

The scientific people were at the scene and some local uniforms had been commandeered to begin some house-to-house legwork near the docks just to get the ball rolling. They were knocking on warehouse and factory doors, as well as boarding some yachts in the marina. Possibly clutching at straws, but Henry knew there was rarely a crime committed that went unwitnessed.

By midday, a small team of investigators had been given the scent and unleashed. A Home Office Large and Major Enquiry (HOLMES) team and appropriate admin supported them.

A murder enquiry was well and truly under way. Henry’s rudely-christened operation had got a new dimension. He wondered how much time he’d be given to solve it. Several weeks ago he’d been warned he only had a month to get a result and he’d failed. Now a murder had come in which may or may not be connected … one thing he knew for sure was that Dave Anger was hovering for the kill.