by Nick Oldham
‘They missed all the vital organs,’ Henry said, ‘although it doesn’t feel like it.’
‘So, come on,’ FB said. ‘This is about as close to the murder of a cop as you could get without an actual dead body in uniform. Got detectives working on it, and your uniformed mates, and this is about the first time you’ve been able to talk coherently … so what do you remember?’
Henry managed a shrug. Even his shoulders hurt. ‘Not much to be honest.’
‘You chased the lad out of the department store,’ FB prompted him.
‘Which lad?’
FB rolled his eyeballs in their sockets and tried to jog Henry’s memory with a list of bullet points: ‘Teenager … nicked a load of perfume, plastic bag, spark plug, did a runner, you behind him.’
‘Oh, right, that lad.’
‘Yes, that lad. It’s on CCTV.’
This was the first Henry had heard of this development. ‘Oh, OK. So can you ID him?’
FB made a doubtful noise. ‘Clever little sod kept his face turned away from the cameras; obviously knew exactly where they were positioned.’
‘So, no face?’
‘No, but you saw it.’
‘Don’t recall,’ Henry said.
FB tutted with irritation.
‘I did get my head kicked in,’ Henry said defensively.
‘And this lad was one of the two you encountered in the alley, yeah?’
‘Again, couldn’t say … I clearly remember being in the store, then it’s all a bit vague. Blank, even. Maybe my memory will return bit by bit.’
‘But at the moment, nothing?’
Henry nodded. His skull rattled.
‘Marvellous,’ FB said, clearly annoyed.
‘Sorry, boss.’
FB shook his head. ‘Like I said, a good kicking.’
‘But are you anywhere with it yet?’ Henry asked.
‘Not so far.’
‘Did the policewoman see anyone?’
‘She said the alley was empty when she ran in and found you. They must have legged it moments before she arrived.’
Henry took this in. ‘Shame.’
‘Right, well.’ FB slapped his chubby thighs. ‘Need to get back to the station. If you do recall anything worthwhile …’
Henry nodded. ‘Any chance you could arrange a couple of mugshot albums to be dropped off for me to peruse?’ he suggested. ‘Could jog my memory.’
FB dithered for a moment, then said OK and left.
Henry had a series of visitors over the course of that day: members of his SU team, none of whom showed any signs of sympathy, as was the usual case with fellow cops. One even showed up bearing a punnet of rotting grapes. Banter and bluster covered up how concerned they had been, and Henry would have been extremely worried if they’d come in all sad-faced and tearful. He would have suspected they knew something he didn’t. Their presence cheered him up considerably. A very young CID admin lady came from the police station bearing a couple of hefty photograph albums containing mugshots of hundreds of local crims, which she got him to sign for, and he promised on his life he would guard and return them.
After that, the policewoman who’d found him in the alley came on to the ward and shyly said, ‘Hello.’
Henry had the photo albums on his lap, but he’d drifted off into a slight doze and had to force himself to open his eyes. He’d slithered down the bed and quickly pushed himself back up into a sitting position, wiping away the drool from the corner of his mouth. He knew he didn’t look great.
‘Hi.’
‘Sorry to bother you …’
‘No, it’s fine, sit down, sit down,’ Henry said.
She was in full uniform, tunic and skirt, and she looked immaculate. She sat.
‘It’s Julie, isn’t it?’ Henry asked. He knew really, but his mind was still a bit fuzzy and he wanted to make certain. He also knew she had been in to visit him a couple of times previously, but he’d been more or less out of it.
‘Yes, that’s right … I thought I’d just check in on you.’ She removed her hat and shuffled the chair up to the bed as she said, ‘See if you’re recovering.’
‘I’m doing fine … I really need to thank you for what you did for me. I haven’t had the chance yet.’
‘I didn’t really do anything,’ she said modestly.
‘I beg to differ … Anyway, thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘You can’t have been far behind the offenders,’ Henry said. ‘They must only just have scarpered by the time you came into the alley.’
‘I suppose so … there was just you lying there.’
The two officers looked at each other: Henry, battered and ugly; Julie, way beyond attractive as far as Henry’s good eye could see. He had never met her before the attack, but now knew she was mainly a town centre foot patrol officer.
She coughed to clear her throat. ‘I’ve heard you don’t remember anything.’
‘Not so far – that’s why I’m going through these, just to see if I can jog the mind.’ He indicated the photograph albums. ‘I recall bits. Remember being in the store. Then – splat! – zilch until I woke up in casualty half an hour later surrounded by people in white coats. Thirty minutes of my life is pretty much a blank.’
She blinked and her shoulders seemed to drop slightly in a way that Henry could not quite understand. ‘That’s really a shame,’ she said. ‘They need catching. They almost killed you, Henry.’
‘Ah, but unless I get a blood clot on my brain,’ he joked badly, ‘I’m still here … just – thanks to you.’
‘Well, let’s hope you don’t get one.’
Henry settled down again after she left and closed his eyes as a wave of tiredness overwhelmed him. He’d had enough of work-related visitors and looking through mugshots, and his one good eye was feeling strained.
His next visitor arrived during official visiting hours.
It was Kate, his wife.
She kissed him carefully on the less battered side of his head, then perched on the edge of the bed so she could hold his left hand, the one without the cannula pierced into his vein.
‘You actually do look better,’ she admitted. ‘Bashed, but better.’
‘Improving all the time.’ He tried a weak smile; even that hurt, although looking at Kate through one eye did not. He knew she had been at his bedside for two whole days after the assault, sitting there, holding his hand, whispering things to him, keeping him going.
‘How’s the investigation going?’ she asked. She knew FB had been in to see him earlier. She, too, knew the DCI, having encountered him in Rossendale.
‘No progress, as far as I know.’
‘Damn.’
‘I know. Hey, look, sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’
‘The one thing I do clearly remember: it should’ve been our date night.’
‘Ah, yes, date night.’ Kate looked tenderly at him.
‘I’m assuming I was on a promise?’
‘More than a promise,’ she said tantalizingly. ‘It would have been Vesuvius erupting.’ She looked him in his good eye, took a breath, about to say something, then hesitated.
‘What?’ Henry asked.
‘Er, look … I have something to tell you. I wanted to wait. But it won’t wait any longer. There’s always somewhere better than a hospital ward to say something important, but I need to tell you, and you need to know, Henry,’ she said seriously.
Henry’s lubricated mouth suddenly went dry. He knew the precursor to a ‘ditch’ speech when he heard one. She was going to leave him, to end it – he just knew. Already she’d had enough of being a cop’s wife.
‘Hey, I know it’s been a tough few months – moving across here away from your mum and dad, even though your dad despises me. The new house, new job, no friends … but it’ll settle, I promise.’
Her grin of wry amusement at his desperate waffle made him realize he was way off the mark.
‘Everyth
ing’s fine between us,’ she assured him.
He swallowed. It hurt. His throat was only just starting to improve after the near strangulation. ‘I thought you’d had enough,’ he said meekly.
‘I’ll never have enough,’ she promised him.
Inside, Henry was pretty sure that his heart had literally melted. They had married only a couple of months after she had followed Henry across from her home in Rossendale, where she lived with her parents. Henry had been promised a move to uniform in Blackpool, but that had not happened and he found himself, more by accident than design, on the western team of the newly formed Support Unit based at headquarters. He was acutely aware that while he was still ensconced in the comfortable world of being a cop with so many colleagues, Kate was completely alone in a new environment with no local friends, in a new job and new house in Blackpool. He knew it was hard for her.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been about to give him an ultimatum of some sort; or maybe no ultimatum at all, just, ‘Bye.’
‘Same here,’ he said in response to her declaration of love.
‘So, coming back to our ruined date night,’ she emphasized, teasing him, ‘there was something I needed to tell you, preferably at home, preferably lying naked on the rug in front of the fire …’
‘After Vesuvius?’ he guessed. Even with just those words and despite his condition, Kate had the ability to make the blood stir in his loins.
‘But here will have to do because I’m bursting and I can’t wait any longer.’
Henry’s good eye blinked. His other was too heavily gunked-up to do anything.
Kate was still holding his left hand, still perched on the edge of the bed. She took his hand gently and laid it softly, palm down, across her belly and smiled at him with a tear in each of her blue eyes.
The concept of becoming a father wasn’t something Henry had ever really contemplated, but as he lay back in the hospital bed that night, he knew one thing for certain: his life was about to change in ways he could never imagine.
He was in a state of blissful turmoil as he tried to wrestle with the enormity of it all.
One thing he did know for sure was that he didn’t care if the baby was a boy or a girl.
Either would do, thank you very much, and he didn’t want to know what sex it would be before he/she actually came into the world.
Whatever the sex, he and Kate would take it from there.
Finally, after a couple of hours thinking, wondering how you actually burped a baby, and swallowing as many painkillers as he was allowed, he managed to settle back and apply his mind to the important matter of recovery, getting back to work and catching the people who had put him here.
On that thought, he sat upright and reached for the album of mugshots and flicked through the pages of slot-in photographs of prisoners – frontal shots and profiles, each with a custody reference number and a name underneath.
He found the one he was looking for, slid it out of its pouch and took a closer look at it through his good eye.
The thing was, in spite of the battering he’d taken, which really had mashed his brain, he actually did remember everything about that day: the lad entering the store, the theft of the perfume, the foot chase – the lad’s face, all clear in his mind – and then finding him and another youth in the back alley behind the shops. He remembered right up to the point where he was about to reach out and grab the little thief and the realization there was someone behind him. That was the point at which it all went blank and the next thing he knew was waking up in hospital.
He looked at the photograph he’d extracted.
‘Yes, I remember you, you little git,’ he said to it.
He hadn’t revealed any of this to anyone because he wanted to be the one who laid hands on him.
‘You’re mine, you little bastard.’
TWO
Even though he was in an unmarked cop car and wearing a bomber jacket over his uniform shirt, Henry Christie knew there could be some danger attached to cruising single-crewed – i.e. just by himself – around Shoreside, the most notorious council estate in Blackpool. There had recently been a big increase in tensions between the criminal fraternity on the estate and the police. There had been a series of pretty forceful crime operations, and then a couple of lone officers had been lured into ambushes in which their vehicles had been trapped in cul-de-sacs, attacked and trashed. The officers had escaped unscathed but the vehicles were write-offs.
There was now an edict from above that all police patrols going on to the estate had to be double-crewed and that comms had to be informed of any officer venturing on to the estate for whatever reason.
Which was a slight problem for Henry because his foray on to Shoreside was completely unauthorized, and he was also using his inspector’s car without the guy’s knowledge.
He wasn’t going to let any of those things bother him too much; they were chances he was willing to take.
Because he was on a mission.
A personal mission.
But as soon as he turned on to the estate from the main road, he knew he’d been clocked by two teenagers sitting on a low garden wall, drinking from cans of Irn-Bru. Their conversation stopped abruptly and their eyes levelled on him, identifying the maroon-coloured Vauxhall Cavalier as a police car – which wasn’t hard: the two aerials on the back wings screamed cop car.
Just so Henry could be certain, he drew in alongside them and wound his window down.
Their heads tilted back and they sneered at him suspiciously.
Henry guessed they were on lookout duty and would be skilled in hurtling through gardens and down alleyways to deliver warnings to their mates and bosses within seconds.
‘OK, guys?’ he called affably.
They did not reply, but at least it threw them into a bit of confusion.
Henry smiled. ‘Yep, you got it: I’m a cop.’ Then he pointed at one of them and said, ‘Damian Costain, yeah?’ Then he transferred the pointing digit to the other and said, ‘Ben Flynn – am I right? Yep, I’m a cop and I’m coming on to my patch, not yours, so tell your mates if you want to … I’m PC Henry Christie, by the way.’
‘Fuck d’you want, cuntstable?’ the one with the Costain surname snarled.
‘Arf, arf! Never heard that one before. Good joke.’ Henry clapped his hands mockingly, knowing he was probably poking a tiger with a shitty stick. ‘Can you tell me where Poland Drive is, please?’
It wasn’t where he was going, but he thought he’d ask anyway, just for fun and to further the confusion.
‘I can tell you where Fuck-Off Drive is,’ Costain said and jerked up two fingers at Henry.
Henry gave him the thumbs-up and said, ‘Second on the right, then?’
Costain’s gesture then turned to one which suggested Henry was keen on masturbation.
He gave the lads a nice smile and a wave, wound up his window and drove on to the estate.
As much as anything, he’d wanted to get a closer look at the pair to check if either of them – or both – were the people he was after.
Neither was, but he had recognized one of them as being a younger member of the Costain family who, Henry had learned, pretty much ruled the roost in this neighbourhood, much to the chagrin of all law-abiding residents on Shoreside.
In his rear-view mirror, he saw the two lads stand up and watch the car, then Costain lobbed his drinks can into the road, turned and sprinted down a ginnel between two houses.
Definitely lookouts: the early-warning system had been activated.
Henry gave a mental shrug, knowing that in minutes his presence would be known across the whole of the estate and that, depending on the mood of the moment, he could find himself in a situation. However, he didn’t intend to stay long – just long enough to arrest at least one of the lads who’d kicked his head in some four weeks earlier.
Henry’s convalescence had been fairly swift. The head swellings had reduced quickly, his facial, neck and
bodily bruising from the assault had turned from a livid purple colour to a sickly yellow, and the broken ribs had knitted together well. As much as his skull felt as if it had been fractured after his attackers had repeatedly kicked his head like a football, somehow it wasn’t, even though the doctors had suspected it initially as the first X-rays had been inconclusive because of the swellings.
He was discharged after a week, and ten days after that, having been cared for at home by Kate and his mother – all too much faffing for Henry who didn’t like fuss – he was itching to get back to work and make some arrests, although he did continue to maintain he still had that ‘five-minute memory loss’ which, try as he might, meant he could not recall vital information.
He was lying.
However, as a doctor’s note forbade him from returning to work until four weeks had passed and he’d been thoroughly checked over and given the all-clear, he spent a lot of his recovery time fawning over Kate and her newly revealed pregnancy – which drove her to distraction and to the toilet a lot – and doing some very low-level DIY around their new home, a terraced house on the outskirts of Blackpool, which eventually drove him to distraction because he was not great at any form of manual labour.
All the while, he was in contact with FB about the investigation into the assault, only to be regularly informed it wasn’t getting anywhere fast. Henry picked up from FB’s tone of voice that it had lost all momentum, which both annoyed and pleased Henry in equal measure. Annoyed because the enthusiasm had waned; pleased because no arrests had been made – because that was something Henry wanted for himself.
When he finally did resume work, deployments with the Support Unit – which included several football matches and a two-week-long crime operation in Blackburn – kept him occupied, though all the while he was looking for the opportunity to sneak back to Blackpool and try to collar at least one of his attackers.
He managed it after a Support Unit training day.
Following a morning of gritty public order training and an afternoon of physical training at the headquarters gym and running track, Henry found himself alone in the SU office which had once been a police house within the grounds of headquarters. The rest of his team had cheekily taken an early dart in compensation for all the unpaid overtime they’d worked recently.
