Scarred

by Nick Oldham

  He told Diane about his baptism of fire with Blackstone and heard her laugh, which was a sound he had grown to love.

  In the interview room, the two detectives, who had pre-planned the interview meticulously, began to put things to Clanfield. Not in a threatening way but in such a manner as to make him feel very comfortable and then very, very uncomfortable.

  The fact that the police still had semen samples from Melanie Wooton’s rape.

  ‘Definitely his spunk,’ Blackstone had said at that point as she watched Clanfield squirm.

  And that – obviously – the police had now taken DNA swabs from him which would match those from the victim if he was the offender.

  ‘Like a fish on a hook,’ she then said.

  And that various items – not yet specified – had been seized from his flat that could also link him to the rape, not to mention what might be found on his computer and the numerous obscene photographs also seized.

  ‘Bastard’s fucking wriggling like a fucker,’ Blackstone said.

  At that point, the pressure on Clanfield was so intense that he said simply, ‘I might as well tell you.’

  Blackstone twisted to Henry and offered up a palm for a high five.

  Henry was about to respond, but before their hands actually met, they both realized it was something they were not allowed to do. Sheepishly, they pulled back and gave each other an elbow instead.

  It was ten p.m. by the time they walked out of the police station. Despite Clanfield’s admission, he had not been charged with any offences, but his detention had been further authorized overnight. There was a lot more to do with him.

  As they walked across to her car, much to Henry’s surprise, Blackstone threaded her arm through Henry’s.

  ‘I know, I know – the bloody virus, but I feel happy. We did good there.’ She smiled at him and added, ‘Pal.’

  ‘You did. I just watched, mostly.’

  Henry’s mobile phone rang. He disentangled himself from Blackstone and fished it out of his pocket. It was Rik Dean.

  ‘Bloody good result today, mate.’

  ‘Not my doing,’ Henry said, eyeing Blackstone.

  ‘Whatever … Look, are you planning on going home now?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Change your plans, then.’ Rik told him something, then hung up.

  To Blackstone, Henry said, ‘Rik Dean … he says good job.’

  A fierce look instantly descended on her features. ‘So why didn’t he call me? Why did he have to call his mate? Fucking bosses – I’ve shat ’em,’ she snarled, at which moment her mobile phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it. ‘DS Blackstone.’

  ‘Debbie? Rik Dean here … just a quick word to say: awesome, bloody well done. You probably won’t get too much credit – that’s the CCU for you – but I wanted you to know from me what a brilliant job you did. I’ll be briefing the chief in the morning and I’ll let her know.’

  ‘Uh, thanks, boss.’

  ‘Anyway – you have a good night.’

  The call ended.

  Henry had picked up the gist, tilted his head at her and arched his eyebrows, waiting for a response.

  ‘Well, I’m astounded …’ Then she looked suspiciously at Henry. ‘You told him to ring me, didn’t you?’

  ‘You heard my end of the conversation. It was all his own doing. He just had something to tell me that had nothing to do with Clanfield, that’s all.’

  ‘I think you spoke in code.’

  ‘I can assure you we didn’t. I taught Ricky boy all he knows, including how to be a good manager and the value of patting your staff on the back for a job well done occasionally.’

  ‘Well, whatever … like I said, astounded.’ The change in her temperament back to one of happy normality was as quick as the change a couple of moments earlier to one of incandescent rage. She hooked her arm through Henry’s again and sort of skipped alongside him to her car. ‘What did he want?’

  Henry told her.

  ‘Oh, right.’ Her mood flatlined. ‘How about I take you, then you don’t waste any time going back to Hutton for your car. The McDonald’s drive-through on the docks has reopened, so we could grab a burger on the way, ’cos I’m famished.’

  It would be the second dive of a flat Henry would enter that day, a dingy hole above what was once a tobacconist, now just a shop selling tat, on Central Drive, Blackpool, in close proximity to the resort centre.

  Two police cars were on the road outside, the occupants standing in a cluster by an open door that Henry assumed was the entrance to the flat. Blackstone parked behind the cop cars, and she and Henry got out of the Mini, binning their fast-food wrappers and walking to the assembled officers.

  ‘Can I help?’ one asked, stepping forward.

  Blackstone, who did not recognize any of them, showed them her ID. ‘DS Blackstone from the Cold Case Unit; this is Mr Christie, a civilian investigator, formerly a detective super on FMIT. We’ve been asked to attend this by Detective Chief Superintendent Dean.’

  He gestured. ‘Up the stairs. Can’t get the lights working, but if you go down the long corridor to the end, the flat’s on the right. Bit grizzly and stinky … which is why we’re all out here.’

  ‘I believe a paramedic pronounced life extinct?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘That’s right … and a CSI’s been and gone. Just waiting for a body remover with a strong stomach and a big plastic bag. The night detective’s been and gone, too.’

  ‘Suspicious circumstances?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Just a sad, lonely old lady,’ one of the other officers called out. ‘Pain in the arse, if anything … nobody’s interested, just a run-of-the-mill suicide.’

  Henry gave him a chilly stare, but said nothing. One thing Henry had never come across in his career was a ‘run-of-the-mill’ suicide.

  Blackstone, echoing Henry’s thoughts, said, ‘Should I punch him out now?’

  The officer looked quickly away.

  Henry jerked his head to Blackstone. ‘Let’s have a look.’ To the cop he’d been speaking to, he said, ‘Borrow your torch?’

  He handed Henry a hefty Maglite torch and said, ‘Oh, it’s on the gas fire, by the way.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The reason you’re here.’

  Henry nodded and entered. Like Clanfield’s flat earlier in the day, there was a steep flight of steps directly behind the door, but without any lighting to show the way. Henry took a grip of the handrail and went up, using the torch.

  He went carefully, with Blackstone behind, reaching a landing and then a long, narrow corridor.

  ‘This goes back a long way,’ Henry said, flashing the torch beam down it.

  Outside, when he’d arrived a few minutes earlier, he could smell death in the air. Up here, the stench was more intense and sharp on the nostrils. Decomposition of flesh – the smell that police officers were obliged to walk towards, not away from.

  ‘You might want to brace yourself,’ he said over his shoulder in warning to Blackstone whom he could feel right up behind him.

  She had her own torch and had balanced it on his shoulder like a sniper and peered down the beam. She was very close to Henry and he heard her gasp and sensed her body stiffen up.

  ‘Henry,’ she whispered into his ear. Her voice was brittle, and although he had only known this woman for a short time, he recognized something completely different in the tone. He knew what it was: fear. He assumed that was a fairly normal reaction to having to walk down a long, dark corridor expecting to see a dead body. Anyone would have been a little bit tense – even Henry who had walked down many such corridors and alleyways. It was only human to be like that, but a cop had to be able to control the fear.

  ‘You OK?’

  Suddenly, there was a chilling scream and Henry felt the rush of something between his feet.

  Blackstone screamed too and dropped her torch with a clatter.

  ‘Fuck! A bloody cat,’
Henry said. He turned to see a petrified moggy hurtling down the stairs. He let out a long gasp.

  He picked up Blackstone’s torch for her and shone it across her face at an angle so as not to dazzle her, and in the long shadows caused by the way the light spread diagonally over her features, her eyes seemed sunken and frightened.

  ‘You still OK?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Not really.’ Her voice was tiny and fragile, lost even. All her bluster had gone.

  ‘I know it’s a bad smell,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not that … Look, I’m sorry, I can’t go down there.’ She pushed his arm away and took the torch from his grasp.

  ‘OK, not a problem.’

  Without another word, she turned and went back down the stairs to the outside world.

  Henry frowned as he watched her, not understanding and wary of making assumptions. He turned and looked back along the corridor which, even to him and despite other cops having already trodden this path, was not exactly enticing, not least because of the smell and fleeing felines.

  There was a light switch on the wall which he flicked, but nothing happened.

  Adjusting his face mask, he began the walk along the corridor, its floorboards creaking. It seemed to take an age to reach the final door which led into the bedsit and from which the overwhelming putrid smell emanated.

  He stepped inside, flashed the torch around, now hearing a low, buzzing murmur. He kept his mouth closed tight and pinched his nostrils over his mask – which was not helping to reduce the smell in any way – as the torch beam moved around, past a small TV on a stand, a gas fire, a kitchen sink, a single gas hob and a tiny fridge, past a settee to the bed at the back of the tiny room in which someone had once lived, if one could call it that.

  The bed. A shape on the bed.

  Then, with a noise like the crack of a bullwhip which made him jump, the lights suddenly came on and he could clearly see what before had only been an outline on the bed – a body, face up.

  And with the illumination came the reason for the low murmuring sound he’d heard as a huge swarm of bluebottles rose en masse from the body, disturbed by the lights.

  ‘Ugh!’ Henry stepped back, disgusted, swatting them away with his hand, feeling their hard bodies as he wafted them. ‘Holy—!’ He tried not to swear.

  He too wanted to do a runner, but he held his nerve as the flies buzzed around him and he continued to flick them away as he stepped forward to look, feeling nauseous.

  And he saw someone who had taken their own life – quietly, desperately, sadly – and who had only been discovered because of the smell.

  The head was encased in a clear plastic bag which had kept the woman’s facial features more or less intact while the remainder of the corpse rotted away, particularly the lower half of the torso from which the juices spread across the bed and seeped down through the mattress, causing a black viscous puddle underneath the angle-frame bed.

  Henry took cautious steps as the flies began to settle back on the body, forcing himself to compartmentalize the horror he was seeing.

  He wasn’t sure how long he looked at the face – just long enough to know he had let someone down very badly.

  Finally, he backed away, turned on his heels and looked at the wall-mounted gas fire which protruded from the wall and acted as a mantelpiece on which items could be displayed.

  There was a folded letter propped up on it, leaning against the wall.

  Henry picked it up. Scrawled across the back of it in spidery, almost childlike handwriting were the words For Detective Henry Christie.

  ‘I’m sorry I bottled it,’ Blackstone said. ‘I just got spooked … can’t explain it … and that effin’ cat! Scared the crap out of me. I just had to do a runner. It was like my throat clogged up and I couldn’t breathe.’

  ‘It got worse,’ Henry said, ‘but no problem.’

  They were now sitting in the twenty-four-hour Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant on Preston New Road, Blackpool. It had recently reopened and social distancing measures were in place but unnecessary at this time of day as it was almost deserted. It was somewhere Henry had frequented in his past, somewhere that could be relied on for sustenance and half-decent coffee at any time of day or night for hard-working cops who were short on sleep but long on hours.

  He hadn’t been in for a while. One of the last occasions had been when he had proposed marriage to Alison. Not the most romantic of locations but, at that specific moment in time, it had been the ideal spot to slide a ring on to her finger, especially when the answer had been ‘Yes’.

  It was a future that hadn’t happened.

  Henry compartmentalized that bittersweet memory when he instructed Blackstone to turn into the restaurant car park on the way back to Preston. She took a seat while he ordered two large coffees and, when he returned with them, she spoke of her sudden loss of bravery.

  She narrowed her eyes at his seeming disinterest. ‘Don’t you want to know why?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me,’ he said, obviously distracted. He sipped his hot brew through the tiny hole in the lid of the disposable cup, then decided to peel the damn thing off before noticing Blackstone glaring at him. ‘What?’

  ‘I was going to tell you something deep and meaningful. Something I’ve never even considered saying to anyone … but you.’

  ‘Why me? We’ve known each other less than a day.’

  She shook her head, pursed her lips and looked away.

  Henry took the letter with his name on it out of his pocket, the one he’d taken from the scene of the suicide but not yet unfolded or read. He placed it on the table.

  ‘What’s that?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘A letter from the suicide.’

  ‘I hope you haven’t read it yet. The first time a suicide note should be read is by the coroner.’

  Henry gave her an ‘as if’ look. He knew that, technically and procedurally, she was probably right. Practically, however, that never happened. He had never been to a suicide where a sealed note or letter had not been opened by the police. If nothing else, if the death was not suicide but a murder, it could become vital evidence that might be worthless two months later when an inquest opened.

  ‘Is this why Ricky boy asked you to attend?’

  ‘It’s got my name on it, so I guess so.’

  ‘Better unfold it and read it, then.’

  Henry’s mouth went dry. He took a hurried sip of coffee and unfolded the paper without actually touching its surface with his fingers. He hardly dared to bring his eyes to read the words that were written in the same immature scrawl as his name on the back.

  It wasn’t a long note. It was badly written, had several spelling mistakes and bad punctuation, but was no less heartbreaking for that.

  Dear Detective Christie.

  I jus wanned to say thank u for what u did for me. I kept looking. Every day I kept lookin for my boy. Lookin n asking but no one ever seen Tommy. I don no what happened to him. I jus know it were bad. An I was is mum and I cud never find him agen. I knew I never wud. 30 years gone and I dint give up but now I ave dun.

  I tried

  I know you did to.

  But he’s dead. Has to be.

  I cant look any more. I got to call it a day.

  Evry day I miss him.

  Now I need to be wi im.

  Pleese don’t you give up on im.

  There was no signature, which Henry found slightly odd, and the bottom quarter of the page was ripped off, which was also strange.

  Henry sat back after reading it and swivelled it around to Blackstone, keeping his fingers off the surface.

  ‘You know when you’ve let someone down? I mean, really, really let someone down?’ he said.

  Now the reason for Henry’s disinterest in hearing Blackstone’s excuse for not going down the corridor became apparent to her as she read the note a few times, then passed it back to him.

  Henry gave her the background. The arrest of
young Tommy over thirty years before for shoplifting – not the most heinous of crimes; the assault on Henry that put him in hospital; Tommy going missing from home, never to show up again. He told Blackstone about bumping into Trish, Tommy’s mum, a year later as she stopped people on the streets of Blackpool, shoving a photo of the lad under their noses.

  No one had seen him.

  Henry had promised to keep an eye on the case and until a couple of years before his retirement he did review it annually, checked in with Trish – whose life had become a constant, dedicated search for Tommy with the knock-on consequences that she suffered psychologically and financially because of the never-ending quest, and that she turned to drink.

  Officially, the file on Tommy was shelved. Henry did check it each year to see if anything more had come to light, but despite some apparent sightings of Tommy in Manchester in the first couple of years, the file had gone dead since.

  ‘I think she had a pretty miserable life before he went missing, but Tommy – the little rascal that he was – was all she had, and when he went, she had nothing but hope – and hope in me,’ Henry said bleakly.

  ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, you’re taking this a bit too much to heart,’ Blackstone said. ‘Bit OTT.’

  Henry looked squarely at her. ‘Admittedly we’ve only known each other what, twelve, fourteen hours, but I already know you don’t believe those words.’

  ‘Oh? Exactly how do you know that?’ she bristled.

  ‘Because I can tell. You might come across as hard as nails, don’t give a flying eff on the outside, but I can see right through you, DS Blackstone. I know what I see isn’t pretty in there’ – he pointed to her heart – ‘but I know it cares.’ He paused and looked down his nose at her. ‘So, go on, tell me why you bolted back out the door, had a panic attack. Walking down corridors is what cops do all the time. Into situations you know are going to be tough. They do it every day of every week. Knocking on a door is like walking down a corridor, yet I know you would have done that without hesitation because you already did it earlier today.’

  ‘You a psychoanalyst or something?’