by Nick Oldham
‘Initially, having read the suicide note: despair, drink, suicide. Now: despair, drink, murder – but there’s nothing to suggest her murder had any connection with Tommy at all. I imagine when we start looking into her lifestyle, that’ll probably lead us pretty quickly to a killer, although we need to keep an open mind. I’d guess, looking round this dump, that she was in a very bad place in her head, and probably hung around with town-centre drunks.’ He was desperately trying to reconnect with his murder scene mojo, which had served him well on so many murders in the past – but he knew it was rusty. ‘But, that said, she’d been searching daily for her long-lost son for more years than any parent should have to, apparently without discovering any answers. She never gave up, showed a depth of resolve that most of us, even in those circumstances, might never have within us. She tried and failed – or did she?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, boringly, the old adage “find out how a person lived, find out why they died” must apply here.’
‘So how did she live?’
Henry shrugged. ‘Don’t yet know. Maybe she was just a town-centre drunk; maybe she mixed with other drunks who are not above suffocating a person to death for a few quid. But she also kept up hope for Tommy. Her life will be scrutinized once an investigation gets underway, but the suicide note troubles me slightly.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s only just struck me. It’s incomplete … it’s just three-quarters of a page; the bottom section is missing, ripped off, so it’s unsigned, which is unusual. So maybe there is more to this … I don’t know,’ he said inadequately. ‘Other than she’s dead and I’m in some way connected to it. No matter what, even if this isn’t linked to Tommy, the least I can do, with that photo of him from Clanfield’s flat, is to get some closure for her, while assisting on the investigation into her death, too.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t bank on that,’ Blackstone said. ‘We’re the Cold Case Unit, not the Murder Squad.’
And on those words, Blackstone’s phone rang. Rik Dean.
She looked at the screen and then at Henry, and before answering, said, ‘Are we taking bets?’
She walked out of the room into the corridor and spoke to Rik out of earshot of Henry. She came back a few minutes later, pretending to throw her phone down. But didn’t.
‘Told you!’
‘What’s happening?’
‘He’s bringing a team in, wants us to brief the SIO, then wave bye-bye. We’re not on it,’ she said. ‘We’ve to wait until he arrives, tell him what we know, then head back to the office.’
‘Well, let’s just roll with that punch, eh?’ Henry suggested.
‘You know what? I get kicked aside all the piggin’ time!’
It was a chilly day, a cool breeze coming in from the Irish Sea over the Ribble Estuary, as Henry and Blackstone took a seat at an outdoor picnic table at the Beach Café on the seafront at St Annes, the resort a little further south than Blackpool – more genteel but still on its way, sadly, to becoming a ghost town.
The café had reopened recently following lockdown. It was one of Henry’s favourite spots. It served good food and was a great place for a meet and a chat, especially with someone like Blackstone who was on edge and needed to chill.
They looked at each other across the table, hunched over yet another coffee.
‘Brrr,’ she shivered.
‘Tell me about your night in a dark corridor,’ he said to her.
Obviously, he was no shrink but he thought he needed to get to the bottom of this as far as possible – for his own sanity as well as hers – because he could see how much it was holding her back.
He had seen the outer scars; she’d alluded to the inner ones, but there hadn’t really been any meat put on the bones. Purely from a selfish point of view, Henry felt he had to know as much about the incident as possible and she had to know he knew. Otherwise, this fledgling relationship was going to get nowhere in the next six months.
That was his take, anyway. Whatever lay ahead for him and Blackstone as running partners, not just what was going on here and now, needed them to be comfortable with each other, and that comfort had to come from knowledge.
Blackstone seemed to sense it. ‘Do I detect some amateur psychobabble shit coming up? Because if that’s the case …’ She left the final words unsaid.
‘That’s what I like – an open mind.’
She tutted.
‘Look, Debbie … I want you to know I’ve been down some pretty dark holes in the last forty-odd years. I’ve had a nervous breakdown. I’ve been chased by black dogs many times. I’ve had to shoot people, yes. I’ve been hammered so many times I’ve lost count; I’ve also been sidelined by the job more times than I care to mention. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the most popular cop on the block.’
‘Honestly? I’d never have guessed.’
‘I know, hard to imagine.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve lost my wife, then my fiancée; I’ve lost good friends …’ He gulped and went silent, turned his head and stared across the sand dunes.
‘Don’t tell me – you had counselling for everything? CBT?’
‘I’ve had my fair share,’ he confessed. ‘And, honestly, it never really did me much good.’ He shrugged. ‘I just learned how to deal with things myself. Compartmentalizing stuff so that in the course of time those little rooms are so far at the back of your brain it gets forgotten on a day-to-day basis, unless some arsehole chucks you the key!’
‘Oh, great master, what do I do, then?’ she mocked him, shook her head and scowled.
‘How should I know?’
‘So why the boo-hoo lecture? All that syrup and “woe is me”?’
‘God, you really are hard work.’
‘Whatev—’
‘Petulant, abrasive, self-centred, arrogant, nasty – and definitely scarred,’ Henry responded, reeling off her character defects.
She started at him, aghast. ‘You swallowed a thesaurus?’
‘But I do know something else.’
‘That would be? Astound me with your vocabulary.’
‘The world and this job owe you nothing, Debbie. Fuck all. It’s all down to you and what you make of it. If you’re not cut out for its harsh realities, then get the fuck out of it. You won’t be missed; that I can assure you.’
‘Sometimes I just want to work behind a till, or stocking shelves.’
‘I’m not decrying those ambitions … but you are better, much better than that.’
‘Even though I’m a twat?’
‘I never said that … not sure it’s in the thesaurus,’ he said. ‘Thing is, those qualities are part of what it takes to be a good detective, and what I’ve seen over the last couple of days is that you are a bloody good detective.’
Across the table from him, her tattooed eyebrows furrowed deeply.
‘And if you keep going, one day all this shit will fall back into place for you. You have what it takes, but even I can see you somehow must deal with the acid thing.’
‘Bit more than just an “acid thing”,’ she corrected him.
He held up his hands to pacify her.
‘It screwed my life up, Henry,’ she said with heart-rending bitterness. ‘Made me hate myself, made me go into hiding, go on the defensive, come out attacking every time.’
She pinched the bridge of her nose, then her right hand snaked into the inside pocket of her denim jacket and she extracted her wallet. She took out a piece of A5-sized paper that had been folded to fit inside, unfolded it and pushed it across to him. It was a photograph.
‘Me. As I was,’ she said simply.
Henry flattened it out. Blackstone in uniform with short, bobbed, brunette hair, neat, tidy, immaculate. She looked very, very pretty, almost childlike.
‘Pretty fit, eh? What d’you say, Henry?’
‘Always had a thing for a lass in uniform – and yes, fit.’ He grinned lopsidedly at her, then looked closely at the photo. Back then, whenever it wa
s, the only adornment her face had was a couple of studs in her ear lobes. He glanced up at her current look with the numerous nose, eye, lip, ear and eyebrow rings.
She was getting another piece of paper out of her wallet – another photograph which she unfolded and smoothed out and pushed across to Henry who placed it alongside the first one.
This was a selfie, taken in a full-length mirror.
Blackstone’s current look: dressed in only a sports bra and a pair of large black knickers. Her hair was spiked red, piercings abounded, including one in her belly button. A snake tattoo curved all the way around her torso, coloured with emerald scales and ruby eyes. It was truly stunning.
‘I’ve had my nipples pierced too,’ she added helpfully.
Henry said nothing, just compared the photographs, his eyes dancing from one to the other and back again.
He saw the caustic fingers of the acid burn in the selfie but also her sad eyes, the self-loathing in them.
‘My boyfriend ditched me. He couldn’t even look at me.’
Henry leaned back and pushed the photographs back to her. She re-folded them and slid them back into her wallet.
‘Ever since it happened, I’ve been running away from myself. I hate what I’ve become. I hate me.’
Having instigated this, Henry started to feel he was out of his depth. He said, ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I know that. You can tell me that till you’re blue in the face. Doesn’t help.’
‘And no one was ever caught for it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Tell you what,’ Henry said, suddenly having an idea. ‘Let’s help each other out here and see if our paths cross at some point.’
‘How exactly is that going to help?’
‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’
‘Again, I ask …’
‘Well, I clearly have unresolved issues and so do you, so why don’t we help each other? As I see it, it doesn’t really matter that we aren’t officially on any specific murder investigations. In fact, it helps us out a bit, gives us a bit of freedom to come and go. We’re detectives, aren’t we? Let’s go and detect things that are bugging the life out of us both.’
‘I think you’ll find that I’m a detective and you’re a civilian investigator.’
Henry shook his head in irritation. ‘Be that as it may … but before we move on to rid Gotham City of all known crims, there is one more thing I need to tell you.’
He saw her draw away in mock horror.
‘And I say this as purely a neutral observer, no axe to grind or agenda to pursue.’
‘Shit – it gets worse.’
‘Thing is, you are still fit and, above all, you are still beautiful, and don’t you ever forget it.’
She blinked at him many times, nonplussed. Her mouth opened and she swallowed as she looked at him, completely shocked by this statement. A flush of red crept up from her scar and around her neck.
Then she laughed it off. ‘I’m still not going to shag you, old guy.’
‘Debbie, I’d never get past those gatekeeper knickers.’
They finished their coffees and put together their game plan, the first part of which was to visit the place where Blackstone had been splashed with acid. On the way, Henry asked her what set of circumstances had led up to her going to that location in the first place.
ELEVEN
Four Years Ago
DS Deborah Blackstone slammed the cell door on the prisoner after pushing him right into the cell itself, assisted by a gaoler and a custody sergeant. The prisoner stumbled to the back of the cell, whirled around ferociously on his captors and came back at them like a wounded tiger, although he was far from wounded.
He was furious because he’d just been interviewed for a serious assault and had smugly sat there for almost two hours, at first saying, ‘No comment’ and then, as the evidence against him mounted, vehemently denying the allegation – which was that he had held a man’s forearm down on a kerb and jumped on it, breaking it badly. It was the culmination of a gruesome attack, one of those difficult ones to prove – one of those so common on the streets of Blackpool, committed by people only in town for a day and a night, then going back to their homes, often in the far reaches of the British Isles.
Blackstone had been relentless in her pursuit of this particular offender. Not because of the severity of the assault, but because an innocent gay man had been the target. She had spent many hours trawling through CCTV images, sifting through ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) images and results, public transport records, submitting blood samples, interviewing night-club bouncers and circulating grainy photographs until she identified the man, a body builder from Glasgow.
She had enjoyed the pursuit, the digging, following leads; she was no analyst, but it suited her to sift through anything that might be evidence, even though some of her colleagues regarded her as a bit too bonkers. It was only an assault, but her response had been that if anyone, resident or visitor to the resort, was attacked, then the cops had a duty to chase the offender(s) and, if possible, bring them to justice.
Interviewing him had also been a pleasure.
Pushing gently as she questioned him, seeing the look in his eyes change as he realized that evidence against him really did exist, was stacking up irresistibly and crushing him against a brick wall so that he had nowhere to run.
That was the point at which he became aggressive in the interview room and had to be physically restrained and thrown back into his cell, where he had been deposited, it had to be said, with as much force as possible.
Blackstone swished the palms of her hands together and exhaled as she grinned at the gaoler and the custody sergeant. She then rearranged her bobbed, brunette hair back into place – she was fanatical about such things – and began the walk back to the custody office. The gaoler went on ahead, leaving Blackstone and the sergeant side by side, their steps slowing in synch as their shoulders touched gently – accidentally, it might have seemed to an observer. Actually, it was quite deliberate and each of them experienced a surge of static from the contact as their relationship was in the very fledgling stage.
‘I’m off at ten,’ the sergeant whispered.
‘I know,’ Blackstone said.
Both were talking with their lips closed, like ventriloquists.
‘Can you hang about until then?’ he asked.
‘I have things I can be doing,’ she said.
‘How does a tryst at the Tram and Tower sound?’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
By which time they had reached the turning into the custody office and Blackstone, in an effort to fool anyone who might suspect this liaison, continued talking as if partway through a conversation. ‘So, I’m looking at a night in the cells for this guy, no bail, court tomorrow … oh, hi, boss,’ she said, spotting the patrol inspector behind the custody desk, looking through the binder containing all the records of everyone in the traps – fourteen of them. A fairly quiet night in the sausage factory.
The inspector looked round as the two came into view.
Her name was Julie Clarke.
‘Hi, Debs. Where are we up to with the guy from Glasgow? I just heard you talking to Dave about him’ – Dave Allbridge was the name of the custody sergeant.
‘Yeah, he’s had his chance to confess. Bracey,’ Blackstone said, referring to one of the DCs up in the CID office, ‘is inputting the charges as we speak. No bail as there’s every chance he wouldn’t turn up for court or he will intimidate witnesses. Hope that’s OK with you, boss?’ Blackstone was more than happy to refer to anyone who outranked her as ‘boss’, uniform or otherwise.
‘Absolutely fine,’ Clarke said. As patrol inspector, it was her responsibility to review all the prisoners in custody and ensure the investigative process was carried out as swiftly as possible, which often meant chasing up detectives who wanted to ‘play the game’. But with almost thirty years’ service, Clarke was rarely hoodwi
nked. Also, by getting Blackstone’s prisoner charged, there was one less body to worry about in the cells because he would now become the total responsibility of the custody sergeant until the court appearance. ‘Looks like a job well done,’ she complimented Blackstone.
‘Cheers, boss.’
Blackstone was feeling quietly proud of herself. It had taken a lot of time and effort to track the guy down.
Clarke closed the binder and, with a nod to Blackstone and Allbridge, left the office.
Both officers watched her leave.
Allbridge said, ‘Think she knows about us?’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me. Not much gets past her.’
‘Hmm – she’s one of the good ones,’ Allbridge said.
‘She is.’
‘So,’ Allbridge said, checking the wall clock. It was just after eight p.m. ‘What’re you doing for the next two hours?’
‘Paperwork, though I might have a quick stroll up the Golden Mile.’
‘Well, fancy that! Your pet project?’
‘Just fancy.’
She gave him a wink and jabbed the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, spun on her heels and left the custody office, giving her arse an extra sashay for Allbridge’s benefit because she knew he’d be leering at her. She didn’t mind one bit because he was one horny cop, and she was happy to have him lusting after her. She fully intended to fuck his brains out later.
After checking with the detective she’d told to fix up the charge forms, she decided to go and mooch around the arcades. Grabbing her personal radio, she set off out, exiting the police station via the door on the mezzanine level across from the magistrates’ court.
She trotted down the steps on to Bonny Street, then walked around to the promenade which was still packed with day trippers. Ear-splitting music and the reek of candyfloss and frying burgers came from the arcades and cafés.
Blackstone would miss this instant connection with the town centre when the police station moved out of the resort; building had just commenced on the new one. She understood the need. The present station, built in the mid-1970s, was no longer fit for purpose and there was no space in town for a new one.
