Bad Cops

by Nick Oldham

  He knew how controversial spit hoods were and, as far as he knew, not a single force in the UK had ever used them, although some were considering trialling them. They prevented prisoners from spitting in the faces of arresting officers but they were subject to outcries from human rights pressure groups.

  There were different types of masks. Usually a thin, transparent mesh, but the one put over Henry’s head was also of the type used to protect the identity of the prisoner and the front section of it was totally blacked out, although Henry could just about see out through the mesh.

  He heard Silverthwaite shout, ‘Get the CCTV off,’ and assumed he was telling the custody sergeant what to do.

  Hawkswood dropped with one knee on Henry’s back, driving it into his spine just between the shoulder blades. It forced all the breath out of Henry’s lungs and put so much weight and pressure on his heart he thought it would burst, but not in a good way. Then Hawkswood stood up, brought Henry with him and, jammed between the two cops, they kept his head low and rushed him off balance up the cell and out through the custody office. Out back their Vauxhall Insignia was waiting, reversed up to the door, boot already open.

  They tipped Henry into it and slammed the lid.

  It was an intense conversation.

  Even though he could not hear their hushed, urgent words, the man who had followed Tullane from Manchester airport could see the as-yet unidentified woman was doing her best to convince Tullane of something, though his responsive body language remained unimpressed and distant.

  She seemed to be losing the argument.

  ‘Everything has to be discreet, under the radar,’ Tullane said to Runcie. ‘My bosses insist.’

  ‘I thought you were the boss.’

  ‘We all have bosses. I’m the area manager, shall we say? I was happy to send a man to sort out the festering problem that was Salter for you. After that, it should have been plain sailing.’

  ‘It was. Is.’

  ‘You made promises about a replacement for him. None seems to have materialized. That means we struggle in both directions. Our trade has fallen to virtually zero.’

  ‘I have a new transporter. It took time, yeah, but he’s in place now. Also a new business is up and running and we expect deliveries next week … three crushers, three screeners, just short of a million pounds. They’ll be onsite next week and in Holland two days later. Fixed.’

  Tullane nodded. At last, there was the flicker of a smile.

  Purposely, they drove roughly, throwing the car around bends, fast over speed bumps, and Henry could only brace himself but was unable to prevent himself from being tossed around the boot space, banging his head continually. Even so, he tried to ease the spit hood from his head, but the elastic kept it in place.

  After more bends and turns, the car slowed. He heard the murmur of conversation between Silverthwaite and Hawkswood, probably discussing Henry’s fate.

  Henry lambasted himself for not realizing what a field of shit he’d stepped into. And then, as things had dawned on him, he asked himself why he hadn’t acted straight away. He’d had the chance – especially after discovering Sowerbutts was dead before plummeting off a cliff. His reservations, even, about the lack of scene preservation on the field, how the mobile crane had just been allowed to churn it up before CSIs had worked it. How he had wanted to get his ducks in a row. That had seemed such a good, sensible option … and may have come to fruition if he hadn’t allowed himself to be pushed into a cell. Not that he could have expected that. Police stations were his domain, places he controlled, felt comfortable in. But not Portsea.

  Another hump jolted him, sending sparks of pain across his upper torso.

  At least Daniels was still out there and, from what he knew of her, she wouldn’t take any shit.

  Now the car stopped.

  Henry waited.

  Nothing happened for a few moments, but then the boot opened and the two detectives towered over him.

  The spit hood was whipped off his head. The half-light did not hurt Henry’s eyes and they adjusted easily.

  He knew he had been dragged out of the car into a building of some sort and, as he glanced around, he saw he was in a small, commercial garage premises with a concrete floor, an old-style vehicle inspection pit to his right and a lean-to office by the wall.

  A Transit van was parked nose-up to the far wall. He thought it could have been the one from which he’d seen Daniels’ attacker get out of. Hawkswood.

  The two detectives had dumped him on a plastic-seated, metal-framed chair. His ankles had been bound to the thin, tubular legs and duct tape had been run around his chest and the back of the chair, binding him to it. His hands were still cuffed behind him and the position was painful and uncomfortable – as it was supposed to be. He was facing into the building and the two detectives were standing in front of him.

  Inwardly, he swore. He could not speak because the tape still covered his mouth.

  They were now both wearing forensic protection suits with skull caps and slip-over covers for their shoes. Face masks hung below their chins, not yet in place.

  All this, Henry knew, was not a good sign.

  Silverthwaite, the older of the two, was gasping for breath following the exertion of manhandling a squirming Henry Christie from the car. Hawkswood showed no sign of the effort.

  The latter stepped forward and ripped the tape from Henry’s mouth. That hurt, and he gritted his teeth.

  ‘Not going to end well, this, Henry,’ Silverthwaite gasped.

  ‘You got that right.’

  ‘For you, I mean.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Kill me? How exactly is that going to be explained?’

  ‘We’ll think of something. I’m sure we can come up with some kinda gangland execution type-A thing … Won’t be any connection with us nice guys who welcomed you to our force.’

  ‘You guys and your boss are well and truly fucked.’

  Henry was going to launch a verbal tirade, but it was cut short by Hawkswood slapping him hard across the face with his open hand, momentarily knocking Henry’s jaw out of line. A slap may sound pretty feeble, but Henry had seen jaws broken by well-aimed ones. He rolled his jaw and spat out something: blood and phlegm.

  Then he looked insolently at Hawkswood, who was obviously the more volatile and aggressive of the two.

  ‘Now you’ve got my DNA on you,’ Henry said.

  Hawkswood’s eyes showed a dither of uncertainty, then he became confident again. ‘I can wash,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever.’ Henry spat a second time, but it drizzled down his chin on to his chest. He did not suck it back.

  Hawkswood bent over and picked up something from the floor which made Henry freeze in terror – not only because of what he had picked up, but because of what was next to it. He recognized John Burnham’s attaché case, the initials JB engraved in the leather. Burnham had had it with him at Henry’s house in Blackpool.

  The item that Hawkswood had picked up also terrified him and he watched it, riveted, as the man held it in his right hand and bounced it threateningly on the palm of his left.

  ‘Know what this is?’ Hawkswood asked.

  ‘A stick of Blackpool rock?’

  ‘Eh?’ Silverthwaite interjected. ‘You know we were in fucking Blackpool?’

  ‘I didn’t, but I do now,’ Henry said, remembering the car parked down the avenue, two men on board, and attaching no significance to it as FB and Burnham drove away from his house after offering him this simple job.

  ‘No matter,’ Hawkswood said, still bouncing the item in his hand. It was a T-type wrecking bar. ‘So what is this?’

  ‘Something similar to the instrument that killed your chief constable. It can’t be the actual one because that was left in his head. Killing your own chief – pretty fucking desperate.’

  ‘Not half as desperate as killing a visiting superintendent and his sidekick,’ Hawkswood said with promise.

  ‘Which brin
gs me back to the question: where is she?’ Silverthwaite asked.

  At which moment, Henry’s mobile phone, still in his jacket pocket, beeped to indicate a message had arrived.

  ‘Let’s have that,’ Silverthwaite said. He stepped in front of Henry and rummaged in his pockets. His face came close to Henry’s, almost eyeball to eyeball as he searched for the phone.

  Henry could not resist.

  He quickly jerked his head back and slammed it forwards into Silverthwaite’s left eye socket. It wasn’t great as headbutts go. It hurt him and sent Silverthwaite spinning away, clutching his head, dropping Henry’s phone.

  ‘Bastard, bastard,’ he groaned, picked himself up and came back at Henry, fists flying. Hawkswood stood aside, smiling, and let him do it.

  The assault probably only lasted ten seconds, but when Silverthwaite backed off, having delivered punch after punch, Henry’s face was a battered mess, bleeding and cut, his left eye swelling instantly and closing. He wondered if his previously broken cheekbone had been cracked again. It felt like it.

  He spat out again. And again the combination of blood and phlegm trickled thickly down his chin. He raised his head, forced himself to smile and said, ‘DNA again.’

  Silverthwaite glowered at him, his chest rising and falling.

  Hawkswood bent to pick up Henry’s phone, which was still in one piece. He tucked the wrecking bar under his arm and looked at the phone, which he was able to access because Henry had never bothered to put a passcode on it.

  He saw Hawkswood’s mouth twitch – the beginnings of a smirk. ‘What have we here? Let’s have a listen.’

  ‘You have one new voicemail message,’ the metallic female voice said. ‘To listen to your messages, press one.’ Hawkswood did so. ‘First new message …’

  Henry went cold as he heard Daniels’ voice.

  ‘Boss, it’s Diane. Look, I’ve discovered that Salter had two phones, one business, one private. As far as I can tell, it’s the business one in his property. Anyway, I’m just going on a hunch first. I’m going to see if I can get into his office and see if the missing phone’s in there, maybe fallen down a crack or something. Wouldn’t surprise me if these local tossers didn’t find it. Then I need to speak to you urgently, face-to-face. I’ve a lot to tell you. Ring me when you get this. Cheers.’

  ‘End of messages,’ the metallic lady said.

  Hawkswood pulled out his bloodied rump steak of a tongue and said, ‘She’s mine.’

  NINETEEN

  Daniels stood with her nose pressed up to the closed and locked steel palisade gates and raised her eyes to look uncertainly at the triple pointed tips and across at the flat-wrap razor wire adorning the fencing around the industrial unit and large yard that formed Tom Salter’s business premises. The protection made the scaling not easy or safe, and the thought of implanting herself on the trident-like tips made her shiver.

  She rattled the gates. They were securely locked.

  Then had a thought.

  She walked to her Peugeot, got in and drove it up to the gate, so that its radiator grille was almost touching. Going to the boot, she rummaged in it, flinging various items aside until she uncovered the old picnic blanket that her mother had made probably twenty-five years before. It had always been in the back of her dad’s cars just in case. They had been a picnicking kind of family back then. She dragged it out and said, ‘Sorry, Mum,’ before clambering on to the bonnet and saying ‘Sorry, Dad,’ sending the blanket spinning high with a swing of her shoulders like casting a fishing net. It landed across the spiked tips of the gate.

  She clamped her mini Maglite torch between her teeth and gingerly hauled herself up and over the gate, still able to feel the spear-like points through the thick blanket, and dropped cat-like into the yard beyond. There were plenty of things she could use to put up against the gate to climb back from this side, such as barrels, boxes and bins.

  She walked across to the office building, activating the security lights, only now wondering how she could gain entry. The discarded fire extinguisher in a bucket by the door proved to be the answer to that conundrum.

  Having first tried the door handle, not wanting to waste effort by bashing her way through an unlocked door – it was locked – she took the fire extinguisher in both hands and, using the base of it like a door breaker (of the type she’d used herself as a cop busting down doors in raids), she slammed it against the lock. The impact jarred her, but she steadied herself again, repositioned the extinguisher in her hands, then rammed it and felt the door give slightly.

  Ten slams later and the door finally crashed open.

  She entered and took the stairs up to the first floor, where she remembered from the murder book that Salter’s office was located.

  Although she switched on the lights, it did feel creepy and not a little scary entering a room where she knew a man had been shot to death, even if it was months before. Part of her believed just a little bit in the spirit world.

  It seemed as though nothing had been moved following the murder, then the crime-scene investigation.

  Salter’s chair was still there.

  Blood splatter was on the wall behind it.

  Lots of blood – and not just blood.

  Daniels recalled the gory crime-scene photos and felt herself heave slightly.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she whispered, a little awed by the thought, the knowledge of what had taken place here. Her hands went a little dithery and she had to physically and mentally shake off the sensation of dread and begin to root for what she had come to find. If it was there. If nothing else, this was a starting point.

  Other than the blood, the office was basic, the fixtures and fittings old and battered with blinds at the window. A coffee filter machine was on a table, the jug full of cold, black coffee now with a mouldy green crust that she could smell. Her top lip curled in disgust.

  Then she got to work using the technique she’d been taught on a search training course she’d once attended, which simply applied good logic to the task: walls, ceiling, floor, doors … Furniture in that order, missing nothing.

  She found nothing.

  Two phones, she thought.

  One found and recovered, the other not.

  Why not?

  Why one, not the other? Surely he would keep them together?

  The same questions tumbled through her mind.

  One phone in police possession. Was the personal one hidden away somewhere? Maybe from his poor wife, but not when he wasn’t in her company.

  She stood up, inhaled deeply and let her eyes work their way around the office again – a quick skim at first, then slowly traversing everything, up, down, across, until they settled on an adjustable air-vent cover on the external wall. It had a sliding fly-screen grille cover behind the vents and was fixed to the wall with Philips head screws, one in each corner, although the one on the bottom left was missing and one of the mesh fly screens was also missing.

  The vent was perhaps seven feet from the floor, just under the level of the ceiling.

  Daniels walked towards it and peered up at it on tiptoe.

  One screw was definitely missing and the other three in place, which meant nothing. It was a tatty office. But the lack of the fly screen behind one of the vents slightly intrigued her. She could just about reach the cover and get her fingertips under it to pull it away from the wall a little, but although the plastic was fairly flexible, it did not want to move, and force would only snap it.

  She backed off, then went through the drawers in Salter’s desk again, remembering she’d seen a couple of screwdrivers in them. One was a Philips crosshead type. She dragged a chair over to the wall, climbed up, coming level with the vent and now able to apply eye to hole.

  An involuntary grunt of triumph caught in her throat because propped up behind the vent hole with the missing fly screen was a mobile phone. Quickly, she unfastened the screws, eased the vent away from the wall and trapped it between her knees before reach
ing in for the phone, picking it out carefully between her finger and thumb.

  Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

  What the hell was it doing in an air vent?

  It was a Samsung phone, similar to the one she owned, though a slightly older model and encased in a rubberized industrial case for added protection, useful in the type of environment Salter had worked in.

  Daniels turned it on, but it was dead, the battery flat.

  She lowered herself to the floor, switched off the lights and left the office, closing the front door behind her, very aware she could not lock it properly seeing as she’d bashed it open. She was certain Henry would be happy to turn a joiner out to secure it, based on what she had found, whether it proved to be useful or otherwise. She jogged across to the gate, rolled an industrial wheelie bin under the picnic blanket and climbed cagily back over on to the bonnet, then got behind the wheel, started the old engine and plugged the phone into the mobile charger unit.

  She gave it a moment, then sat back and switched the phone on.

  The first screen that appeared was the one requiring a four-digit PIN to be entered in order to access the phone.

  She groaned in frustration.

  Then tapped in one, two, three, four.

  And with a squeak of glee, she was in.

  She looked at a list of the calls made and received the day Salter died. There were several, none of which meant anything to Daniels. The text inbox and sent messages were both empty.

  The last thing she clicked on was the camera icon.

  The phone had been well positioned behind the vent, giving its lens an uninterrupted view of the office.

  Transfixed, Daniels watched the scene: Tom Salter behind his desk, two people entering the office. DCI Runcie was clearly identifiable. The other person, male, was wearing something that covered his head and body. Runcie went to Salter’s desk. The man lounged by the door.

  Daniels turned up the volume and heard voices, not clear but audible enough.

  She listened, then witnessed a cold-blooded murder.

  The recording ran on long after the killing, Tom Salter sitting dead in his chair, unmoving.