by Nick Oldham
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.
Three
Henry Christie regarded his reflection in the mirror of the gents’ toilet of the public mortuary in the grounds of Lancaster Royal Infirmary. His injuries — the combination of the whack on his eye and the painful glancing blow he’d taken on the thigh from Uren’s car, together with the long day he’d just had, made him look grey and not a little frail. He splashed some water on his face, though it didn’t do much to revive him, and wiped himself dry with a paper towel.
His thumped eye had gone a vivid shade of purple, though the swelling had subsided and he could more or less see through it now. His ‘gammy’ leg, as he now called it, was sore and aching; he was actually wondering whether he should start using a walking stick, which could maybe become a pretentious trademark. After all, all great detectives had something quirky which defined them.
‘Great detective my arse,’ he mumbled at his reflection and necked a couple of the strong painkillers the hospital had doled out to him.
Behind him, the door to the gents’ opened and the Home Office pathologist entered, still in a bloodied-up apron from having just completed a gruelling three-hour post mortem examination on the body found in the back of the burned-out car. He was called Baines, a stick of a man with ears like a trophy. Henry had known him for longer than he cared to remember. He was a down-to-earth soul, and he and Henry had often retired to sleazy public houses after many a post mortem to ogle womenfolk and, occasionally, to discuss the findings of the examinations. Usually Baines was jovial, often ribbing Henry about his frequently disastrous love life; today, though, he was sombre. The nature of the PM he’d just performed had efficiently damped down all sense of fun.
‘Grim one, that,’ Baines said, fumbling underneath his apron and lining up on a urinal.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Henry, also affected. On the whole, PMs did not tend to bother him greatly. Today’s, however, had been deeply unpleasant. ‘So you’re sure?’ Henry ventured.
‘Oh yeah.’ Baines was now peeing.
‘She was dead before the car was set on fire?’
‘Stabbed repeatedly, then burned when the car was set alight.’ He finished, crossed to the sink, started to rinse his hands. ‘Murdered in situ, I would say. The angles of the wounds and the position she was found in corroborate that. I think we can get a good idea of the type of knife used, though. Probably a five- or six-inch bladed one, with a straight edge and a serrated edge. Kitchen knife.’
‘Bastards,’ Henry spat, vividly recalling the recently-completed PM. Henry believed that as SIO, he had a responsibility to attend post mortems of victims whenever possible. He had been present when the undertakers had carefully lifted the body out of the burned-out car in Fleetwood, placed it in a body bag, then driven all the way to the morgue at Lancaster. This was for reasons of jurisdiction, as the north Lancashire coroner covered Fleetwood, and therefore the PM had to take place in his area. It was a long journey and Henry had followed the undertaker’s van in his car, having picked it up from home. Professor Baines had spent some time at the scene in order to acquaint himself with the crime, and to offer advice, but he was ready and waiting at Lancaster when the van arrived and reversed up to the double access doors. The body was slid on to a gurney and wheeled into the well-lit examination room where, with little formality, the PM began.
Some details were quickly established: the body was that of a young girl, aged somewhere between eight and eleven years; she was naked and had been trussed up, hands bound behind her, feet tied at the ankles, another piece of what looked like clothes line tied between the feet and ankles. Henry could only begin to imagine the sheer terror she must have gone through. It wasn’t a great leap of the imagination to guess she had been abducted earlier the same day, Friday. But from where? No young girl had been reported missing in Lancashire, nor in any of the neighbouring forces in the northwest. A simple telephone call to each control room had quickly established that one. So it was a matter of waiting. Henry had already arranged for messages t
o be sent with urgency to all forces in the country, giving brief details of the facts, asking for immediate responses if any of their mispers possibly fitted the bill. He had arranged for that to happen whilst the PM was taking place, but so far, to the best of his knowledge, no one had yet got back.
In the meantime, his other priority had not changed: find George Uren. Something that was proving difficult.
‘God, I wish I wasn’t so knackered, beaten up and run down,’ Henry said to Baines as they left the toilets. ‘Literally run down.’
‘What is it? Too much playing away?’ the pathologist teased, his mood lightening a little. ‘Is the rather delicious DS Black your new piece of totty? Though I must say, she looks like she’s been round the block a time or two.’
‘You really need to get out more,’ Henry said with a shake of the head.
‘You provide me with all the entertainment I need,’ Baines laughed.
They walked through the room commonly called the kitchen, mainly because of the huge chiller cabinet set against one wall with dozens of doors in it, set at the perfect temperature to keep a dead body fresh and fragrant. Cards with names scribbled on, slotted into the holders on the doors, declared whether there was a body on the roller behind the door. The place looked pretty full to Henry.
They crossed the tiled floor to the double doors and stepped out of the rear of the mortuary into the cool Saturday evening. Debbie Black, who had driven up to Lancaster in a firm’s car, stood on the grass verge, smoking. Henry winced slightly at the sight.
Baines elbowed him and hissed in his ear, ‘Know what they say about a woman who smokes?’
Henry stopped. ‘No, go on, surprise me.’
‘Fellatio, your todger’s happiest pastime.’ Baines winked lewdly.
‘Just fuck off,’ Henry said tiredly, but not nastily. ‘I actually don’t shag every woman I work with, y’know, even though I’m regularly accused of it.’
‘Not what I’ve heard.’
They continued to walk towards Debbie, who blew smoke in languid rings into the atmosphere.
‘Jesus, smoke rings, too!’ Baines gasped. ‘You lucky bastard.’
Henry shook his head. ‘You’re incorrigible.’
‘Great word,’ said Baines. ‘Underused.’
‘Hi, guys,’ Debbie said, stamping out her cigarette whilst exhaling her last lungful and wafting away the smoke with distaste. ‘I only smoke after PMs … I can’t stand the smell of them. Keep a packet of fags on standby, just in case.’
Henry nodded understandingly, although he had never known the desire to resort to cancer sticks. His stress default had usually been booze in the form of Stella Artois and Jack Daniel’s.
Debbie looked distraught, as though it was more than the whiff of death that was troubling her.
‘You OK?’ Henry asked.
‘No, no, not really.’ She was shaking her head, eyes filling with moisture. ‘It’s just that …’ She looked up to the heavens, seeming annoyed with herself for showing emotion. ‘I know I shouldn’t let it bother me … it’s just what you said, Henry, when you described what happened when you clocked Uren.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You know,’ she prompted. ‘That poor girl was probably tied up in the back of his car, wasn’t she? And those two bastards had stopped for fish and chips. They had her tied up alive and they stopped for fuckin’ chips,’ she said angrily. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said, drawing her hands over her face. She composed herself, took a few deep breaths, then regarded Henry levelly. ‘I want to be on the murder team, Henry. I want to have a chance at collaring Uren and I won’t accept anything less.’
‘What’ve you got?’ Henry asked the question of the single person who formed the intelligence cell in the MIR. He didn’t particularly like the way the DC looked back at him, because he sensed the answer in his expression: nothing.
‘Er, not much,’ mumbled the detective constable. His name was Jerry Tope and his nickname was ‘Bung’, short for ‘bungalow’ because, as legend had it, he had nothing ‘up top’. He was the DC Henry had snaffled from the local Intel unit.
‘How much more than when I left?’
The DC blinked nervously.
‘That much, eh?’ Henry said, his mouth set.
‘Er, just really the stuff that’s already on the system.’ Tope held up a fairly heavy file. ‘Downloaded.’
‘Right,’ clicked Henry. ‘So basically, since Uren was released and then did a runner from the hostel, we’ve nothing on him, except a snippet from an interview?’
The DC looked forlorn.
‘In that case, I want everything that we do know to be turned into an action. I want all known associates visited, all previous addresses visited, all known haunts visited, however out of date any of them might seem to be. I also want all known sex offenders in the area visited and spoken to …’ Henry squinted thoughtfully, marshalling his dendrites. ‘Anything back on the burned-out car yet?’
‘No … sorry, yes … no current keeper.’
‘We have the name of the previous keepers?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Get that actioned, too,’ he snapped. ‘And … find out who he was in prison with, who he was at the hostel in Accrington with — inmates and staff — OK?’
The Intel cell nodded.
Henry said, even though it sounded rather corny, ‘No stone unturned, because I’ve got a very bad feeling about this, the more I think about it.’
What he did not share with Tope were his thoughts on what exactly gave him such a bad feeling, something he was keeping to himself at the moment … not that it was rocket science, but something that had occurred to him after Debbie Black’s heartfelt remark about fish and chips; if Henry had interrupted Uren and his friend before they had a chance to do whatever they were going to do to the unfortunate girl, then it was always possible they might still be angry, believing they hadn’t achieved their goal. They might just be in the frame of mind to continue where they’d left off — and abduct another.
One thing was certain: Henry was now heading a hot, fast-moving investigation and at that precise moment, feeling tired and jaded, hurt and injured, just wanting eight hours uninterrupted sleep, he did not feel confident of pulling it off.
Henry raised his eyebrows at DC Tope, who was regarding him unsurely.
‘So what you waiting for?’ he demanded.
Tope’s head dropped and his fingers moved to the keyboard of the computer in front of him. Henry spun and strutted across the MIR — as much as he could strut with a gammy leg — and as he exited through the door he was pretty sure he heard the word ‘git’ waft from Tope’s mouth. He stopped at the door and, in the fashion of all good TV drama, turned to look, about to say something profound and life changing. However, words failed him, so he just left and made his way back to the office he had been allocated on his redeployment with FMIT.
It wasn’t such a bad office really. It was out of the way, which was always a plus point. It was small, with a long narrow window running from floor to ceiling, overlooking Bonny Street and not much else. Daily he was now faced with a massive model of a shark stuck on the wall at the rear of Sea World. It had blood on its fangs and small piggy eyes and looked ferocious. He had named it Dave, after Dave Anger, his boss, and greeted it every day with a nod and a wave. The office was desperately cold, though — always — and he had acquired a plug-in electric radiator from someone else’s office, which did the job up to a point. He often felt that his front half was red hot, but his back was frozen, even on the best of days. He had a desk, a computer with a will of its own, a swivelling chair and just enough room for two plastic chairs opposite the desk, for those cosy chats that chief inspectors often found themselves having, usually with themselves.
He sat behind the desk and tilted the chair back until it whacked the wall, then raised his sore leg on to the desk, giving it some relief.
Yes, the office was just about functional, but nowhere near as comfy and spacious as the one he’
d been evicted from at HQ. The one with the view of the tennis courts, rugby field, trees and grass. Now all he had was a Blackpool back street to admire. And a shark.
It was eight thirty p.m. A debrief was planned for nine p.m., then there would be another briefing in the morning at eight a.m. Sunday would be a good day for working, getting progress made.
He wondered if he would be able to pull this one off quickly and if he couldn’t, what would his future look like.
Dave Anger, who he had now renamed Sharky, would see to it that it would be bleak and tragic … Henry was visualizing feeding his boss into the mouth of a Great White shark when the office door opened, clattering against the plastic chairs. Debbie Black came in, a terrible expression on her face.
‘I’ve just had a horrendous thought,’ she blurted.
‘I know,’ Henry said, reading her.
‘They’re going to do it again, and they’re going to do it soon, and if we don’t catch them, another young girl is going to die.’
‘I know,’ Henry said again. ‘I know, I know, I know.’
In a nutshell, nothing was achieved that day apart from on the scientific front. Uren had gone to ground and could not be found and all other leads were dead ends — for the moment. But then again, unless someone struck lucky in those first few hours, there weren’t even enough detectives to spin a drum. It was clear to Henry that the murder squad would have to be seriously enlarged by Monday at the latest.
