by Nick Oldham
Although Deakin was successfully prosecuted and jailed, and it was never proved that the million pounds actually existed, a very dark cloud of suspicion hung over Flynn and Hoyle. Both men were withdrawn from front-line policing and given tedious desk jobs at opposite ends of the county. Henry Christie was pulled in to investigate Flynn and although he could not prove anything against him, Flynn’s life as a cop became untenable. So much shit, and much of it stuck. That, together with a private life that was unravelling faster than a reel of cotton, drove Flynn to quit the job and scuttle to Gran Canaria to try and rebuild his life.
Only when two of Deakin’s heavies came along and asked him in fairly unpleasant terms where the million pounds was did Flynn put the sums together and realize that Jack Hoyle had stolen the dirty money right under everyone’s noses. Then things got very nasty indeed. Not just for Flynn, but for Deakin, too.
‘Felix Deakin,’ Flynn breathed out loud. ‘Jonny Cain . . . now that’s some connection.’
But Deakin was now dead, killed by a hit man’s perfectly aimed bullet; killed because he was supposed to have volunteered to give evidence against Cain, who had been up on a murder charge. Not being a cop any more meant Flynn didn’t know the complete background to all that, but what he did know was that Cain was acquitted of the original murder charge and as far as he knew, it was never proved that he’d hired someone to whack Deakin. And Cain had resumed his old ways.
And now Flynn had seen two of Cain’s lieutenants in Kendleton, which meant Cain wouldn’t be far behind. Chuck Jack Vincent into this little casserole. And a dead cop. ‘What the hell’s going on in this village?’ he asked himself.
And Henry Christie too . . . Flynn’s slightly disconnected thoughts focused on Henry again. Not his favourite character, but not many did like Henry. He had a tendency to rub even the most mild-mannered folk up the wrong way. Flynn closed his eyes. But instantly he was bathed in bright white light, as though a flying saucer had landed behind him. Startled, he jumped around in his seat as four beams of light burned into his retinas like four mini suns.
The tractor was massive. What’s happened to the tractors of my youth, Henry had thought when he climbed on to the running board of the huge machine. The ones that pottered amiably around country lanes with wobbly wheels and a stereotypical farmer hunched over the iron-rimmed steering wheel, often with a collie dog trotting at the back wheel, tongue lolling.
Now they were monsters. Complicated, powerful vehicles designed to carry out all manner of tasks.
‘Welcome aboard,’ Don Singleton, farmer and butcher, announced proudly, taking his seat in the centre of what Henry could only describe as a cockpit. He was amazed by its size and the relative comfort it offered, from the big leather driver’s chair to the two jump seats either side of it, set back slightly, for passengers. Henry sat in one of these seats and Dr Lott in the other, rubbing his hands together keenly.
‘This is a John Deere 5M,’ Singleton continued. ‘Lovely, lovely beast.’
He turned a key, pressed a button and the engine came to life – diesel, but as smooth as a car engine. All the lights came on, even the four positioned across the roof of the cab. He released the clutch and the beast on wheels moved. Henry was very much aware that the cab now reeked of exhaled alcohol. The only good thing was that there was no chance of a cop appearing, breath kit in hand.
From Henry’s description, Singleton knew exactly where he was going and the heavy tractor mashed its way easily through the deep snow, past the police house, then past the entrance to Mallowdale House. Following Henry’s last directions, Singleton came off the road and swung the tractor on to the forest track, stopping just behind the Shogun, out of which Flynn emerged blinking and shading his eyes, probably thinking that a plane had crash-landed behind him.
Henry swung down from the cab.
‘Got some help,’ he shouted to Flynn over the din of the powerful engine. Flynn opened his mouth to speak, but Henry cut him short. ‘Don’t ask. This is the local GP,’ Henry introduced Dr Lott, who had clambered down, ‘and the gent at the wheel is a farmer and butcher. The way I see it,’ Henry went on, ‘is that we’ll have to do the best we can under the circumstances. Obviously we can’t leave her here,’ he said, eyeing Flynn, ‘yet this is the scene of a serious crime that needs protecting.’
‘What are you going to do?’
Henry pulled out the digital camera that Alison had let him borrow. ‘I’ll try and record it as best I can and I’ll get the doctor here to pronounce life extinct and offer any opinions he may have.’
‘I can tell you she’s dead,’ Flynn grunted. ‘Don’t need a quack.’
‘Like I said, we’ll make the best of a tough job. We need a doctor’s certificate.’ Henry tapped Dr Lott on the shoulder and led him past the Shogun.
‘I’m not that good with death,’ the doctor admitted. ‘Old fogies are the most I usually deal with.’
‘I understand,’ Henry said. He had also snaffled a soft-bristled sweeping brush from the landlady’s utility room and he used it carefully to brush the newly dropped snow off Cathy’s body. Flynn and the doctor both held torches for Henry as he carried out this task.
‘Oh my lord,’ the doctor sobbed. Henry detected that he had suddenly become sober.
‘You all right?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured Henry. ‘It’s just, I knew her. Not well, but I knew her,’ He lowered himself down and shone his torch on to Cathy’s disfigured face. ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,’ he repeated. Henry knew that normal, run-of-the-mill doctors had very little contact with violent death and it could affect them as badly as any member of the public. Even more so when they’d had a drink or two.
‘Oh hell!’ Henry heard from behind as Singleton got his first view of the body. He guessed there was a difference in seeing butchered animals as opposed to human beings.
Dr Lott did a swift visual examination of the body, not touching it.
‘Just confirm the time and date you pronounced life extinct,’ Henry told him, ‘though any observations you might have could be useful.’
‘Yeah, um,’ the doctor nodded, clearly shaken. ‘I can confirm death at . . .’ He consulted his watch, read out the time and added the date. ‘Massive head trauma,’ he added, ‘consistent with a shotgun wound, I’d say.’
‘Thanks for that,’ Henry said. ‘If you can back off, I’ll do some photography.’
He moved everyone out of the way and started to take numerous shots of the body, the surrounding scene and the approach. The camera was twelve megapixels, of good quality, and the flash bright, but he was unimpressed by his results as he checked the screen. Not that they weren’t adequate, but he was no crime scene photographer.
And the snow still fell, the wind continued to blow.
‘What’s the plan for moving her and where is she going to be kept? Is there an undertaker’s in the village? Are they on the way?’ Flynn fired the questions like a Gatling gun.
‘In answer to the last part, there is no undertaker, but I’ve sorted out the next best thing and my plan for moving her is that.’ He pointed at the huge bucket affixed to the hydraulic lifting gear on the front of the John Deere.
Flynn’s eyes followed Henry’s finger. ‘You must be joking.’
Next to Cathy’s body, Henry laid out one of the tarpaulin sheets that had been folded up in the tractor bucket. The four men lifted her carefully, Henry gently taking her head and neck, and placed her on the sheet. She was light and easy to move.
‘She’s as stiff as a board,’ Singleton commented. ‘Rigor mortis?’
‘Frozen solid,’ Lott answered.
Henry took more photographs of her, then the sheet was folded over her. Between them they carried her down to the tractor and put her in the bucket. It was just a little too short for her and her legs stuck out.
All four men took a moment to consider their handiwork.
‘Talk about respect for the dead,’ Flynn commented.
Henry made a ‘Harrumph!’ noise, then walked back up to the scene. With Singleton’s assistance he unravelled a second sheet of tarpaulin which was about twenty feet square. They laid it over the spot where the body had been, and secured it using stones and chunks of rock.
Henry weighed up the job and shook his head in frustration. It was a far cry from what he would have preferred to do: erecting a crime scene tent, special lighting, the scientific teams, police search personnel, securing the scene . . . bringing in the circus, as Flynn had so disparagingly referred to the constituent parts of a murder squad. The professional approach, not this half-baked cockamamie crap. He prayed silently that what he’d done would not turn into an alligator ripping his arse to shreds sometime in the future. And the mantra, also sneered at by Flynn, ‘You don’t get a second chance at a crime scene,’ kept looping through his mind – because it was a good mantra.
‘It’s the best you’re going to do,’ Flynn said, picking up on his thoughts.
‘It’s rubbish,’ Henry said, ‘and goes completely against my professional instincts.’
‘You and your professionalism, eh?’
‘Yeah, bummer. Fancy wanting to get the job done right.’ The atmosphere between the two grew colder by a few degrees. ‘But you wouldn’t know about that, would you, Steve?’
A strong gust of snow-laden wind suddenly pushed both men off balance. They staggered against each other, almost into an embrace, in order to stay upright. They broke off the clinch with much facial distaste and bodily quivers of disgust.
‘Are we going, or what?’ Don Singleton shouted as he and Dr Lott climbed into the tractor cab.
‘OK if I use the Shogun?’
‘Yeah, sure, but don’t forget it could be part of the crime scene. Having said that, I suppose we can always eliminate your prints.’
‘Except that, as you know, my prints aren’t in the system, because, guess what? I don’t have any convictions. You’d have to take them specially.’
‘Yeah – bullet well dodged.’ Henry could have got in the Shogun with Flynn, but could not bring himself to do so. He hauled himself back into the tractor cab. Singleton reversed out of the forest, then headed back to the village. Flynn followed in the Shogun.
As Henry had noticed earlier when he’d driven into the village using Flynn’s car, there was only a handful of shops, one being a butcher’s. This was the one that had given him the idea. The fact that it belonged to Singleton was a bonus and made the facilitation of the matter that much easier.
Singleton slowed the John Deere down outside his shop, then expertly turned right into a narrow ginnel running down the gable-end of the shop, just wide enough for the tractor. From the way he handled the machine, even though he was well under alcoholic influence, Henry assumed he must have driven down the alley many times. Either that or the alcohol just made him blasé.
Behind the shop he wheeled into a small customer car park and stopped.
‘Back entrance,’ he said. ‘Those double doors open into the cold storage room.’
Henry jumped down from the cab. Singleton and Lott followed. The butcher/farmer let himself in through the back door and a few moments later the double steel doors opened on what was simply a huge walk-in freezer, big enough to live in. Singleton pushed the doors wide, the strip lighting flickering on behind him. Slabs of meat swung from rows of ceiling hooks, lamb, beef, pork, venison and a long line of big fat turkeys. An icy mist seemed to surround everything spookily.
‘Wow,’ Henry said.
‘Health and safety nightmare, this,’ Singleton said. ‘A dead human.’
‘Needs must.’
Flynn pulled into the car park in the Shogun and trotted over to them. ‘The new public mortuary, eh?’
Henry gave him a sour look. ‘Help us,’ he said.
The four men went to the tractor bucket and lifted Cathy’s tarpaulin-swathed body out of it, carried it into the freezer and at Singleton’s direction, laid her on a steel slab in one corner that had previously been cleaned and disinfected ready for the following day’s business. They took a step back as Henry unfolded the sheet and revealed her.
He blew out his cheeks. Under the bright lights of the room, it was possible to see her injuries in much more detail. The head wound was horrific, much of her face having been blasted away at close range.
‘She would have been face to face with her killer,’ Henry said.
‘I agree,’ Lott said.
‘Talking to him or her?’ Henry asked himself, glancing down at the rest of her, noting she was dressed in jeans, a warm zip-up anorak over a tracksuit top, walking boots on her feet.
‘She looked prepared for the weather,’ Flynn observed. Henry glanced at him, seeing his face strained.
‘You OK?’
Flynn nodded.
‘What’s your plan, Superintendent?’ the doctor asked, no longer slurring his words in his new-found sobriety.
‘I need to take some more photographs,’ he said, his mind working things out. ‘Then I’d like this place to be secured?’ It was a question aimed at Singleton, who nodded, said it wouldn’t be a problem. ‘Then I need to report all this in, start a murder book and see if we can find Tom James.’ He turned to Flynn. ‘From what you said, he told you she stormed out after a domestic, so he could possibly have been the last person to see her alive . . .’
‘Or the first person to see her dead,’ Flynn said. ‘You know the stats.’
‘Yeah, most people are murdered by their nearest and dearest, or other close family members . . . but there is that message about the poacher.’ Henry turned to the local men. ‘Is there much to poach around here at this time of year?’
‘The deer come down from the hills in bad weather,’ Singleton said. ‘So yes, plenty.’
‘OK. I’ll get some photos, then we can lock up. Can I ask you gents to keep shtum about this for the time being? I know it’s a big ask, but the fewer people who know, the better at the moment.’ They both nodded and assured him of their silence. ‘And then, I’m afraid I need to get showered and changed before I start looking into this. Also need some food down me, which hopefully will come via the landlady at the Owl.’
‘Alison?’ Flynn said.
‘Never got as far as her name.’
Despite knowing that Karl Donaldson had recently stretched out in the same bath, Henry only took his time entering the hot soapy water so that he could enjoy every inch of his body’s response to the bliss. He eased himself carefully into the deep water, his bottom burning at first dip, slowly submerging the whole of his six-two frame and allowing the heat to permeate his freezing bones. He exhaled slowly and the tip of his nose started to burn strangely.
He was in the bathroom situated in the private living accommodation at the rear of the Tawny Owl and the room looked as though it had been recently refurbished, with a large question-mark shaped bath/shower, matching loo, bidet and wash basin. The walls were tiled in white from top to bottom. It was quite a feminine room, Henry observed in passing, no evidence of a man.
The landlady, Alison Marsh – Henry had thought it appropriate to ask her name as he was going to be using her facilities – had been kind enough to show him straight through to the bathroom, in which she’d unpacked his rucksack and laid out a change of clothes from therein. And run the bath. Fact was, she couldn’t do enough for him and Donaldson since the unauthorized re-letting of their rooms. She was trying her best to make amends.
Henry pinched his nose and sank under the water like a submarine, then surfaced like a whale, his head covered in nice-smelling bubbles.
He uttered a short laugh at the memory of the phone call he’d made to Kate before heading up to the crime scene on the tractor.
Neither she nor Karen, Donaldson’s expectant wife, had any inkling whatsoever of the peril in which their two men had found themselves. Since depositing them in the Trough of Bowland, they had dropped Henry’s car in Kirkby Lonsdale, then they’d dri
ven like the clappers in the Jeep to the Trafford Centre in Manchester to have an indulgent shopping trip and they simply had no idea about the weather. Which was a good thing, Henry thought. There had been no worrying on their part and Kate had taken the news of Karl’s twisted ankle and food poisoning as though it was nothing. Neither did the fact that the men were now snowed in seem to bother her too much. She and Karen had booked into a hotel close to the Trafford Centre and were going for a meal, then catching a film at the multiplex cinema. There was no concern, either, when Henry told her about finding a dead body.
‘Henry,’ she said knowingly, ‘I wouldn’t have expected anything less.’
He shook his head, grinned, scooped the bubbles off his head, then shot bolt upright when someone knocked on the door. ‘Hello.’
‘It’s me,’ the landlady called. ‘Sorry to bother you, but I’ve brought that bath towel I promised – and I’ve got those photos printed off. Can I just stick my hand through and drop them in?’
‘Hold on.’ Henry gathered suds and built a pile of them to cover his nether regions. ‘OK,’ he said.
The door opened. Alison leaned in and dropped a towel, then a few sheets of A4 paper.
Henry, having to peer slightly over his left shoulder, caught her eye. She smiled shyly.
‘I hope the photos weren’t too upsetting for you. You really didn’t have to print them off. I would’ve done it.’ Henry had of course checked that Alison wasn’t Cathy’s closest friend and had warned her severely of the content.
‘Like I said, I’ve seen worse.’
Henry didn’t go there. ‘Well, thanks.’
She paused. Henry grinned self-consciously.
‘The food’s almost ready. I got the chef to prepare a roast beef dinner. I hope that’s OK. Whenever you’re ready, Superintendent.’
