Edge

by Nick Oldham

  Henry heard the response from the farmhouse. ‘Fuck you, fuck her, fuck you all.’ This outburst was followed by another blast of the shotgun, splattering the low wall protecting Henry and the others with shot, making it sound as if it was being pebble-dashed.

  All the cops ducked.

  ‘Maybe a retreat is on the cards.’

  Nothing happened for the next half hour, other than the weather worsening. Abel remained cooped up and uncooperative in the farmhouse, where it was believed he was plying himself with much booze. A force negotiator arrived on the scene and attempted to ‘open a line of communication’ with him, but Abel was clearly in no mood for dialogue and frequently loosed off rounds from the shotgun to keep the cops at bay.

  Other reinforcements arrived in the guise of a fully kitted-out firearms team from headquarters and an Operational Support Unit serial. Hot drinks and pies arrived, together with a dozen umbrellas, but where they came from, no one knew.

  The cold and wet was getting to Henry, drilling through to his bones despite the coffee and meat pie he consumed.

  He was having a tactical discussion in the pigsty, talking to the negotiator, the patrol inspector, the local DI and the divisional Chief Inspector (who had been dragged out of his warm office at DHQ at Henry’s insistence). They were also talking things through with the chief constable who, it transpired, was actually and unusually on call that weekend. They were talking to him via mobile phones, but the signal was dicey and unpredictable at best here in Whitworth. The high hills and descending cloud were having a rotten effect on communications.

  ‘I don’t mind digging in for the night,’ Henry was saying. ‘That’s probably the way it’ll go … no doubt Abel will fall asleep at some point. Then we’ll look at going in. That said, I’m not remotely happy leaving his wife’s body out all night, nor even the dog’s. That, to me, is unacceptable. At the very least we should insist on him letting us cover them up, give them a bit of dignity in death.’ This was something Henry felt strongly about. Murder victims lost all dignity, the way their lives ended, and Henry felt that part of his job as an SIO was to restore some of it, somehow.

  ‘I agree,’ Rankin said.

  The force negotiator, an inspector from headquarters, nodded her head sagely. ‘If nothing else, if he concedes on that point, it starts to give us a psychological advantage over him. So far, Abel’s called all the shots, literally. If we can get him to allow us to cover the bodies, his house of cards may start to tumble.’

  Henry blinked at her and said, ‘Yeah, er, sure … I’m all for psychological advantage.’

  They all looked at each other, waiting for a smidgen of inspiration. Nothing came, so Henry said, ‘I’m going to make that happen.’

  Henry’s black woolly hat with the chequered band was drenched, as was the rest of him, as he rose from behind the cover of the low wall, loudhailer in hand.

  ‘Abel,’ he called, ‘this is Henry Christie again.’

  Henry saw movement at the broken window. The shotgun barrel moved and now, despite having swapped his stab vest for a bulletproof vest from the firearms team, Henry’s guts still did a backflip.

  ‘What you want?’ Abel hollered, slurring his words and sounding very drunk.

  Henry glanced at the firearms officers by the barn wall. They were ready, guns drawn. He would have liked to have a sniper with a bead drawn on Abel’s forehead in the form of a red dot, but there was no such officer available.

  ‘Abel? I want you to trust me here, OK?’

  Abel snorted at that.

  ‘I want to come over and cover the body of your wife with a blanket – just me, unarmed, unaccompanied. Just let me cover her and the dog up, to keep the rain off them, that’s all I’m asking. Oh, and if you want, I’ve got some hot pies here if you’re feeling hungry.’

  Henry dropped his hands, stood in the rain.

  ‘You can stuff your pie,’ Abel shouted.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Henry said through the loudhailer. ‘But can I cover up your wife, please? Nothing silly, I promise. Just let me do that and then I’ll back off.’

  ‘I might shoot you.’

  ‘You might; it’s a chance I’ll have to take, isn’t it? But you won’t, will you?’

  ‘Well done, sir,’ the negotiator hiss-whispered at Henry. ‘This is more than he’s said all day.’

  ‘It’s a natural talent,’ Henry said through the side of his mouth, not telling her that he had once been a trained negotiator, but the qualification had lapsed through lack of use and, to a degree, patience. He bent down and picked up an aluminium foil blanket similar to the ones used by athletes to keep body warmth at the end of a long race. It was his intention to cover the woman’s body with it and secure it down with some stones. He raised it in his hand and called out to Abel, ‘Are we on?’

  No response.

  Henry waited, his shoulders drooping.

  ‘OK then,’ Abel shouted. ‘Just you, and no fucking tricks.’

  ‘Promise,’ Henry said. He placed the loudhailer down.

  ‘Talk to him whilst you’re there,’ the negotiator instructed Henry. ‘Establish a rapport.’

  ‘I will,’ Henry said and started to walk slowly towards the farmhouse, resisting the temptation to say to the firearms officers, ‘If he kills me, kill him.’

  It felt like a very long way, suddenly exposed and vulnerable and under no illusions about the protection offered by the ballistic vest. A blast from a shotgun might not blow a hole in his chest but could just as easily blow his head off. The drumming of the rain on his head was replaced by the pounding of the pulse in his temples as he took slow, deliberate steps so as not to increase the tension, although it clearly did. What he didn’t want to do was spook Abel, who no doubt had his finger coiled around the trigger of the shotgun.

  The two bodies, woman and dog, were lying about ten feet away from the window where Abel was positioned.

  Henry got to them and for the first time saw the dreadful damage inflicted.

  Abel’s wife, Ingrid, had been blasted from close range and her face was no longer recognizable, looking as if she had been smashed repeatedly with a sledgehammer. The dog had a huge, jagged hole in the side of its chest.

  Henry took a steadying breath and looked through the broken window. The farmer’s wide face seemed to have no expression on it.

  ‘We need to talk, Abel.’

  Abel jerked the gun at Henry, who winced instinctively, expecting to be fired at. But Abel said, ‘Just get on with it.’

  Henry nodded and started to unravel the blanket over Ingrid.

  ‘Thanks for letting me do this,’ he said, bending over her and seeing the real detail of her horrendous wounds, which made him gasp. His limbs seemed to tighten up and his breathing became short. ‘Bloody hell,’ he whispered as he drew the blanket up and over her chest.

  ‘Stop!’

  Henry stopped instantly, still bent over the woman. He angled his head to look at Abel, truly believing he was now going to meet the same fate, but Abel withdrew the shotgun from the window, then disappeared. Henry came slowly upright, glanced back at the officers behind the low wall and the firearms officers by the edge of the barn. All he could see were several pairs of worried eyes.

  He heard bolts being drawn back. A key turn in a lock.

  Then a creak as the farmhouse door opened and Abel Kirkman stepped out, his shotgun held diagonally across his body. He staggered slightly – drunk, Henry assumed – then moved forwards.

  Henry’s mouth dried up, his whole body tense and ready to do something, dive one way or the other, launch himself into Abel’s abdomen or – his personal favourite – run.

  ‘Hello, Abel,’ he managed to say.

  Abel nodded, walked to the body of his wife and looked down at her, then the dog, both still only half-covered.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to give me the shotgun, Abel?’ Henry suggested softly, reaching out, his palms face up.

/>   Abel looked Henry straight in the eye and said, ‘No,’ before he swung the weapon around.

  The landlord placed the second JD down in front of Henry’s sagging face. Henry looked at him, said thanks and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the square, genuine Jack Daniel’s tumbler to stop them trembling. He gripped the edge of the bar with his left.

  So it wasn’t altogether true.

  If a person was desperate, desolate, determined and drunk enough to want to kill themselves with a shotgun, and if their arms were long enough, their thumbs big enough, there was no need to go to any great, intricate lengths to pull the trigger with a big toe, or rig up a piece of string and slam a door. If the arms were long enough, all that person needed to do was position the muzzle under the cleft of the chin, angle the barrels at, say, forty-five degrees, then jam that big thumb on to the triggers and push.

  Abel Kirkman had done just that.

  For a nanosecond, Henry had thought that Abel was going to blast him, but he had been mistaken.

  His dexterity unaffected by the copious amount of alcohol he had imbibed since shooting his wife and dog, one moment he held the gun across his chest, the next he had spun it around and forced the barrel into his neck.

  Henry had lurched forward at that point, but Abel’s eyes stared defiantly at him.

  He forced back the triggers with his thumb and Henry stopped moving mid-streak as both barrels were fired upwards and at just the correct angle to go through the ‘V’ of the underside of his flaccid jaw, up through the back of his mouth, into the rear half of his brain and then take most of his skull off in a spectacular burst that, in a strange, parallel thought, reminded Henry of a party popper being pulled.

  Henry’s eyes rose and met those of the pub landlord, who said, ‘You seen a ghost, mate?’

  Henry’s mouth twitched. ‘No, no ghost.’ He raised the JD and said, ‘Rather than one for the road, I’ll raise this one to the hand of fate.’

  He was about to throw it down his gullet when the pub door burst open and a young woman hurtled in, fell to her knees, screaming, ‘Help me, help me, please …’

  Henry’s glass stopped an inch away from his bottom lip and his head swivelled around to see what the commotion was.

  The blood on the woman’s hands and smeared across her face made him groan inwardly.

  FIVE

  The actions of Abel Kirkman had transfixed Henry and for what seemed an eternity he stood there with the foil blanket scrunched in his hands, next to Abel’s wife and dog, staring unblinkingly, open-mouthed, at what remained of Abel himself, the dead man’s legs twitching in a macabre jig.

  He found himself in some kind of horror world, immobile in the heavy rain, completely drenched, stunned by the terrible suicide. The moments felt like an aeon, but he knew it was really only a matter of seconds before other officers joined him, as shocked as he was.

  ‘Boss, you OK?’ Inspector Rankin asked.

  Henry had to shake himself physically out of the reverie and said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ knowing that he wasn’t remotely OK. ‘I couldn’t stop him … it was like I froze.’

  ‘You couldn’t have stopped him, boss,’ Rankin assured him. ‘He’d obviously decided to top himself. Literally.’

  Henry now started to blink the rainwater off his eyelids and looked at Rankin, who was also staring in shock at Abel’s now motionless body.

  ‘Fuck me, what a way to go,’ Rankin said. ‘Why? Just why?’

  Henry shrugged, unable to think why, but said, ‘We won’t know now.’ He glanced around. One of the firearms officers was looking at Abel, too. Suddenly the PC retched. Henry saw it coming.

  ‘Over there,’ he shouted, pointing.

  The PC lurched over to the house wall and was copiously sick over some pansies in a stone tub.

  ‘Let’s get the crime scene tent over this,’ Henry said decisively, postponing his own emotional reactions until later, in private. ‘Get a CSI team in, a pathologist – you know the score, and let’s do it quickly.’

  Rankin nodded and moved away. Henry went to the front of the house and took some cover from the eaves, then fished out his mobile phone: nothing. The signal was still intermittent and weak, sometimes non-existent.

  ‘Boss?’ he said, when he managed to get a connection by walking back into the rain in the middle of the farmyard. He was on the line to the chief constable, Robert Fanshaw-Bayley, or ‘FB’, as he was known to friends and enemies alike. Over the years, Henry had been both his friend and enemy. ‘It’s Henry. This, er, situation has been resolved …’

  After a brief, broken discussion, Henry tuned in to autopilot, put the exploding head of Abel Kirkman out of his mind, started to work in the here and now and get the practical side of the job done at a scene that was both a murder and a suicide.

  A lot of decisions were made in the dry and warmth of the pigsty, not least of which was the short-term plan for Abel’s farm. He reared pigs, kept a lot of sheep up on the moors above the farm and had a barn full of battery hens that all needed feeding, watering and generally caring for. Roy Philips, the local bobby, said he knew another local farmer who could take care of that. He also volunteered to see if he could find a suitable relative to pass the news on to, although he wasn’t hopeful that any of Abel’s relations would be even half-interested in his death – other than his legacy. He then set off, after Henry arranged for him to be back on duty at six a.m. next day to continue with the incident.

  Three hours later, the scene had been dealt with as far as was possible in the horrendous weather. A Home Office pathologist had made a flying visit to the scene and, after everything had been recorded and photographed and seized for evidence, Henry had called in an undertaker to move the bodies to the public mortuary. Previously the nearest mortuary had been at Rawtenstall, not too far away, but with cutbacks and centralization of resources, Burnley General Hospital was now used which, from Whitworth, was a long and very inconvenient trek – one Henry could not be bothered making. He therefore delegated the task of following the two hearses to the local DC so that a basic chain of evidence could be maintained.

  By then it was getting into the evening.

  PC Philips had arranged for a neighbouring farmer to look after Abel’s livestock, but hadn’t had much luck in finding any relatives of Abel or his wife. Henry told him to start that search in the morning. He didn’t really like leaving the relatives thing, but he was sagging physically and, if he was honest, he’d had enough for the day. With regards to the scene, he ensured that Abel’s farmhouse was secure – and found the keys to his shotgun cabinet, which contained a further four twelve-bore shotguns. Henry locked this up, locked up the house, took down the forensic tent and dismissed everyone, pocketing the keys himself.

  It would all resume first thing, by which time Henry would have had some sleep, he hoped, but not the evening he had originally planned.

  He was the last one to leave the scene, trudging back down the track to his car, completely saturated; even his mini-umbrella had given up the ghost. It drooped uselessly, not even water-resistant any more. But one thing kept him going – something he had resisted doing all afternoon and into the evening. Like any half-decent detective, he always carried a change of clothing with him in the boot of the car. Socks, underpants, trainers, jeans, a T-shirt and a zip-up windjammer. At least he knew the journey home would be comfortable; he would not be driving forty miles in wet clothing. And he had a towel in there, too, which he laid carefully on the driving seat of the Audi, then got in and started up.

  Then he aimed for the nearest pub, which he knew from days gone by was called the Cock and Magpie; this was where he intended to get changed.

  It was only as he parked on the narrow road outside that the thought of having a drink entered his head.

  Just the one.

  A bit of quiet reflection over a JD, maybe.

  Think about life and death.

  Think about retirement.

  His ch
ange of clothing was in a holdall, which he pulled out. He walked across to the pub and went straight to the gents’, where he stripped and re-dressed. He stuffed his wet gear in the bag and entered the bar for a warming drink before commencing the long journey home. He did make a quick call to Alison using a payphone in the toilet corridor and told her he’d be about another hour. It was an awfully long way from Whitworth to Kendleton.

  He couldn’t resist asking her, cynically, if Steve Flynn had made himself comfortable. Just as cynically, Alison said yes, he’d got his feet under the table, bringing a snarl to Henry’s lips.

  It was only then that he had the first drink and, staring into it, relived Abel’s suicide, and considered the implications of fate. He was only vaguely aware of what was going on in the pub, a place where, many years before, he had been to a few retirement ‘dos’. But he hadn’t been here for a long time, though when he did glance around it seemed not much had changed. It was still homely and welcoming, like a decent local should be.

  He glanced around only once.

  A few local residents were in, but the two young girls huddled together in an alcove, eagerly inspecting their iPhones and giggling, seemed slightly out of kilter for the pub. They were dressed provocatively in short skirts, tights and cut-off blouses showing their stomachs. But Henry didn’t spend too much time trying to work them out. Probably just local girls taking a rest-stop here before heading into Rochdale for the night. So, really, when he put that spin on it, there was nothing out of the ordinary and his assumptions seemed to be confirmed when a young man popped his head through the door. The lad’s eyes sought out and alighted on the girls, who were obviously waiting for him. He beckoned them – a sharp gesture and an angry face. Clearly though, he was their lift or boyfriend and they collected their coats and hurried out of the pub.

  Henry didn’t watch them go.

  Instead his eyes had returned to inspect the honey-coloured liquor in his glass, and his mind to his bleak thoughts, and just as a judder cut through his soul he downed the JD in one.

  It was when, just about to send the second JD in the direction of the first, he was working out the practicalities of blowing one’s own head off with a shotgun, that the young woman came flying through the pub door and fate took a turn. Although he wasn’t to know it at that moment, it was probably just as well that he didn’t get the chance to neck that second whiskey.