Edge

by Nick Oldham

  He had been arrested and conveyed to Burnley Police Station. He had been acquiescent and manageable, but retained a self-satisfied smirk throughout the journey and the custody booking-in process.

  The handcuffs were taken off him only when he was standing in front of the custody sergeant.

  Jerry Tope had been asked to go with him and oversee his detention. He explained to the custody sergeant why Wilder had been arrested and the sergeant asked Wilder if he understood that. He said, ‘Yes, but it’s all crap.’

  He was offered the chance of speaking to a duty solicitor, which he declined. He was also asked if he wanted someone else informed of his detention. He said he wanted his brother Luke told, and laughed at that. Although he was only dressed in his boxer shorts – he had been conveyed in the police van with a blanket over his shoulders – the sergeant still authorized a strip search and that his underpants be seized for forensic examination. A note was taken that he was wearing an electronic tag on his left ankle.

  Jerry Tope watched and listened to all this, frowning.

  He watched the strip search, which was carried out by a gaoler and another PC.

  He let it all happen and laughed grimly as he bent over to expose his arsehole. He was then given a forensic suit and slippers and trapped up in a cell.

  Jerry Tope made his way to the CID office and logged on to a spare computer.

  ‘You said you were going to do this by the book,’ Rik said. He was trying to keep up with Henry as the detective superintendent walked quickly across the car park at Burnley Police Station. Henry had driven over from Rossendale in his battered Audi coupé, Rik following in his own car. Rik had seen the look of determination in Henry’s eyes and was feeling apprehensive about his sudden desire to go face to face with Charlie Wilder.

  Henry reached the entrance to the custody complex, paused and turned to Rik.

  ‘I am,’ he promised. ‘I’ll make sure the custody officer logs it in the record that I am accompanied down to the cell and that everything that takes place there is witnessed and recorded.’

  ‘I’ll be there, too,’ Rik said. ‘We cannot jeopardize this by not complying with PACE.’ He was referring to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the law that governs the way in which police deal with suspects.

  It was Henry’s turn to roll his eyes. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Frankly, no.’

  Henry tapped in the entry code on the keypad – he knew by heart the keypad combinations for every custody suite in the force. The door buzzed and he pushed it open and stepped into Burnley Custody Office.

  He waited patiently to see the custody sergeant who was busy booking in another prisoner.

  The problem, often, with computers in divisions was that they were often slightly older than those found at headquarters and therefore were slower to function and crashed a lot.

  The one Jerry Tope had logged into in the CID office was such a computer. Log-in took ten long, agonizing minutes.

  ‘Could have made a brew by now – and drunk it,’ he’d said to no one, because the office was empty. His fingers drummed on the desk as he waited to get into the system. Eventually he was in, typing furiously, but his searches seemed to take for ever and it took him over forty minutes to do what could have been done at his own computer in five – or less. When he found what he was looking for, he sat back in the rickety office chair (chairs in divisions were also poor cousins to those at HQ) and bunched both his hands into fists.

  ‘Boss, I know what’s happened,’ the custody sergeant said to Henry, ‘but don’t do anything silly down there.’

  ‘I won’t, sarge,’ he assured him, now firmly believing that everyone thought he was going to beat the prisoner to a pulp.

  I may just have to prove them all right, he thought wickedly.

  He and Rik followed a gaoler down the cell corridor to number four. Everything then slowed down for Henry as he watched the key being inserted in the lock, turning, heard the mechanism click and the door start to open outwards.

  Behind him he was vaguely aware of someone coming quickly along the corridor. He glanced. It was Jerry Tope, waving a sheet of paper. Henry ignored him and turned back to the gaoler as he slowly drew open the heavy cell door.

  Inside, the prisoner stood in the centre of the cell floor with his back to the door. He did not turn.

  Henry stood on the threshold, his heart thudding, adrenalin gushing, that bitter taste in his mouth, the tightness in his bowels.

  ‘Turn around,’ Henry said.

  The prisoner did not react.

  Henry heard Jerry shout, ‘Boss?’ but didn’t look.

  All Henry wanted to do was see the face of the man who had brutally murdered at least two people, maybe more. He was relishing the moment, savouring it, the words already practised in his head. He would tell him that he would never, ever see the outside world again. It was Henry’s promise to those dead people.

  ‘Turn … around,’ Henry said again.

  The prisoner turned slowly, a devilish grin on his face, mocking, laughing at him.

  Everything drained out of Henry as Luke Wilder stepped up and sniggered harshly into his face.

  SEVENTEEN

  Henry’s eyes darted from Rik Dean’s face to Jerry Tope’s terrified countenance and back again to Rik.

  The three men had taken over the detective inspector’s office at Burnley nick – and none of the three of them had ever experienced such ferocious and unbridled anger from Henry Christie, and that included the man himself.

  He was shaking with it, boiling, about to explode as he strutted to and fro across the office floor, his fists clenching and unclenching. Rik and Jerry stood there, heads bowed and shamefaced like school kids parading in front of a dangerous headmaster.

  Henry stopped in front of Rik.

  ‘You arrested the wrong man,’ he said, trying unsuccessfully to keep his tone level.

  ‘I–I—’ Rik stuttered.

  ‘Boss?’ Tope ventured bravely.

  Henry didn’t even acknowledge him because at that moment his eyes were drilling like laser beams into those of Rik, who was sure that his retinas were being melted.

  ‘Am I right, or am I right?’ Henry demanded.

  ‘Er, well, er …’ Rik flustered. He was going to marry Henry’s sister later in the year but suddenly the idea of having Henry as a brother-in-law did not seem quite so appealing. ‘Well,’ he attempted to explain, ‘we got one of the bad guys. That’s a result.’ He almost cowered under his hand as he expected Henry to slap him hard.

  ‘But not THE bad guy. Not the one who should be in a cell.’

  ‘Boss?’ Tope tried again.

  Henry held Rik’s gaze until his own turned to one of scorn. He shook his head sadly and looked slowly at Jerry. ‘What?’

  ‘Easy mistake to make,’ Jerry said. ‘Or should I say …’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Easy to be fooled.’

  ‘Why would that be exactly?’

  ‘They’re brothers, they look similar, their ages aren’t a million years apart, they know enough about each other to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes for a time at least – they could con anyone. The photos we had were not brill and DCI Dean—’ here he glanced at Rik – ‘hadn’t actually seen any of the photos, to be fair.’

  ‘Thanks Jerry, but I’ll fight my own battles,’ Rik mumbled tightly.

  ‘Just saying,’ Tope sighed, slightly offended.

  ‘Look, Henry, I made a mistake and I’m sorry. He had a tag on, I jumped to a conclusion. And we did search the house, it’s not as though we didn’t do that.’

  ‘How thoroughly?’

  Rik screwed up his face and shrugged. ‘At least we got one of them.’

  ‘But not the complete psycho one. Fuck!’ Henry’s face was hurting badly now and because he had almost blown his stack and his blood pressure had risen, each wound on his face was now seeping a greasy mix of antiseptic cream and blood, like oil pai
nt. But his shoulders fell defeated and not a little despairingly. He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked at Tope. ‘So why exactly were you racing down the cell corridor, waggling a piece of paper?’

  ‘Er …’ His expression now looked pained. ‘Because I’d worked it out that maybe it wasn’t Charlie in the cells.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘After he was booked in I went through GuardSec’s database again, the company responsible for tagging and monitoring prisoners, and I saw that Charlie’s tag was fitted around his right ankle. It just nagged me when we arrested Charlie – sorry, Luke – then it came to me. I also got some better mugshots from the system and it was obvious that we had Luke in custody, not Charlie. If we’d had that information prior to the arrest …’ He left the rest unsaid. ‘That’s why he was so compliant – to keep us busy with him.’

  ‘Ya-di-ya-di-dah!’ Henry waved him off. ‘Balls-up in anybody’s books.’

  ‘Henry,’ Rik said, now having had enough of being treated like a clown.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Henry relented. ‘But the next job is to hunt Charlie down, bearing in mind that because someone else was arrested we thought was him—’ he glared at Rik – ‘he’s way ahead of us and could be anywhere, even out of the country.’ Henry plonked himself down at the DI’s desk, feeling the anger drain from him. He actually didn’t want to let it go, because he knew that it would help him keep going. He sighed heavily and touched one of his pellet wounds with a fingertip, felt the bulge under his skin, then looked at the blood on his finger. ‘That said,’ he speculated thoughtfully, ‘I know people like Charlie Wilder. Guys like him are home birds. They don’t have the gumption or resources to spend their lives on the Costa del Sol.’ He raised his eyes, feeling a headache coming on. ‘Need coffee,’ he said. ‘Need more pain killers, too. Need a bacon sarnie. Jerry?’

  ‘I’ll fix it.’

  ‘Right. We start at Johnny’s sister’s address, and we lean on her first. My guess is she doesn’t even have a clue what Charlie did to her brother; when she finds out, she might be a good help. While we do that, I want the Wallbank estate locked down, every nook and cranny and property searched, with consent or without, I don’t care. We get search teams in, firearms teams. I want two ARVs patrolling the place as of now. In the meantime, Jerry, get me that food, somehow – and also get Charlie circulated extensively, APB and all that shite, media, other forces, ports, airports.’ He turned to Rik. ‘Get the search team on their way and set up a couple of checkpoints on Wallbank so no one can get on or off the estate either in a car or on foot without being checked. I just hope he hasn’t gone yet because I want that bastard caught and in the cells.’

  Roy Philips, the long-standing local PC covering Whitworth, had been posted there for many years. He was content with his lot, knew he did a good job and was liked by the community, but not the criminals within it. They usually ran scared of him, gave him a wide berth when possible.

  Philips had lived through the many changes in policing that went with the job. Originally he had served at the old red brick police station on the main road in Whitworth, which gave way to a new one, which was then closed in its turn. He then had to trudge all the way to Bacup to parade on duty (he lived in Whitworth) and then come back on to his patch. When Bacup nick shut down he then had to travel even further to Rossendale Police Station in Waterfoot, again to drive all the way back to his beat.

  But he did not mind, just so long as the bosses in the upper echelons of the force realized what a complete and utter mess policing had become, not only in the valley, but right across the force.

  When he paraded on at Rossendale early that morning he could see first-hand what an absolute nightmare had occurred since he had gone off duty the previous night after Abel Kirkman had blown his head off.

  The sense of the loss of Fanshaw-Bayley pervaded the station and it was clear there would be a mass of police activity in Whitworth that day as the hunt to track down Charlie Wilder got under way, though Philips himself did not expect to be directly involved as such. He was told to continue his normal duties, but obviously to be on the lookout for Wilder. That suited Philips in a way, because he had a lot of work to do as regards finding relatives of Abel Kirkman and informing them of his death, as well as finding relatives of Abel’s wife.

  He was expecting a tear-filled, angry morning.

  As the parade room emptied, Philips hung back and waited a few moments before sauntering to the front and looking at all the information pasted up on the wall and interactive whiteboard about Charlie Wilder and the night’s events.

  ‘You know him, Roy?’ The question was asked by the sergeant.

  ‘Yes I do,’ Philips said. ‘I locked him up for the assault that got him sent down two years ago.’

  He remembered it well. Charlie had been a nightmare to deal with; violent, uncooperative, threatening, following his drunken attack on a man he had never met before, during which he had killed the man’s dog. It had been a pleasure to get him sent down, and even back then Philips marked Charlie as someone who could easily kill others. He felt no remorse, had no conscience about almost killing a man who had done nothing to him, and actually killing his dog.

  What surprised Philips was that before the incident he didn’t know Charlie Wilder, but subsequently he learned that he and his brother Luke had gravitated up to the village from Rochdale and that he had never done anything wrong in Whitworth itself until that fateful night when he had a big drunken fallout with his girlfriend about babies, or lack of them.

  Philips continued to examine Charlie’s mugshot, mulling it all over, including the fact that he had shot and killed at least two people overnight, one of whom was Johnny Goode, and that he had used Johnny’s sister’s house as an address for the Probation Service.

  Philips knew Johnny’s sister well.

  He had known Johnny, too, a strong lad with a bit of character; he had a nasty streak, but Philips judged him as essentially harmless. Philips had arrested him for stealing from vehicles about six months earlier, a minor offence for which he got a caution. He had taken him back to his sister’s house on Eastgate, where he lived.

  Philips squinted.

  ‘Sarge, does Johnny’s sister know yet that he’s been shot dead?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve told you everything I know.’

  ‘OK, ta.’ Philips collected his patrol car keys and set off back towards Whitworth thinking he might put off trying to find Kirkman’s relatives for an hour or two. He fancied doing a bit of bobbying first.

  He drove into Whitworth along the A671, a road he knew well, had travelled many times. He turned on to Cowm Park Way and then up to the quarries past the Cock and Magpie. He knew the police Land Rover had disappeared and it was imperative that it was found soon if there were dead bodies in the back of it. He knew the quarries were a dumping ground for stolen cars and knew the location of the favoured disused flooded quarries into which most of the cars were pushed. If the Land Rover had been dumped, there was every chance it was in one of these big holes in the ground. A quick check would not go amiss.

  The heavy overnight rain made it hard going for Philips’s Astra, but not impossible, and he found what he was looking for at the second disused quarry – two fresh sets of tyre tracks in the mud but only one set leaving.

  Philips was a good cop and prided himself, after many years of local coppering, on doing a bang-up job. This was why he did not contaminate what he found with his own tyres or footwear. Instead he backed off, called in his find and then spent some time stringing cordon tape around the tracks, fixing it on, around and under rocks and stones, of which there were plenty. Then he walked around to the far side of the quarry to look down into the water which he knew was over forty feet deep. Occasionally it was clear but not today. It was murky and muddy and he could not see two feet into it, but he was sure he had made a find.

  He had been told that a CSI van was en route to him and he should await its arrival. He was subseq
uently told that a diving team had been turned out, too.

  Henry was weighing up the pros and cons of conducting an urgent interview with Luke Wilder. This was where, if life was at stake, an interview could be authorized by a high-ranking officer and conducted with a suspect, but without their legal representative being present.

  Luke had clearly stated that he was going to say nothing at all, a claim that Henry believed. Also, knowing as he did that the opportunity to save lives had possibly passed now, and that the endangered people were already dead, such an interview could go against Henry when the whole thing came to court.

  He could imagine a defence barrister looking down his nose and saying, ‘So, superintendent, you conducted an urgent interview with my client knowing full well that the people in the back of this police Land Rover were already dead, hm? So you could hardly have believed that this interview would save lives, could you?’

  Henry would probably struggle to justify it and anything he had managed to obtain by interviewing Luke might be thrown out as inadmissible. It might not be a serious problem for later, but it could be jumped on by a sneaky barrister to cloud the waters of a criminal trial.

  He decided to wait until Luke was properly represented – because even though he had decided not to have a solicitor at the moment, there was no way Henry would allow anything to progress further without Luke having one, due to the extremely serious nature of the case.

  Then he would tear the little bastard limb from limb, verbally speaking.

  Instead, he decided to go back to Whitworth, knock on Johnny’s sister’s door and let her know that the man she had allowed to use her home as a probation address had actually killed her brother in the most violent and brutal way imaginable.

  Henry thought she would have at least some idea where Charlie was – and he was going to use every emotional dirty trick in the book to get under her skin.

  If nothing else, it was a good starting point, he thought.

  One of the CSI vans that had been at Whitworth Top Farm turned up for Roy Philips about thirty minutes after he had called in his discovery at the flooded quarry. He explained to the two crime scene investigators what he had seen and done, then left them to do what they had to do with the tracks and footprints. He drove off the moors, back into Whitworth, and headed for the Wallbank estate for a cruise around, because you never could tell. Many a wanted felon had been captured by eagle-eyed cops simply mooching around, although few cops had the luxury of this pastime in these days of targets, cutbacks and league tables. Philips thought that was a shame because he had always believed that mooch-patrol was an integral part of being a cop.