Fighting for the Dead

by Nick Oldham

  Baines and the PC, however, seemed pretty unaffected by it all, fortunately.

  ‘Right,’ Henry said, ‘let’s see if anything’s missing.’

  Other than having been scattered everywhere, the clothing and possessions were as Henry and the PC had recorded. It seemed the only thing taken was the constable’s PR.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible I might’ve missed something in a pocket,’ the PC admitted.

  ‘Or sewn into a seam,’ Henry added – but he knew he and the PC had run their fingers carefully over each item of clothing and unless they’d missed something tiny, maybe the size of a SIM card or smaller, they’d missed nothing. They had searched the property diligently, and Henry assured the PC of this.

  They hadn’t even taken the very expensive-looking jewellery.

  Which was a mistake, Henry thought, because that turned the incident into something more sinister.

  If they had taken the jewels, then it was more than likely the police would have looked on it as just a robbery. Leaving the good stuff gave it a whole new twist, which unsettled Henry.

  A wave of pain and nausea, beginning at the very top of his head, rolled through him.

  He had been squatting down by the property bags, but as he cranked himself up, the sensations hit him. He staggered a little, keeping a grip, then caught sight of himself in a wall mirror and shivered in horror.

  His face was a contorted mess. He already knew that, but what made him extra cross was the amount of blood down and over his jacket and shirt, which were ruined.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go and get patched up.’

  The first thing the triage nurse did when Henry presented himself at casualty and explained what had happened – and that he thought he’d passed out for short time – was to sit him in a wheelchair and get a porter to push him down to the X-ray department.

  Baines accompanied him.

  ‘All I want is a plaster and some Savlon,’ Henry moaned ungratefully as he was wheeled along the corridors.

  ‘I’ve been waiting a long time to say this,’ Baines chuckled, ‘but you need your head examining.’

  ‘Ho bloody ho,’ Henry grunted as they arrived at X-ray.

  Then the waiting began, during which time Baines told him that the doctors would probably want to keep him in overnight for observation. The news cheered Henry no end.

  ‘I don’t have time to spend a night in a hospital. I don’t have time for this.’ He grumbled a few more things, then looked at Baines. ‘You need to go, too. People to dismember.’

  ‘They can wait . . . they’re dead, after all.’

  ‘No,’ Henry insisted. ‘You have things to do. I’ll be OK . . . and I’m not staying the night unless I collapse of a brain aneurysm.’

  ‘Don’t joke,’ Baines said seriously. ‘But I will go . . . I’ve some mouths to look into, but I don’t see me doing Jennifer Sunderland’s post-mortem until tomorrow at the earliest.’

  ‘That’s fine. I need to speak to the coroner anyway and she needs to be formally identified.’

  Baines rose, then hesitated. ‘That was pretty frightening, Henry. Y’know – the guys with the guns thing?’

  Henry’s good eye squinted at him, which meant both eyes squinted. ‘Soft fucker.’

  ‘Knew you’d understand,’ Baines grinned.

  ‘I’m sure I would’ve been frightened too.’

  ‘If only you’d been awake.’ Baines touched Henry’s shoulder, in a tender, but still manly gesture, turned and left, passing DI Barlow shoulder to shoulder through the swing doors.

  Barlow regarded Henry’s bashed-up face. ‘Jeepers – you OK?’

  ‘Exactly how do you want me to answer that one?’ Henry winced.

  ‘Uh, sorry. Hell of a thing . . . everybody’s running around like blue-arsed flies at the moment.’ Barlow leaned against the wall. ‘What do you reckon it was all about?’

  ‘No idea, Ralph, other than to guess . . . and then go and ask the grieving husband what the hell his dead wife had in her possession that it took two armed men to try and find.’

  ‘Do you think they found what they were after?’

  ‘Again, I don’t know. Maybe.’ Henry indicated the file Barlow had in his hand. ‘Is that Sunderland’s MFH file?’ he asked. Barlow nodded. ‘Does everything match up, file to body, et cetera?’

  ‘It’s definitely Jennifer Sunderland.’

  ‘Right, we need to speak to hubby, then.’

  ‘Leave that to me, eh, Henry?’ Barlow swept his hand around to indicate their present location. ‘I can sort him.’

  Henry glanced at the scrolling LED sign above the X-ray reception desk. It informed him, and the other people in the waiting area, that there was a three-quarters of an hour wait for the next X-ray.

  ‘No, I’m coming,’ Henry said, seeing Barlow’s face fall.

  ‘But, Henry, I’m quite capable of . . .’

  ‘I know you are. That’s not the issue.’

  ‘What is, then?’

  ‘I’ve got a fresh shirt in the back of my car and if I wear my anorak instead of my jacket, I can get away with my appearance.’

  ‘What’s the issue?’ Barlow persisted.

  ‘I want to look Mr Sunderland straight in the eye and tell him we’ve found his wife – dead. Well,’ Henry amended this, ‘look him in the eye as straight as possible in the circumstances. My curiosity has been aroused.’

  FOUR

  Flynn jolted awake, feeling worse than he had done before, cursing for having made the fatal error of falling asleep in the middle of the day.

  He groaned, shrouded by the warmth thrown out by the canal boat’s central-heating system, which was proving far more efficient than he could have imagined. His eyelids flickered heavily and even though he wanted to wake up, he could not seem to stop himself from dozing, his brain mushed by the mid-afternoon nap.

  Combating the urge, he inhaled deeply and forced himself to stand up. He glanced at the wall clock.

  ‘Oh – what?’ He could not believe that more than an hour had slipped by.

  From their box, he pulled out the sturdy new boots he’d acquired from the chandlery, quickly threaded the laces and slid his feet into them. They were a good, comfortable fit.

  ‘Shit,’ he uttered, extremely annoyed at himself.

  He was late for the arranged meeting with Diane, who had enough on her plate to contend with, without an unreliable friend who had promised to help out. He switched the heating off, locked up and jumped off the barge onto the canal side. He jog-trotted back to the shop, his mind still not having woken up fully.

  Diane was already there and Flynn entered awkwardly. She was leaning on the counter, looking through some order forms. Flynn crossed the shop floor quickly and said, ‘Sorry I’m late, Diane.’

  She raised her eyes at him. They were red raw with tears and she seemed to have aged ten years since he last saw her.

  He hardly dared pose the question.

  But he did. ‘How did it go?’

  Her lips worked soundlessly for a moment as the enormity of the last few hours seemed to hit her like a sledgehammer. ‘I . . . I . . .’ she stammered. Then she burst into tears.

  Flynn shot around the counter and took hold of her, walking her back into the private office where he kept hold and held on whilst she cried out her emotion with big, gulping sobs and a runny nose and tears. Finally it subsided and she eased herself away from him, looking up through eyes filmed with moisture.

  Flynn braced himself for the worst.

  She struggled to find the words. ‘I . . . they said . . . oh, God, I don’t know . . . they said . . . the doctor said it went as well as could be expected . . .’

  Flynn exhaled in relief.

  ‘They won’t know for certain for a while and there’s a long way to go and we probably won’t know for weeks how successful it was . . . or not.’ A long blob of phlegm dripped out of her nose and she wiped it away with a chuckle, but then her lips
quivered again, her mouth on the verge of collapse. ‘It was horrible, Steve . . . the worst moments of my life . . . waiting around . . .’

  ‘I take it you’ve seen him?’

  She nodded. ‘Just briefly . . . I wanted to be there when he came round. He opened his eyes for a few seconds, but that’s all . . . and he . . . he managed a smile, then he went back to sleep. They said to get back about five.’

  Flynn squeezed the top of her arm, trying to avoid saying any of the trite but reassuring lines people say in circumstances like this. Things like, ‘He’ll be fine,’ or ‘He’s a fighter.’ Phrases that seemed meaningless and were often wrong in the end. Flynn knew how serious Colin’s condition was and could only hope that the operation had caught the cancer in time, that it hadn’t spread, wasn’t going to ambush his body three months down the line.

  Instead, he drew Diane towards him again and held on to her with another embrace before easing her away and saying, ‘Have you eaten or had anything to drink?’

  ‘Not hungry.’ She blew her nose. ‘Couldn’t eat anything. Need a brew, though.’ She smiled feebly at him. ‘Thanks for being here.’

  ‘Least I could do – how about that brew, then?’ He picked up the kettle and filled it from the tap in the small loo at the back of the shop. As he plugged it in and switched it on, he said, ‘Had a bit of an adventure myself in your absence.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Heaved a dead body out of the river.’

  ‘You what?’ she gasped.

  Flynn told her his tale and included how he’d helped himself to a new wardrobe from the chandlery afterwards to replace his soaking wet clothes.

  When he’d finished, Diane said, ‘Who was she?’

  He shrugged. ‘Cops didn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Probably Jennifer Sunderland.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jennifer Sunderland . . . she went missing a few days ago. It was in the local paper and on the radio . . . it was thought she might have slipped into the river.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Phh . . . sort of vaguely. Colin knew her husband. He did a bit of driving for him when he retired from the police, and we bought this place from him. But I wouldn’t say I knew her – or him, really.’

  ‘Oh,’ Flynn said absently. When he glanced into the tea jar he found it empty, neither was there any coffee or milk. And the kettle had just boiled.

  ‘Sorry – a bit scatterbrained at the moment,’ Diane said.

  ‘I’ll get some supplies from the shop across the way.’

  ‘OK – then I’ll try and show you how the shop works – even though you’ve already found your way around the clothing department.’

  Operating with one good eye, Henry cautiously drove his Mercedes from the mortuary car park to the police garage at Lancaster nick and parked in the already overcrowded premises. He didn’t want to leave his car unattended in the hospital grounds, which had a poor record for car crime. He was also a touch reluctant to leave it in the police garage, where the cars were jammed tightly together and there was every chance a police motorbike would topple over and cause extensive damage. It was the lesser of two evils.

  Ralph Barlow waited impatiently for him in the CID Astra. Henry dropped in alongside him, already regretting his decision to go AWOL from the hospital without getting his face X-rayed. It had swollen up even more and was bruising nicely purple now, throbbing like a pump, sending out pulses of agony. Definitely a cheekbone broken.

  Now he was suffering. The adrenaline that had flooded his system at the time of the incident had dissipated and all he wanted to do was place his head on a soft pillow. But no. He’d been too keen, didn’t want to miss anything even though he knew he could easily have let the DI deal with Harry Sunderland, which he was more than capable of doing.

  But Henry had an insatiable desire to witness people’s reactions to bad news first hand. He believed it was an intrinsic part of being a detective to judge how people dealt with things and the only way to do that properly was to deliver the news personally, watch, read, assess and feel. Especially in this case, as there was clearly not something right with the situation.

  From what he’d skim-read on the MFH file, Jennifer Sunderland had gone out for a walk, as she often did, apparently, down to the bottom of her garden and along the banks of the River Lune. It had been a bad night weather-wise, so the theory went that she must have slipped and gone into the fast-flowing, deep water . . . with something in her possession that two armed men wanted.

  Henry was therefore looking forward to seeing Harry Sunderland’s reaction to the news of her death confirmed. That was purely from a professional point of view. Not because he enjoyed delivering death messages. In fact that was an aspect of the job he had never been comfortable with. He had done it many times during his police service, but more frequently as an SIO, since it usually fell to the senior investigator to deliver the message because, sometimes, it would be to the actual murderer.

  He touched his face gingerly.

  ‘You OK, boss?’ Barlow asked. ‘It looks really bad. Let me take you back to X-ray.’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Henry shook his head. ‘I need to see Harry Sunderland’s reaction . . . then you can take me back and I’ll throw myself on the mercy of the nurses.’

  ‘They don’t like people disappearing on them.’

  ‘I know.’

  Barlow pulled away from the police station and eased the CID car into the traffic gridlock that was Lancaster’s one-way system.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Barlow said, ‘To Sunderland’s haulage depot out at Slyne. He’s most likely to be there. If not we’ll go to his house . . . you sure you don’t want me to ring ahead, Henry? Tell him we’re coming?’

  ‘No. I want to see his unprepared reaction.’

  ‘You think it’s more than a simple drowning accident?’

  ‘I’m making no assumptions – but you know the score: always think murder, then you don’t make a tit of yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘I like to see the whites of their eyes.’

  Barlow skipped from lane to lane to make progress through the city. Soon they were heading across Greyhound Bridge, which spanned the River Lune, taking westbound traffic out of Lancaster towards Morecambe. Henry’s one eye got a good view of the river as he looked across to St George’s Quay and south down the river itself, under Carlisle Bridge, which was just a footbridge. At that moment the river was fairly low, but ebbing quickly, and he thought of the terrifying vortex of a journey Jennifer Sunderland must have had in the river. If she had fallen in at the Crook o’ Lune, where her house was – maybe a mile and a half north of Greyhound Bridge – she had been dragged and dumped five miles away at Glasson on the estuary.

  ‘I wonder at what point she gave up struggling and accepted her fate,’ Henry mused out loud. She could have gone a long way, gasping and fighting, hoping to get snagged on an overhanging branch or washed up on the bank. Henry was reasonably familiar with the general geography of this area – as he was for most of Lancashire – and knew she had passed under seven bridges, including an aqueduct, and over a weir. She had been on a hell of a journey. ‘Unless she was unconscious before she went in,’ he added. ‘Or maybe she didn’t struggle at all. Maybe she just jumped in and killed herself intentionally.’

  Barlow filtered across more lanes of traffic and picked up the A6 to head north out of Lancaster. He did not reply to Henry’s first stabs at forming a hypothesis.

  Flynn trailed Diane around the shop, both of them with a mug of tea in hand. She showed him the ropes, literally and metaphorically, of how the chandlery operated. From how to use the till and credit/debit-card machine, to how items were priced, how stock was recorded and even how to bag up goods for customers, how to smile, make small talk, make them feel important, all that customer focus stuff.

  He was amazed at how much stock there was and the value of it, running to tens of
thousands of pounds. Upstairs there was a large storage room that was once a bedroom, jam-packed with boxes and crates, plus an upstairs toilet and shower, but they didn’t go up there.

  He let her chatter on and could tell she was enjoying being distracted from the main issue in her life, which would very soon return to the forefront when she went back to the hospital.

  After this introduction and the opportunity to deal with a couple of customers, they sat at the back of the shop with new brews.

  ‘I never asked how you are,’ Diane said. ‘I mean, pulling a body out of the river, for goodness’ sake.’

  Flynn blew out his cheeks. ‘Not really bothered,’ he said. ‘Done it before a few times – y’know, back in the day, as they say,’ he spoke wistfully. ‘I’ve even hooked my fair share of bodies out of the Atlantic . . . boat people from Africa, you know. Thousands come ashore in the Canaries . . . and hundreds don’t make it.’

  ‘That must be awful.’

  Their conversation ran on for a while, going around the houses, studiously avoiding the important issue. Flynn could sense what was going on, so he said, ‘Do you need to go back to the hospital now? You can leave the place with me . . . I’ll muddle through. You do what you need to, Diane.’

  She stared at her tea, then raised her eyes. ‘Will you come with me?’

  The glaze of her tears did it for Flynn. He always considered himself to be a hard man, and in most instances he was. But Diane got to him and he had to swallow back his own tears.

  ‘Course I will.’

  Slyne village lay a couple of miles north of Lancaster, straddling the A6. Henry knew it a little, that it consisted mainly of dwellings and rural businesses because this part of Lancashire was predominantly countryside. Years ago he’d been to the two pubs on either side of the A6, but hadn’t visited the place recently.

  Barlow turned off the main road, left the houses behind and drove into the rolling hills, then swung a tight right into Sunderland’s haulage depot. It was a huge operation with at least four massive warehouses, surrounded by smaller units, and a long line of HGVs parked in a regimented row, all bearing the Sunderland Transport crest. Henry counted twelve, plus two pulled up at the doors of warehouses being filled with goods. He guessed there were a hundred more out on the roads. There were also possibly over fifty container units stacked high.