The Nothing Job

by Nick Oldham

  As ever, he remained a model of professional restraint, simply scrunching up a piece of A4 paper his left hand had been resting on, turning it into a tight ball.

  The DI stopped by Henry’s shoulder and exchanged a knowing glance with him.

  ‘That man is a total wanker,’ he stated, folding his arms, then grinned at Henry and said, ‘Has Jerry been of help to you?’

  Henry shrugged non-committally. ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘Fancy a brew, then – kettle’s on in the office,’ the DI offered.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  An hour later, brews being a leisurely affair in the Intelligence Unit, Henry stopped off at the accounts department on the journey back to his top-floor office. There he spoke to a woman of his age who he’d known for many years and had once, indeed, had a one-night stand with about twenty-odd years before when he’d bumped into her on a CID night out in Preston.

  ‘Henry Christie,’ she said warmly, almost purring.

  ‘Madeline Payne,’ he responded, recalling the night of debauchery that had ended up in her grotty flat in the town centre. Memory gave him a little golden glow.

  ‘Madeline Rooney, actually,’ she said, holding up her left hand and wiggling the third finger.

  ‘Oh, nice.’

  ‘Third time around … last time around.’

  ‘Congratulations … anyone I know?’

  ‘A DC over in commerce – John.’

  Henry nodded. He knew John Rooney. ‘Yeah, good man,’ he said and hoped that their little liaison would never rear its head again like the one he’d had with the woman who became Dave Anger’s wife. Almost thirty years on, that little indiscretion still cost him dearly.

  ‘I still remember, you know,’ Madeline said demurely, looking at him in a sultry, dirty manner. She pursed her lips, which were not as full and soft as they had been in the flush of youth. Having said that, Henry happily admitted that he too was drying up with age.

  His heart missed a thump and he thought tensely, Too much bloody history in this organization, too many skeletons in my cupboard, mostly based around my dick. He smiled fondly and said, ‘Me, too.’

  ‘Mm, anyway, water under the bridge. What can I do for you?’

  Relieved, he said, ‘Operation Wanted. How much have I got to spend?’

  ‘Follow me.’ She beckoned him, as she had once done all those years before and he followed (as he had done). Only this time she took him to her desk, noting that whilst the lips might have lost their fullness, the hips had expanded, but in a very shapely way. She manoeuvred herself into her chair and bade him pull up another one next to her. She gave her mouse a shake and the screen came to life.

  ‘Operation Wanted,’ she confirmed, tapping a few keys to bring up a file full of figures. She placed a pair of specs on her nose to look at the monitor. From where Henry was sitting, he could not really make any sense of what he saw.

  She whistled appreciatively.

  ‘You’ve got a nice round figure to play with,’ she said, giving him a suggestive sideways glance. She shuffled her shoulders and her large breasts moved provocatively.

  Henry gave an inward, sad sigh. ‘How much?’ he asked, deciding to ignore the blatant double meaning. Madeline had been, and obviously still was, a girl with a reputation.

  ‘Four grand.’

  ‘Four grand,’ Henry spluttered in disbelief.

  Eventually back in his office, Henry leaned in his chair and wondered what had happened to the outstanding twenty-one thousand pounds that he knew, unofficially, was in the budget for Operation Wanted. Madeline had been insistent that four thousand was the only money available and though Henry suggested with subtlety that she look again, he didn’t feel he had the right to come out and say he knew there were twenty-five big ones in the budget.

  He scratched his head and decided it was probably nothing to sweat about. The four grand was probably just his sub-allocation from the larger budget, or however accounts worked. He was no expert and now knocked himself for not attending the two-day course called ‘Finance for Non-Financial Managers’ about two years before. Like most cops he had an aversion to handling money as well as an aversion to attending training events. He would never have missed a session on serial killers, though, but he’d thought that two days of figures and more figures was an appalling prospect and he’d made his excuses.

  He rocked forward and reached for the three envelopes that had appeared on his desk from Jerry Tope, efficient as ever. He splayed them out and read the names on each: Downie, Kinsella, Scartarelli.

  Eeney, meeney … he thought, but decided to make the choice on a financial basis crossed with a weighting on whether there was any chance of success.

  Kinsella, according to Tope, was supposed to have fled to Australia. That meant if Henry physically went there, his vastly reduced budget would get wiped out straight away. Scartarelli might be in Cyprus, which was a possibility, but the definite quick win would be Anthony Downie. There was a good chance he wasn’t too far away and just needed flushing out. So, decision made, Henry’s finger and thumb slid inside the envelope and pulled out the now thicker file.

  He smiled as he read the front sheet, which was a copy of The Informer, the constabulary’s crime intelligence bulletin, and wished he’d chosen a trip to the Antipodes instead.

  The headline screamed, Wanted for Murder, Rape and Indecent Assault.

  Under the headline in thicker, fatter, bolder lettering were the words: ‘DOWNIE IS VIOLENT AND DANGEROUS TOWARDS POLICE OFFICERS’.

  Under that it read, ‘Known to frequent the Blackpool, Leyland, Rochdale and Central Manchester areas.’

  Then there was a colour photo of the man staring back at the lens with an expression of loathing and arrogance.

  ‘Nice choice,’ Henry said, sitting back and starting to read the file on the first of three people he was expected to go out and arrest.

  Anthony Downie sat in the back of a police car. The car was a Vauxhall Astra owned by Greater Manchester Police and he was being driven to Rochdale police station with two uniformed constables in the front, passing an occasional comment to each other. Both were pretty pleased by the fact that Downie was in the back. So pleased that they’d just got a little bit complacent.

  Downie huddled down in the seat. He was a big man, six-eight, broad-shouldered and just on the verge of being very fit. He was strong and agile and already cursing his stupidity in getting caught. He should have suspected this would happen. He’d stayed too long in one place and had paid the price.

  He had been in Rochdale for three months, living under the stolen identity of a man he’d killed and buried under the patio of the previous house he’d rented, in Nottingham. No one had noticed the man was missing yet. Downie knew this would happen because the man, a nonentity, had been carefully chosen for just that reason. It had been easy to live off the capital he had stashed in several bank accounts, all of which were accessible via plastic. Before he had killed the man – a very satisfactory strangulation following a wild bout of male-on-male intercourse – Downie had tortured him for four days and made him reveal all his PIN numbers. After the midnight backyard burial, Downie had moved up to Rochdale, withdrawing three hundred pounds per day from each of three accounts, renting a room in a modest terrace and hiring a nondescript car. Nine hundred pounds a day was just about right and he had worked out that the accounts would last him about ten weeks at that rate.

  His downfall came from a family in the same street. A hard-working family whose eldest son was gay. Downie had befriended him whilst pretending to be a supply teacher, as was his modus operandi, and started to steal from him and the family. The young man found some of his mother’s property in Downie’s rented room and challenged him. Downie made the mistake of apologizing and returning the property, only for the lad to blab to his mother what had happened. She in turn told her husband, a suspicious fellow, who began to follow Downie and discovered that he never went near any school. Instead he
drifted each day into the Canal Street area in Manchester, where he targeted gay men in bars and cafes.

  Not happy, the father called the police, who spoke to the son.

  At that moment, the police believed they were dealing with a man called Tony Robinson and simply went round to the rented room for a chat.

  Downie’s defensive and suspicious demeanour set off a few alarm bells in the officers’ heads and with a nod and a wink between them they arrested him in a very nice manner, still unaware they were dealing with a ruthless murderer.

  They ‘conned’ him into the car, saying there was a complaint of theft from the family and they ‘needed to go through the motions’.

  ‘Yeah, I can see that,’ Downie said and willingly got into the police car. The officers dropped their guard and with such a compliant prisoner, they neglected to put handcuffs on him, by no means an unknown occurrence.

  On the journey to the station the officer in the front passenger seat turned and said, ‘What’s your name again, mate?’

  ‘Ant …’ Downie stopped in mid-name and corrected himself. ‘Tony Robinson,’ he said quickly, stupidly caught out.

  A look of comprehension came over the officer’s face, but before he could react, Downie launched himself at him, powering a terrible punch into the side of the cop’s head, breaking his jaw instantly, then hitting him again.

  The car swerved as the two men fought in the cramped space, mounted a pavement and glanced off a bollard before bouncing around and stalling with a gear-crunching lurch. Downie, knowing the back doors were child-locked, crushed his big frame through the gap between the front seats, his fists flying and connecting, and he went for the passenger-door handle and scrambled out over the injured cop.

  They had come to a halt on a quiet side road, a location which went a long way to inform Downie of his next move.

  As he emerged from the police car he started to run – but only took three strides before stopping abruptly, turning and making his way back to the police car.

  He dragged the officer he’d assaulted out of the car and dumped him on the ground before stomping on his head a couple of times, bringing his whole weight to bear and feeling the skull crack sickeningly under his shoe.

  The officer behind the wheel was trying to free himself from his seat belt, scream for assistance over the radio, get out his baton and CS spray and get the prisoner Robinson, or whoever the hell he was.

  Downie saved him the trouble of going too far.

  He walked casually around the front of the car and opened the door for the officer.

  ‘Get back or I’ll spray you with CS,’ he was warned. Downie laughed uproariously as the CS canister was pointed at his face and he was sprayed with a face full of the very nasty, usually effective, irritant …

  ‘Unfortunately it doesn’t work on everyone,’ Henry Christie said as he read to the end of the depressing report in Downie’s file. Downie had laughed in the cop’s face, punched him hard and repeatedly until he was senseless, then dragged him out of the car and thrown him to the ground. He had then stolen the police car, calmly driven back to his rented room, collected an armful of his belongings, then disappeared.

  Henry breathed out. He shook his head at the stupidity of cops. Putting a six-foot-eight prisoner into the back of an Astra, being taken in by the willingness to cooperate and then being surprised when it went boob-up.

  Shit happened.

  If young cops were stupid enough to post videos of themselves breaking traffic laws on YouTube, then they were daft enough to think it wouldn’t happen to them.

  One was left with a fractured skull and broken jaw, the other a broken cheekbone and hand.

  They subsequently found out the true ID of the man they had arrested and some pretty diligent follow-up detective work discovered a whole string of offences connected to gay communities and ID thefts perpetrated by the big man Downie, as well as the previously unknown murder in Nottingham.

  Six foot eight did make him a very big, formidable bloke. But as Henry read on in the file, the Intel on him revealed he was known to change his appearance frequently by wearing a variety of wigs and he hunched down to try to give the effect of being smaller than he actually was.

  The assaults on the police officers were the last time Downie had been seen by a cop. He was known to have committed further offences in Scotland and northern England and had let it be known to some of his victims that he ‘just loved’ the gay scene in Blackpool even though there was no evidence to suggest he was gay himself. The Lancashire connection came about because he had committed further offences in the county and had seriously assaulted twelve-year-old boys in Leyland and Blackpool.

  Henry rearranged the file neatly and looked at Downie’s photograph.

  ‘So how the hell am I going to catch you, big fella?’ Henry asked the image.

  It was going to be through routine, Henry knew that. Delving into the file, checking out where he’d been, who he’d spoken to, what he’d said and let slip, and from that, working out where he was now. In other words, plain old-fashioned detective work. Talking to people, putting two and two together.

  Henry’s musings were interrupted by a figure at the office door.

  He regarded the man suspiciously.

  ‘You still here, Henry?’

  Henry’s eyes went into slitty mode. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I heard you’d been seconded to some elite crime-fighting team.’

  Chortling back a guffaw, Henry uttered, ‘What?’

  The man – it was Chief Inspector Andy Laker – shrugged and said, ‘Whatever.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Andy? The comms room is way over there somewhere, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m stepping into the breach.’

  ‘What breach would that be?’

  ‘The one opened by your move.’

  Then it dawned on Henry. ‘You’re the one who’s replacing me here?’ He pointed down at his seat and his hands flapped at the office.

  ‘The penny drops.’

  ‘You really have upset someone – the chief’s bag carrier, to comms and then to this!’

  ‘The chief chose me personally.’ He sounded offended.

  ‘And I thought you had a career in front of you,’ Henry said amused. ‘How wrong I was.’

  ‘I’m taking over something that hasn’t been working well.’ Laker turned and regarded the larger Special Projects Office disdainfully, then turned back to Henry. ‘They wanted a mover and shaker in here, apparently.’

  ‘And who would that be?’ Henry asked mischievously.

  Laker bristled. He reddened up from the neck and his shoulders rolled.

  Henry collected the three files in front of him, logged out of the computer, picked up the framed photograph of Kate and the girls and stood up. He walked slowly across to Laker, who shrank away from him.

  ‘That was your induction,’ Henry said. ‘That’s the in-tray, pending and out-tray … I’m sure you’ll be able to work out the rest for yourself, being so smart.’

  ‘Uh – what?’

  Brushing ignorantly past the smaller man, Henry closed his ears to the babbling and, now office-and-desk-less, he clutched the files and his meagre personal possessions and walked upright and erect out of the Special Projects Office without a backwards glance.

  FIVE

  There was something about the whole Downie saga that made Henry believe it would be a relatively easy task to track him down. A quick win, one out of three, a tick in the box. The hard bit would be physically getting hold of the big bastard and getting him into a police cell. Not an encounter Henry relished, but something he would have to deal with. He was only just getting over the pounding he’d had on the back streets of Preston.

  He had looked at the file repeatedly and wondered how best to approach it and eventually decided he would kick the enquiry off in Rochdale, the last place Downie had come into contact with the cops, by visiting the family he had befriended and t
hen stolen from. He had thought of speaking to a couple of Downie’s more recent victims from two attacks in Blackpool and one in Leyland. From all accounts, though, these people were still traumatized.

  Unusually for Henry he made an appointment. He preferred to drop in on folk unexpectedly and catch them on the back foot, but because of the rising fuel costs and the possibility of a wasted journey, he made the call instead.

  He cleared his throat and looked at the family, mother, father, gay son.

  They were in the living room of their terraced house in Rochdale, close to its border with Whitworth, which was in Lancashire.

  ‘You found the bastard yet?’ the father demanded. He was a gruff, no-nonsense working-class man struggling with the concept of having a gay son. He continually shot dagger-like glances at his lad, who sat there with his hands wedged between his thighs, uncomfortable and shamefaced.

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Henry said. ‘I’ve been given the job of finding him.’

  ‘Hm,’ the father breathed, unimpressed.

  ‘How can we help?’ the mother asked. She was dressed in a dour skirt and apron and could have been a character from an early episode of Coronation Street. All that was missing was a hairnet, curlers, blue rinse and bottle of stout. ‘We didn’t have much to do with the man … at least, me and Norman didn’t.’ She glanced at her husband, then at her son. ‘Eric did …’ Her voice trailed off uncertainly, disappointment evident.

  Eric, the son, mid-twenties, slim build, round face and long eyelashes, gave Henry a wan look and a shrug.

  ‘He was a thievin’, devious, perverted bastard,’ the father blurted. ‘A conman and a killer. It’s lucky you’re still alive, by all accounts,’ he said to Eric. ‘You could’ve ended up under a fuckin’ patio.’

  ‘Norm!’ the wife cut in. ‘No need to swear.’

  Norman’s mouth clamped shut with impatience and became a tight line of disapproval. But then he muttered, ‘Shit-shovellers.’