Judgement Call

by Nick Oldham

  Juggling clothes and phone, Henry said, ‘Did he say who?’

  ‘No – didn’t know the guy.’

  ‘Likely story … How long ago?’

  ‘Last ten minutes.’

  ‘On my way,’ Henry said and slammed the phone down and thought, ‘Shit!’ He didn’t have a car. He rushed through the corridors to the sergeant’s office where all the patrol car keys were hung. The morning patrol sergeant was sitting at his desk, delving into his sandwich box whilst scanning a newspaper. He lifted his head and watched open-mouthed as Henry barged in and snaffled the only set of keys on the rack.

  ‘Oi!’ the sergeant yelled, revealing a mouthful of beef-paste sandwich.

  ‘Needs must,’ Henry said, disappearing with the keys, which were for the sergeant’s car. He ran along the main corridor and crashed out through the double doors into the rear yard.

  He ran to one of the covered parking bays and climbed into the liveried Austin Metro which he skidded out of the yard and then hurled through the streets, heading towards Fat Jack’s, screeching to a halt outside the shop on the double-yellows where he took a second to arrange his clothing and appointments a little more comfortably.

  As he opened the door, the cool voice of the station duty PC, underpinned by a tone of urgency, came over the PR.

  ‘Patrols to attend Anwar’s Spar shop, Burnley Road. Report of armed robbery and officer down, repeat – officer down – having been shot.’

  Without hesitation, Henry responded.

  There were three of them in the shop when Jo Wade stepped through the front door. Her pleasant thoughts were smashed to smithereens as she crossed the threshold and saw the scene in front of her.

  Three armed men, their faces ski-masked.

  One of them was behind the counter, emptying the contents of the cigarette shelves and till into a small hessian sack. The shop owner stood terrified to one side, arms raised.

  Two other robbers armed with shotguns were aiming them at the two customers who had been backed up against the bread shelves.

  As Jo stepped in, she froze.

  And it was over in an instant.

  The gang were high on speed, operating like wild men. The one closest to Jo as she came into the shop whirled towards her, saw the uniform, fired.

  The blast from the double barrels slammed into her lower stomach, doubling her over, driving her against the wall. She slithered slowly down onto her backside, total shock and disbelief on her face as she looked down at the huge hole that had been punched in her guts. No words came out of her twisted mouth.

  Within seconds, the gang had gone, all three of them leaping across Jo’s outstretched legs, one of them actually stepping on her thigh and almost tripping over.

  Henry gunned the Metro – in as much as a 998cc engine could be gunned – swerving along the streets, honking the pathetic little horn (there was no two-tone on a bog-standard section patrol car) but at least it had a blue light fitted and screwed to the roof that didn’t slide off as the car’s speed increased.

  He was at the scene in two minutes, first cop to arrive.

  It puzzled him slightly he couldn’t see Jo’s police car, but guessed it was parked out back. Henry mounted the kerb and leapt out of the car, bursting through the shop door, finding Jo on the floor, surrounded by four scared people.

  He pushed through and squatted next to her, fighting his own rising panic.

  Her terror-filled eyes looked pleadingly at him.

  ‘Henry,’ she whispered, ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  He called comms to chase up the ambulance and further assistance, giving a cool situation report in spite of the feelings boiling within him. Then, holding a clean tea towel over the horrendous gaping wound in her stomach, Henry slid beside her and eased his left arm around her shoulder, gently moving up against her, aware she was trembling and shaking and going into deep shock.

  ‘Henry, I’m really cold and it hurts so much.’

  ‘I’ll warm you up, sweetie. And it’s not as bad as it looks. You’ll be OK.’ He moved a lock of her hair away from her face.

  She exhaled long and with difficulty, wincing dreadfully as a searing pain creased her body. She grabbed Henry’s hand, the one holding the cloth over the wound, digging her nails in deep.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Just hold on as tight as you need to. The ambulance is coming.’

  He was aware of the onlookers, the people who had been caught up in the robbery, standing around, probably feeling useless. But suddenly he felt as though he was in a disconnected, distorted bubble of unreality.

  ‘Henry, it really hurts.’

  ‘I know … just hold onto me, hold on … the ambulance is almost here … they’ll get you sorted.’

  She convulsed with pain. ‘Oh God.’

  Henry held her slightly tighter, aware of a wetness underneath him: the spreading pool of Jo’s blood.

  ‘It’s OK, OK, love.’

  ‘Henry … is that you?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah … it’s me.’

  ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘I know, I was just thinking about you, too.’

  In the distance he heard the ambulance sirens for the first time.

  ‘Not long now, not long.’

  Jo coughed and bubbles of blood spittled out of her mouth.

  Henry groaned inwardly. That was bad.

  The sirens were close now.

  She died in his arms as the first ambulance man ran into the shop.

  TEN

  The pounding on the front door eventually penetrated through the hiss of the shower and the hum of the electric motor, beating through the force field that seemed to be encasing Henry Christie’s head in a grey haze.

  Henry’s ears came on stream as the knocking persisted, wouldn’t go away.

  ‘Just get lost,’ he said, and lifted his face into the burning hot, but fairly weak jets, wishing they would wash away his all-pervading bleakness.

  But the knocking continued. Whoever it was knew Henry was in and would not be deterred by a no-response. It was a cop’s knock. Reluctantly he turned off the water and stepped out of the bath in which the shower was located and began to dry himself. He put on tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt and padded down the tight steps to the front door, still rubbing his short-cropped hair with a hand towel as he opened up.

  ‘Thought you’d drowned.’ It was DI Fanshaw-Bayley, FB. Henry’s nostrils dilated as he regarded his DI. ‘Can I come in?’

  Henry sighed, stepped aside and allowed FB’s chubby form to roll past him into the narrow hallway to the kitchen at the back of the rented house.

  ‘You making a brew?’ FB said, easing himself onto a chair next to the fold-leaf kitchen table.

  Henry said nothing, but filled the kettle and dropped two tea bags into two mugs. The kettle started to heat up noisily. Henry leaned against the sink.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘You did well, Henry … The people in the shop who saw you said you were there for her.’

  Henry shook his head and looked away sharply, his lips tight lines as he fought to control anger and grief.

  ‘The chief constable’s out and about – although we did have to give him directions to get to the valley. He’s been to see Jo’s parents in Lancaster. He wants to see you at some stage today.’

  ‘I’ll give that a miss.’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Tell him I’m not fit and I’m likely to rip his face off.’

  The kettle boiled. Henry made the tea and handed one to FB. Henry took a sip of his. It burned his lips. He had his back to FB now, staring out of the kitchen window into the back yard. ‘I couldn’t stop her dying,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘No one could have, not even if she’d been in hospital one minute after being shot.’

  Henry exhaled with fury, raging at himself. He rounded on FB like a tiger. ‘This,’ he stamm
ered, ‘this needn’t have happened.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been prevented,’ FB said defensively.

  Henry’s face set. ‘You know what I was thinking this morning in the lecture room? When I was looking at the pathetic police operation to catch these bastards?’

  ‘They might not even be the same crew,’ FB cut in.

  ‘What?’ Henry’s voice rose incredulously. ‘Getaway car torched not a million miles away from the one the other day? Another stolen car ready and waiting for them to jump into and then that one torched in Manchester? Pull the other one, boss. It’s the same team and you know it. And what the hell have we done about it? Just let ’em get more and more violent and then – surprise! This happens. An innocent girl gets gunned down like vermin. It should never have come to this. We should’ve been onto these bastards from the first job, not let it build up. We are to blame for this.’

  ‘We don’t get into the blame game here.’

  ‘Unless it suits,’ Henry blasted. He could see FB’s chins wobbling and his face glowing with anger.

  ‘The only people to blame are the ones with guns, PC Christie.’ A formal, defensive statement. ‘Stop carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.’

  Henry didn’t seem to have heard. ‘I’ll tell you what I was thinking …’

  FB stood up. ‘I don’t want to know what you were thinking, Henry, understood?’ His head tilted back challengingly. ‘And I don’t want you to even think about blabbing anything to anyone about your not required thoughts on the matter.’

  ‘You mean the chief constable? You don’t want me to tell him what a half-arsed response the CID were making to apprehend a brutal gang of armed robbers that should have had a team of twelve detectives on their tail from the word go? Is that why you’re here? To warn me off?’ Henry was painfully aware he was treading a very thin line by addressing a senior officer in this manner, particularly one who had a dangerous streak a mile wide in him and was known to bear grudges. But at least Henry knew that if it came to explanations he could claim being out of his mind at the grief of witnessing the death of a colleague. He was actually grieving, but he wasn’t out of his mind.

  He was simply furious, wanted to lash out.

  ‘Henry, you can tell the chief constable whatever you bloody well want – if you decide to see him. But remember one thing, he’s an ex-detective. Being a jack is in his blood. And he’ll understand our response to the problem of an armed gang.’ FB smiled cruelly.

  Henry swallowed something about the size of a brick.

  Throwing his Teddy out of the cot was not a good idea.

  ‘And no,’ FB said calmly, ‘I did not come for that reason.’

  ‘Why then?’ Henry asked quietly. ‘A shoulder to cry on?’

  FB regarded the constable critically, his fat jaw rotating as he sized Henry up and down.

  ‘To tell you that a proper operation is now up and running to catch these cop-murdering bastards … and that before Jo was shot, I was in the process of setting up a bigger operation anyway and you know that.’

  Henry fired him a look of disbelief. Stable doors and horses bolting came to his mind.

  ‘Just ask around if you don’t believe me. I was on the blower all morning pulling a team together. The bastards just caught us on the hop and Jo walked into something we couldn’t have foreseen.’

  ‘And now they’re unlikely to come back here in a hurry,’ Henry observed.

  ‘Agree,’ FB nodded. ‘They’ll go to ground in Manchester, which makes it very hard for us to follow up. But I do think they’ll be back and we need to be ready for them in that case, which we will be.’

  Henry said, ‘So you’ve come to tell me that?’

  ‘Yes, and something else. If you’re up for it, I want you on the murder squad, but only if you’re emotionally stable enough.’

  ‘Doing what? Brewing up for the detective constables? The numpty woodentop?’

  ‘No.’ FB half-smiled. ‘Well that, obviously, goes without saying,’ he teased. ‘You certainly are a woodentop, as they say in the Met.’

  Henry shook his head and folded his arms, waited cynically.

  ‘Clearly this will be a murder investigation now,’ FB announced.

  ‘Clearly.’

  FB snapped his mouth shut at the interruption and reconsidered Henry. ‘You know, you really do need to learn to keep it shut, Henry. Big gob achieves nowt.’

  Henry pretended to pull a zipper across his lips.

  ‘You mentioned you thought there might be a local connection … not the most original thought, admittedly,’ FB said, just in case Henry might have believed he was the only cop thinking things through. ‘I want you to look into that.’

  ‘What about everything else I have on my plate?’

  ‘We’ve all got shit on our plates,’ FB snarled. ‘Man up, deal with it.’

  Henry wound his neck in, rather like a tortoise.

  ‘You’re drafted onto the murder squad as of now. Whatever you’ve got pending, deal with it or pass it on, but you won’t be given anything else. You’re on the squad, I’ve sorted it with your crime car boss, so now you can make a valid contribution to finding these bastards who rob, murder and terrorize. How does that sound?’

  ‘Plain clothes?’

  ‘Whatever’s appropriate.’

  ‘Who will I be working with?’

  ‘You’ll be all alone.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And the other thing I want you to spend time doing is mooching in Manchester.’

  ‘Mooching?’

  ‘Eyes and ears. In the vicinity of where the second getaway cars are abandoned. See what you can pick up, yeah?’

  ‘Alone again?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  The first thing Henry had to deal with was making a witness statement. He did this after FB had gone, driving back to the station at Rawtenstall – which was now crawling with cops. A few people stopped, spoke and commiserated with him. Henry was pleasant but he wanted to get the statement written whilst the incident was still clear in his head. He snaffled a few CID 9’s and 9a’s, the witness statement forms, and did a quick exit, driving back to his house where he pulled out the kitchen table and got writing.

  He’d done it in less than an hour, all the while wondering if the man who had killed Jo was the same one who’d fired at him. A man with an itchy finger and a death wish. He made a mental note to read the statements taken from the customers at the shop and see if whatever description they made, vague though it would be because there wasn’t a lot to describe – a masked man with a gun – matched his own memories of the masked man.

  After that he knew that his next port of call that evening should really be to see Kate and spend some time with her, connecting with his emotions.

  The more he thought about doing that, the more his lip curled.

  What he needed was a drink. Several. And the fact that his local hostelry was in walking distance sealed the pact. He changed into jeans and a jacket, strolled down and ordered his first pint of the night from Steph, the landlady who he had not yet seen naked that day.

  He fell into bed at 1am after staying for a lock-in after the pub closed at 11. The lock-in had turned into a mini-celebration-cum-wake of Jo Wade’s life, carried out by the usual in-crowd of cops who often gathered in the pub. By the time the doors were closed, Henry had finished his fourth pint and moved onto whisky. The landlady provided a steaming tureen of chicken curry, a huge bowl of boiled rice and a stack of naan breads. The cops set upon the feast like hyenas on an injured warthog.

  They raised their glasses to Jo and then turned as one to Henry and silently toasted him in an unrehearsed, spontaneous gesture which made him blink back a tear and start to blub a little – until someone bought him another Bell’s whisky.

  He made his excuses after that and headed for the toilets at the back of the pub, bouncing off the walls as he stumbled drunkenly to them.

  It seemed to take an i
nordinate length of time to urinate and he had to steady himself a few times and prop his forehead on the toilet wall to prevent himself from staggering sideways.

  When he emerged, zipping himself up, the landlady was waiting for him.

  ‘Can I assist you in your grief?’ Her eyes sparkled enticingly and once again Henry was bedazzled by the prospect of jumping into bed with another female. Such was the simplicity of the life of a single cop in the valley, if he or she wished it to be that way. Henry was finding it hard to break the habit.

  Steph took a firm hold of his jacket, then jerked him roughly towards her until their faces were only inches apart. Her eyes stared deeply into his, then she dragged him that last inch and their lips mashed together for a long, slow, drunken kiss. When they disengaged, Henry found himself literally breathless. ‘Have you ever had a landlady?’ she asked throatily.

  ‘It’s on my to-do list,’ he said in the moment before she yanked him back into a clinch and walked him back against the wall with a crash. He went with the flow, although there was that black cloud somewhere in his mind telling him to do a sharp exit. Not just that when he made love to any lady, he much preferred to have a clear head because he enjoyed it all the more. A bit tipsy was OK, but being stone-drunk was not always that pleasurable. The other section of the cloud concerned Kate and his declaration to her and his half-baked marriage proposal not many hours ago.

  Yet here he was, locked in an embrace with a woman at least a dozen years older than he was, pathetically fighting off the urge to drag her to bed.

  He extricated himself clumsily. ‘No, this isn’t right,’ he said and pushed her gently away.

  But her eyes were on fire, radiating sexual desire. ‘If you’re bothered about Gerry,’ Gerry being Henry’s housemate, ‘don’t be. He’s away on a driving course.’ She told him something he didn’t know. He might have been his housemate but they certainly didn’t live in each other’s pockets.

  She fought back at that, pulling him towards her, unwilling to take no for an answer. One hand slithered around his neck, another grabbed the front of his jeans which, despite Henry’s mixed emotions and alcoholic state, bulged. He gasped and she forced her tongue into his ear. He emitted a whimper of submission as this organ worked in and out and she murmured, ‘Let me screw you senseless, Henry.’