Judgement Call

by Nick Oldham

  It was an offer he failed to refuse. She led him easily up the back stairs into her boudoir and carried out her promise.

  Afterwards, Henry scooped up his clothes – they had been flung around the room as Steph had undressed him, half reminding him of a dog digging madly for a bone – and got dressed in the en-suite shower room, although he couldn’t be bothered putting on his underpants or socks. He stuffed them into his jacket pocket. The landlady was asleep, having exhausted herself. He gave her a drunken wave, then stumbled back into the pub where the wake for Jo was still strongly underway, with a cop behind the bar serving the drinks and placing the money in an honesty box on the bar top. This is what usually happened at a lock-in.

  They gave Henry a victorious cheer as he made his way through the bar, acknowledging the accolade with a shy bow and a royal wave. He let himself out through the locked doors, closing them behind him and, weaving like a stereotypical drunk, walked back to his house and bed, where he fell instantly asleep.

  He woke at seven, feeling horrible, crawled on his hands and knees to the bathroom, slid over the side of the bath like a creeping blob from a sci-fi movie and fired up the shower. He sat underneath it until he woke up.

  After this he downed three paracetamols, donned his running gear and set off for a three-mile trot to clear his head, even if his brain felt as though it had come free from its moorings inside his skull.

  On his return he showered again, then fried up egg and bacon, made a strong filter coffee and devoured this amazing tasting breakfast. Then, dressed in jeans, shirt and a leather jacket, he drove into work, almost fit to face the world.

  Henry had claimed that he thought the armed robbers, now murderers too, must be using a local connection to identify their targets. It was unlikely that they would simply roll into town and rob the first place they came across. It would have to be planned. His claim, though, was purely conjecture on his part. They could just as easily be reccying premises themselves, but the thing about crime investigation was that hypotheses were put forward and then followed up, either to be discarded as fanciful thinking, or shown to have some value.

  Henry saw it as his job to work out if there was a local connection or not.

  If not, so be it. Shrug the shoulders, move on.

  But he had to give it a go … plus, there was just something at the back of his mind niggling away.

  As he drove into work he wondered how best to go about his task and decided that his first job would be to check if any of the targeted businesses had CCTV cameras installed and, if so, which of the detectives who had been looking into the attacks had reviewed the tapes, what had been seen and was it of any value to Henry’s bit of the puzzle.

  The station was bustling again. The rear yard was overflowing with cars Henry did not recognize, indicating an influx of personnel from all points of the county. He made his way up to the first floor and discovered that the lecture room had been transformed into an incident room, now crowded with sitting and standing detectives and uniform officers, awaiting a briefing. Henry loved the anticipatory buzz of it, and a shimmer ran through him. He nodded at a few people he knew, including a couple of detectives from Blackburn, then took up a position at the back wall and waited for action.

  A couple of minutes later, FB bustled in, followed by the chief constable, and the two of stood in front of the dry-wipe board and flip-chart easel at the front of the room.

  A hush descended, the chief took a breath and, as Henry guessed, he gave an emotional and motivational rallying call to the squad about the need for professionalism, diligence and persistence to catch the offenders who had so brutally taken one of their colleagues. A large photograph of Jo, blown up from her personal record, was pinned to the wall. Once that was done, he handed over to FB, who began the briefing proper.

  When this finished, Henry made himself scarce for a while to avoid any possibility of contact with the chief. He didn’t fancy talking to the guy about what had happened.

  Then, when he thought the chief had gone, he went to see the detective who had been allocated the job of exhibits officer, a sensible first port of call, Henry would have thought, but the meeting only really made Henry realize just how amateurish the set-up was.

  The officer was an experienced detective, drafted in from Blackburn, where Henry had met him a few times during his recent ill-fated secondment.

  He frowned deeply at Henry as the request was made.

  ‘I need to look at the video footage from the tapes seized from any of the shops that have been hit,’ Henry explained. ‘So … can I have the tapes, please?’

  ‘What tapes?’

  ‘The CCTV footage from the shops?’ Henry’s voice had a rising inflection of disbelief in it.

  ‘Like I said – what tapes?’

  ‘You mean no one’s seized any tapes from the shops?’ Henry now tried to keep his voice on a conversational level, trying not to show his utter horror.

  ‘Well – I’ve only just started this job yesterday, but so far I haven’t seen any tapes,’ the DC said. ‘Perhaps you could go and seize them. Might be a good idea.’

  Henry had envisaged being given an armful of videotapes containing hours of mostly useless footage, but just to confirm how slapdash the whole thing had been so far, he left with an armful of nothing.

  ‘You need to generate an action and make sure the allocator has seen it, then no one duplicates what you’re doing,’ the DC called after him.

  ‘I will,’ Henry said over his shoulder.

  ‘Hey – aren’t you the one who nearly clocked DI Chase?’ he called after Henry, mentioning the name of the DI in Blackburn Henry had so nearly decked.

  ‘No,’ Henry denied the accusation, even though it was true.

  ‘Ah well, shame … the guy needs a seeing to.’

  Further enquiries revealed that no one, so far, had had the nous to get the tapes from the shops. This was an important little lesson for Henry, which he filed away in his mind: sometimes even the most obvious, simple things get overlooked, and he was astounded that no one book or document existed, a process map, almost, of how serious investigations should be conducted, what to consider, what to do … but it seemed that investigations were just done on the hoof, based on experience and gut feeling. Some sort of murder investigation manual would be a great idea, he thought. Maybe one day …

  He snaffled a set of keys from the sergeant’s office again and went on the hunt for some evidence.

  He revisited all the shops that had been robbed, including the latest one which was still a murder crime scene. But his hoard was pitiful. The use of security cameras was patchy across the board and only three of the shops had them. One shop had only one tape that was constantly rewound and then reused when it reached the end and the other two had a couple of tapes each but were not automatically set up to record and he learned that the VCRs were often completely forgotten about until someone in the shop just happened to remember to switch them on.

  All in all, Henry thought, crap. Big Brother was hardly watching anything in 1982.

  He had envisaged having to sit through dozens of tapes that had systematically and chronologically recorded footage of daily life in the shops, but he came away from his visits with only five tapes that had been reused numerous times. He had expected to be sat for days on end in a darkened room, drinking coffee, sifting through hours of boring footage but the reality was it would be just a few hours and if he could find a good quality tape player he would be able to skim quickly through the tapes on fast-forward and save some time.

  He returned to the station, labelled the tapes and booked them into the evidence system, then logged them back out to himself.

  Next task was to sit somewhere comfortable to watch them – and he had an idea on that score.

  In passing, he quickly checked his tray. The two committal files were still on top, their return dates seeming to flash ominously at him. With yesterday’s incident he obviously hadn’t completed them as
intended and had no desire to pick them up today, either.

  Underneath the two thick files was a new one, slipped in by a sergeant.

  It was Jack Bowman’s, stapled to the front of which was the ‘wanted/escaped from custody’ circulation and another note pinned to that from FB which simply read, ‘Please expedite.’

  Henry slid it out and had a quick glance through it. When he had gone to Dover all he had been in possession of was Bowman’s original arrest warrant, but this file contained details of the three house burglaries offences Bowman was wanted for, and made mention he was suspected of about forty others. Henry scanned through them and wasn’t surprised to see they were all of a similar nature. Bowman had broken, mainly, into terraced houses, usually through the back door, or by breaking a ground-floor window; sometimes he had shimmied up drainpipes and used glass cutters on windows, showing he was a very dextrous burglar indeed. He had stolen cash and easily portable trinkets and jewellery and often broke in whilst the occupants were asleep, and sometimes he had excreted in hallways or on landings – something Henry wasn’t aware of.

  And, Henry noted, with a little surge of excitement, most of the victims were old-age pensioners.

  Very similar, in fact, to the burglary he had attended the previous day at Mrs Fudge’s house.

  Some of the MOs were identical, even the type of property stolen.

  A silver photograph frame was something that Jack Bowman would happily steal and then try to sell.

  ‘Little bastard’s back in town,’ Henry mused.

  He stacked the videocassettes on top of his tray and left the station on foot. He intended to make two stops.

  First he popped into the insurance brokers on Bank Street. Sitting primly at a desk behind the counter was Kate, whose face rose as he entered. She smiled her customer-focused smile for just a brief moment, but then her expression iced over when she realized it was Henry and that she hadn’t heard from him in almost two days.

  He leaned on the counter, flashing his boyish half-grin, which didn’t seem to have the desired effect. She got up menacingly from her chair, making him quiver with a fear he had never felt before. Why did this woman – this mere slip of a girl, really – do this to him?

  As she approached him he changed his own facial expression to one of great sadness, blinking like a little lamb.

  It had no effect on Kate.

  She jerked up to him and under her breath she said harshly, ‘I haven’t seen or heard from you in God knows how long and then you turn up acting like a bloody schoolboy, Henry.’

  ‘You’re cross,’ he said, trying to sound puzzled.

  ‘I’m bloody fuming … What is it, shag ’em and leave ’em? That will not happen to me, Henry James Christie.’ Her eyes were like devil’s orbs. Henry almost expected to see a trident in her hand and red horns growing from her forehead as she morphed into a devil ready to do battle with the cowardly devil on his shoulder.

  ‘I … I … er …’ he stammered.

  ‘I … I … er … – what the hell does that mean?’ she mimicked him cruelly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he ventured meekly.

  ‘You virtually ask me to marry you and then nothing! Zilch! What was that – just to get your leg over?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he protested.

  ‘Did you mean it, or was it just a ploy to get a blow job?’

  Kate’s voice rose on the last three words and the two other ladies who worked in the office at separate desks, who had been watching and trying to earwig the conversation, looked at each other with shocked, wide open eyes.

  ‘Both,’ he admitted.

  Kate eyeballed him steadily.

  ‘I … had a bit of a busy day yesterday,’ he said, still trying to elicit sympathy.

  Kate softened. ‘I know, and you should have contacted me, we should have seen each other.’ She sighed and nodded towards a consultation room on the public side of the counter where customers were taken to finalize deals. ‘In there,’ she ordered him.

  She came out from behind the counter and hustled him into the room, almost propelling him through the door. She stepped in behind him and closed the door softly and turned the butterfly lock and leaned on the door.

  ‘Trapped,’ she said.

  ‘Spider and the fly.’

  ‘I need to be kissed, Henry.’ Her voice had become husky – and not a little threatening. ‘C’mere.’

  ‘Well that was a first – and on duty,’ he muttered whilst walking jauntily up Bank Street. He blew out his cheeks and made another discreet check of his flies, with a little skip and a hop as he went.

  He was still grinning as he entered Fat Jack’s and negotiated his way through the display goods to the counter where, once more, he found Dominic Tighe, aka Fat Jack, studying a newspaper, cigarette in one hand, brew in the other. He didn’t look up.

  Henry stood there quietly, arms folded. He could feel his jugular pulsing.

  ‘Well I did my bit,’ Tighe said, turning the pages of his newspaper.

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘He ran with it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Guy came in, tried to sell me a silver photograph frame.’ Still he didn’t look up.

  A beat of silence. ‘And?’

  ‘I must’ve given some vibes that made him nervous.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He snatched it back and legged it.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Jack Bowman – but I didn’t tell you that.’

  ELEVEN

  Henry scurried back to the station intending to root out Bowman’s file to remind himself of the burglar’s last known address, because he was going to pay it a visit. Not that he expected to find the escapee there, but he would never know until he knocked, or kicked the door in, and he knew he had enough reasonable suspicion to do that if he had to. Or at least he could manufacture some if necessary.

  As he took the videocassettes off his tray and re-stacked them on the table, FB swung into the office on the door jamb. ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded.

  ‘Making enquiries,’ Henry responded, picking up a tape to show he wasn’t lying, and waggling it at FB. ‘Why?’

  ‘We need more monkeys, that’s why.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Muscle – we need some muscle. I want to go and hit an address in Salford with the Regional Crime Squad, but I need some cannon fodder.’

  ‘What address? Why?’

  ‘Upstairs now,’ FB said and swung back out of the office.

  Ten minutes later Henry was sitting in the back of a personnel carrier with four other constables, a PC driving with Fanshaw-Bayley and another detective crushed together alongside the driver on the bench seat.

  Henry cynically understood the psychology of it. The superior detectives up front, as uncomfortable as it was, and the dumb-ass riff-raff plebs in the back.

  He smiled and didn’t care. He had a sledgehammer propped up between his thighs and he was going to smash down a door. One of life’s little pleasures.

  A detective from the RCS joined them at Salford police station, together with a uniformed inspector from Greater Manchester Police who came along for the ride to ensure no funny business happened. The inspector took a list of the names of everyone present in the carrier and issued a briefing about behaviour. GMP was accommodating this raid because of its urgent nature and the fact it was a follow-up to the shooting of a colleague. Normally GMP would have insisted on being fully in control, but acquiesced to the circumstances on this occasion because it was a hot, dynamic operation.

  The RCS detective squeezed onto the front seat with FB and the other jack and the inspector sat in the back of the van with the five constables, four of them in uniform, Henry still in plain clothes. The inspector leaned forward and directed the driver to the outskirts of the estate where the raid was to take place and gave a commentary about life in Salford.

  ‘This isn’t like one of your poxy little estates in Lancs,’ h
e boasted proudly. ‘Everyone here hates the cops and if they get chance, they’ll have you. There’s knives and guns galore and not many people afraid to use them on the police. So watch out.’

  ‘What’s the plan, then?’ Henry piped up, as a plan of how they were going to hit this particular address seemed sadly lacking.

  ‘I’ll knock on the front door for you,’ the inspector said. ‘A few of you need to be behind me. If I get a reply, I’ll step aside and in you go. If not, bring on the sledgehammers.’

  A pretty thin plan, Henry thought, knowing it should be much, much better than this, operating on a wing and a prayer, hoping for the best. Disorganized and dangerous, he thought, but exciting nonetheless. He would happily go with the flow.

  ‘He lives on the top floor of a four-storey block of council houses,’ the inspector said, referring to the target. ‘It might be as well if a couple of guys were round the back, just in case he tries to jump for it. It has been known.’

  FB, who had been listening to the inspector with his arm draped over the seat, looked at Henry. ‘You and me,’ he said. ‘Plain clothes would be better than a couple of uniforms hanging about, spooking folk.’ To the inspector he said, ‘Drop us off a short distance from the address and we’ll make our way on foot. Give us a few minutes to get into position, then hit the place.’

  Henry tried to hide his disappointment. He wouldn’t be smashing down a door after all.

  They drove to the perimeter of the council estate where FB and Henry dropped out of the carrier and began to walk after getting directions from the local man.

  The estate didn’t look too bad, Henry thought. Actually not much to choose between here and something similar in Blackburn, despite the smug claims of the inspector. It was a big, densely populated estate dominated by four four-storey blocks of flats, one at each corner, giving it a German prisoner-of-war-camp feel. Henry half expected to see guards brandishing machine guns.