by Nick Oldham
SEVENTEEN
Since leaving the company of the old, retired vicar in Oswaldtwistle, having listened to his astonishing story, the following days had been monstrously busy for Henry, and other than the cloud looming over him that was his hospitalized mother, he had enjoyed himself immensely.
He had been at the helm of a complex, multi-layered police operation which involved lots of doors being kicked down and gang-related arrests made, alongside various media appearances for which a range of sound bites were prepared. These appearances included an early morning visit to Media City in Salford, where by chance he had shared a sofa on the BBC breakfast show with an ageing pop star he had longed to meet and who was on a comeback tour that had hit Manchester the night before. Henry was there to talk about the Lancashire manhunt, which had captured nationwide interest, and the meeting with the old rocker had been a bonus. Henry had got the man’s autograph in his pocket notebook and had excitedly phoned Alison with the news, although she huffed at it, unimpressed. He was also given a pair of tickets for a London concert later in the week, but doubted he would be able to make it.
Despite the police activity, which was very intrusive to a lot of criminals in Lancashire, Terry Cromer remained at large, as did Freddy.
Henry knew they would come. Just a matter of time.
He was also keeping an eye on missing persons, but none who were reported seemed to fit the victim profile he was interested in. One misper did turn up floating in a reservoir, but his demise had no connection to Henry’s inquiry.
They reached New Year’s Eve without any real success and Henry’s team was dismissed to enjoy the festivities, have the next day off and come back on the second of January ready to get stuck in again.
That day’s debrief had taken place at 4 p.m., after which Henry and Rik headed across to Blackpool — Henry to visit his mother, who had been watched over by Lisa for most of the day; Rik to pick Lisa up.
As Rik and Henry walked through the hospital corridors up to the cardiac unit, Henry had said, ‘I’m not saying you can’t have a drink at midnight, but I’d rather you erred on the side of caution.’
‘Why’s that?’ Rik had been looking forward to getting plastered with Lisa.
‘Dunno. . instinct? We’ve had a quiet few days. . I know the crims have had cops up their backsides all week and we’ve ruined a few New Years, but something might kick off tonight and I’d rather have one or two of us capable of reacting in a sober fashion.’
Rik shrugged an ‘OK’. He wasn’t about to argue. Henry’s influence had managed to get his love life back on track and secure him a promotion, albeit temporary. He needed to keep on Henry’s good side.
His mother looked like a shadow in the bed. After a brief resurgence of health, she had gone downhill fast and life was something she now clung onto only tenuously.
Lisa crossed over and gave him a hug, then kissed Rik.
‘How is she?’
Lisa shook her head, unable to find words. Henry touched her shoulder tenderly. ‘You go, I’ll stay for a few hours. Not a problem.’ A day earlier Henry had pinned her down and they’d had the unpleasant DNR conversation, sadly concluding that their mother’s wishes should be followed. Henry thought with a hint of cynicism that Lisa had reached that decision a bit too quickly, but immediately chastised himself, for being mean spirited and judging her as the old Lisa, the selfish, self-centred Lisa who only cared about herself, the daughter who saw her mother only as a pain in the neck. Even though it was early days, a great change seemed to have come over his sister since making peace with Rik and rekindling their relationship. She was much more serene and laid back now, as if she accepted that her unstable past was over and her future was with Rik. For ever. And she was happy about it.
Henry sat next to his mother, who lay there as if she was already in her coffin, hands folded across her chest, legs out straight. She wore an oxygen mask, but her breathing was ragged and unsteady. Before he settled down, he decided to buy himself a coffee and a sandwich, returning a few minutes later with his goods and laying them out on the bedside cabinet. He ripped open the sandwiches, a noise that seemed to wake his mother, who opened her eyes as though she’d been prodded and ripped the mask off her face in a panic.
‘Hey, Mum, it’s all right.’ Henry gently helped remove the mask and plumped up her pillows to raise her slightly. He could hear her chest rasping as she breathed.
‘Not long now, eh?’ she said.
He stayed with her until nine that evening and left her sleeping. As ever he made certain the nurses had his phone numbers — that of the Tawny Owl and his mobile — on their information sheets. Then he drove back to Kendleton and entered the crazy world of New Year’s Eve at the Tawny Owl, where at midnight he allowed himself a small glass of champagne and bawled out ‘Auld Lang Syne’ without any thought for melody.
He and Alison stepped away from the crowd in the bar and went outside into the chill of the night, where most of the population of Kendleton were singing and dancing and a bonfire and fireworks were lighting up the New Year.
They stood side by side, watching the flames and the rockets, Henry’s arm around her slender waist. He said a few romantic words to her, which had the desired effect, and they shared their first proper public kiss, although hardly anyone saw it.
Not long afterwards he was in bed, alone. Alison slid in about 2 a.m. after shooing out the last of the revellers.
At 03:48 the bedside phone rang.
Henry walked a few metres after he had ducked under the cordon tape, then stopped and breathed in the cold New Year’s Day air. Further down the track he could see the side of a factory unit and the car park next to it, the police cars drawn up, blue lights rotating unnecessarily.
The phone call that had awakened him just over an hour earlier could have been either one thing or the other — his mother, or work. It could easily have been from BVH informing him of the worst.
But it had been the FIM — who, having been on duty for most of the previous week, knew what was happening and what Henry was interested in. Hence her opening gambit, ‘Boss, I think this could be one of yours.’
It was now that Henry found himself standing in the en-suite shower room, half-wondering if the FIM was visualizing him naked.
He hunched down into his jacket — a surprise extra Christmas present from Alison, one that was of immediate use — and was about to set off towards the unit when he heard another car pull up on the main road. He turned to see that Rik Dean had also arrived and parked behind the Audi, and was now walking quickly towards him, flashing his warrant card at the PC guarding the entrance and ducking under the tape.
Rik was wrapped up in a thick outer coat.
‘Henry,’ he said in acknowledgement. ‘Looks like you were right. What’ve we got?’
‘I probably know as much as you,’ Henry said. ‘Let’s see.’
They started to walk. Rik said, ‘How was your New Year’s Eve?’
‘Nice, but short of alcohol. Yours?’
‘Ditto — no sex either.’
Henry and Rik were making their way to a light industrial unit at the bottom of the village. Though disused it wasn’t old; built of breezeblock and panelled metal, it was the end one of four units. The other three were in use: one as a garage, another by a storage company, the third by a manufacturer of window blinds. All, though, looked dilapidated.
The night duty detective emerged from a personnel door in the wall of the unit, adjacent to a roller shutter, and walked across the car park to meet Rik and Henry. They all knew each other. DC Oxford was a steady detective in the middle years of his service who had the possibility of making DS if he wanted. He briefed them, they fitted their latex gloves and snapped elasticated paper coverings over their shoes, then followed him inside.
It was quite a large unit — Henry would have to be told its cubic area, he couldn’t even begin to guess the figure. But as he entered the unit proper through the door, then a small ve
stibule, he stopped, astounded and almost overwhelmed by the thick aroma that seemed to clog the steamy atmosphere.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
‘Just had a quick count-up and I reckon there’s about eight hundred,’ said Oxford.
Henry and Rik blew a low whistle each.
There were rows and rows of them. Eight hundred cannabis plants, all very healthy-looking, with overhead lighting and heating and a sophisticated hydroponics set-up to water and feed them.
Henry was no great whizz at maths, but he knew that the street value of each plant was somewhere in the region of five hundred pounds. Multiply eight by five and add the zeros — that meant he was looking at somewhere in the region of four hundred thousand pounds’ worth of illegal drugs. He blinked. Good money.
‘Who found them?’ he asked.
‘Local couple came down here in a car for a bit of nookie,’ Oxford said. ‘Parked up outside to get down to business, security lights came on and they noticed that the door we just came through was open. . through their steamy windows. They called it in, and the lad says they didn’t even look inside, which I’ve no reason to doubt.’
Henry nodded, his eyes scanning the jungle of leaves, his head shaking at the enormity of the find.
Which was not the reason he was here.
‘One of the Oswaldtwistle patrols eventually made it up here to check it out and wandered through and poked his head in the office down there.’ Oxford pointed to the office at the far end of the unit, door open, light on. ‘And that’s where he is. This way.’
Oxford led the two detectives around the perimeter of the unit, using the route that everyone attending would now have to follow. Reaching the office door, he stood aside and let Henry and Rik sidle past him.
Henry stood at the threshold and let his eyes do the walking, as he experienced the strange feeling of dread and excitement that always engulfed him at such a scene.
In terms of an office, there was a desk and a chair and a laptop computer but little else. The walls were bare. His eyes roved. He saw the rucksack propped against the wall, a stack of clothes, the Primus stove with a small saucepan on top of it. There was half a loaf of bread, some cans of soup, a cheap- looking kettle, a carton of milk, a jar of coffee and a mug. Two newspapers were folded up next to two pillows. There was also a small two-bar electric heater of a type he had not seen for years, and a couple of raggy-looking blankets and a stack of clothes.
Someone had been living here, hiding out.
And that person now lay splayed like the letter X on an unzipped sleeping bag on the cold office floor. The head wound was dreadful. The entry of the bullet on the right side of the face was about the size of a five pence piece, the exit wound on the left had removed about a quarter of the skull, most of which was splattered against the office wall. The sight made Henry’s lips twitch. Even so, the man was easily identifiable. And very obviously dead.
‘Jeepers,’ Rik said. He was looking over Henry’s shoulder.
‘Jeepers indeed,’ Henry agreed.
‘So this is where he’s been hiding out,’ Rik said.
‘Looks that way.’
‘Oh dear, Terry Cromer,’ Henry said. ‘What a terrible end, even for a man as villainous as you.’
Henry stepped back into the unit, easing Rik back a step with him.
He looked at Oxford. ‘Who’ve you got coming?’
‘Scenes of crime, and I’ve turned out a pathologist. . seemed pretty obvious he was dead. And a couple more uniform patrols, just to get the scene sealed properly.’
Whilst Henry couldn’t disagree with that diagnosis, he always felt it prudent to get paramedics on the scene. Cops could make mistakes in assuming that people were dead when actually they weren’t. . But he let it slide. He would bet his commutation that Terry Cromer was dead. ‘Have you checked the rest of the unit?’
‘Not yet.’
Henry looked across the hundreds of plants — clearly one of the Cromer family’s cash cows as cannabis was still very, very popular and its possession hardly even merited a slap on the wrist. It was always the importer and distributors the police were interested in cracking down on, not the end users. Along one side of the unit was a set of steps leading up to what appeared to be another office, supported by a metal framework, which would give a supervisor a view across the unit.
‘What you thinking, Henry?’ Rik asked.
‘Er, nothing, nothing really,’ he said absently.
‘Looks like the Costains found him before we did,’ Rik said. He looked back into the office. ‘Also looks like he’s been living like a tramp.’
Henry said nothing. He always found it best to ingest serious crime scenes slowly. Soak them in, let ’em permeate; start hypothesizing but don’t reach any conclusions. Too early for anything like that. But it did certainly look like this was the place where the fugitive Terry Cromer had been hiding out and living rough, no doubt fed and watered by his family and other members of his organization. Even for someone like Cromer, this was an existence that would have been short- lived, unless it was just a stop-gap before leaving the country. And it was the place where he had met his maker. . but already Henry had his misgivings.
The Costains were on the warpath and killing Terry Cromer was no doubt high on their agenda, yet it seemed unlikely they would have discovered his whereabouts, unless someone in Terry’s set-up had betrayed him. That was a likely scenario in a world where allegiances were fickle, and it would be one line of enquiry. . but Henry wasn’t convinced.
The yellowish glow of the lighting suspended above the cannabis plants made for an eerie radiance, not really suitable for searching properly — that would have to be carried out in daylight, with proper lighting rigs. But before focusing on the body in the office, he wanted to have a quick look around the place without spoiling any evidence there might be to find.
He switched on his Maglite torch and began to edge around the perimeter of the unit, right up by the wall, until he reached the steps that led up to the elevated office. He stopped here and shone his torch up at the office door, which was closed. From this position he looked across the bushes, most of which were as tall as he was, then flashed his torch up the wooden steps again, to the door above him.
Then he froze.
With measured deliberation, he ran the torch beam downwards across each step, and saw what had made him stop abruptly.
Blood. Tiny drops of it on a couple of the steps. He flashed his torch on the breezeblock wall and saw more blood, and in it a big handprint. On the stair rail there was yet more blood where a hand had gripped it. His torch flicked up to the door and there was blood on that, too, another handprint by the door handle that he hadn’t seen on his first arc of the torch.
Henry swallowed and turned to look over to Rik and Oxford, chatting quietly by the office door. He could hear the murmur of their voices.
He gave them a little wave but they didn’t look over at him.
He coughed — still no response.
He flashed his torch wildly at them and both detectives squinted over at him. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned them over. Rik opened his arms in a ‘What?’ gesture.
If he could have read Henry’s lips, they would have said, ‘Just fucking come here.’
Instead, Henry beckoned again, this time with a more urgent hand signal, and shook his head despairingly.
They seemed to move with reluctance, but joined him a minute later. As they made their way towards him, Henry kept his finger to his lips.
‘What is it?’ Rik asked.
Henry flicked his torch beam onto the wall, up the steps and onto the door of the upper office, showing him the blood smears.
‘Shit,’ Rik hissed.
‘No — blood,’ Henry corrected him. Then, ‘I’m going to have a look.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘Probably not.’
He put his right foot on the first step and went up slowly, avoiding the blo
od and not touching the wall. At the top of the steps there was a small, railed landing. Having reached it, he touched the door silently with a knuckle to see if it would swing open. It was shut, but maybe not locked.
He crouched low, squatting on his haunches. Rik was three steps behind him. Oxford watched from the bottom of the stairs, mouth agape.
Henry rapped on the door and shouted, ‘Police!’ then cowered slightly, expecting bullets to strafe the door from inside the office. There was no response, no indication of movement. Henry knocked again and once more said, ‘Police!’, but kept low and to one side of the door.
He gave it a few seconds and then reached up for the door handle, a basic latch type, easing it down with his thumb and forefinger. He pushed the door open and ducked to one side in case anything unpleasant came out of the room. . like chunks of lead travelling at fifteen hundred miles an hour. The door swung open to an unlit room. Nothing moved or responded.
Henry counted to thirty — not certain as to why, but it seemed a good number to aim for — then shouted, ‘This is the police. Is there anyone in there?’
Still nothing. He shuffled himself around and then, with his back to the wall by the door, he rose to his full height, aware that the wall against which he pressed his back seemed to be made of MDF or some type of hardboard. It wasn’t solid. . and if there was anyone in the office, desperate and armed, the wall would not give him much protection. He reached around the door jamb with the fingers of his left hand, feeling at a height at which he would expect to find a light switch. He touched it and his forefinger ran up the curved slope of a rocker switch. He hesitated a moment and then flicked it. A strong light came on in the room.
Henry jerked away from the door and dropped low again, but nothing happened.
‘Police,’ he said again. There was no harm in making sure that everyone knew, he wouldn’t like to have anyone arguing in court — either Crown or at an inquest (including his own) — that they had not been clearly informed the police were there. ‘I’m a police officer and I’m going to come in through the door,’ he said clearly. ‘I am not armed and you will be able to see my hands. . OK?’
