Big City Jacks

by Nick Oldham

  Lynch relaxed. Control had reverted to him.

  Four

  Henry Christie knew a large number of criminals. He had been a cop over twenty-five years and had worked right across the county of Lancashire, east, west, north and south, though the majority of his latter service had been on the Fylde coast around Blackpool or at headquarters in various departments. Over that time he had come to know and deal with petty thieves and drug barons, drunks and murderers. He had put many of them away, never having tired of the process, nor the feeling of elation to see a bad guy get his comeuppance.

  He had known the Costain family who lived on the Shoreside Estate in Blackpool for many years. They had been a thorn in the side of the police ever since they had landed from God knew where in the sixties and taken up residence. They were born troublemakers and law breakers and had established themselves as burglars, handlers of stolen property, loan sharks and protection racketeers, and, as Henry knew, more recently as drug dealers.

  They were never an easy family to deal with. He did not know of one occasion when the police hadn’t been given a rough ride by them – even when one of the Costain brothers had been murdered and Henry had solved the case. They still hated Henry with a vengeance because they were unable to make themselves see the police as anything other than the enemy.

  Not that Henry gave a stuff. A jousting match with the Costain clan was always a bit of a wheeze . . . and he always had an ace up his sleeve when dealing with them.

  Driving on to the Shoreside Estate brought back myriad memories for Henry, some minor, some major – such as the racially fuelled riot (caused by the Costains) he had once quelled; he drove on past a row of derelict shops, all now burnt out and dilapidated, never to be resurrected. The local hooligans had systematically destroyed them and all the shopkeepers had been driven off the estate, ensuring that law-abiding residents no longer had local services. It was now a car or bus journey to the local supermarket, though even the bus service to the estate had been severely curtailed. Too many drivers had been attacked and injured, too many buses had been trashed.

  Some people on the estate seemed intent on making it even more depraved than ever. Its future, Henry thought, was bleak.

  Even cops had to tread carefully. It wasn’t quite a no-go zone, but it wasn’t far off.

  If the millions of tourists who poured annually into the resort only knew about the crime-ridden, poverty-stricken hinterland just behind the tacky, money-driven seafront, Henry thought . . . then smirked . . . they wouldn’t give a monkey’s.

  He drove slowly along a debris-strewn avenue, no streetlights working (all smashed), and pulled to a halt behind another car. The occupant of this one climbed out and walked back to Henry, who lowered his window. It was the on-call detective sergeant, Rik Dean.

  ‘Hi, boss,’ said the tired-looking sergeant, groggy from recent sleep.

  ‘Rik,’ Henry acknowledged him. He knew Dean well, had been instrumental in getting him on to CID in the first place. Dean was a good thief-taker, had an instinct second to none. ‘You know the score, pal?’

  Dean nodded. ‘How are we going to handle it?’

  Henry rubbed his fatigued face. It felt leathery and harsh. ‘Well, the Costains are never easy. How the hell they’re going to react to the knowledge that Renata’s dead and Roy killed her, I dunno.’

  ‘Blame the cops?’ Dean suggested.

  ‘Mmm, quite possibly.’ Henry’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘Always a good option.’

  ‘Shall we go in one car?’

  Henry shook his head. ‘Take both. If we leave one here it’s more than likely to be a wheel-less shell when we get back.’ Henry’s personal radio squawked into life. He answered it. ‘Yeah – receiving, go ahead.’

  ‘Van in position, four on board.’ It was the voice of the uniformed police sergeant who had been at the crash scene with him earlier.

  Henry ‘rogered’ that and smiled slyly at Rik Dean. ‘Bit of insurance, just in case the family from hell kick off.’

  The two detectives got back into their cars and drove around the corner up to the Costain household, passing a big police van on the way, parked up out of sight and as discreetly as possible – bearing in mind it was big, blue and in your face.

  Several lights burned at the house. It was a twenty-four-hour dwelling. The only time there was much of a lull in the activity was around breakfast time, as the Costains tended to sleep in when most other people were getting up. A bit like shift workers.

  It is fairly true to say that most crimes committed in a town are done by a small minority of people, the repeat offenders, the skilled burglars, the car thieves. Henry thought that if the government gave the go ahead for a crim-culling process across the country, by eliminating a couple of thousand felons, the crime figures would probably be reduced by about two-thirds. He knew that if this cull was applied to selected members of the Costain family, the crime rate in the resort of Blackpool would plummet to around zero.

  Wishful thinking.

  He and Rik Dean walked up to the front door and knocked. Henry speculated as to which combination of Costains was presently residing herein. The family had a tendency to be fluid about living arrangements, but he knew this was their main house, the one presided over by old man and old woman Costain, the house through which most of the extended family passed or stayed at one time or another. Henry was fairly certain that Roy and Renata lived here at the moment.

  Music and speech could be heard through the door – a hi-fi and TV on in different parts of the house.

  Henry rapped on the door again. The music level reduced a couple of decibels. Someone was coming to the door. Henry braced himself, ID at the ready, foot prepared to jam down into the opening and wedge the door if necessary.

  A smile spread wide across Henry’s face when he saw that the person opening up was Troy Costain. The smile was only fleeting and morphed into Henry’s best funereal and serious expression.

  ‘What?’ Troy asked cautiously. He knew Henry very well and did not trust him. He was forking Pot Noodle into his mouth from a tub in his hand. It smelled awful, looked awful and sounded awful.

  Henry sensed Troy’s tension. It made him feel good. He liked to keep these people on the back foot.

  ‘Troy, mate, I need to come in and speak.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Troy sneered. ‘Cops don’t walk into this house without warrants.’

  Henry stifled a chortle. He was always amused by the widespread misconception held by most members of the criminal fraternity, even the ones who purported to know the law, that the police only had the power to enter premises brandishing a warrant. Henry could rhyme off at least a dozen powers under which a cop could lawfully bundle into someone’s house and cause havoc.

  ‘Troy,’ Henry began patiently. ‘Mate, let me and my fellow officer in. You are not in trouble, but you and your mum and dad need to know something, something about Roy and Renata.’

  Troy seemed to relax slightly. ‘Mum and Dad are in Spain.’

  ‘Who’s in charge, then?’ Henry asked, aware that no one was ever really in charge of this house. Theirs was a world of anarchy.

  ‘Me,’ Troy boasted.

  ‘The family’s in safe hands, then,’ Henry guffawed. ‘Let me in, then, Mr Responsible Adult. This is serious stuff.’

  Troy and Henry had a little eyeball-to-eyeball competition then, just for a few moments until Troy relented and looked away.

  ‘OK, what have the little shits been up to . . .?’ Troy’s words stopped suddenly. He and Henry had a lot of history between them, as well as a lot of up-to-date dealings, so Troy knew Henry’s status in the police. ‘You still an SIO?’ he asked Henry, who nodded. Troy gulped. ‘So what have they been up to?’

  ‘Let me come in and I’ll explain.’

  Keith Snell took a long time to catch fire. Lynch doused him thoroughly with petrol from a plastic can he had just bought from a twenty-four-hour service station. He flicked a
lighted match on the dead body he’d had to drag out of the boot. The trousers ignited quite well, but for some reason the upper part of the body did not get going. The two extra matches he threw down extinguished themselves before they even touched the body.

  ‘Fucking weather,’ Lynch cursed and added more fuel. He almost set himself alight as he splashed more and more petrol around.

  Even then, Keith Snell did not burn well.

  ‘Too fucking riddled with drugs,’ Lynch muttered, flinging match after match at the body which refused to burn. ‘Come on you wiry bastard.’

  Flames flickered uncertainly, then there was a restrained whoosh and they began to lick Snell: lick, burn and take hold.

  ‘Thank fuck for that.’ Lynch turned and trudged back to the car in which Bignall was ensconced, the agony of the gunshot wound increasing incessantly as he faded in and out of consciousness.

  The knock on the door had roused various members of the clan from all points of the household and several faces showed themselves, none friendly. Henry’s ears caught a few under-the-breath obscenities. He decided to ignore them. Troy led the two detectives into the living room, adorned gypsy fashion with horse brasses, intricate ornaments, figurines and a lot of sepia photographs of distant relatives. The Costains claimed a line back to Romany gypsies, but Henry had to be convinced. He thought it was just a clever ploy to use when they got discriminated against, which was quite often.

  In the lounge, a teenage girl was splayed out on the deep, black leather settee, dressed in a micro-nightie and nothing else. She left the room unwillingly when Troy jerked his thumb at her. She flounced out, offended, displaying what Henry could only describe as a ‘pert little bottom’.

  ‘Sit,’ Troy said generously with an open wave of his hand.

  ‘You too, Troy,’ Henry said, easing down into an armchair.

  ‘OK – fire away,’ yawned Troy, scratching his head with his fork, then plunging it back into the Pot Noodle. Rik Dean’s disgusted face said it all. ‘What’ve they done? Murdered somebody?’

  ‘No . . . they were in a stolen car, a Ford Escort, nicked earlier from Manchester,’ Henry explained, seeing Troy tighten up ever so slightly. Henry had built a career on responding to body language and he immediately knew that Troy was not surprised by this news. He had interacted with Troy many times over the years and felt he particularly knew Troy’s non-verbals. He could tell that he knew something about the stolen car. He paused.

  ‘And . . .?’ said Troy.

  ‘There was a chase and an accident, I’m afraid.’ Troy’s face drained to the grey colour of the noodles he was devouring. ‘We think Roy is OK. He legged it from the scene.’ Again, Henry paused. Delivering a death message was never easy, even when there was no real sympathy. He had been doing it since the age of nineteen and it never got easier. ‘I’m afraid Renata did not make it. She was killed in the collision. She is dead.’ Henry said the words forcefully because he had learned that people had to be told that a person was dead. Not passed away. Not lost. Not gone to a better place. Not couched in any other term but dead. Otherwise the recipients often hung on to this in the hope that they were being told something different. They had to be told it unambiguously.

  ‘In a collision with a cop car?’

  ‘No – a taxi.’

  ‘So the cops were chasing them and now Renata’s dead!’

  ‘They were in a stolen car,’ Rik Dean interjected quickly, bristling.

  ‘And the cops killed her,’ Troy said fiercely, brandishing his tub of Pot Noodle.

  ‘This is a mess.’ The mahogany-coloured Nigerian doctor examined the wound in Bignall’s upper arm. ‘He needs surgery.’

  Pacing up and down behind him, Lynch spun ferociously. ‘I didn’t bring him here for you to tell me that. You’re on the payroll, get him fixed the best you can.’

  Bignall, in a haze of disorientation, was in no position to make any sort of contribution to the debate. He did not know where he was, what was going on, who the hell these people were . . . nothing. All he knew was pain and sickness. He wanted to die.

  ‘He needs blood . . . he’s lost a lot . . . he needs to be on an operating table . . . I think he could be bleeding internally,’ the doctor said. ‘I can give him something for the pain. I can bandage it up, but he needs a surgeon to look at this.’

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘What with – a knife and fork? I have no facilities, don’t you see?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Sort him,’ Lynch said brutally. ‘Patch him up, drug him up . . .’ He relented a little. ‘Then let’s think about getting him operated on.’

  The doctor paused thoughtfully, then, in a caring way which transgressed his hypocritical oath by 100 per cent, he said, ‘It’ll cost a grand.’

  ‘Then you’d better do a bloody good job, hadn’t you?’

  Henry had been in this position before. Right in the middle of a grieving Costain family, with lots of wailing, moaning, shouting, cursing and gnashing.

  On hearing the news about Renata, even more family members seemed to appear out of the woodwork. Where they had all been previously secreted mystified Henry. He had once been on safari in Kenya with Kate in the pre-child days (following a massive paycheck during the 1984 miners’ strike) and their tour bus had got stuck in mud in the middle of nowhere. There had not been a soul in sight, just vast plains of emptiness and wild animals. But within minutes the bus was surrounded by kids and adults, all eager to assist for a small consideration. Henry had been astounded and it was rather like that with the Costains. They just appeared from nowhere. He could only guess at what the sleeping arrangements were.

  Eight people of varying age ranges were now in the brass-adorned living room.

  And they were moving en masse to an ugly mood.

  Henry knew it was time to beat a hasty retreat, otherwise there would be trouble. But even there and then, his mind was thinking of the future. The Costains were past masters at whipping up frenzied mobs on the estate and he could already envisage anti-police problems arising unless some pretty swift action was taken with the press and the community.

  The community beat bobbies were going to have their work cut out for a few days, he guessed.

  But in the here and now, he and Rik Dean needed to get out, preferably with Troy in tow, because they needed him to formally identify Renata’s body.

  Henry was attempting to get through to him. The Pot Noodle had been smashed angrily against a wall, the contents slithering down it. Troy was doing some classic ranting and raving, which did not actually quite ring true with Henry. There was something slightly suspect about the whole display.

  ‘Troy . . . Troy!’ Henry shouted above the collective din. ‘You have to come with us, OK, pal?’ Henry played the sympathetic cop. Hand on shoulder. Sad expression. ‘We need you, pal . . . c’mon, we have to do this.’

  Troy slumped into an armchair, head dropping into hands, sobbing, ‘I know, I know . . . I loved the girl, she was fantastic . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I know she was. Look, I’m really sorry, but we have to get this thing done. You know that.’

  ‘I know!’ he bawled, wiping his eyes. He rose to his feet unsteadily, trying to regain control of himself, his chest heaving.

  ‘Good man.’

  Troy shoved past Henry. ‘I need a coat.’

  Henry and Rik Dean stood in the middle of the living room, surrounded by other members of the family. The detectives eyed each other uncertainly, wishing they were out of there. They were encircled by hostility which could easily flip over into violence.

  ‘Bastard cops,’ one hissed: a six- or seven-year-old lad in raggy pyjamas.

  ‘Twats,’ said an older one.

  The scantily clad female teenager sent from the room earlier was with them, still so dressed. She looked coyly at Henry and raised the hem of her nightie.

  To Henry’s relief, the temporary head of the household reappeared. ‘I’m ready,’ he sniffed. Henry eased past him out o
f the room and took the opportunity to whisper, ‘Keep it up,’ into his ear.

  Blood seeped through the bandages, blossoming like some sort of flower. Bignall struggled to maintain consciousness and compos mentis.

  Lynch knew this could be big trouble and he was in two minds about what he should do for the best.

  He had a horrible feeling that Bignall would die if he was returned home, so he decided to do the decent thing. He drove through to the A&E unit at North Manchester General Hospital in Crumpsall, leaned across to open the passenger door and rolled Bignall out.

  ‘Best o’ luck, pal,’ he muttered and drove away quickly.

  Five

  Phil Whitlock’s journey had taken him across the breadth of Europe and back again. As far as Greece, then returning through Italy, France and finally up into Belgium to the port of Zeebrugge prior to the trip across the water and back home via Hull. All in all it had been a smooth passage with the usual and expected red tape and bureaucracy which Whitlock was accustomed to. He accepted it with equanimity, an inconvenient facet to his job as a long-distance lorry driver.

  The company which employed him, based in the north-west of England, were respected international hauliers with a sound, profitable business. No part of Whitlock’s journey had been undertaken without a container load of goods. From the UK he had delivered his first container – washing-machine parts – to a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. At another depot he picked up a load of bonded cigarettes (millions of the fuckers, he thought – the cancer express) and delivered them to Milan. From there, with a load of hardware-type goods, he had driven down to Athens, dumped them, then virtually retraced his journey. He had dropped off a final consignment of medical sundries in Brussels and, very unusually, had nothing further to pick up. He contacted his firm who instructed him to return home empty, but could he be ready for a further trip in three days?

  Yesiree. He loved the job. He was proud to be a knight of the road. He enjoyed meeting people, passing through different cultures. It was wonderful. He had been doing it for twenty years. It’s what kept his marriage together, he often joked.