by Nick Oldham
He knew that crime scenes were precious and that at every scene the offender leaves messages behind indicating motivation and drive for the crime and that investigators must try in their minds to reconstruct what has happened. The crime-scene assessment recognizes that when a murder is committed, three elements exist which are coincidental in time – namely, location, victim and offender. Henry knew that the process of concentrating on the relationship between these three elements can be crucial in the development of lines of enquiry.
Henry looked at the unidentified body lying in the grass. Burned to a crisp from the shins upwards, the skin blackened like overgrilled steak, the surrounding land charred. The body was unrecognizable but Henry could tell it was a man, which was a good start. Obviously he had been brought up to this out-of-the-way place and set alight, probably with petrol as the accelerant. Was he dead before being brought here, or had he been murdered here then set alight? The crime-scene examiners would be able to guess at that and the pathologist would confirm it.
And why here? In the middle of nowhere? Yet no attempt had been made to hide the body . . . why here, on the boundary between Lancashire and Greater Manchester? Was that significant?
And who the hell was the poor victim? When the ident was made, that would give one almighty thrust to the inquiry, but Henry knew that whilst the ID was critical, it shouldn’t be rushed at the expense of anything else.
In Henry’s experience, this type of killing occurred in two areas – not to say they were exclusive – but he knew of several gangland murders in which the victims had been set alight, and also of several Asian family killings where victims had been burned.
Henry hoped it would be neither, but if he had a choice he would go for the gangland killing any day. This type of killing was usually driven by simple motives – business deals gone wrong, debts unpaid, whatever . . . but Asian murders were far more complex to deal with and were usually related to family matters that could be impenetrable.
If he had been asked to make a guess, he would have said this was probably gang-related and that most of the work he and his team would have to undertake would be in Manchester. Not rocket science by any means.
‘Thoughts?’
Henry spun. Roscoe was behind him.
‘To quote from the Murder Investigation Manual,’ Henry said haughtily, ‘“Why, plus where, plus how, equals who,” and the old maxim, “Find out how a person lived and you will find out how they died.”’
‘Very profound.’
‘But also very true.’
It was a very defensive Superintendent Brooks who faced Karl Donaldson at Rochdale police station. ‘If somebody wants to kill themselves, are determined and devious enough, then no matter what measures you put in place, they’ll do it. They will lie in wait for the opportunity and they’ll top themselves.’
Donaldson glared furiously at him, knowing what he was saying was true, but . . . big but . . .
‘But,’ Brooks went on, picking up on Donaldson’s thoughts, ‘there is no excuse to let it happen to someone in custody, particularly someone who should have been under constant supervision.’ His head shook as he considered the enormity of the problem. Yes, bad enough if any prisoner does it, but one responsible for the deaths of so many other people was unthinkable. ‘Somehow he managed to secrete a safety razor on him. He removed its blade, then when he got time alone – when we were talking to his solicitor – he stripped off his paper suit, tore it into strips, twisted them like a rope, made a noose and hung himself on the door handle after slitting his wrists.’
‘Double whammy.’
‘I just wish he’d done it elsewhere, the bastard. We’re going to get some real flak for this. Everybody and his dog’ll want a piece of us.’ Brooks looked beleaguered.
‘And not only that, it screws up the investigation. He could have been the direct key to unlocking a whole chain of illegal people smuggling.’ Donaldson’s temper got the better of him and he slammed his fist on to the desk.
A strange, knowing expression came to Brooks’s face. ‘Why are you so bothered, Mr Donaldson? If you are to be believed, you were just an innocent passer-by.’
‘International crime is my remit.’
‘Bollocks! You’ve been really cagey with me and I think I’ve had enough of it. If you were the innocent bystander you claim to be, then it’s time to say goodbye. I’m sorry you were involved in it, but thanks for making a statement. I can well do without you muddying the waters. However, if your involvement is deeper, then I should be knowing.’
They were in Brooks’s office, sitting on opposite sides of the desk, steadily holding each other’s gaze.
‘I made a few phone calls earlier,’ Brooks admitted. He beamed as he revealed, ‘You had a multi-agency team at the Port of Hull yesterday, didn’t you? Please do not continue to duck and dive, Mr Donaldson. I don’t have the time for it. Be straight with me or piss off because I’m up to my neck in shit right now. If you’re worried about confidentiality, don’t be. I’m as honest and reliable as the day is long, and if you’ve got something which will help me, I need to know.’
Donaldson exhaled. ‘OK, I did pull a team together yesterday, but we hit the wrong vehicle. It was a coincidence I was on the motorway when Whitlock got robbed, actually.’
‘His vehicle was the one you should have stopped, isn’t it?’
Donaldson nodded.
‘It’s like getting blood out of a stone, talking to you.’
Donaldson smirked.
‘Can I hazard a guess at something?’
‘Fire away.’
‘You investigate organized crime on the continent of Europe that has ties with US organized crime?’ Donaldson gave a slight shrug. Brooks pushed on. ‘And you were acting on information at Hull, but the information was not quite right, shall we say?’ Donaldson raised his eyebrows. ‘Am I on the right track?’
‘Could be.’
‘But you’re not going to say any more?’
‘Nope.’
‘Why not? Inter-agency cooperation and all that?’
Another smirk crossed Donaldson’s face, this time a very sardonic one.
‘The great myth of modern law enforcement,’ Brooks said. ‘Inter-agency working . . . only when it suits, but in most cases, knowledge is power.’
The smirk remained on Donaldson’s face.
‘OK, then.’ Brooks laid his hands flat on his desk. ‘Just tell me one thing . . . was it definitely drugs as well as bodies in the lorry?’
The smirk evolved into a smile of confirmation. ‘Millions of pounds worth of coke.’
Brooks’s jaw dropped and his lips opened with a little ‘pop’. ‘Shit!’ he uttered as a scenario dawned on him. ‘Stolen by one gang from another . . . gang wars here we come.’
Henry Christie began his policing career in East Lancashire. His first posting as a newly scrubbed bobby off the production line had been to Blackburn – then, as now, the busiest town in the county – closely followed by a move (for manpower reasons he had been told) to the Rossendale Valley, which is where he had really learned to be a cop.
He had attended his first sudden death in Rossendale. It had not been suspicious, just an old lady who had died and not been seen for a few days, nor had she seen her doctor for a few weeks, so there had been the necessity for a post-mortem. This had been carried out in the mortuary situated, appropriately, in the cemetery on Burnley Road, Rawtenstall.
The memories of that first PM were still vivid in his mind, even after all these years. It had been such a big thing: the journey following the hearse from the woman’s home to the morgue, assisting the undertakers to heave the very large body from vehicle to gurney to slab, undressing her ready for the examination; then Henry’s sergeant – in collusion with the pathologist – closed all the doors and windows and turned the heat up so the stench of death would, hopefully, become unbearable and the young officer – PC Christie – would give them some amusement by lurching out an
d hurling up.
The tyro cop had taken it in his stride. He hated the smell of death, the way it clung to nasal hairs, grabbed and did not let go of clothing, but he had never once been sick.
Ahh, the good old days, Henry thought. That sort of treatment of police probationers these days would probably end up in an employment tribunal.
And now, suitably masked and gowned, he was back at that mortuary, looking at the remnants of a body that had been burned beyond all recognition. It was a shrivelled, blackened mess, parts of it charred away like paper, other parts burned away completely – such as the face. The skin and muscle tissue had been well and truly razed, leaving a burned-black skull. Henry walked slowly round the mortuary slab, taking his time, taking in everything as it was because soon, except for the still photographs and video footage of the PM, very little would be left of this body once the pathologist got his knife into it.
A slightly woozy Jane Roscoe, also masked and gowned, sat in the corner of the room, swallowing heavily, watching the activity: the CSI recording everything, the pathologist carefully preparing his tools, the mortuary assistant doing everything else . . . and Henry on the prowl. His eyes watching, studying, his brain clicking over, learning.
The odour of burned flesh was overpowering here, despite the windows being opened. Roscoe was feeling quite unwell.
Henry circled and reached the pathologist who, once again, was Dr Baines.
Roscoe also knew Baines, had worked closely with him previously. He was probably the most popular Home Office pathologist on the rota and always worked well with the police, eager to share his knowledge. He and Henry were in a mini-scrum, muttering under their breaths into each other’s ears with muffled sounds from behind their surgical masks. Roscoe strained to hear, but could not quite make out a thing. She assumed they were discussing the body.
Wrong.
‘I see that bonny, if homely, Mrs Roscoe is here,’ Baines noted.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You still plating her?’
‘What?’
‘Y’know – dinner-plating her.’
‘Eh?’
‘Y’know . . .’ Baines pretended to hold a dinner plate between his hands, which he pretended to lick, making a slurping noise. ‘Gravy off a plate?’
Henry groaned at the less than subtle reference to cunnilingus. ‘Sometimes you make me sick, Doc.’
‘So what’s new?’ giggled the massively educated professional like a schoolkid. He eased on his latex gloves. ‘So . . . are you?’
‘No.’
‘Not surprised. There’s a certain tension between you.’
‘Tension is an understatement.’
‘You should really keep your dick behind the barn doors, H,’ the pathologist admonished.
‘Doing my best-ish,’ Henry said doubtfully.
‘And failing miserably, I’ll bet.’ Baines turned to the body. ‘Now, let us begin. Are we recording, please?’ he asked the mortuary assistant, who pressed a button which switched on the three wall-mounted video cameras. Baines moved to the slab. ‘A terrible, terrible way to die . . . if, indeed, death was this way.’ He began to commentate for the benefit of the recording, describing the body and the burns in minute detail, always surprising Henry with his observations. For over ten minutes he talked and did not even once touch the body. Then he reached the stage where he could truly begin the physical examination.
‘No chance of fingerprints,’ he said, inspecting each blackened digit. ‘Now, let’s have a look underneath first . . . you never know, there might be a knife in there.’
With the mortuary assistant, Baines gripped the body and rolled it up on to its side. Baines bent double and looked closely, ‘Hmm-ing’ to himself. ‘Well, he wasn’t killed where you found him, Henry. He was certainly dead before he was set alight. The back is virtually untouched by the fire, from the shoulders down to the backside, so he was laid out on his back before being set on fire. He was either dead or unconscious at that point, but I would say dead, though I will confirm that of course.’ He turned to the mortuary assistant. ‘Can we cut off the clothing, please.’ He looked across the body at Henry. ‘The item of clothing on the upper body is a T-shirt, by the way, not burned at all on the back. Looks like it has some rock-group tour dates on it . . . bit of a line of enquiry for you there, maybe.’ Henry nodded. The assistant began to ease up the fabric, revealing the man’s skinny back. Henry walked round for a better view without getting in Baines’s way.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Baines. ‘This man has been shot twice in the back.’
Mendoza actually did little business from the winery. Other than occasional briefings from Lopez he did most of his dealings on the hoof, meeting people, phoning people, killing people; sometimes he did it himself, more often he used hired hands, men he knew he could trust.
Verner had been one of those. Originally a Brit, Verner had emigrated with his family to New York and from there had turned to a life of crime. He became a remarkable and ruthless killer for the mob, but when the heat turned up and the Feds started manoeuvring he was moved quickly to Europe, where he came under Mendoza’s line management. He carried on working for Mendoza with ruthless efficiency until he came to an ugly end in England, gunned down by an unknown shooter who was still on the loose. Despite all of Mendoza’s resources, that killer still remained unidentified, something which rattled the Spaniard.
Surely a name should be surfacing by now, he demanded.
But nothing . . . other than the Cosa Nostra, members of which were starting to ask awkward questions about Mendoza and his lack of control.
Mendoza and Lopez and the two heavies had driven into Torrevieja, where Mendoza owned a few bars and a couple of restaurants, one of which overlooked the harbour. At six p.m. that afternoon, Mendoza was sitting on the terrace of that restaurant, enjoying the heat, the view and the cool drink in front of him. He had ordered prawns in garlic and was waiting with anticipation for its arrival.
Lopez was pacing up and down the quayside, speaking animatedly into his mobile phone. The two guards sat at the far end of the restaurant, dozing; at the table opposite Mendoza sat the manager of the restaurant, going through the accounts.
‘Business is not good,’ the manager wailed as Mendoza looked at the figures.
‘Why not?’
The manager shrugged.
‘Two months ago this was the best eating place in town . . . what has happened? Has the food gone off?’
‘No, Señor. People have moved on.’
Mendoza scowled at him, thinking that the poorly performing restaurant was just another fly in the ointment. He picked up the accounts and flung them at the manager, who ducked and cowered. Mendoza’s voice stayed level. ‘Get people back in here,’ he said simply. ‘Do what you have to. Burn other restaurants down, if necessary. Otherwise, I will have you . . . removed from your post, shall we say? Now get out of my sight, you shit-faced worm.’
The manager dropped to his hands and knees and collected the scattered papers, then scuttled away, terrified.
Lopez finished his phone call. He had been doing a deal with a drug importer in Lisbon. From his body language, Mendoza picked up that the deal had gone through . . . but then the phone rang again.
Mendoza watched Lopez’s whole body posture change. He stiffened. His face had a look of shock on it and he immediately shot Mendoza an expression of horror.
Four hours was long enough to be at a post-mortem, especially one like that, but it had to be done. When it was over, Henry gratefully stepped out into the cemetery, where the air was wonderfully fresh, the scent of many flowers hanging in the cool afternoon.
Henry, Roscoe and Baines stood by the door of the mortuary, enjoying breathing the air into their lungs, until Baines lit up a very smelly cheroot which smelled worse than the dead guy. Both Henry and Roscoe squirmed away from him.
The PM was over, complete, thorough, detailed. Everything that could h
ave been evidence was bagged up and being fast-tracked through forensic submissions. That included the two misshapen slugs that Baines had rooted out of the dead man’s heart and the dental X-rays which would go a long way to identifying the body.
After a short debrief and a promise of a quick report followed by a more detailed one, Baines bade the two detectives adios. As he turned away, he pretended to lick an invisible plate.
‘What the hell did that mean?’ Roscoe asked, puzzled.
‘Sick humour . . . don’t go there,’ Henry said. ‘Let’s get to the cop shop.’ He checked his watch. He had originally scheduled a briefing for four p.m., then put it back when the PM went on longer than anticipated. They jumped into the Mondeo and Henry drove them to Rawtenstall police station, where the incident was to be run from. If it had all gone to plan, twenty detectives, a uniformed support unit (one sergeant, fifteen constables) and various other bods would be waiting for the briefing.
All he had to do now was think of something to say to everyone.
‘Muy mal,’ Lopez said. Very bad.
‘Just tell me.’
A waiter appeared with the garlic prawns, sizzling in the skillet. Mendoza waved him away.
Lopez took a breath, steadied himself.
‘It is all gone and they are all dead.’
‘What is?’
‘Everything.’
Then Mendoza knew.
‘Todo?’ he said coldly. ‘Everything?’
Lopez nodded numbly.
‘Then I am finished,’ Mendoza said desperately.
Twelve
For the next fifty-four hours Henry Christie felt as though he hardly took a breath. The time shot by in a spiral of activity and images and it was only at eleven a.m., two days after the initial briefing to his team of detectives, that he found the opportunity to sit down, catch up, review and properly document everything that had transpired.
In days gone by, when Henry had been a pasty-faced rookie, naïve enough to think he could even get away with wearing yellow socks with his uniform, the cops in the Valley had been supervised by a superintendent, a chief inspector and a whole rake of inspectors, one for each town in the Valley and more besides. Now there was one inspector covering the whole lot and it was in this man’s office that Henry secreted himself for half an hour to reflect – with a mug of coffee – on the progress, or otherwise, of the investigation.
