by Nick Oldham
Henry’s thoughts were bleak. He had never considered himself to be a sexual harasser. The notion made his skin crawl. Maybe he always had been, but hadn’t recognised it. Maybe he was so immersed in the sexist white heterosexual culture, he couldn’t see when he was harassing a woman. Could he be one of those men who made his blood boil? Those who constantly touched women, patted their arses, brushed against their tits? Perhaps he was.
Kate!
She would go ballistic. His eyes closed in a shudder of despair.
Two years of getting his marriage back on the straight and narrow. Working hard at it. Putting family first. It had taken a lot of dedication and love.
Once again through his own foolishness it was very likely to come tumbling down around his ears.
How the hell could he keep this quiet?
Just then, his day took a further turn for the worse. In stalked Superintendent Guthrie from the Discipline and Complaints branch.
Henry suddenly felt weaker than alcohol-free lager.
For the second time that day, Henry came out from an interaction with a higher-ranking officer with his head in a spin. Again he had difficulty taking in what was told him. This time things were in his favour, but even so it did not feel like a victory. It simply added to his overall confusion.
Shane Mulcahy had been into the police station earlier and retracted his complaint of assault, saying that everything was his fault. He’d pulled a hidden knife on the detective and the officer had acted in reasonable self-defence. In other words, Shane admitted he deserved what he got — a knee in the bollocks.
And to add weight to the retraction, Superintendent Guthrie said he had checked the custody record and found it backed up Henry’s description of the fight in the cell corridor.
‘ What?’ Henry had said, totally perplexed. ‘You mean the custody record says..?’
‘ That you acted in self-defence, yes.’ The Superintendent winked at Henry. ‘I knew things would work out for you. They always do when it’s a flimsy allegation. So, all I need to do is tie the loose ends up and write the whole unpleasant incident off. And I hope you learn something from the experience.’
‘ I’m sure I shall.’
On leaving the room Henry made his way quickly to the custody office where he looked up the relevant custody record.
It was true.
Eric Taylor had written that he’d observed the tussle between him and Shane, and had entered it onto the custody record.
Except it wasn’t the original entry, as Henry well knew. Because he’d checked the custody record last week and been in despair that firstly he’d forgotten to make an entry himself, and secondly that Eric Taylor did not leave him any space to write something in later.
Henry knew that Taylor was a good custody officer. Very fair in his dealings with prisoners and police officers alike. So why had he changed the entry in Henry’s favour?
Not something Taylor would have done in a million years.
He replaced the custody record binder on the shelf and sauntered back up to the CID office, trying desperately to get a grip on what had happened. He found it impossible and very disturbing.
‘ We need to judge this just right,’ Morton was saying. His audience consisted of Gallagher, Tattersall and Siobhan Robson. ‘Henry’s a dangerous individual because, basically, he’s honest. He might bend the rules to get a conviction, but you can bet it’ll be watertight in the end and will survive even the most ruthless scrutiny. So, people, how do we proceed?’
Gallagher replied, ‘He might be honest, but he’s not stupid. He’ll know when the cards are stacked against him and I’m sure he’ll hold his hands up.’ He laughed.
‘ Siobhan?’ Morton raised his eyebrows to her.
‘ Go straight for him,’ she said in a brittle tone. ‘Lay it on the line. He’ll realise he hasn’t any choice and he’ll stick with us. He’s not stupid, as Gallie says.’ She nodded towards the DI. ‘He doesn’t want to lose his job and his wife.’
There was a knock on the door. ‘Come,’ said Morton. Superintendent Guthrie, Discipline and Complaints, poked his head through the door. He held up a finger. ‘Done and dusted,’ he said.
‘ Thanks, Will,’ Morton said. ‘See you later about it.’
Guthrie closed the door.
Morton clamped his fist tight triumphantly. ‘Right! This will be a difficult time, for us and him. His first reaction may be to go running to someone else and blurt everything out. If he does that, we need to be watertight. Are we?’
‘ I am,’ said Siobhan.
‘ Me too.’ Gallagher.
The laconic Tattersall merely nodded.
‘ Right. Let’s wheel him in, drop a few more bombshells on him, then see where we stand.’
Henry tapped without confidence on Tony Morton’s door. He had been summoned once more, probably, he guessed, to receive an update on the Siobhan affair. ‘Come,’ he heard Morton call out.
Henry pushed the door open, expecting to see only Morton. It knocked him sideways when he firstly saw Siobhan, then Gallagher, then Tattersall, sitting in there too. They were in a semi-circle facing Morton’s desk. At the open end of the semi-circle was an empty chair.
Henry had a quick look round for The Four Horses of the Apocalypse.
Overcoming an urge to run away and hide in a toilet, he entered the room. If he’d had a tail it would have been between his legs. His eyes avoided contact with Siobhan’s; his mouth was arid extra dry. Tattersall stood up and approached Henry. ‘Let me search you.’
‘ Eh?’
‘ You heard.’
Gallagher rose from his seat and without warning he and Tattersall hurled Henry against the wall.
‘ What the fuck’s going on here?’ Henry demanded. He flicked around and tried to pull himself out of their grasp.
Gallagher punched him hard in the chest with the base of his hand.
Henry bent double as the pain from the bullet-wound corkscrewed out through his heart and lungs.
Gallagher and Tattersall hoisted him up against the wall and searched him quickly and expertly. They then manhandled him to the chair and threw him onto it. His arms crossed over his breast and nursed the pain. He looked up at Morton, unable to speak for the moment.
Gallagher seized a handful of Henry’s fine hair and pulled his head back. He looked down at him and said, ‘That is to show you we are not pissing about, Christie.’
The two detectives sat down.
‘ What the fuck’s going on here?’ Henry struggled to say.
Morton took a deep sigh and stared coldly at him before he began sombrely. ‘There are a few things that have been brought to my attention since this morning’s complaint from DC Robson here.’
There was a sheet of paper on the desk top. Morton held it up for Henry to see. His watery eyes found it hard to focus. ‘This a photocopy of the firearms authorisation sheet used by the NWOCS. It clearly shows you booked a firearm out without my signature to authorise it.’ Morton indicated the offending blank space on the form.
‘ But she said,’ he turned hopelessly to face Siobhan, ‘it was OK to do that. That you’d automatically sign the form later.’ He looked at Morton again. Then back to Siobhan. ‘Come on, tell him. I did what you said.’
A warm trickle ran down Henry’s neck. He wiped it and saw blood on his hand. His ear had started bleeding again.
She remained silent, her eyes as cold as ice cubes.
‘ This is fucking outrageous,’ Henry spat, and got to his feet. ‘What the hell is this?’
Tattersall moved quickly, followed by Gallagher. A well-aimed blow to the kidneys from the DS brought Henry to his knees in front of Morton’s desk. Gallagher forced his head onto the desk, holding his cheek to the wooden surface, squelching his features, but allowing him to look up at Morton.
‘ A very serious discipline offence,’ he heard the Chief Superintendent say. Morton’s eyes lifted and looked at Gallagher. ‘Put him back on the chair.�
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Two pairs of hands lifted him bodily back and deposited him like dumping a sack of rubbish.
‘ I don’t know what’s going on here, but as soon as I get out of this room every one of you is in deep shit.’
Morton laughed. ‘Henry, you’re splitting my sides. If you do anything like that, I promise you’ll face a charge of rape as well as a civil litigation suit for harassment. Both will stick. That’s a promise too.’
Henry had lost all sense of comprehension. His mind was being blown, like he was on some kind of hallucinogenic drug, and he was adrift on the Sea of Unreality.
‘ How did your D amp; C interview go?’
‘ What’s that gotta do with anything?’ As he was speaking he analysed the question. ‘You!’ he said.
‘ No, not quite,’ Morton said affably. ‘In essence, yes. But in reality — no. You did it, Henry. It was all your work. Bribing that poor custody officer to change the record so it read in your favour. You beat the living shit out of that defenceless young man — what’s he called — Shane. Just so he would retract his statement. All in all, you’ve been a very busy and naughty boy, Henry. What do they call it? Perverting the course of justice.’
‘ I deny it.’
‘ Well, you would, wouldn’t you? But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that we’ — here Morton indicated everyone in the room, including himself — ‘could, if necessary, prove you did. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it? So all in all you’re well and truly stitched up, as they say.
‘ Let’s look at it. Firstly there’s sexual harassment. Then there’s rape, or indecent assault at the very least. And we can find the necessary witnesses if we have to. Then there’s the discipline offence re the firearm. That in itself could lose you your job. Then there’s perverting the course of justice and, of course, planting evidence.’
‘ What the hell are you talking about?’
‘ Those guns found in Anderson’s Shogun. You were left alone with the car for a few short minutes and lo and behold, guns appear. Very neat, wouldn’t you say?’
Henry thought back to the incident. How Siobhan had gone to the toilet, leaving him to start the search of Anderson’s vehicle. And then him finding the guns.
‘ Fucking bad news all this,’ Morton said. ‘Individually they’re horrendous. Put them all together, pal, they’re devastating. You are a very corrupt and perverted individual, and we have done well to unmask you, wouldn’t you say? You will never recover from these allegations professionally or personally, once they start being investigated. What d’you say, Henry? Cat got your tongue?’
‘ I’m not guilty of any of those allegations,’ Henry replied stubbornly to Morton’s prodding.
‘ Doesn’t matter whether you are or not. I mean, I know you’re the cleanest cop in the world. Bet you don’t even have skid-marks on your undies, do you? What matters is that we will make sure that, at the very least, you will lose your job and your private life will go to rat-shit.’ The matter-of-fact way in which Morton spoke the words hit Henry like a hodful of bricks.
A hush descended on the room.
Henry stared past Morton’s left shoulder out of the window where he could see Blackpool Tower, now painted a garish blue colour to promote a fizzy drink. It was raining hard, driving against the glass, obscuring the view, distorting the Tower.
He blinked, brought his vision back to focus and said, ‘Why?’
‘ If you haven’t sussed that out by now,’ said Morton, sounding a little exasperated with him, ‘you’re not the great detective I thought you were.’
‘ Dundaven and Marie Cullen,’ he stated. His brain cells shuffled through the incidents of the last week. ‘Marie Cullen I can see. You have some connection with Harry McNamara and I suppose you’re protecting him because he’s as guilty as fuck. I can only speculate about Dundaven. Must have something to do with the guns. Presumably you’re protecting somebody else and I was getting too close to them, and they — or you didn’t like it.’
‘ By Jove I think he’s got it,’ Morton chortled patronisingly. ‘But that’s enough of the speculation. You don’t need to know anything further, other than you were beginning to worry some people and they needed to be… reassured. Remember when you said a little dickie bird would tell you when you’d gone as far as you could with those enquiries? Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep. It’s me. I am that bird.’
‘ You bastard!’ Henry had a sense of being trapped in a cage.
‘ You should know that certain people want you dead, Henry. I saved your life. You should be thankful to me, not call me names.’
‘ Big deal. What’s to stop me walking out of that door, going straight to my Chief Constable and blowing the whistle on you?’
‘ You still don’t get it, do you? Your life will be worse than hell. We will drag you through the mire. We’ll come up smelling of roses and you’ll just smell like cowshit. You’ll lose. We won’t. Simple as that. We’ve had problems like this before and dealt with them accordingly.’
Henry stood up without warning.
Morton drew back defensively. Gallagher braced himself and Tattersall was half off his seat.
He walked to the window and stared out blankly through the rain.
He had nothing on these people. They had everything on him, twisted and perverse though it was. And they were prepared to use it, should Henry make a stand.
They had power and organisation. He could not even begin to guess the scope of their activities.
Standing there he was isolated — and beaten.
He turned slowly from the window, a look of defeat on his face. ‘So what’s the score?’
‘ I’ll lay it on the line, Henry, then you know exactly what is required of you. Firstly, you must ensure that to the best of your abilities those two investigations get nowhere.’
‘ That may not be within my power. Other people work on them.’
‘ In which case you must keep me informed of any progress, you must destroy or contaminate evidence without drawing attention to yourself, and you must pull your weight in terms of making enquiries hit dead ends. Otherwise you’ll suffer.’
‘ And secondly?’
‘ Keep a watching brief on the Derek Luton case and let me know how that goes.’
‘ Why?’
‘ Because I’m interested. And thirdly, before you go back to your normal duties, we may have something else for you to do.’
‘ And what’s that?’
‘ All in good time, Henry.’
‘ So you’ve got me by the bollocks.’
‘ Only if you value your life and how you lead it.’
‘ Is that it?’
‘ No,’ said Gallagher sharply. ‘You were given some documents by Annie Luton last night, I believe.’
‘ How do you know?’
‘ Telephone. Hand them over to us now.’
‘ I left them at home,’ Henry said quickly. ‘I’ll bring them in this afternoon.’
‘ Make sure you do.’
‘ Can I go now?’
‘ Yes, you can. Go away and reflect on things. Consider your position very carefully, but realise one thing: you now belong to us and basically you’ve no way out of that.’
Tight-lipped, Henry strode angrily to the door and wrenched it open. He stopped for an instant, turned quickly and uttered the word ‘Cunts!’ before storming out, slamming the door behind him with a ferocity which nearly brought it off its hinges.
Morton regarded the other three with raised eyebrows.
‘ I don’t trust him,’ Siobhan said.
‘ Nor do I,’ Gallagher agreed.
Tattersall said nothing.
‘ Me neither. Make sure he’s followed. We really don’t want him to do anything stupid, do we? Jim?’ Morton looked towards Tattersall.
‘ I’ll see to it, boss.’
Chapter Twenty-One
The weather over the whole of the country was appalling.
Karl D
onaldson, with Karen sitting by his side, drove their Jeep Cherokee through driving snow around London, sleet and icy hailstones all the way up the MI, five minutes of clear weather around Birmingham on the M6, then bucketing rain the rest of the way up to Blackpool.
The journey took nearly five hours at an average speed of 50 m.p.h., headlights blazing all the way.
As ever they made the trip more pleasurable by singing along with each other. A Beatles session, followed by Motown, a little opera and finally some good ole country music onto which Donaldson had successfully weaned Karen. Dwight Yoakam, the O’Kanes and Lacy J. Dalton were no longer a mystery to the girl who’d been born in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, not Nashville, Tennessee.
It made the time fly and helped Donaldson concentrate.
They arrived at Henry’s house about twenty minutes before he did.
Kate greeted them warmly. They had become good friends and often made excuses out of nothing to visit each other, even if it meant a two-hundred-mile hike. The two women had an extra dimension to their relationship now and talk turned immediately to babies, pregnancy and childbirth. Kate began to feel broody again.
When Henry came in like a bull with a wasp stinging its arse, it was immediately obvious to all three that he was fuming with anger.
He refused to say anything about what was bugging him, but his body language put them all on tenterhooks.
Kate coerced him into the kitchen and said sternly, ‘Henry, they’ve come all the way from London to see you, you could try to be just a little bit polite.’
He nodded and breathed down his nose. ‘You’re right.’
They had a light, but hot lunch, and Henry made an effort. They exchanged stories about their injuries — Henry’s chest and ear, Donaldson’s face. Over coffee Henry said to Karl, ‘What can I do for you, pal? I know this is a work-related visit first and foremost.’
‘ Henry!’ Kate said in a warning way, ‘Don’t be so rude.’ She looked apologetically at the other couple. ‘He’s had a long week.’
