Substantial Threat

by Nick Oldham

  One thing was certain. She was dealing with some totally ruthless individuals who had coldly planned this multiple execution very carefully and precisely.

  Henry had once dealt with a domestic murder where a man had killed his wife simply because she had moaned at him for smoking in bed. The guy had been drunk at the time, admittedly, but it had demonstrated to Henry that people can go ‘off on one’ for no particular reason and resort to murder in their rage. What Henry could not see happening in the case of Johnny Jacques and Carrie Dancing was that JJ had killed her, whatever the provocation. And he especially could not believe it when Baines peeled back the charred skin from Carrie’s head to reveal the cranium underneath. The damage caused to it was beyond anything Henry thought JJ was capable of. JJ was a weak, spindly druggie and Henry just could not see him being so violent over the sustained period of time needed to inflict such injuries on the woman he’d been with for years.

  Which kind of put a spoke in the wheel.

  In truth, this was the sort of incident Henry knew he could write off if he so desired. He could easily surmise that JJ had murdered Carrie and then, in a fit of remorse, had leapt to his own death. He was supremely confident he could get a coroner to swallow it hook, line and sinker.

  It would be a good one-for-one. A murder solved without the expense of a trial. A good one for the figures.

  Except he did not believe it and his conscience would not allow this to happen, until he was totally convinced otherwise.

  He bagged up JJ’s clothing for forensic examination, and did the same with Carrie’s burned garments too.

  If JJ had killed her, Henry was sure he would be able to see blood on JJ’s jeans at the very least. There was nothing.

  He decided to return to the scene of the fire to see if anything had been missed or forgotten.

  Before setting off he spoke to Rik Dean via mobile phone and found out he had been re-deployed to the shooting incident down in South Shore. It sounded like an interesting job, but Henry was not going to poke his nose in unless asked – which he knew he would be very soon. He wasn’t going to show his face before then because he trusted Jane to get a grip of everything and work the scene professionally.

  He bade farewell to Baines, after warning him he was likely to be dealing with a further three bodies before the night was over.

  Baines thanked him profusely for the news and said again, ‘Why is it that when you’re involved there’s always a mass of bodies?’

  ‘Just lucky, I guess,’ said Henry.

  Crazy drove Ray to his girlfriend’s house. Marty, still in the back seat, looked drained and unhappy.

  At the end of the driveway, Ray instructed Crazy to be back in an hour or so, not to hurry, but to be there. Crazy promised he would be and Ray got out of the car. Marty clambered over between the seats and plonked himself into the passenger seat.

  Crazy put the car into first and set off, but Marty said, ‘Wait!’ a little too quickly, then felt he had to explain himself to Crazy. ‘Er . . . let’s make sure he gets inside safely.’

  Ray rang the doorbell. The door opened and Ray stepped inside.

  Jacqueline Burrows gave a quick wave to Marty and closed the door.

  Five

  ‘Welcome to life as an SIO,’ Bernie Fleming, the detective chief superintendent in charge of the team, said to Henry Christie. ‘Never rains but it pours.’

  Henry was unfazed. This was what he wanted. Involvement up to the hilt. To be kept busy, to be hunting down killers. He was sure he had been born to do this job – well, perhaps not – but it was certainly something he enjoyed, keeping all the plates spinning in the air, hoping to God they did not smash around his feet.

  Fleming had turned out to the triple shooting, then called Henry in to see him at Blackpool nick, following a consultation with the divisional chief superintendent concerning allocation of resources, which is what murder enquiries always came down to these days.

  Which is also why Fleming was slightly irritated with Henry and his view on the incident involving Johnny Jacques and his girlfriend. It would have been simpler for all concerned for Henry to write the job off, but because he believed it was not as straightforward as it appeared, it meant that a team needed to be allocated to it at the expense of the triple shooting.

  Henry and Fleming were trudging up the steps in Blackpool police station because the lift was not working. They were making their way up to the canteen. Both men were starting to sweat, and the bigger, older and less fit Fleming was wheezing as he breathed. He was also whining about costs. It was a story Henry was familiar with and the words only just registered.

  ‘There’s six ongoing murder investigations right across the county. I’m not saying they’re all labour intensive by any means, but we don’t really need two more.’

  ‘Tell that to the murderers.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Fleming snorted gruffly. ‘So obviously the shooting is going to take priority here.’

  At last they reached the sixth floor and stepped into the canteen, which was about to close for the evening. Using their charm they managed to wangle two mugs of coffee from the reluctant lady behind the counter.

  ‘How do you want to play the fire job?’ Fleming asked.

  ‘Run it as a full enquiry until it’s proved otherwise,’ Henry said defensively.

  Fleming shook his head. He looked pained. ‘Not enough people to go round.’ He pondered things for a few moments, rubbing his chin. ‘What about if you head up the shooting, then split your resources to look into the fire and see how it pans out?’

  ‘I thought you were going to SIO the shooting.’

  ‘Name only, name only. I want you to do it and as a sideline, use people as and when to look into the other job.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Henry. There was no point arguing. The days had long since gone when every suspicious death was allocated a full team. Everything got prioritized these days and in these circumstances it was seen as far more important to catch someone who was dangerous enough to use a gun in public to shoot a man down, than to catch someone who may have killed someone in the confines of a council flat. Henry could not see the difference, but in a world where money counted, that’s what happened. It was not unusual these days for a pair of detectives to investigate a murder – a state of affairs that had long existed in the USA.

  Although Henry accepted the way of the world, he hated to see the police being driven solely by money and budgets. He believed the public did not get the service it deserved because of it.

  He squinted. ‘You want me to run both jobs at the same time? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Henry, one day you’ll make one hell of a fine detective with such a sharp mind.’

  The sex had been over within a minute. Ray Cragg, still hyper after the shooting, had almost dragged Jack Burrows up the stairs, tearing her clothes off as he went. She played the part too whilst disguising the shiver which ran through her. She led him into the bedroom and pushed him on to the bed before straddling him and letting her breasts flounder over his face.

  He bit and sucked at them greedily, biting her large, purple nipples so she gasped, not with pleasure, but with pain.

  ‘You really have had some kind of day.’ She smiled lovingly.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’ He moaned then said, ‘I want to do it from behind.’

  ‘Yeah, okay babe,’ she agreed.

  ‘Like dogs,’ he added.

  As she slid off him and he took up his position behind her, she was glad he could not see the expression on her face.

  He rammed himself in and after only a very few hard, ruthless thrusts, he came, jabbing wildly in an orgasm all of his own.

  She pretended to climax, but all she felt was a cold, cold chill inside. She was relieved when he withdrew and slumped on the bed, exhausted.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s my first day back at work, love, and I’m sorry, but I can’t help it that three people have been shot to death on my pa
tch . . . Yes, my patch, and unfortunately I have to start running an investigation immediately . . . time? Er . . . not sure . . . when I get there . . .’

  The door to Roscoe’s office opened. Henry Christie poked his head through.

  She beckoned him in, shaking her head. She did not want him to go. She mouthed the word ‘husband’ to Henry and raised her eyes heavenwards.

  ‘Look, I’m not sure what time I’ll be back . . . There’s a pizza in the fridge which you can do in the microwave . . . As soon as I can, okay?’ She slammed the phone down and sat heavily on the chair at her desk, brushing her hair back from her face. She looked frazzled and sighed deeply.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘first day back and I’m going to be late home.’

  ‘Goes with the territory, and you don’t get overtime for it.’

  ‘And guess what?’ she said, placing both hands on the desk. ‘I don’t care. I’m just glad to be back at work, involved in something as meaty as this – and especially with you around.’ She sat back. ‘Henry, I’ve really missed you.’

  He swallowed. She had been in his thoughts too. Not just in his thoughts, but all over his brain every waking moment. He sometimes even dreamt about her. ‘I’ve missed you too,’ he admitted. ‘But we’ve got a bit of a job on and it needs to be done pdq.’

  She smiled radiantly at the prospect of working alongside him. ‘Better get on with it, then.’

  ‘I need an alibi,’ Ray said to Jack Burrows. ‘For around two till four o’clock this aft. You have to say I was with you during that time, okay?’

  She had returned to the bedroom from the shower, having spent a long time washing under the hot, power jets. Ray made her feel dirty. She always had to wash herself after intercourse.

  ‘Sure, no problems.’ She sat at the dressing table, a towel wrapped around her body, and started working on her hair. Suddenly, a thought came to her and she stopped brushing it. ‘I can’t,’ she said, her mouth arid. She turned to Ray, who was spread-eagled on the bed, still naked, thin and pasty white.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean, you can’t?’

  She told him about the visit she’d had from a cop that afternoon.

  Henry and Jane walked side by side into the parade room on the ground-floor annexe of Blackpool police station.

  The people assembled there were not the actual murder squad, but a mish-mash of people cobbled together just to get things underway. The real squad would come together for an 8 a.m. briefing in the morning when all the detectives and other specialists were brought in. Henry desperately wanted to get things moving now, but it didn’t mean it would be a haphazard deployment of personnel. He had particular goals in mind for this evening, especially the rooting out of informants to bleed them of anything that might be useful.

  It was 8 p.m. by the time the briefing finished. Henry and Jane returned to her office to discuss the briefing which would take place the following morning and get everything prepared for it. They had numerous phone calls to make, trying to pull a team together. It did not help that other murders were being investigated across the county and that the majority of the people Henry would have liked on his team were already gainfully employed.

  After an hour, Henry hung up the phone for the last time and wiped his brow in mock exhaustion.

  ‘Just one more call to make, if you’ll excuse me.’ He stood up and took his mobile phone from his jacket pocket, leaving the room as he dialled Kate.

  Out in the corridor he filled her in on what was happening. She already knew a lot because he had spoken to her earlier, but as part of the communication package between them he had felt obliged to call her again and tell her he was going to be very late coming home. Then, not really knowing why, he added that it might be better if he spent the night at his flat because it was so central, handy for the police station, and he would not disturb Kate or the girls by coming in late.

  It was all rubbish, of course, but that ‘certain something’ had crept into Henry’s brain again. He experienced a vicious stab of guilt when Kate happily accepted what he was saying at face value, told him she loved him and asked him to ring her if he could – any time.

  He ended the call with an irritated frown on his face. He returned to Jane’s office, replacing the expression with a more positive one.

  ‘Ready?’

  She grabbed her coat. Henry was going to take her on the town in the hunt for an informant or two. As they descended the stairs, Roscoe asked, ‘Was that Kate you were talking to?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth.

  By 9 p.m. Ray Cragg, Marty and Crazy had made their way to the counting house. When he was there, Ray always thought of himself as the king counting out his money. Or to be more accurate, overseeing while others counted out his money for him.

  The counting house was in the middle of a short dead-end terraced street in the town of Rawtenstall in east Lancashire. The houses had been built towards the end of the nineteenth century to accommodate workers at the nearby cotton mill on the banks of the River Irwell. Over a hundred years later the mill and the cotton business were long since gone. After having been abandoned and allowed to decay through non-use and vandalism in the decades following the Second World War, the shell of the mill had finally been flattened in the early 1990s. The demolition of its massive chimney had made national TV news. A new industrial park had replaced the mill and the cotton trade itself had been replaced by a variety of businesses and services, none of which would last half as long as cotton had done.

  But the street remained. Two rows of houses with back yards and outside toilets, clinging perilously to the side of the Rossendale Valley. Even its original cobbles remained, now shiny and worn with age, use and weather. On damp, dank, foggy days it did not take too great a leap of the imagination to visualize those bygone days when cotton ruled: clogs clattering on cobbles, the mill chimney belching plumes of unhealthy smoke into the atmosphere, cholera and typhoid.

  However, it had been touch and go for the survival of this street. Most of the surrounding streets had been demolished, grassed over, never to be rebuilt in any shape or form. The bulldozers had been ready to roll to flatten this last one. The required compulsory purchase orders had been served and all the residents, bar one stubborn old lady – ninety years old, who had lived in the street all her life and had never been further than Blackpool – had been evicted and rehoused. It was only a matter of time before the old lady popped her clogs and the bulldozers waded in. The council had been prepared to wait.

  The street had been saved by Ray Cragg. He had spotted its location and potential, and had slipped some fairly hefty backhanders in the form of cash and B-list celebrity blowjobs to a couple of councillors ripe for the plucking.

  It would be a crying shame to flatten the street, destroy history, wipe out our heritage . . . at least that’s how the councillors lobbied on Ray’s behalf. The council were informed that a local businessman and general do-gooder (no name mentioned, obviously) wished to preserve the street, yet also modernize it and let out the properties to the local community at low rents.

  What the council did not hear was the truth: that Ray Cragg had seen the street’s potential. A nice, little nondescript location, tucked out of the way, affording the privacy he craved, close to a motorway link giving him fast access to Manchester in one direction and the whole of Lancashire in the other. It was also extremely cheap.

  Neither were the council told that he wanted to relocate his counting operation from Blackpool to Rawtenstall, somewhere easily guarded and controlled, away from the prying eyes and greedy intentions of his business rivals, where he knew who the neighbours were – somewhere like Balaclava Street, Rawtenstall.

  The first job Ray had done when it became his was to ensure that the stubborn old lady died in the house she had been born in. He had enjoyed doing that himself, breaking into her house in the middle of the night, sneaking up to her bedroom,
his face covered – appropriately enough – with a balaclava. His intent had been to terrify her to death, something he thought would have been easy. It did not happen as quickly as he had anticipated.

  Her valiant old heart only packed in after he had dragged her from her bed, torn off her winceyette nightie, thrust the barrel of a revolver into her toothless mouth and told her he was going to rape her.

  ‘That is, unless you die, you old bitch,’ he’d growled into her hearing aid. ‘Die, die, die.’

  She’d complied and Ray had placed her back into bed, covered her up and left her to be discovered by relatives three weeks later. It had been one of Ray’s proudest moments.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ Crazy asked him.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Ray chuckled, shaking his head to rid himself of the memory of that night in the old biddy’s room. He had really enjoyed making her die. And no one, not even Marty, knew he had done it. It was his little, proud, secret.

  Ray’s eyes roved round what had once been the living room of one of the terraced houses, but was now where the counting took place. There was no front window any more. A large piece of hardboard had been fixed on the outside of the window to make it appear as though it had been boarded up. Behind the board was a thick sheet of steel pock-riveted into the stone window frame. The rest of the room had been gutted. Four tables had been brought in, similar to decorators’ pasting tables, and one person sat at each of the tables.

  Ray moved and stood behind one of these people, a woman by the name of Carmel. He watched her counting.

  The week’s takings were looking very healthy indeed. Spread out on the four tables were four very large piles of cash. At each of the other tables was also a woman studiously separating the notes into respective denominations, piling them neatly and then counting them.

  Ray Cragg glanced appreciatively at the stacks of cash, feeling a flush of excitement. A quarter of a million, he guessed. All in used notes. Not a bad week’s work by any standards. A million a month. Twelve million a year, conservative. All his hard work over the past four years had been worth it. The violence, the intimidation, the planning, the homework and the killing where necessary. He now virtually controlled the supply of drugs from Merseyside to Cumbria, and from Manchester north to Blackpool.