Backlash

by Nick Oldham

  ‘We need more people on Jane Roscoe,’ Henry said. ‘Sooner rather than later. We can’t afford to wait till weekend. The trail will be well cold by then.’

  FB sighed. ‘If I could give you more, I’d give you more, but I can’t and I don’t feel good about it because, and you probably won’t believe this, I do care. I even care about you, which is why I pulled you off CID. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly, Henry. I thought I was acting in your best interests.’

  Henry shuffled the papers in front of him and sniffed. ‘Yeah, well, it would have been nice to be consulted about that. Anyway, that’s by the by now. Catching the bastard who killed Mark is all I want to think about now, that and finding Jane dead or alive. I hope you won’t take me off this.’

  FB shook his head. ‘I won’t.’

  The man who had used the name and taken the identity of David Gill was sitting and thinking about the events of the last few hours.

  The police had finally rumbled his address. Mentally he worked through the flat inch by inch, visualising what was there, what he had left behind, what might be used to incriminate him or reveal his true identity. He was pretty certain there was nothing.

  The relationship with Gill had been good while it lasted. Gill had been just the sort of low-life thicko he had been searching for. A man of low intelligence, who had few friends, and lived alone with no family who gave a shit about him. A bit of a druggie, a bit of a tealeaf, living for the most part on state handouts in a flat with no neighbours, whose only interest in life was his clapped-out motorbike. He had been perfect. The real David Gill had been the fourth such person he had used over the years to provide a cover for his murderous activities.

  He had watched Gill for a while. Learned about him and his habits. Saw his occasional friend. Saw where he lived and had come to the conclusion that he could easily become David Gill whenever the situation required. He could pull Gill on like an overcoat and that would offer him a veneer of protection should he ever get caught – which was something he never intended to happen.

  He had befriended Gill, something that had not taken long once Gill’s natural reluctance had been broken down. And then he had killed him and frozen the body.

  And from that day on he came to believe that it was David Gill who had committed all the murders. It was Gill, not him, who came out of the dark and actually carried them out. But now Gill’s body had been discovered. Unfortunate. He would have to find some other poor, sad soul who could be bought for the price of a pint and then disposed of.

  But before any of that could happen, two things had to be sorted out.

  He had decided Jane Roscoe had lived long enough. He was getting tired of her now. He would just kill her quickly, nothing flashy, just slash her to pieces in a frenzy and enjoy it for what it was. And secondly he had to do the thing that would show the world that the backlash had truly started: kill the wife of the prime minister.

  ‘Sorry, boss, I was miles away,’ PC John Taylor said. He was sitting in the report-writing room. He looked up at Henry Christie.

  ‘I said, how are you feeling?’

  ‘Oh, much better.’

  Henry hovered by the doorway.

  ‘Just redoing my statement from last night. Want to get it right,’ Taylor explained.

  ‘Good. I just wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Henry waved the note Taylor had left him about the neighbourhood watch co-ordinator. ‘I know you got no reply from that neighbourhood watch co-ordinator. It says one of the neighbours told you he’d gone on holiday, didn’t say where to.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Taylor nodded.

  ‘Did you find out when he was coming back?’

  ‘Er . . . next week sometime . . . Tuesday, I think.’ Taylor seemed flustered.

  ‘Can you give me the name of the neighbour?’

  Taylor thought for a moment. ‘No, don’t recall it,’ he said worriedly.

  ‘Where does he live?’

  Taylor scratched his head. ‘Next door but one – no, two.’

  Henry sighed. ‘Would you be able to take me there? One way or another I need to identify this military man who Jane spoke to. It’s just possible the neighbourhood watch co-ordinator might know who he is if he’s a local character, or it could even be the man himself – after all, the co-ordinator is called Captain Blackthorn. But, whoever it is, I need to get hold of him. He’s the key to this and the sooner I see him the better.’ Henry dangled a set of car keys between his fingers. ‘I’ll drive. You show me which house it is. If we can’t bottom it tonight, we’re going to have to go house to house in the morning, major style.’

  Taylor looked rather peeved to be interrupted from his paper work.

  They drove silently to South Shore. Taylor sat primly with his hands clasped between his thighs, slightly distracted.

  ‘How’s things?’ Henry asked.

  ‘OK.’ Nothing more was forthcoming.

  ‘What’s your background?’ Henry asked, more to keep the conversation going than anything. He found Taylor quite difficult to connect with. He had seen him around over the years but never really spoken to him at all because Henry had been so CID-focused and Taylor had been in uniform. It wasn’t unusual not to know someone at Blackpool police station with it being so large.

  ‘University of Salford 1980, then into the police. The rest is history.’

  ‘What degree?’

  ‘Psychology.’

  ‘Interesting delving into people’s minds. Never got any qualifications myself. Bone idle, that way. Too interested in girls and getting a job.’

  Taylor smirked.

  They reached Winston Road.

  ‘The neighbourhood watch co-ordinator is that one,’ Henry stated, peering at the numbers on the doors, shining his torch out of the car window at them. ‘Which way did you go to see this neighbour, up or down?’

  ‘Down, I think. That one there I think.’

  Henry stopped. ‘Can you just hand me my radio?’ He had tossed it into the passenger footwell at the start of the journey. Taylor reached down and fumbled in the dark, dropping it once, then handing it to Henry who got out of the car saying, ‘This one, you reckon?’ pointing to the house.

  Taylor nodded.

  ‘Come on then.’ Henry walked across the pavement to the front gate of the house, went through and up the steps to the door. It was a house divided into flats with six doorbells in the wall next to the front door. ‘Who did you speak to?’ Henry asked. There was no reply from Taylor, who he expected would be right behind him. Instead the officer was standing by the gate, looking sheepish. ‘Which one did you speak to?’ Henry raised his voice, shining his torch on the cluster of doorbells.

  ‘I’m trying to remember,’ he said feebly.

  Henry felt a gush of impatience and anger well up. He came back down the steps, face to face with the PC, who was actually as tall as him and quite a bit broader. ‘This is a murder inquiry and I’m just about getting pig sick with you, PC Taylor. You volunteered to do this job for me, to come and see the co-ordinator, and as far as I can see you’ve made a complete balls of it.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he gulped.

  Henry grabbed his shoulder and propelled him up the stairs to look at the names on the doorbells. ‘Which one was it?’ Henry demanded.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he wailed.

  ‘Right, in that case I’m going to have to apply a process of elimination here and ring every one of the fuckers, aren’t I?’

  Taylor’s shoulders drooped. He looked ready to cry.

  ‘You did actually go and knock on the co-ordinator’s door?’ Henry asked suspiciously.

  ‘Yes I did,’ Taylor came back defiantly. ‘And he wasn’t in.’

  ‘And you did visit a neighbour?’

  Taylor’s mouth pursed. He looked down at his feet. ‘No,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Fuck-shit!’ Henry shouted, turning on him. He grabbed hold of his blouson and slammed
him up against the front door of the house. ‘How dare you?’ Henry said through gritted teeth. ‘How dare you fuck-up and tell me a lie? One of our officers has been murdered by a fucking maniac and another is missing, probably dead too – and you tell a fucking lie!’ Henry let go of him like he was flicking shit off his fingers. ‘I don’t know what your game is, pal,’ he growled, ‘but when this is over I’m gonna pin your hide to Blackpool Tower, and now, just for my own piece of mind, I’m going to knock on the door of the neighbourhood watch guy because I’m not sure I believe you even did that!’

  He trotted down the steps and marched down the street to the relevant address, absolutely boiling over with rage, vowing that Taylor would lose his job if it was the last thing he did.

  Up the steps, putting his thumb on all the doorbells until some irritated resident buzzed open the front door. That the door opened did not surprise Henry, it was a tactic police officers often used to gain entry to multi-occupancy premises. He stepped into the hallway.

  He knew Captain Blackthorn’s flat was number one, the first one on the right on the ground floor. He knocked hard on the door. Knocked and knocked. There was no reply. Maybe Taylor had been telling the truth. He swivelled away in frustration, his hand going for the door knob in a gesture of despair, not expecting it to open, but it did. The door swung open – creepily – with a long moan of the hinges.

  PC Taylor came through the front door of the building and Henry looked at him before pushing the flat door open fully. The short hallway was unlit. Henry called out, ‘Captain Blackthorn. It’s the police. May we come in, sir?’

  Henry’s voice carried and reverberated around the hallway. He repeated his words. Again, no reply. The hairs on the back of his neck tingled. To find the door unlocked at this time of day, no security chain across, no sign of an alarm having been set, was disconcerting. He imagined the captain would be one of the most security conscious people on the planet, especially in his volunteer role. There would be no way he would leave his home unlocked.

  Henry walked down the hallway of the flat, his radio in his right hand.

  The smell of death hit him.

  ‘Damn,’ he whispered under his breath, jumping to the conclusion that he was about to discover that a natural sudden death had occurred, that the old guy had popped his clogs which had been the reason why Taylor had been unable to rouse him. Already he was angry at the temerity of the man to die without a thought for the murder investigation.

  Where would he be, Henry wondered. In bed? On the bog? Many elderly people died while straining on the loo.

  He opened the living room door and fumbled for the light switch. Then froze. This was no natural sudden death.

  Blackthorn’s body was on the hearthrug in the middle of the room, in the space between the settee and the fireplace.

  Like Joey Costain he had been gutted like a fish. His insides were flipped out, wrapped around his head and neck. Henry squatted down next to the body and inspected it without touching. His eyes roved round the blood-splattered room and spotted a walking stick resting against the settee. In blood, the word ‘grass’ had been scrawled.

  ‘Gill must have been here,’ Henry hissed, remaining down on his haunches. His thought processes whirred and clicked, going back to only moments before when he had reflected on the likely security consciousness of Captain Blackthorn. There was no sign of forced entry on the door, although it was possible an intruder could have entered by other means, such as a kitchen window. Failing that, someone had been invited into the house, someone Blackthorn knew and/or trusted. As was the case for Joey Costain who had turned his back on someone he knew or trusted or thought he could trust. And to confirm it, Henry saw two mugs of tea on the coffee table. Two mugs.

  Henry was aware of movement behind him: PC Taylor.

  Henry stayed where he was down by the body and hoped that his thoughts had not transferred themselves to his body language as his skin chilled. God, he hoped he was wrong, but he was sure he was not.

  Taylor was behind him still. Not good. Henry sensed him to be by the living-room door about six feet away, a little bit of distance.

  ‘Where’s Jane Roscoe?’ Henry asked quietly. He stood up slowly, his knees cracking, betraying his approach to middle age. Taylor was immobile by the door. Henry had it in his mind that if he was wrong, he could just say he asked the question rhetorically, out of frustration, but when he looked at Taylor, he knew he was right, so he said it again. ‘Where is Jane Roscoe?’

  Taylor smiled confidently. A transformation from the ‘big softie’ he had been described as. His face had a dark shadow over it. He was not the person Henry had come to know recently.

  ‘I made two mistakes,’ Taylor said quietly. ‘One, reading the Sunday Times. Two, leaving you that note and pretending to be the keen constable. Very foolish of me. I should have known you’d not accept it at face value. I was hoping it would put you off for a few days, give me time to do what I have to do, then disappear. As it is, you’ve given me even more things to do now. I need to kill you, Henry.’

  Taylor’s right hand appeared from around his back, holding a baton. He did not say anything, just maintained that enigmatic smile.

  Henry brought his radio up to his mouth and pressed the transmit button. Nothing happened.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Taylor said. ‘I’ve changed the channels. By the time you tune it back to Blackpool, you’ll be dead.’ He raised the baton. For the first time Henry saw it was an electronic-shock baton. ‘High voltage, low amperage, non-lethal shock,’ Taylor explained. ‘Just enough to put you down long enough for me to slit you open like all the rest.’

  ‘Like Mark Evans? Louise Graveson?’

  Taylor shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

  Henry’s mind spun. He tested the water: ‘What about Mo Khan?’

  Taylor smirked. ‘I finished off what Joey started. He left Khan bleeding, but I whacked him to death, very satisfying,’ he said with pride. ‘Then I killed Joey before I came into work that evening. I phoned in about his death from the hospital; remember when I was supposedly vomiting at the thought of letting the prisoner in my charge die? I was telling communications all about Joey being a mess. And that nice Sergeant Byrne was being so caring. You weren’t, though, were you? Nasty man!’ He smirked cockily. Henry’s hands bunched into tight fists which he wanted to smash into Taylor’s face. ‘Joey was an imbecile and we used him.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Hellfire Dawn – the saviours of this second-rate country.’

  ‘And Jane Roscoe? Where the hell is she, PC Taylor?’

  ‘I’m not PC Taylor at the moment,’ he came back stiffly. ‘My name is David Gill.’

  ‘Really?’ Henry guffawed, picking up on the brittleness in Taylor’s voice. ‘My understanding is that David Gill is lying in the mortuary defrosting like a frozen lamb.’

  Taylor pointed the baton at Henry. ‘Wrong. He is who I have become. He is me, when I need him. He is my raincoat, my comfy pair of slippers. He was just a shell waiting to be inhabited, a good for nothing loser, better off with his throat cut. At least he now has a purpose in life.’

  ‘Well that’s fine and dandy for the judge and jury: I become someone else so I am therefore not responsible for my actions – fuck that,’ Henry spat. ‘You can convince them that you’re Jekyll and Hyde for all I care, but I guarantee you’re still going down for a long time. You can take my regards to Ian Brady.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You see, no one knows I’m here with you, do they? So once you’re dead, I’ll go and do the business with Janey, then my pièce de résistance, then I’ll be gone. I’ll find some other shell to inhabit, rather like that nice, but sensitive policeman PC Taylor, so deeply affected by the sight of blood and death and a little bit soft – PC Taylor – who the hell was he but a shell?’

  ‘There’s a slight hitch in your plan,’ Henry said. His voice held, but he was starting to feel it going, starting to quake as, with his right han
d, he fumbled with the channel selector on the radio. ‘I’m not dead – and I don’t intend to be.’

  Taylor moved into the room proper and closed the door behind him.

  Henry stepped back over the captain’s dead body, his feet slipping in the blood, which had a crusty top on it, but a slimy underbelly. He wanted to keep his distance from Taylor and the shock baton.

  ‘There’s quite a bit of a difference here,’ Henry pointed out, ‘between you and me.’

  ‘Oh? You victim, me killer,’ Taylor said. ‘Where’s the difference?’

  ‘Difference is that I’m expecting you. None of your previous victims were ready for you, were they, PC Taylor? You either surprised them or got them to trust you, then you whacked ’em. I’m not surprised and I don’t trust you, PC Taylor.’

  ‘Gill, David Gill,’ Taylor corrected him sternly. ‘Call me David.’

  ‘Bonkers, more like,’ Henry said. ‘So come on then, let’s have a bit of action here. You don’t like this, do you? Face to face, level terms, with someone who’s going to disarm you and beat you. How does that feel, John?’ He emphasised the name blatantly. ‘Gonna wrap me up like a parcel?’ Henry taunted. ‘Just put the baton down and any other weapon. Make this easy on yourself.’

  Taylor hesitated. Henry stood there giving the impression of composure, which underneath he did not feel.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Taylor screamed. He shook the baton angrily and stepped towards Henry.

  Henry moved back to keep out of range.

  ‘You’re the one who’s fucked – make it easy on yourself: give up now,’ Henry said, soothingly. ‘Life won’t be bad for you, cosseted in a padded cell. It’ll probably be quite nice. You can be who you want to be all the time.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. You see, it’s not my time yet. I have things to do, wrongs to put right. I mean, take this job, for instance. I came into it in the first place because it was the last bastion of the white man. Now look at it. A shambles. Promoting Pakis and women, leaving us behind. I mean,’ he babbled, ‘you should be pleased by what I’ve done for you, Henry.’