Nick Oldham - Dead Heat

As the sky grew a slightly lighter shade of pale, he could see smoke rising in the distance.

Henry’s throat was parched, mainly because of the beer he had drunk in the pub before bed. He should have thrown some coffee down before setting off, but he had been eager to get going. To get, for the first time in months, to the scene of a crime.

The old feeling stayed with him as he drove down the long driveway towards the house, which was dead ahead of him, and the stables, which were to his right.

Looking across he could see a lot of chaotic activity. Two fire engines, two marked police cars and an ambulance, as well as other vehicles. Blue lights rotated a-plenty. Dozens of people, it seemed, scurried about and the reflective jackets of the uniformed services glistened against the blue lights, headlights and the approaching daylight.

Henry parked outside the house, not wishing to add to the confusion of vehicles and bodies down at the scene. This was an old habit of his. Whenever and wherever possible he liked to approach any crime scene from a distance. ‘I like to come from downwind, with the sun at my back,’ he was fond of saying. He always felt it gave him an advantage. . somehow. It allowed him to make assessments and start shuffling the pack of cards in his head that was his combination of experience, skills and abilities of being a detective.

Not that he was a detective at present, just a cop on suspension.

So what the hell was he doing here?

The question hit him hard as he pulled up and parked on the gravel at the front of the Wickson house. He sat with his hands resting at the ten to two position on the steering wheel and thought seriously about withdrawing.

Curiosity got the better of him.

He looked at the house in front of him, a big, double-fronted, extensively extended and modernized former farmhouse. All the lights were on, the front door open. It was a house that oozed wealth. To the left side of it he could now make out a tennis court and beyond that a helicopter landing pad. He thought it would be safe to assume there would be a swimming pool out back somewhere.

All in all, very nice. The domicile of a rich and successful person, as Henry knew John Lloyd Wickson was. Henry, an avid reader of the county magazine Lancashire Life — mainly to gawp enviously at the property pages — had seen Wickson several times in the social pages. He was always attending charity events, race meetings and had been profiled on a couple of occasions by the magazine’s money section. Henry thought he should re-read one of the profiles sometime. But he did remember enough to recall that Wickson’s wealth was estimated somewhere in the region of about fifty million. Not bad for somebody who began his working life as a bricklayer, or so the story went.

As he got out of the car, he glanced at the other cars parked on the gravel. One was the Mercedes Tara Wickson had been driving, another was a huge Bentley, a lovely car which Henry estimated would cost over a hundred and twenty grand. He was surrounded by big bucks, that much was obvious.

He turned away from the Bentley, then stopped dead in his tracks. There were another three cars on the gravel. One was a Ford Focus with a blue light clamped to the roof. Henry thought it probably belonged to the senior Fire Officer on scene, another, he guessed, was a plain cop car, but it was the third one which he instantly recognized and made him think, Oh bollocks! It was Jane Roscoe’s car.

The sight of it almost made him jump back into his car and tear-arse away immediately. But, valiantly, he braced himself and trudged onwards.

The stables, some 200 metres to the right of the house, were accessed by means of a narrow lane just wide enough to allow passage for one vehicle, with drainage channels and fields on either side. Henry stepped aside to let the ambulance drive away. It did not seem to be in much of a hurry, so he guessed there were no patients on board. Perhaps it had been called as a precautionary measure. He walked on into the stable yard, the ever brightening dawn allowing him to get his bearings and make sense of the geography of the area. It was with a surprised jolt that he realized that the banks of the River Wyre were perhaps only a hundred metres away to his left as he walked to the stables.

It was very apparent where the seat of the fire had been.

There was a huddle of people scrummed down near the bonnet of one of the police cars: cops, fire fighters and Tara Wickson. Tara was gesticulating wildly. One of the cops was trying to keep her calm, using soothing hand movements. Henry recognized one of the uniformed cops, and another of the plain-clothed variety.

He held back a second, made up his mind, and approached the conflab.

Tara Wickson saw him coming and the frustration and exasperation in her body language seemed to wither and die. Her shoulders drooped. She broke away from the group of officials and made toward him. She stopped in front of him, her face a brave mask, which immediately crumbled. She bowed her head and started to sob in big, raking breaths which rattled her small frame.

‘Get hold of me, Henry,’ she pleaded. ‘Squeeze me.’

Making sure there was no possible sexual connotation to this act, he put his arms around her and did as she wanted, though for the life of him he did not know why he did it. Instinct? He patted her back and almost said, ‘There, there.’

The detective Henry had recognized came and stood behind Tara, a disgusted expression on her face. She grimaced at him over Tara.

‘Henry, what the hell are you doing here?’ She surveyed him, head tilted back, eyes looking down her nose.

Henry managed a shrug. ‘Hello, Jane.’ Tara stepped back and wiped her hands down her tear-stained face.

DI Jane Roscoe shook her head in disbelief.

This, Henry thought sardonically, was always going to be the problem: the distinct possibility of doing some unofficial digging on behalf of someone and bumping into the real cops who would get very shirty at any encroachment on to their patch. And in this case, to make matters worse, a real cop with whom he had recently been ‘involved’ and who was also a witness in the internal discipline proceedings being brought against him.

With a bit of soft prodding and cooing words, Henry managed to steer Tara Wickson back to the house, where in the kitchen he made a pot of tea for her and left her in the capable hands of a policewoman who looked pretty bloody annoyed to be doing such womanly work. ‘Does it have to be a woman looking after her?’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘This is so sexist.’ She folded her arms underneath her ample bosom.

‘It’s called caring for victims,’ Henry told her in reaction to the expression on her face.

The policewoman almost sneered at him.

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ he added. Political correctness interfering with the practicalities of policing often irked him intensely. To Tara, he said, ‘I’ll be back to have a chat once I’ve had a word with the detective inspector, OK?’ The proximity of the policewoman made him aver from adding the word ‘love’ at the end of his sentence. She would probably have thought it sexist and patronizing.

Jane Roscoe was still in discussion with the Fire Service when Henry got back to the scene. She was deep into it and Henry did not interrupt.

He took the opportunity to have a closer look at the seat of the fire — in a row of loose boxes now completely flattened, charred and blackened. There were a couple of fire fighters still damping down and ensuring the fire would not reignite, spraying copious amounts of brown water on the debris from hoses they had run all the way down to the River Wyre. They were pretty much destroying any chance of recovering any useful evidence. Henry did not comment. Not his problem.