Nick Oldham - Dead Heat

‘Just stabbed in the chest, that’s all. I’ll recover.’ He opened his jacket to reveal his shirt. ‘He only plunged a knife into my heart, nothing serious.’

‘Stay put, pal. . I’ll see you later.’ Donaldson jabbed his foot down and swung the Jeep away, parking it on double yellow lines, half on the footpath. He jumped out and trotted into the hospital.

Henry sat back down, intrigued about what was going on.

Verner had done as Henry had guessed. Once he had dealt with his captors and made the terrified nurse find a handcuff key on one of the dead cops, then killed her, he had walked calmly out of X-ray in the opposite direction to Casualty. He looked at and weighed up each male he passed in the corridors.

One, he estimated, was about right.

Within a minute the man was naked, trussed up with wire from a kettle and dumped in an empty room. Verner put the man’s clothes on and strolled out through the back of the hospital, where he stumbled into a staff car park.

Seconds later he was driving a Ford Focus out of the hospital, along Sharoe Green Lane, on to the A6 and down to Broughton, where he joined the M6 south. Fifteen minutes after escaping he was on the M61 heading towards Manchester.

An hour down the line and Kate had still not shown. Henry could imagine what she was going through, so he called her on the pay phone in the waiting room. She sounded flustered and out of breath.

‘I’m in the middle of Preston. I’m following hospital signs, but I keep looping back into the town centre.’

Henry was aware she was not familiar with the newly crowned city of Preston. She had only been there a handful of times in her life, being very much a Blackpool girl. He calmed her down, ascertained exactly where she was and directed her from that point to the hospital, which was nowhere near the centre of the city.

‘See you in a few minutes.’

‘OK, love,’ she said, sounding more relieved.

‘And I’ll make sure I meet you outside the hospital.’

He hung up.

Since Donaldson had arrived, Henry had not spoken to anyone about what was going on. He watched with more interest now, but decided to stay away from the action in spite of his inner urges to do otherwise. Something told him that his involvement with this was not over yet, anyway, so he would wait and see what came his way.

Having said that, he thought he should tell Jane that he was about to be picked up and driven home.

He made his way back into the Casualty waiting room. There was no sign of anyone he needed to speak to. He made his way down to X-ray.

It was still a mass of confusion. Henry hoped Jane had taken firm control of the scene. As he approached the police cordon tape stretched across the corridor, his progress was halted by a constable with a clipboard.

‘You can’t go any further. Sorry, mate.’

‘I could do with talking to DI Roscoe.’

‘I’m afraid she’s very busy.’

‘Just a moment of her time, please.’

The cop shook his head. ‘I’ll take your name and a number and get her to call you, if you like.’ Then he had a thought. ‘Unless you’re a witness.’

‘I was first at the scene with the DI, actually.’

The officer shrugged, now not interested. ‘I’ve been told to let no one through.’

‘OK,’ said Henry. He fished out his phone and saw the battery was actually showing some charge now. He thought mobile-phone batteries were the strangest of things. Sometimes they go on forever with little or no charge showing, other times they just seemed to die on a whim. He keyed in Jane’s number. It rang, but was not answered. When the answer phone clicked in, Henry ended the call.

With leaden feet he began walking out of the hospital to wait for Kate, who should not be too far away now. It hit him hard, like a kick in the testicles, that he was not wanted or needed. They could do very well without him and the realization hurt him. Hurt him hard.

Once again he experienced great regret about ever turning out to help Tara Wickson. He had been a fool. If he had not got out of bed, none of this would have happened — but then something else struck him. If he had not got out of bed it was possible that John Wickson might be dead now. Or, worse still, Jane Roscoe. Yes. Actually he had done some good. He had saved lives. That realization gave him a speck of comfort.

Kate arrived the moment Henry set foot outside.

She jumped out of the car and ran to him.

‘Henry, I’ve been so worried.’

He gave her a very cautious hug and kissed her forehead. He had never been so happy to see her and could not wait to get home.

Henry Christie’s daily life had developed some kind of routine. These days he was always up and about before the rest of the family surfaced and no matter what the weather, he would don a T-shirt, shorts and trainers, and push himself out for a three-mile run.

At the beginning of his suspension it had been run-walk, run-walk and had taken him in excess of thirty minutes to complete his route. Now, four months down the line, he had trimmed the time to twenty minutes, a pace which made him sweat, his heart beat and lungs expand. He had no great desire to go much faster, but he was tempted to increase the distance.

The running had helped him to lose weight, as had his move on to a diet on which he ate just as much as ever, but ate the right things. Fruit and veg instead of chips and pies, the staple diet of many a detective.

Towards the end of his run, the route took him past a newsagent’s, into which he popped each day to collect a paper.

He usually got home about 7.15 a.m., slid into the shower, got dressed and then dragged everyone else out of their pits. As the three females who made up Henry’s household fought over bathrooms, showers and toiletries, Henry started getting breakfasts ready.

Kate rarely ate more than one piece of toast. Often Henry had to force that down her. She was not a morning person. Leanne, the youngest daughter, started her day with cereal and several slices of banana on toast; Jenny, the eldest, varied from nothing to a fat-boy’s fry-up, so Henry left her to her own devices.

Himself, he had black filtered coffee, the All Day roast from Booths, the local supermarket, and wholemeal toast spread with Tiptree Shredless marmalade. He then retreated to the conservatory with that and his newspaper.

He usually ran the girls to school and college before returning home and mapping out his day. This involved a mixture of gardening, decorating, shopping, studying for an OU degree (something he had always promised himself), preparing the evening meal and, three times a week, a trip to the YMCA for a workout on the rowing machines.

Suspension, he often said, had made him a new man. He was only sorry that suspension had been the catalyst. He was doing things now he should have been doing for years.

He had become content with the way things were going, though he was increasingly missing work, hence his decision to fill time by acceding to Tara Wickson’s request.

His discipline hearing, the inquests he was involved in, and the court cases, were very much on his mind all the time. He was desperate to clear his name, but he knew that would come when it came. He was determined not to let bleak thoughts destroy him, like when he had been talking to Donaldson in the pub. That state of mind was a rarity and he intended to keep it that way, hard though it was.

Now his routine had been disrupted.

He had become involved in something which had taken him artificially back to police work and it had opened up a trapdoor in his mind he had been trying to keep closed.

The Wickson thing had set his mind churning. It made him realize just how much he missed being a cop.