Nick Oldham - Psycho Alley

‘You do a lot of that, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Winging it. “Wing” could be your middle name. Henry “Wing” Christie.’ There was a brittle edge to her voice.

Henry stayed silent, his head resting, eyes closed. Jane gripped the steering wheel, her mouth twisted down with disapproval.

‘You don’t have to do this to yourself, you know,’ Henry said.

‘Do what?’

‘You know — work with me. You’ve got Dave Anger’s lug-hole … there’s no need for you to be working the same cluster as me, is there? You could influence him easily enough.’

‘I didn’t have any choice … we all got posted around the county when the SIO team became FMIT. As much as possible people were posted where it didn’t cause too much inconvenience.’ She shrugged. ‘I live in Fulwood. Not too much of a hardship to get into Blackpool down the ’fifty-five.’

‘Or Preston, or Blackburn, come to that,’ Henry pointed out. ‘Or is it that you’re still spying on me … Anger’s little mole?’ He squinted through his good eye.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, her neck reddening.

‘Whatever,’ he said tiredly, past caring.

Jane had driven from Henry’s house, down through Blackpool on to the promenade, then turned north, the sea on her left. The tide was a long, long way out and the clearing dawn was windless and tranquil, the weather having eased since last night. The huge expanse of beach looked for all the world like something from a glossy travel brochure. There were times when Blackpool actually looked beautiful, but Henry did not cast a glance to his right so as not to spoil the illusion. The tacky Golden Mile would bring anyone crashing back to earth. Instead he tried to imagine he was somewhere tropical.

‘Shit.’

Jane slammed on the brakes. Had it not been for his seatbelt, Henry would have been catapulted through the windscreen. He was literally jolted back to reality, brought back from his dreams of distant shores.

A scruffy black mongrel dog trotted across the road, a dirty look directed at Jane’s car. She had managed to avoid flattening it more by luck than judgement.

‘County dog,’ Henry remarked, referring to the semi-mythical creature which had been used ruthlessly as the explanation for many otherwise inexplicable police vehicle accidents: ‘It was a dog, Sarge, a big black one, came from nowhere.’

‘I didn’t see it coming … I was almost asleep,’ Jane admitted, sounding cross with herself. She set off again with a long exhalation of breath.

Henry sat up straight, aware that tiredness could get you killed. ‘Whatever happens today,’ he announced, ‘we’ll both take a couple of days off …’ But even as he spoke he had one of those pit-of-the-stomach premonitions that indicated to him there would be fat chance of that happening. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, hoping to keep Jane awake by way of discussion, ‘what else do you know about Uren’s car?’

‘Other than the body in the boot, you mean?’

She drove north through Bispham, then Cleveleys and up into Fleetwood. All charming, romantic-sounding names, Henry thought sardonically, rather like the names of the towns along Route 66. Jane threaded through the streets of Fleetwood and emerged at the roundabout where Henry had originally spotted Uren and his unknown companion in the Astra not many hours before. Just off the roundabout was newly-built superstore, next to which was Fleetwood’s well known retail outlet, Freeport, which sold brand names at much reduced prices. Henry had been there a few times as a customer, but in the many clothing stores on the site he had never yet found anything that actually quite fitted him. He always ended up back in Asda or Debenham’s.

Jane spun round the roundabout, now heading out of Fleetwood, Freeport on her left. Just beyond Freeport and a few large, untidy warehouses, she turned left into a service road which ran towards Fleetwood docks. This led through a series of tatty, run-down buildings which were once fish-packing sheds and other warehouses, all bearing the hallmarks of a once thriving fishing industry.

A couple of serviceable trawlers were berthed in the dock itself, but the quayside was littered with several rotting hulks of fishing boats which had once provided a living for the people of the town, together with huge chunks of unidentifiable scrap metal. The place looked and felt desolate, overseen by the ghost of a bygone age of profitability. Jane drove past a scrapyard, at the gate of which stood the classic, stereotypical scrapyard hound; a mean-looking mongrel, a cross between the Hound of the Baskervilles and Scooby-Doo, all bones and bollocks. Then there was a caravan storage facility behind high, chain link fencing.

After the dock, Freeport could be seen away to their left, and between was a newly refurbished marina in which was berthed an array of yachts and motorboats. Henry was struck by the juxtaposition, old and new, poor and wealthy, clean and shite. A microcosm of Lancashire, he thought.

Jane drove on. Out to their right was the mouth of the River Wyre. The road narrowed to a cracked, concrete track, then bore right towards the river itself. Ahead of them was a police van with two uniformed constables lounging tiredly against it. Jane drove up to them and stopped. She got out, flashing her warrant card. Henry stayed where he was, looking out across the estuary. With the tide out, huge, dirty-looking mud bars were exposed. The area was wild, rugged, quite barren, the silence broken only by the call of gulls.

Following a brief conversation, during which the officers pointed directions, Jane returned to the car, shivering.

‘Surprisingly cold out there.’

She continued the journey, taking the car along an ever-narrowing track, past the remnants of old buildings, their foundations now merely outlines in the earth, some areas of flat concrete, some bricks that had once been part of walls, reminding Henry of the remains of a Roman fort. Maybe one day this area would be of historical and architectural interest.

‘How far?’

‘Another hundred yards and this track stops, then we’re on foot. You up to it?’

‘Aye,’ he nodded.

Jane pointed. ‘Across that hillock, between those trees, then almost down to the edge of the river, apparently.’

Looking to where the track petered out, Henry saw two more vehicles, one a liveried cop car, the other plain, probably belonging to the on-call local detective. They were parked nose to tail.

‘Let’s stop here, walk the rest of the way.’

Jane stopped the car. She knew Henry liked to stroll up to major crime scenes from a distance: ‘With the sun at my back,’ he would say. He always thought that such an approach gave him and edge, although he could never quite qualify or quantify that with any tangible evidence. But as Jane knew, when dealing with a crime and any subsequent enquiry, gut feeling was not always to be sniffed at.

Henry climbed out stiffly, his leg hurting, his eye throbbing. It was cold out here at dawn, near the banks of the river, a cutting if intermittent breeze coming in from Morecambe Bay. They walked to the point where the track disintegrated and became part of the scrub; then they continued up the small hill Jane had pointed out between some trees. At the top of this rise they paused and took stock. The land ran away from them, harsh grass and scrub, then became muddy sand at the edge of the river, intercut by a number of narrow and, at that moment, waterless creeks. The tide being out, the main channel of the river was the only water to be seen as they looked up towards the big ICI works a mile or so north.

‘Beautiful,’ Jane commented.

‘Spooky.’ Henry was momentarily mesmerized by three more hulks of trawlers abandoned in the mudflats, lying there like the rib cages of some giant, mythical monsters. It all seemed very Dickensian, and if there had been mist or fog rolling in, Henry could have believed he was in the opening chapter of Great Expectations . He almost expected to see the fleeing figures of escaping convicts and hear the rattle of manacles.