Nick Oldham - Psycho Alley

Another hastily-devised plan, Henry thought, leaving him exposed and a little nervous. He was prepared to give it until daylight. If Trent had not returned by then, it would be all hands to a manhunt.

To Henry, the return seemed unlikely, but it was worth a try.

The time passed on. Henry settled in for the wait, yawned. His earpiece fell out. He replaced it, screwing it in. Sometimes he thought his ears were not the right shape for anything other than good quality headphones.

‘DCI Christie — contact call,’ Henry whispered over his PR.

‘Received,’ comms answered.

He settled back. His stab vest was not the best thing for comfort, especially with the covert cuff/baton/CS harness hanging under his left armpit.

Twenty minutes later he found himself nodding off, the toil of the long hours beginning to play on him. He struggled to keep his eyes open.

‘Shit.’ He took some deep breaths. ‘Not good.’ He sat up and urged himself to keep going. He went ten more minutes before his head fell forwards, the earpiece came out, and he jerked his head upright, rubbed his eyes hard.

Then he sensed something dreadful, but before he could react, his head was yanked backwards and a knife placed across his throat.

‘Long time, no see,’ Louis Vernon Trent whispered into Henry’s ear. ‘If you move, I’ll slit your throat.’

He could feel the narrow, fiercely sharp blade digging into his skin, not quite cutting the surface. Trent was standing behind him, leaning forward so that his head rested on Henry’s right shoulder. Trent’s breath was warm on his ear, the man’s left hand on Henry’s forehead, holding his head back.

‘This is a good trap,’ Trent said.

‘Yeah, I scream, they all come running.’

‘They being?’

‘Lots of cops.’

Trent thought about this and pressed the knife harder into Henry’s skin. ‘Do you know how long it takes to slit a throat? Before they come, that’s how long it takes … and actually, it’s not that good a trap.’ His voice was quiet, no more than a whisper. He seemed calm and relaxed. In control.

‘Good enough for you.’

‘What, you alone in this house? I don’t think so.’

‘How do you know I’m alone?’

‘Watched you all coming and going. I have a friend next door, nice old lady, until she saw you lot and asked me why all you nasty policemen were raiding my house. Now she’s a dead old friend.’

‘Why come back?’ Henry asked. ‘If you knew we were here?’

‘Need to get my money before leaving. And I knew you were here. Couldn’t resist one last chance to kill you, could I, Henry? I always wanted it to be Danny, but she came to another sticky end, so that’s all right. Just had to have the last word with you.’

‘Ego,’ Henry said.

Trent adjusted his stance slightly, getting a better hold on Henry’s head, the knife digging deeper. It felt sharp and deadly. Henry’s nostrils flared. Just one cut — zip — and he was dead, or at least bleeding to death. ‘Ego?’ he laughed. ‘You’re the one with the ego problem, if you think you can catch me all by yourself, with the nearest help, what, three minutes away. You’ll be dead, I’ll be gone by the time they land, when they realize you haven’t made that last contact call.’

Trent’s face was right next to Henry’s. He could feel the skin of the man’s face next to his. He could smell him.

Henry moved his right hand a fraction.

‘So where’ve you been?’ Henry needed to keep him talking.

‘Around … left a trail behind me … such memories.’

‘Including a cop in Florida?’

‘He was getting too close.’

‘That why you came home?’

‘Where the heart is … now I have to uproot again, and it was going so well.’ Trent stiffened, the knife at Henry’s throat cutting in now. Henry gasped as a trickle of blood dribbled down his neck. Trent relaxed, and the knife came off. ‘Time for me to go, Henry. Don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.’

‘So you kill me, set me on fire, is that it?’

‘Could be.’

‘Where’d the incendiaries come from?’

‘America — small-time white supremacists. Idiots, but their hearts are in the right places, I guess.’ He twisted the knife and scraped it across Henry’s skin. ‘I’ll make sure you die quickly, Henry … sort of.’ He stuck the point of the blade into the soft fleshy part underneath Henry’s chin. ‘It’ll go behind the Adam’s apple, right through, and I’ll dig around, and blood’ll fly everywhere.’

‘Thanks for that — just like George, eh? Why kill your buddy?’ Henry’s right hand moved an inch more as he slid it across his stomach towards his left arm.

‘He panicked. It was obvious you wanted him and I knew he’d crack if caught. A weak man. I had to shout at him to run you down, and then he didn’t do it well … he would have crumbled, and that would have been the end of my quiet life, occasionally fulfilling my desires and making recordings for posterity.’ He was speaking in a cold, matter-of-fact way about filming his killings. The voice of a psychopath, a man whose beat was Psycho Alley, who could see nothing wrong in the way he lived.

‘How many desires did you fulfil?’

‘Since coming home? Maybe ten, twelve. Lost count. Don’t keep a tally. Most of them are downstairs in the walls.’

‘And Kerry Figgis, where is she?’

‘How should I know?’ He pulled Henry’s head further back, stretching and exposing his neck further. ‘As soon as I saw you in Fleetwood, I knew you’d come to me sooner rather than later. You’re the only one capable, I think. All the rest are idiots. So you have to die, Henry, then I truly believe the police will never, ever catch me again.’

‘Why the texts, though?’ Henry gasped.

‘What texts?

Henry’s right hand edged under his jacket.

The point of the knife pressed into his neck.

‘I like this part,’ Trent said.

‘You’re fuckin’ bonkers.’ Henry’s fingers had got as far as touching the base of the CS canister held in the covert harness.

Trent’s face was side by side with his, cheek to cheek. He pushed the knife in a little further, pricking the skin. Henry jerked. Trent chuckled. ‘That was nothing. Just imagine the knife plunging into your neck.’

He raised his head away from Henry, obvious that he was steadying himself for that thrust into Henry’s neck, to end his life once and for all.

‘One more thing,’ Henry said urgently, his voice desperate. ‘Just one thing.’ His hand was now wrapped around the CS canister.

‘What?’

‘What did you do with Jodie Greaves between kidnapping her and me stumbling on you?’

‘Henry,’ he said patronizingly, ‘you truly do not want to know, other than that she was lovely. She would have been a star.’

‘Bastard,’ Henry said.

On that word, the light came on in the room as Karl Donaldson stepped through the door. Trent looked up and saw what looked like a space-age ray gun in Donaldson’s right hand. At the same moment, Henry snatched the CS canister out of the harness, twisted away from the knife as far as he could and, trying not to spray himself, aimed where he thought Trent’s face might be and pressed the spray button. Donaldson aimed the weapon at Trent and pulled the trigger. But it was no gun: it was a taser. Two hooks shot across the room, attached to minutely thin wires, and snagged into to Trent’s clothing. Fifty thousand volts of electricity arced across his body at the same time as the spray from Henry’s CS hit him full in the face.

The joint effect was stunning.

The charge sent Trent writhing across the room with an unworldly shriek and floored him like he’d been hit by a demolition ball, the knife flying out of his hand. The CS took immediate effect, eating like acid into his eyes and nose, making him scream and claw at his face.