Nick Oldham - Psycho Alley

Henry leapt to his feet, and staggered across to the fireplace which he used to hold himself up.

‘I love it when a plan comes together,’ Donaldson beamed.

‘Fuck me, Karl,’ Henry said, ‘he nearly slit my throat. Fuckin’ Yanks, always leavin’ it to the last minute.’

‘Pal,’ Donaldson said soothingly, ‘a miss is as good as a mile.’

One of the cruel hands of fate Henry believed he had been dealt in life was that he was useless at golf. No matter how he tried — and he had tried — throughout his life, he had failed humiliatingly. He thought he had a good, easy swing, but the problem was when that little white, bastard of a ball was placed in front of him, it all went, as his colleagues say, ‘shit-shaped’. His attempts at the game were so disastrous that in order to compute his score, he always used the following equation: think of a par, double it and add two and, without fail, Henry’s score could be fairly accurately estimated.

It was this equation that he applied to, yet amended, in relation to Louis Vernon Trent, for the benefit of the custody officer. ‘Think Hannibal Lecter times two, add a dash of Ian Brady, then a smidgen of Jeffrey Dahmer and you’ll be somewhere in the region of how Trent operates.’ Henry dabbed a piece of tissue on the nick Trent had cut into his throat; he could still feel the line of the blade where Trent had held the knife across his windpipe. In his imagination, he felt it tearing his throat out. ‘He’ll kill you, or rip off your face, at the drop of a hat, so never deal with him unaccompanied.’

The burly sergeant seemed contemptuously unimpressed.

‘I mean it,’ Henry said mildly.

‘OK, boss.’

Right now, Trent was in a cell. The door to it was wedged open and two strapping PCs sat outside in the corridor next to each other on chairs positioned directly opposite the door. They kept a constant vigil on him — suicide watch — as per force instructions regarding murder suspects. Trent had been stripped and every orifice had been searched. The police were as sure as they could be that he had nothing secreted in his mouth, nose, ears or arsehole that he could use to harm either himself or anyone else. He had been given a paper suit and slippers before being marched down to trap one, the nearest cell to the custody office door. He had acquiesced to everything in a muted, but resentful way, which made Henry worry slightly.

Henry had questioned him — off the record and highly illegally — during his recovery from the horrible effects of CS, firing him questions about the whereabouts of Kerry Figgis, but Trent refused to talk and Henry wanted to spray him again, but realized that torture would get him nowhere. The only thing Trent said was that he wanted a solicitor and a doctor. It annoyed Henry that both requests were being complied with. The doctor would be half an hour, the solicitor one hour.

In the meantime, Henry debated whether or not to get a superintendent’s authorization under PACE to conduct an urgent interview. This could take place without a solicitor for the purpose of saving life.

Would it achieve anything, he was wondering. He looked thoughtfully at Donaldson, who had taken a back seat as Trent was processed through the custody system.

The American sidled up to Henry. ‘How are we going to explain me and the taser, H?’

Henry shrugged. That would be a bureaucratic nightmare of bullshit at the very least, and he didn’t want to think about it just now. ‘Minor matter,’ he said, brushing the issue aside for the moment. ‘We’ll think of something.’

‘Still, can’t argue it was a good idea me sneaking back into the house to hide in the kitchen. You’d be dead otherwise.’

‘Yeah, I’m glad I thought of it,’ he said tiredly, remembering Donaldson’s insistence. ‘As brave as I am, I didn’t really want to be all alone in the house with those bodies in the basement and the possibility of him showing up — even if you obviously fell asleep under the kitchen table,’ Henry admonished.

Donaldson sniffed resentfully. ‘He was a sneaky son of a bitch himself. It’s no wonder the firearms guys missed the hole in the wall.’

On a further, more detailed search of the house following Trent’s arrest, officers had discovered that a hole had been made in the brickwork in the attic wall which divided Trent’s house from next door, a hole just wide enough to allow a grown man to clamber through easily enough. A stack of cardboard boxes had hidden the hole from cursory inspection. As the firearms team had initially been searching for a man, they had missed the hole during their brief attic search. They had also found a bundle of Bank of England notes totalling thirty-five thousand pounds, proceeds of Trent’s crime spree against old people, and four passports in different names. Unfortunately, they had also found the old lady dead next door, stabbed innumerable times.

‘He must have been watching our every move from next door,’ Henry said. ‘Saw us come and go and set up our little sting. If he hadn’t been so greedy, he could’ve walked.’ Donaldson nodded. ‘But he needed the dosh to set up somewhere else … and he couldn’t resist getting one over on me, one of the few people who’ve stood in his way and lived, I guess. This one’s for Danny Furness.’ Henry sighed, reflecting a second.

‘It’s a pity he saw fit to kill the old lady next door,’ Donaldson said. ‘You know — I think I’ll apply for an extradition order for this guy back to the States to stand trial for Mark Tapperman’s murder when you’ve finished with him. Florida is a pleasant little state which still fries its killers. Now there’s one execution I would go and see.’

Henry regarded Donaldson pensively. ‘You’re a bit of an enigma, aren’t you Karl?’

‘Hell, why?’

‘Well, big old friendly Karl, yet you sneak about like a ninja.’ Henry’s eyes narrowed. ‘More to you than meets they eye, isn’t there?’

‘Don’t push it, Henry.’ Donaldson said uncomfortably.

The English detective gave a short titter. ‘I won’t. I probably don’t want to know …’ His mobile phone rang, breaking the slight tension between the two. Henry answered it and within moments his face had darkened, all thoughts about the clandestine activities of his pal gone from his mind. ‘OK, OK … stay there … I’ll be with you in five.’ He finished the call.

‘Problem?’

‘Need a motor.’ Henry looked round and saw PC Fawcett strolling unsuspectingly into the custody office. ‘You still got a plain car?’ Henry pounced.

‘Uh, yeah.’

‘Come on — I need you.’ To Donaldson he said, ‘You too, job on.’

‘Look, I don’t know, I don’t know — it could be summat, it could be nowt. It’s just weird, that’s all.’ The words were spoken by a harassed Troy Costain. ‘You asked me to check out Callum Rourke and that’s what I’ve done, and I’ve ended up followin’ him here, doin’ your dirty work.’

‘OK, well done. Now tell me what happened.’

They were on Shoreside, having met up with Costain following the hurried phone call he’d made a few minutes earlier. They were outside the grounds of the primary school on the perimeter of the estate, a complex of low-rise buildings surrounded by high, anti-vandal painted walls and railings. Henry was talking to Costain in a huddle, the other two, Donaldson and Fawcett, still in the unmarked police car.

‘Uh, well, I don’t know the twat that well, other than the bit o’ smack I’ve dealt him, so I asked about, unobtrusively, like, but no one else seemed to know much about him either.’

‘Just hit the nail on the head, Troy. It’s freezing out here.’

‘Yeah, well, I went and sat outside his house, well down the road a bit, wonderin’ how t’get something on him, y’know — just to please you, because I’d robbed your mum. Then, I dunno, about half an hour ago, there’s no lights on in the house and the front door opens and he sneaks out and starts walking. I think, odd, so I follow him, y’know, in and out of the bushes and all that crap. Dead jumpy he was, always looking back. Could tell he was upta no good … but I like an enigma, and I stick with him and follow him here.’