Nick Oldham - Big City Jacks

Henry knew Renata, just as he knew Roy and the rest of the Costain family, which had a notorious and fearful reputation in Blackpool. He had encountered Renata a couple of times. Young though she was, she dallied on the periphery of the main activities of the Costains; bit of a shoplifter, bit of an assaulter on other girls, bit of an old-lady mugger. Her future was pretty much mapped out: crime, unwanted pregnancies, abuse. . probably. Who was Henry to say? Maybe she would have turned her back on it all, become respectable.

Whatever, her death was a tragic waste. Henry hated it when young people died.

Standing upright, he turned. Looking north up Dickson Road he saw the figure of a man hurtle across the road as though his life depended on it.

‘Mr Christie?’

Henry’s puzzlement about what he had seen was curtailed by the appearance of the local road policing sergeant. But before he could respond to the officer, another figure raced across the road, as though in pursuit of the first one.

‘Boss?’

Henry’s attention twisted to the sergeant. ‘Yep?’

‘Can we get the body moved now?’

‘I think so, yeah. . I need to speak to the officers in the vehicle which chased this one as soon as; but before that I’ll need to contact your divisional commander and my super. Both will want to have a handle on this,’ he said, ever so slightly troubled by the image of the dark shapes running across the road. Why he was affected, he could not really say. Blackpool is Blackpool, he thought wryly, one of the weirdest places on planet earth. He shrugged. Bollocks to it. He had more on his plate to think about than two idiots running around town in the early hours.

Renata’s dead, but wide-open eyes seemed to catch his, sending a shiver down his spine.

‘We’ll catch him, lass,’ Henry said under his breath, ‘but you shouldn’t have been here in the first place.’

As he walked back round the Escort, something in the glint of the streetlights reflecting on the front windscreen made him stop. He stopped, puzzled, eyebrows meshing together.

The sergeant, who had been standing next to him, saw the hesitation.

‘Summat up, boss?’

Henry tilted his head, peering at the windscreen. Above the domed bulge made by the impact of Renata’s head in the glass, just on the edge of the screen, he had spotted something unusual. ‘What is that?’ He pointed.

The sergeant followed the line of the pointed finger, then his own eyes widened. He stepped in for closer inspection.

‘Well,’ he drawled without too much commitment, ‘I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it, but I’d say it was a bullet hole.’

The close proximity of cops just down the road made Lynch uncomfortable. Justifiably so. After all, he had blasted someone to death in an alleyway not very far away from a dozen boys in blue.

After shooting Snell, he had dragged his body to one side, to lie in shadow, then returned to the guest house.

The police were very busy, dealing with what looked like a nasty accident. Blue lights, ambulances, the works. But Lynch, though uneasy, smirked: not half as nasty as the ‘accident’ in the dark alley behind the prom, prom, prom.

As he crossed back over Dickson Road, he was tense, but exhilarated.

He made it unscathed.

At the guest house, Bignall was lying in Snell’s recently vacated room, bleeding from the wound to the upper arm inflicted by the fleeing thief. He had ripped a dirty bedsheet into strips, then bound the injury with it, afterwards slumping weakly on to the metal-framed bed, pale, dithering. Blood seeped through the grubby material like spilled ink on blotting paper. He attempted to sit up when Lynch returned, but did not have the strength.

‘Not good,’ the wounded man rasped. ‘Not good at all.’

‘You’ll be right,’ Lynch breezed without concern. ‘Bloody body armour didn’t do you much good, did it? Anyway — look! Success!’ He held the blue sports bag aloft triumphantly. ‘Got the dosh back.’

‘Great.’ Bignall winced with pain. ‘I need a quack. I think I’m bleeding to death.’

‘Rubbish,’ sneered Lynch. ‘I’ll get you to one when we get back, OK?’

‘Did you shoot him?’

‘Right between the shoulder blades,’ Lynch nodded. ‘Went down like a sack of spuds.’

Bignall shuddered. He knew he was involved in a deadly game now, but just how ruthless and nasty it was, was only just dawning on him as he lay there feeling strength ebb out of him. It had just spiralled out of control and suddenly he felt very foolish and vulnerable. Shit, shit, shit, his mind whirred. Get me out of this now.

‘We need to get him back to Manchester.’

‘Who?’

‘Snell.’

‘Why?’

Lynch looked despairingly at his wounded partner in crime. ‘Control. . it needs to be controlled and we can only do that if his body turns up within the environs of the city. . yeah?’

‘Fuck!’ Bignall muttered. A searing pain radiated out from his arm. ‘Hell!’ he grimaced, gritting his teeth.

‘And there’s no way on God’s earth that you can see a doctor around here, mate. That needs controlling, too. Fancy getting bloody shot!’

‘Yeah, fancy. Just what I wanted. How the hell am I going to explain this away?’

‘We’ll think of something.’ Lynch’s nostrils flared as his mind cogitated. ‘Let’s get Snell-boy sorted first.’

Henry took a great deal of wicked pleasure in telephoning Detective Superintendent Dave Anger. He left it until the last possible moment when he thought he could get away with it. . then rang him.

It was five thirty a.m.

He had waited at the scene of the accident after Renata’s dead body had been removed to the mortuary and then until the local rota garage had turned up to remove both cars. He watched the vehicles being pulled apart with an ugly-sounding tearing of metal, then winched into place on the back of the recovery truck. He knew the garage had a secure compound in which the cars would be stored. He instructed the recovery driver to ensure that no one, other than himself and crime scene investigators, had access to the cars. Henry wanted to see if a bullet could be dug out of the stolen Escort.

He phoned Anger as the fully loaded recovery vehicle was driving away. It was a very satisfying moment to hear the sleep-jumbled voice at the other end of the line.

Just following orders.

Well in that case, Mr Anger, I’ll follow them to the letter, Henry thought.

His smile was warped as the conversation ended and Henry folded up his mobile phone.

‘Right,’ he then said to himself, suddenly feeling a chill from the Irish Sea. ‘Let’s go and knock on a door.’

Lynch and Bignall drove across the breadth of Lancashire and back into the Greater Manchester area without incident. Both men were at cracking point on the journey, not surprising as the dead body of Keith Snell, low-level low life, was folded up neatly inside the boot of their motor, covered by an oily blanket. One pull by a curious cop, one pull by a cop who wasn’t impressed by their credentials, would have ended the game for them there and then. Such a cop would have found a murder victim, the best part of 25,000, an injured passenger, a revolver and a shotgun. It would have made the cop’s career.

But their journey was uninterrupted and no cops were even spotted.

Lynch, at the wheel, mumbled angrily to himself for much of the way. He was annoyed at having to heave Snell’s body into the boot of the car with no assistance from his partner, who claimed that his injury prevented him from doing anything other than sitting there like a spare part, or as Lynch said, ‘Spare prat.’

As spindly and light as Snell might have been, he still seemed to weigh a dead ton. Manoeuvring, dragging and heaving him into the car required a lot of effort and more time than Lynch would have liked to spend on the job.