Nick Oldham - Big City Jacks

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A smile spread wide across Henry’s face when he saw that the person opening up was Troy Costain. The smile was only fleeting and morphed into Henry’s best funereal and serious expression.

‘What?’ Troy asked cautiously. He knew Henry very well and did not trust him. He was forking Pot Noodle into his mouth from a tub in his hand. It smelled awful, looked awful and sounded awful.

Henry sensed Troy’s tension. It made him feel good. He liked to keep these people on the back foot.

‘Troy, mate, I need to come in and speak.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Troy sneered. ‘Cops don’t walk into this house without warrants.’

Henry stifled a chortle. He was always amused by the widespread misconception held by most members of the criminal fraternity, even the ones who purported to know the law, that the police only had the power to enter premises brandishing a warrant. Henry could rhyme off at least a dozen powers under which a cop could lawfully bundle into someone’s house and cause havoc.

‘Troy,’ Henry began patiently. ‘Mate, let me and my fellow officer in. You are not in trouble, but you and your mum and dad need to know something, something about Roy and Renata.’

Troy seemed to relax slightly. ‘Mum and Dad are in Spain.’

‘Who’s in charge, then?’ Henry asked, aware that no one was ever really in charge of this house. Theirs was a world of anarchy.

‘Me,’ Troy boasted.

‘The family’s in safe hands, then,’ Henry guffawed. ‘Let me in, then, Mr Responsible Adult. This is serious stuff.’

Troy and Henry had a little eyeball-to-eyeball competition then, just for a few moments until Troy relented and looked away.

‘OK, what have the little shits been up to. .?’ Troy’s words stopped suddenly. He and Henry had a lot of history between them, as well as a lot of up-to-date dealings, so Troy knew Henry’s status in the police. ‘You still an SIO?’ he asked Henry, who nodded. Troy gulped. ‘So what have they been up to?’

‘Let me come in and I’ll explain.’

Keith Snell took a long time to catch fire. Lynch doused him thoroughly with petrol from a plastic can he had just bought from a twenty-four-hour service station. He flicked a lighted match on the dead body he’d had to drag out of the boot. The trousers ignited quite well, but for some reason the upper part of the body did not get going. The two extra matches he threw down extinguished themselves before they even touched the body.

‘Fucking weather,’ Lynch cursed and added more fuel. He almost set himself alight as he splashed more and more petrol around.

Even then, Keith Snell did not burn well.

‘Too fucking riddled with drugs,’ Lynch muttered, flinging match after match at the body which refused to burn. ‘Come on you wiry bastard.’

Flames flickered uncertainly, then there was a restrained whoosh and they began to lick Snell: lick, burn and take hold.

‘Thank fuck for that.’ Lynch turned and trudged back to the car in which Bignall was ensconced, the agony of the gunshot wound increasing incessantly as he faded in and out of consciousness.

The knock on the door had roused various members of the clan from all points of the household and several faces showed themselves, none friendly. Henry’s ears caught a few under-the-breath obscenities. He decided to ignore them. Troy led the two detectives into the living room, adorned gypsy fashion with horse brasses, intricate ornaments, figurines and a lot of sepia photographs of distant relatives. The Costains claimed a line back to Romany gypsies, but Henry had to be convinced. He thought it was just a clever ploy to use when they got discriminated against, which was quite often.

In the lounge, a teenage girl was splayed out on the deep, black leather settee, dressed in a micro-nightie and nothing else. She left the room unwillingly when Troy jerked his thumb at her. She flounced out, offended, displaying what Henry could only describe as a ‘pert little bottom’.

‘Sit,’ Troy said generously with an open wave of his hand.

‘You too, Troy,’ Henry said, easing down into an armchair.

‘OK — fire away,’ yawned Troy, scratching his head with his fork, then plunging it back into the Pot Noodle. Rik Dean’s disgusted face said it all. ‘What’ve they done? Murdered somebody?’

‘No. . they were in a stolen car, a Ford Escort, nicked earlier from Manchester,’ Henry explained, seeing Troy tighten up ever so slightly. Henry had built a career on responding to body language and he immediately knew that Troy was not surprised by this news. He had interacted with Troy many times over the years and felt he particularly knew Troy’s non-verbals. He could tell that he knew something about the stolen car. He paused.

‘And. .?’ said Troy.

‘There was a chase and an accident, I’m afraid.’ Troy’s face drained to the grey colour of the noodles he was devouring. ‘We think Roy is OK. He legged it from the scene.’ Again, Henry paused. Delivering a death message was never easy, even when there was no real sympathy. He had been doing it since the age of nineteen and it never got easier. ‘I’m afraid Renata did not make it. She was killed in the collision. She is dead.’ Henry said the words forcefully because he had learned that people had to be told that a person was dead. Not passed away. Not lost. Not gone to a better place. Not couched in any other term but dead. Otherwise the recipients often hung on to this in the hope that they were being told something different. They had to be told it unambiguously.

‘In a collision with a cop car?’

‘No — a taxi.’

‘So the cops were chasing them and now Renata’s dead!’

‘They were in a stolen car,’ Rik Dean interjected quickly, bristling.

‘And the cops killed her,’ Troy said fiercely, brandishing his tub of Pot Noodle.

‘This is a mess.’ The mahogany-coloured Nigerian doctor examined the wound in Bignall’s upper arm. ‘He needs surgery.’

Pacing up and down behind him, Lynch spun ferociously. ‘I didn’t bring him here for you to tell me that. You’re on the payroll, get him fixed the best you can.’

Bignall, in a haze of disorientation, was in no position to make any sort of contribution to the debate. He did not know where he was, what was going on, who the hell these people were. . nothing. All he knew was pain and sickness. He wanted to die.

‘He needs blood. . he’s lost a lot. . he needs to be on an operating table. . I think he could be bleeding internally,’ the doctor said. ‘I can give him something for the pain. I can bandage it up, but he needs a surgeon to look at this.’

‘You do it.’

‘What with — a knife and fork? I have no facilities, don’t you see?’ he pleaded.

‘Sort him,’ Lynch said brutally. ‘Patch him up, drug him up. .’ He relented a little. ‘Then let’s think about getting him operated on.’

The doctor paused thoughtfully, then, in a caring way which transgressed his hypocritical oath by 100 per cent, he said, ‘It’ll cost a grand.’

‘Then you’d better do a bloody good job, hadn’t you?’

Henry had been in this position before. Right in the middle of a grieving Costain family, with lots of wailing, moaning, shouting, cursing and gnashing.

On hearing the news about Renata, even more family members seemed to appear out of the woodwork. Where they had all been previously secreted mystified Henry. He had once been on safari in Kenya with Kate in the pre-child days (following a massive paycheck during the 1984 miners’ strike) and their tour bus had got stuck in mud in the middle of nowhere. There had not been a soul in sight, just vast plains of emptiness and wild animals. But within minutes the bus was surrounded by kids and adults, all eager to assist for a small consideration. Henry had been astounded and it was rather like that with the Costains. They just appeared from nowhere. He could only guess at what the sleeping arrangements were.

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