Nick Oldham - Critical Threat

‘Excuse me, boss,’ the sergeant next to him said, interrupting his thoughts, ‘but are you OK?’

‘Yeah, yeah, why?’

‘It’s just you had a bit of a strange look on your face, that’s all.’

‘I’m fine.’ Henry folded his arms, tilted his head back and tried to relax. There was no point in fretting about anything now. What would be would be. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath through flared nostrils, exhaling slowly and thought, with more than a trace of bitterness, that whilst he was excited to be involved in Operation Enid, the reality was he would have much preferred attending the scene of some grisly murder or other. That was what he really loved doing. He truly believed he had found his niche as a senior investigating officer after years of bouncing around in various detective roles, but other people had other ideas. Obviously.

He was as sure as he could be that he had investigated his last murder.

And that irked him personally, because the key word was ‘investigated’, not ‘solved’. He hadn’t come anywhere near solving it, hadn’t even started investigating it properly.

He uttered a snort of contempt without meaning to, which he covered up with a cough when he opened his eyes and squinted at the sergeant, who was still giving him curious looks.

‘Sure you’re OK, boss?’

‘Yep, yep, fine.’

She regarded Henry as if he were strange.

The uncontrollable snort had been uttered as he had thought about that last murder six months earlier and how things had changed for him in the intervening time …

When he had discourteously flounced from the Race and Diversity training course, he had been eager to get to the scene of the murder, even though he had only the sketchiest of details. Because he believed he had been sidelined and given only dross to do, he was desperate to grab this one by the throat and make it his. He knew he had to get in there quick, take charge and stomp his identity on to the front of the policy book. If he dallied he knew there was the probability of some more favoured detective being handed the job by Dave Anger. He needed to ensure a fait accompli.

He had traded in his trusty Ford Mondeo after Dave Anger had trashed it and bought an almost new Rover 75, which was slotted into a tight space at the far end of the training centre car park. He rushed across the tarmac in a very ungentlemanly fashion, before manoeuvring it out of its spot and speeding out of the headquarters complex, slowing only for the road humps on the drive.

He arrived at the scene within half an hour, having managed to elicit more information en route: a burned body had been found on the edge of a piece of woodland not far from the Kirkham exit of the M55, junction 4. That was really all he needed to prepare himself. The rest he would discover on arrival.

Sitting, eyes shut, in the personnel carrier, Henry could still visualize the body.

He’d had a bit of a run of bodies that had been set alight. There had been the low-life Manchester drug dealer whose charred remains had been found just inside the Lancashire border; then, unconnected, the sad remains of a young girl in the back of a car in Fleetwood which had been torched when her abductors panicked. That had been the work of Louis Vernon Trent, who Henry had hunted down and who now languished in prison serving life following the successful Crown Court trial.

Now this one.

Henry had got results on the first two, but as he looked at what was left of his hat-trick, he had one of those queasy sensations that experienced investigators are prone to, telling him this was not going to be an easy one. No quick glory here, he thought. A hat-trick, maybe, but third time unlucky, too.

At least he could not fault the initial response of the uniformed officers. It had been done by the book. Nothing at all wrong in that. The first cops to arrive had actually done a great job.

As ever, priority had been given to identifying the crime scene itself. In this case it was far wider than just the area immediately around the body. Following directions given, Henry found the entrance to a farm track off the A583, about halfway between junction 4 and the small town of Kirkham. And it was from this entrance that the scene was protected. A few police cars were parked on the main road, including a Scientific Support van. Several white-suited people were hanging about as well as officers in uniform and a guy with a broken shotgun over his arm and a spaniel. Henry pulled in a hundred metres away and walked the rest on foot.

A man broke from the huddle and approached him. It was Rik Dean, a detective sergeant based in Blackpool, and well known to Henry. Rik was one of the good guys and Henry, seeing his potential several years ago, had assisted him to get on CID initially, but his promotion to DS was entirely Rik’s own doing. He was an excellent thief taker and was also proving to be an excellent supervisor, even if he did have an eye for the ladies which sometimes got him into warm water.

‘Henry — glad it’s you.’

They shook hands. ‘What we got, pal?’

Rik turned away from the road and looked across the fields. He pointed. ‘This track — it’s narrow, wide enough for one vehicle at most — leads up to those woods.’ His finger was aimed at what was basically nothing more than a copse in a hollow in the middle of a field, maybe two hundred metres from the road. ‘“Staining Woods”, they’re called. The track here leads to the edge of the trees and the body was discovered ten, fifteen feet inside the perimeter of the trees.’

‘Discovered by?’

‘Local guy hunting foxes on the land — with permission,’ Rik added quickly. ‘Literally stumbled over the body in his wellies. That’s him.’ He indicated the man with the shotgun and dog Henry had already noticed.

‘The body?’

Rik shrugged. ‘Burned to a crisp, almost to the point of breaking up, particularly the legs and arms. Looks like the local wildlife have been having a barbecue.’

‘Male, female?’

‘Hard to say, other than the body’s about five-six, slim, so fair guess is female. No other distinguishing features at the moment.’

‘Been here how long?’ Henry asked, aware he had constructed the question rather like that strange little creature in the Star Wars films.

‘Not too long. Day or so, probably.’

‘OK, let’s have a nosey.’

The lane, and the fields ten metres either side of it, had been cordoned off to preserve any evidence as this was the most likely route the person who had dumped the body would have taken. This meant that Henry — once attired in the obligatory white suit and wellingtons provided by the CSI guys — had to approach by a very circuitous route, through hedges, over dykes and across fields, before even getting to the immediate scene itself.

All this Henry approved of, though one of the things he decided to do as he tramped across a boggy patch was to widen the scene even more.

As Rik had said, the body was lying inside the woodland, in a small depression in the earth.

A tape had been slung from tree to tree around this part of the scene, preventing unauthorized access. A miserable looking PC with a clipboard ensured all details of people coming and going were recorded. A crime scene investigator was down near the body, photographing and videoing busily.

Henry didn’t want to get too close because the fewer who went up to it, the better. Once he was convinced that all the evidence that could be collected had been, then he’d have a closer look. He just wanted to become familiar with the scene, start drawing hypotheses, then pull back and allow the specialists and scientists to get on with their tasks.

‘From what we can gather from the guy who found her, the body had been lying face down in that hollow,’ Rik explained. ‘He’s apparently been chasing a fox on foot with the dog — who’s called Pepper, by the way. The fox has nipped into the woods and the guy’s run after it. The dog, by all accounts, just leapt across the body, while he tripped over it at a fair whack. He’s gone flying, dislodged the body, his shotgun’s gone spinning out of his hands, and he’s ended up on the ground face to face with a screaming skull. Scared the living crap out of him.’