Nick Oldham - Critical Threat

Henry was tempted to knock the beam off Carradine’s face as he crossed the room, and was glad to see the DI cringe back slightly as he came within striking distance. Obviously Henry’s body language was pumping out ‘beware’ vibes. However, he did nothing nor said anything, but pushed past the three of them, getting a muted ‘Sorry, mate’ from Rik, and stalked into the corridor. He had only gone a few yards when Anger called, ‘Henry.’ He stopped abruptly and revolved slowly as Anger strolled up to him, a half-smile on his twisted lips.

‘You don’t seriously think you’d have won, do you?’ he said derisively. ‘I’m part of a gang, you know.’ His eyebrows arched. ‘You, on the other hand, are just a minion, a nobody, nothing.’

‘Whatever,’ Henry said.

‘So let’s let bygones be bygones, eh? There’ll be no need for us to cross paths any more. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Anger’s face froze. ‘I’ll fuckin’ crush you, Henry,’ he said almost conversationally, ‘if you don’t let this go. I promise you.’

‘Your little army going to do your bidding?’

‘I will destroy you if I have to.’

‘Oh, stop talking like Lex Luther. What you need,’ Henry said, ‘is an anger management course.’ It was something he’d been longing to say to the DCS, but when it came out it sounded limp and pointless under the circumstances.

‘I haven’t heard that one before,’ Anger said mirthlessly.

Even so, Henry made himself laugh as he turned and set off down the corridor again, head held high, feeling the pierce of Anger’s blazing eyes burning like lasers between his shoulder blades.

Outside in the car park it was cold and dark and all he wanted to do was scream at the moon.

Instead, he went and sat in his car, engine idling, heater blowing, churning it all over, wondering how best to progress. He wasn’t certain how long he sat there, but it was a good length of time — long enough for him to watch Anger, Carradine and Rik leave after, Henry guessed, their briefing from the pathologist.

A knock on the driver’s window made him jump. In his reverie, Keira O’Connell had somehow approached his car without him seeing her. She had tapped on the glass. He opened the window and she bent down to speak.

‘I noticed you sitting there.’

‘Yep.’

‘I can’t believe you drive a Rover 75,’ she mocked him. ‘Bit stereotypical, isn’t it?’

‘I used to be Mondeo man before this.’

There was beat of silence.

‘I believe you’ve been replaced.’

With a sigh, he nodded.

‘That was short lived.’

‘I’m afraid if I open my mouth I’ll say something I’ll regret and shock you. I’m presently biting my tongue so hard it might bleed.’

‘If you fancy a bit of a diatribe, I’m a good listener and I’m parched, too.’

‘Well, I’m not sure what one of those is, but I could do with letting off steam and I know just the thing for dryness — the Fox and Grapes just round the corner.’

Henry spent an hour in the company of the professor in the pub. During that time he selfishly overpowered her with an unrelenting barrage of his tales of woe and frustration. It was a tirade not designed to woo or even remotely impress a woman. All thoughts along those lines had been banished by his contretemps with Dave Anger anyway. Once again, Henry was furious with everyone and anything and Professor O’Connell sat opposite him like a patient sponge, soaking in everything he chucked at her with a wry smile and an occasional ‘Oh, no’ delivered at an appropriate moment. Even if she wasn’t interested, she gave the appearance of being so — at least for a while.

It was only when her eyes glazed over and she took a surreptitious peek at her watch that Henry realized she was probably bored rigid and he had missed an opportunity, should he have wished it to be one. He had broken the cardinal sin of seduction, or so he’d read in one of the tabloids recently: ‘Get them to talk about themselves, get them to laugh, and you’re on to a sure thing.’

Henry — so self-obsessed and selfish — had done neither. When she politely thanked him for the drink, then got up and walked — again, politely — out of his life, he kicked himself.

Losing my touch, he thought as he finished his pint, sidled back to the bar and ordered another Stella with a Jack Daniel’s chaser. He returned to his seat and found it had been snaffled, so mumbling and pulling his face, he squeezed himself into a corner with a chest-high shelf. He sipped his drinks, stone-faced and brooding, and even the thought of the substantive promotion did not appease him, though he had achieved the goal of pension enhancement.

‘Special Projects,’ he mused glumly. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ To the best of his knowledge it was a rag-tag bunch of individuals no one else wanted who were tasked to run projects no one wanted to touch.

Henry knew the writing had been on the wall for some time. Now it was confirmed: his career as a detective was over.

‘Fuck ’em,’ he said out loud, drawing looks of apprehension from other customers, several of whom made space for a bloke who was obviously deranged, a prime example of the social mistake that was ‘care in the community’.

Special Projects wasn’t so bad for anyone who enjoyed sloshing around in the ‘corporate pool’ — that sad bunch of people who had been shelved by the force. He was given a refurbished office in one corner of an otherwise open-plan office on the top floor of headquarters with no windows and lots of artificial light. From his enclave he could observe his new team. They consisted of a mixed bag who had, for various reasons (none positive), been thrown together after having been batted round from department to department and were generally, and often unfairly, referred to as ‘the sick, lame, lazy and loony’.

He tried not to compare them to the characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , because he felt tarred with the same brush.

Their work consisted of steering various projects from conception to completion — mostly tedious, unsexy ones, all about as dry as birdseed — as well as quality assuring operational orders.

As far as Henry was concerned, there was one saving grace: being a headquarters ‘shiny-arsed bastard’, he made sure his name was on as many call-out rotas for weekends as possible, which meant he could still keep in touch with the real world of policing and detectives.

Which was how he had ended up sitting in an increasingly stuffy personnel carrier at an unearthly hour in Accrington, waiting to raid a property which might, or might not, have some loose connection with terrorism.

He had received the phone call at 8 p.m. the previous evening. Knowing he was on the rota for that weekend, he had not drunk anything for almost forty-eight hours and was experiencing some dithery withdrawal symptoms as he sat down with Kate to watch the typical mind-numbing Sunday evening TV fare. That she was on her third glass of Blossom Hill red, and it looked like the bottle was going to be demolished and she was showing signs of becoming frisky, did not help matters. But he knew it would be the next evening before he could even think about having a drink. Sex, on the other hand, was a possibility.

In truth, the call-out was not totally unexpected. There had been rumours of a big Special Branch op, but as Henry was no longer part of the inner sanctum, that’s how they remained to him — just rumours.

The SB detective superintendent had telephoned to turn him out. The tone of the man’s voice made it clear to Henry that he was only making up numbers. ‘Someone’s gone sick, someone else is unobtainable and you’re the only one left, so you’ll have to do,’ the guy might as well have said.