Nick Oldham - Critical Threat

Henry swallowed, wondering what the hell was happening here. Was she giving him a come-on? Was she toying with him? Or was he, as usual, living in a fantasy world?

Just in case, he kept his lips tightly closed. The worst thing he could do now was to make a flirty remark to a pretty deputy chief constable because he’d misread the signals. That would truly curtail his career.

She gave a half-grin which he found extremely alluring and it was all he could do not to say anything stupid.

‘What I mean is … I’ll see what I can do for you … I want the people who work for me to be totally committed, not cruising, not put somewhere because that’s the only place there is. I do have some clout as a DCC, even if I am a woman … so I’ll look out for you, if that’s OK.’

‘I get your drift,’ he said with relief. His dithering hand picked up his mug and he took a swig of coffee.

One week later

The man was dead — that was for sure. The almost perfectly formed circular bullet hole about the diameter of a five-pence piece just above the bridge of his nose was a good clue. The additional fact that the bullet had then somersaulted through his cranium like a mad circus acrobat on speed, then exited spectacularly out of the back, taking with it a mush of skull and brain, splattering it all over the wall, was a further, even more conclusive clue.

Even a no-good detective could have deduced that, in all probability, and ruling out suicide, this man had been murdered.

Whilst a very rusty Henry Christie was painfully aware of his limitations — and strengths — as an investigator, he knew he was a few rungs above ‘no-good’.

He was confident he would quickly pull together a few known facts, mesh them loosely with a fairly bog standard hypothesis, and come to some early conclusions. All good, routine stuff, which could easily kick-start a murder investigation and get detectives knocking on, or kicking down, a few doors sooner rather than later. Although Henry knew his resources would be severely limited on this one, he had a strip of confidence in him about it which boded well.

He checked his watch, 02:35, mentally logging the time because his arrival at the scene was crucially important. He had known some seemingly rock-solid cases dither at subsequent court hearings just because a sloppy SIO couldn’t remember what time he’d arrived at the crime scene. Evidentially it didn’t usually matter that much, but an uncertain SIO gave a good defence lawyer something to chew on and spit out: if the SIO couldn’t recall exactly the time, what did it say about the rest of the evidence, hm? It was one of those simple things easily overlooked in the vortex of a murder inquiry. And Henry, who knew he’d be under the microscope on this one, as ever, wasn’t about to make mistakes by forgetting the bread and butter.

The call-out had come at 1.15 a.m.

Henry had been at home with his ex-wife, Kate, and the evening had ended on a high note.

Both daughters were out with friends and boyfriends, leaving the parents to their own devices for a change. They had sat through a triple dose of soap operas with Henry whining his way through them, annoying Kate by constantly asking about plotlines and characters and grunting angrily at the ridiculous things they did. ‘Why the hell don’t they just go to another pub?’ was one of his gripes. ‘That way they wouldn’t keep meeting people they didn’t like, would they?’

‘Dear, it’s drama,’ Kate had said irritably. ‘If they did that, there wouldn’t be anything to watch, would there?’

However, when Crimewatch UK came on at nine, he called for hush, sat glued to the screen and refused to speak because this was ‘his’ programme. It didn’t seem to matter he had spoiled her viewing.

Actually, Crimewatch wasn’t something he watched regularly. He found it made him angry at the bad things people could do to each other through either passion, perversion or profit, and even though he had been steel-hardened over the years, some of the reconstructions made him queasy and furious at the same time, particularly those in which lone women or old people were the targets.

However, Henry had a vested interest in that evening’s edition of the show because he’d heard that Dave Anger was taking a starring role to make an appeal about the unsolved murder of a female whose body had been burned to a crisp in the countryside near Blackpool — Henry’s last job as an SIO, the one Dave Anger had gleefully snatched from under his nose and handed to DI Carradine, one of his sycophants.

And they hadn’t solved it. Ha! Six months down the line and they hadn’t got anywhere and as much as Henry liked justice to be done, he did have a smug look on his face as he watched Anger make an appeal for information to the great British public.

‘Your expression is extremely irritating,’ Kate informed him, sipping from a recently poured glass of Blossom Hill red, her favourite.

‘It’s one of superiority … now if you don’t mind, I’m listening.’

There wasn’t a reconstruction of the crime as such because there wasn’t much to reconstruct, but the crime scene itself was shown and a few theories were put forward, but it was all clutching at straws in the vain hope that someone, somewhere might have spotted something.

‘Be lucky to get anything,’ Henry said gruffly. ‘Should’ve kept me on it … their loss,’ he finished with a sneer.

Kate muttered something disparaging and Henry shot her a look.

Back in the studio they cut to Dave Anger, sweating profusely under the hot lights.

‘Look at the twat,’ Henry had muttered, getting a punch on the arm. There were actually some things of interest which could help to identify the victim, Henry had to grudgingly admit.

First there was an unusual pendant on a twisted gold chain which had been found on the victim’s body. ‘No it wasn’t,’ Henry said, puzzled, wondering where it had appeared from. If anyone watching knew the victim, they might have seen it dangling around her neck. Henry generously upped his estimate of the number of calls they might receive — from zero to two — and was still mystified where the jewellery had appeared from. It definitely had not been on the woman’s body.

Next along was a facial reconstruction, a bust of the dead woman’s head and shoulders on a plinth, which Anger revealed with a flourish. Constructed by some whizzo scientist at a university, it was of a woman of Asian descent, who, in life, had probably been a stunner.

‘Maybe they’ll get a few more calls,’ Henry conceded.

The final piece of information that Anger revealed was that the bones of the dead woman had been geologically examined and from their mineral content it had been established that she had been brought up in Blackburn, Lancashire. It was a stunning piece of analytical wizardry carried out by another university, which had the presenters cooing appreciatively and which, Henry had to acknowledge, was a huge step forward in the investigation. A clincher, maybe.

His expression altered to one of jealousy. ‘Bastards!’

Three superb bits of evidence. A piece of unusual jewellery, a face and a place.

On the phone lines behind Anger, Henry spotted a cluster of high-ranking Lancashire detectives wearing headsets, ready to answer calls — something they studiously avoided in the real world. He guessed they’d all trooped to London with first-class train tickets and knew that once the phone lines had closed, they’d all probably be hitting Spearmint Rhino, consuming much beer and curry … and the idea consumed him, ate him up. It was his job. Snatched away. His face tightened enviously. He should be down there getting shit-faced, not them.