Nick Oldham - Critical Threat

Instinctively Sanjay knew he was looking into the eyes of Sabera’s husband.

Sabera lay bound and gagged, trussed up in the duvet cover. She remained unmoving, trying now to stay calm and concentrate on her breathing, which was proving extremely difficult through the parcel tape wrapped tightly around her face. Her mouth was clamped shut by it and she could just about inhale through one nostril. Even that was not easy as the duvet cover prevented a free flow of air.

Then she started to cry when she thought about Sanjay and what might have happened to him. If he had been harmed, and she was sure he would have been — because it was the way things were — then it was all her fault for recklessly involving him in her stupid, ill-conceived life.

Sobs wracked her body, but it was as difficult to cry as it was to breathe.

And now here she was tied up in the boot of a car, travelling quickly on straight roads — motorways. Had to be. M1 out of London, then on to the M6, heading to the northwest.

Back home.

She began to cry for herself.

Henry Christie had not been having a good time of things recently. Having been harassed and threatened by his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Anger, over what should have been a long-buried personal matter (Henry had slept with Anger’s wife when she hadn’t been his wife many years before), Henry had handed the guy’s head on a plate, metaphorically speaking, to the chief constable. The side dish had included secretly taken video footage of Anger trashing Henry’s trusty Mondeo with a metal bar.

But the organization he worked for — Lancashire Constabulary — had done its usual job of dithering, stalling, ‘umming’ and ‘ahhing’ and doing nothing, which it often did in such touchy circumstances. So by default of its inaction, the victim ended up suffering whilst the perpetrator was allowed to carry on, business as usual, and the organization tried to brush the whole sorry mess under the chief’s carpet in order not to lose face. Henry thought that there must have been a lot of such bumps under that carpet that no one seemed to have the bottle to stamp on.

What surprised him the most was his own pathetic naivety. He had actually believed that something would be done, that the firm would grasp the nettle, show that it wasn’t afraid to address such matters and the offender would get his just desserts and find himself demoted or transferred or fined or prosecuted or jobless even … whatever … and that the innocent party — in this case, Henry James Christie — would be allowed to continue operating as a senior investigating officer on the Force Major Incident Team knowing that the wheels of justice were grinding away.

Wrong.

Eventually, when nothing happened, when no one from Professional Standards contacted him, when no one from Human Resources offered him a shoulder to cry on, he took to his local and at the bar had a series of good, long bourbons until he ended up cackling with hysterical laughter at himself and had to be asked to leave because he was frightening the other customers.

Six months down the line, the offending chief superintendent was still at the helm of FMIT in his cushy headquarters office with a nice, leafy view of the sports field, whilst Henry was still on the team sitting in his satellite office (‘office’ being a euphemism for ‘cubby hole’) at Blackpool Central Police Station finding his position completely untenable.

He should have known they would close ranks. They always did at that level, rather like the three musketeers — or was it the ten masons? It was made known to him, with some subtlety, via informal inter-force chat lines and bog gossip, that he would not be getting a decent job anywhere again and that it was actually poor Dave Anger who was the victim of a spiteful, unprofessional, unbalanced inspector who was at best unreliable and at worst a dangerous liability who used force resources — unauthorized — to further his ridiculous claims. But these were only whispers, of course. Nothing on paper, zero said to his face. They were a powerful bunch, the chief supers, especially when threatened.

And then came the news that completely floored Henry, making him immediately request an interview with the chief constable — something that proved almost as tough as getting an audience with the Pope.

‘Why do you want to see him?’ the chief’s staff officer had barked down Henry’s mobile phone in response to the email request Henry had sent. Henry knew that the staff officer was a filter for all emails to the chief and that he would try to block anything he could. The chief was a busy man and liked to avoid as much work as possible.

‘Personal,’ Henry said shortly. He had no time for this newly-appointed little jerk of a chief inspector, a jobsworth who had far greater career prospects than Henry had ever had. ‘Why?’

‘He needs to know.’

‘I expect he’ll have an inkling.’

‘An inkling isn’t good enough.’

‘I’ll tell him when I see him … as I recall, I’m not obliged to put it on paper if it’s a personal matter.’

‘You haven’t even put it on paper.’

‘Print out the email,’ Henry suggested.

‘I mean a typed, signed request on form G43,’ the chief inspector qualified, getting shirty.

‘I’ll have it to you in ten minutes.’

‘Eh? And how will you achieve that?’ said the chief inspector, now a little flustered.

‘Ways ’n’ means,’ Henry said, and thumbed the end-call button on his phone. ‘Ways ’n’ means,’ he said to himself grimly.

The staff officer, whose name was Laker, had obviously expected Henry to be in his office in Blackpool. He was actually at the headquarters training centre on a two-day Race and Diversity course for middle managers, having a mid-morning coffee break in the main dining room. He swigged down his bitter, machine-brewed latte and rose from the circle of other course participants gathered glumly around the table and strutted out to the student resource room next to the training centre reception. He sat down at a free computer and logged in to the system. He opened a word document and bashed out a short, pithy request, hammering the keyboard with his bitten fingertips, hoping that his frustration would pass itself from key to letter. He then printed it off, signed it, logged out.

As he left reception, he passed his shell-shocked classmates trooping back for the next session about transsexuals in the workplace and how to manage them. He could not even be bothered to ask one of them to apologize to the trainer on his behalf for his non-appearance.

He wended his way across the grounds, through the leafy trees and down by the side of the former student accommodation block which had been converted into offices to house the headquarters section of FMIT some years before.

He knew that Detective Chief Superintendent Anger was still sitting pretty in his first-floor office, and it made him shiver, propelling him into a short power-walk across the path that dissected the sports pitches outside headquarters and led directly to its front door. The automatic sliding doors opened and he passed through something resembling an air lock on a space ship into the foyer where he haughtily ignored the receptionist and bore left to the stairs, which doglegged up to the first floor. A man on a mission. He swiped his cardkey through the machine and he was granted access on to the corridor off which all the chief officers had their hidey-holes.

It was the only wide corridor in the building, the only one in which it was possible to pass shoulder to shoulder with someone without having to stand aside and let them pass. The only carpeted one that did not creak. Even those thoughts drew a snarl of contempt on Henry’s face. As much as he despised it in himself, he could not stop himself from growing more bitter all the time.