Nick Oldham - Backlash

They parked a hundred metres away from the target premises, out of sight of it, and alighted. Donaldson, Byrne and Taylor slotted in behind Henry as he strode swiftly towards the flat. A minute later they were up the steps, and at the door.

Henry went to one side. Byrne the other. Donaldson and Taylor hung back. Henry tried the door handle which opened and they were inside.

On silent feet all four moved into the short hallway towards the living room. Henry gently opened the door. The back of the tatty settee was facing them and on the settee was a dark figure, totally engrossed in a game show on TV and also cranking up. A belt was wrapped round his left arm, tightened by pulling the end of it with his teeth and he was injecting the bulging vein on the inner elbow with a blood-filled hypodermic.

On a signal, Henry, Byrne and Taylor leapt on the guy. Henry focused on the needle, ensuring it presented no danger. It was over in a few seconds, the man did not have a clue what was happening and within moments he was cuffed, face down, arms up behind his back.

‘Turn him over,’ Henry said excitedly, wanting to see the man he believed had murdered so many people.

They did.

‘What the fuck’s going on here?’ the man demanded to know.

It was Kit Nevison.

Henry was reluctant to take the cuffs off him. By negotiation and threat, Nevison’s hands were re-cuffed across his stomach for more comfort and he was allowed to sit back on the settee on pain of death if he caused trouble. The towering figure of Donaldson brandishing the sledgehammer just in the periphery of Nevison’s vision was sobering enough to keep him sitting there.

‘What are you doing here?’ Henry demanded.

‘I’ve come to see me mate, Davey. I haven’t seen him for months.’

‘David Gill?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you let yourself in?’

‘Yeah, got a key. Couldn’t find it for ages, then I found it today, so I thought I’d come an’ see ’im.’

‘Where is he, then?’

‘I don’t know. Told ya, haven’t sin him for months. I just woke up an’ thought I’d bob round and see if he’d let me in. He’s always bin good for a bit o’ junk.’ He nodded to the needle out of reach on the top of the TV.

‘What d’you mean, you thought you’d see if he’d let you in?’ Henry asked.

‘Er. . well. . I bin round once or twice recently an’ he told me to fuck off through the letterbox. I thought he were ill, like.’ Nevison looked confused. ‘What’s this all about, anyway?’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘No, I fucking don’t,’ Nevison said crossly. ‘Now unless you’re gonna lock me up for somethin’ I haven’t done, tek these fuckin’ things offa me.’ He held out his manacled hands.

‘I want David Gill for murder,’ Henry said, bending close to Nevison’s face. Nevison blinked and thought about the words. Then he was engulfed by racking laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Davey? Murder? He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Soft bugger, soft as shite.’ Nevison roared. ‘He’s a fuckin’ namby-pamby veggie.’

His laughter continued unabated.

Henry stood up straight. He looked at Byrne who, together with Taylor, had done a quick visual search of the flat and found nothing. They shrugged.

‘Shit,’ he breathed. Then he had a thought. ‘Let’s check the garage.’

Kit Nevison was having a whale of a time now. Still laughing fit to burst, he followed the officers out to the garage. His handcuffs had been removed on the understanding that if he tried anything, or did a runner, he would be arrested on suspicion of burglary and possession of controlled drugs and that Donaldson would whack him across the back of his head with the sledgehammer.

The garage was in the middle of a row of about a dozen. Most of them were unused with broken and twisted doors or none at all. Only a couple, including Gill’s, had locked up-and-over doors on them. It was very well secured with padlocks on either side of the door. Without the necessary keys, the officers resorted to force. Donaldson, who was itching to get swinging with the sledgehammer, smashed the padlocks off with perfectly aimed blows.

‘Very good,’ Henry congratulated him. He pushed the top of the door and up it went. There was no electric light inside, so four torch beams criss-crossed the interior. Not much inside. A powerful motorbike with a helmet on the seat and a large chest freezer along the back wall.

‘Is the bike Gill’s?’ Henry asked Nevison.

‘Never sin it before.’

‘Don’t touch it,’ Henry instructed everyone. He recalled that around the time of Louise Graveson’s murder in Cheshire, a motorcyclist had been seen in the area. Henry walked round the bike and went to the freezer. Although Henry, in his married days, had had a chest freezer in the garage, it seemed odd to have one in this garage. It wasn’t as though it was an easy trip to get frozen food back up to the flat, especially in wet weather.

‘Is this his?’ Henry asked Nevison, pointing at the freezer.

‘Yeah — he, uh, sometimes does a bit of rustling.’

‘Rustling?’

‘Uh — yeah, gets lamb and stuff sometimes from a mate he has in Rossendale who works at an abattoir.’

‘Right,’ said Henry, unimpressed. ‘What about this motorbike?’

Nevison looked doubtfully at it. ‘No, his was a knackered thing. This is too new. That’s his van, though.’ Nevison pointed to a Transit van parked behind the flats.

‘OK,’ said Henry. He went to the freezer, tried to pull the lid up. It was locked and he could not budge it.

‘Sledgehammer,’ he called.

Donaldson responded. He lined himself up in front of the freezer, worked out the necessary upwards trajectory he would need and swung the sledgehammer, catching the freezer lock perfectly, springing it and making the lid fly open to reveal the contents inside, illuminated by a light in the lid.

Henry stared, horrified. The others crowded in behind him and looked over his shoulder.

There were several frozen legs of lamb and beef joints, obviously David Gill’s rustling booty — and there was also Mark Evans’ body, folded at the knees, lying on top of another body. The detective’s throat had been sliced open and copious amounts of blood had run and frozen over the body below. At first Henry thought it was Jane Roscoe, but on closer inspection he saw it was the body of a man.

‘Come and have a look in here,’ Henry said to Nevison.

Warily, the big man approached the freezer. Henry shone his torch onto the horror-frozen face of the man at the bottom of the chest.

‘Wauh — fuck,’ Nevison said, appalled and recoiling.

‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Davey — Davey Gill, me mate.’

‘Anybody got a hairdryer? I’ll never be able to get this guy’s prints while his hands are frozen solid like this,’ the scenes-of-crime officer shouted, leaning over the edge of the chest freezer. ‘Need to get a bit of thawing done.’

Police activity was intense in and around David Gill’s flat and garage. Lights had been erected to illuminate the garage. The macabre task of lifting Mark Evans’ frozen body out of the freezer had been carried out. He was now zipped up in a bodybag waiting for the hearse to turn up and take him to the mortuary.

Four hours since the discovery of the crime scene, Henry was still pacing up and down, directing operations. He stopped and watched as Evans’ body was carried out past him, the bag, literally, containing a stiff. Byrne and Taylor had looked at the other rigid body and neither had been able to identify it positively as David Gill, the man whom Taylor had arrested all those months before. Taylor said the corpse looked ‘familiar’, but seeing him frozen solid it was difficult to say yeah or nay. Cops at Blackpool dealt with thousands of lock-ups like Gill, and PC Taylor said he could hardly even recall arresting him. Byrne remembered cautioning him, but again, he was one of dozens he had dealt with that night in the custody office. Henry was waiting for a photograph to turn up but it could be a long wait. Photographs tend to enter the system with less precision than fingerprints, and it was not unknown for them to get lost or mislaid.