Nick Oldham - Bad Tidings

Oxford led the two detectives around the perimeter of the unit, using the route that everyone attending would now have to follow. Reaching the office door, he stood aside and let Henry and Rik sidle past him.

Henry stood at the threshold and let his eyes do the walking, as he experienced the strange feeling of dread and excitement that always engulfed him at such a scene.

In terms of an office, there was a desk and a chair and a laptop computer but little else. The walls were bare. His eyes roved. He saw the rucksack propped against the wall, a stack of clothes, the Primus stove with a small saucepan on top of it. There was half a loaf of bread, some cans of soup, a cheap- looking kettle, a carton of milk, a jar of coffee and a mug. Two newspapers were folded up next to two pillows. There was also a small two-bar electric heater of a type he had not seen for years, and a couple of raggy-looking blankets and a stack of clothes.

Someone had been living here, hiding out.

And that person now lay splayed like the letter X on an unzipped sleeping bag on the cold office floor. The head wound was dreadful. The entry of the bullet on the right side of the face was about the size of a five pence piece, the exit wound on the left had removed about a quarter of the skull, most of which was splattered against the office wall. The sight made Henry’s lips twitch. Even so, the man was easily identifiable. And very obviously dead.

‘Jeepers,’ Rik said. He was looking over Henry’s shoulder.

‘Jeepers indeed,’ Henry agreed.

‘So this is where he’s been hiding out,’ Rik said.

‘Looks that way.’

‘Oh dear, Terry Cromer,’ Henry said. ‘What a terrible end, even for a man as villainous as you.’

Henry stepped back into the unit, easing Rik back a step with him.

He looked at Oxford. ‘Who’ve you got coming?’

‘Scenes of crime, and I’ve turned out a pathologist. . seemed pretty obvious he was dead. And a couple more uniform patrols, just to get the scene sealed properly.’

Whilst Henry couldn’t disagree with that diagnosis, he always felt it prudent to get paramedics on the scene. Cops could make mistakes in assuming that people were dead when actually they weren’t. . But he let it slide. He would bet his commutation that Terry Cromer was dead. ‘Have you checked the rest of the unit?’

‘Not yet.’

Henry looked across the hundreds of plants — clearly one of the Cromer family’s cash cows as cannabis was still very, very popular and its possession hardly even merited a slap on the wrist. It was always the importer and distributors the police were interested in cracking down on, not the end users. Along one side of the unit was a set of steps leading up to what appeared to be another office, supported by a metal framework, which would give a supervisor a view across the unit.

‘What you thinking, Henry?’ Rik asked.

‘Er, nothing, nothing really,’ he said absently.

‘Looks like the Costains found him before we did,’ Rik said. He looked back into the office. ‘Also looks like he’s been living like a tramp.’

Henry said nothing. He always found it best to ingest serious crime scenes slowly. Soak them in, let ’em permeate; start hypothesizing but don’t reach any conclusions. Too early for anything like that. But it did certainly look like this was the place where the fugitive Terry Cromer had been hiding out and living rough, no doubt fed and watered by his family and other members of his organization. Even for someone like Cromer, this was an existence that would have been short- lived, unless it was just a stop-gap before leaving the country. And it was the place where he had met his maker. . but already Henry had his misgivings.

The Costains were on the warpath and killing Terry Cromer was no doubt high on their agenda, yet it seemed unlikely they would have discovered his whereabouts, unless someone in Terry’s set-up had betrayed him. That was a likely scenario in a world where allegiances were fickle, and it would be one line of enquiry. . but Henry wasn’t convinced.

The yellowish glow of the lighting suspended above the cannabis plants made for an eerie radiance, not really suitable for searching properly — that would have to be carried out in daylight, with proper lighting rigs. But before focusing on the body in the office, he wanted to have a quick look around the place without spoiling any evidence there might be to find.

He switched on his Maglite torch and began to edge around the perimeter of the unit, right up by the wall, until he reached the steps that led up to the elevated office. He stopped here and shone his torch up at the office door, which was closed. From this position he looked across the bushes, most of which were as tall as he was, then flashed his torch up the wooden steps again, to the door above him.

Then he froze.

With measured deliberation, he ran the torch beam downwards across each step, and saw what had made him stop abruptly.

Blood. Tiny drops of it on a couple of the steps. He flashed his torch on the breezeblock wall and saw more blood, and in it a big handprint. On the stair rail there was yet more blood where a hand had gripped it. His torch flicked up to the door and there was blood on that, too, another handprint by the door handle that he hadn’t seen on his first arc of the torch.

Henry swallowed and turned to look over to Rik and Oxford, chatting quietly by the office door. He could hear the murmur of their voices.

He gave them a little wave but they didn’t look over at him.

He coughed — still no response.

He flashed his torch wildly at them and both detectives squinted over at him. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned them over. Rik opened his arms in a ‘What?’ gesture.

If he could have read Henry’s lips, they would have said, ‘Just fucking come here.’

Instead, Henry beckoned again, this time with a more urgent hand signal, and shook his head despairingly.

They seemed to move with reluctance, but joined him a minute later. As they made their way towards him, Henry kept his finger to his lips.

‘What is it?’ Rik asked.

Henry flicked his torch beam onto the wall, up the steps and onto the door of the upper office, showing him the blood smears.

‘Shit,’ Rik hissed.

‘No — blood,’ Henry corrected him. Then, ‘I’m going to have a look.’

‘Is that a good idea?’

‘Probably not.’

He put his right foot on the first step and went up slowly, avoiding the blood and not touching the wall. At the top of the steps there was a small, railed landing. Having reached it, he touched the door silently with a knuckle to see if it would swing open. It was shut, but maybe not locked.

He crouched low, squatting on his haunches. Rik was three steps behind him. Oxford watched from the bottom of the stairs, mouth agape.

Henry rapped on the door and shouted, ‘Police!’ then cowered slightly, expecting bullets to strafe the door from inside the office. There was no response, no indication of movement. Henry knocked again and once more said, ‘Police!’, but kept low and to one side of the door.

He gave it a few seconds and then reached up for the door handle, a basic latch type, easing it down with his thumb and forefinger. He pushed the door open and ducked to one side in case anything unpleasant came out of the room. . like chunks of lead travelling at fifteen hundred miles an hour. The door swung open to an unlit room. Nothing moved or responded.

Henry counted to thirty — not certain as to why, but it seemed a good number to aim for — then shouted, ‘This is the police. Is there anyone in there?’

Still nothing. He shuffled himself around and then, with his back to the wall by the door, he rose to his full height, aware that the wall against which he pressed his back seemed to be made of MDF or some type of hardboard. It wasn’t solid. . and if there was anyone in the office, desperate and armed, the wall would not give him much protection. He reached around the door jamb with the fingers of his left hand, feeling at a height at which he would expect to find a light switch. He touched it and his forefinger ran up the curved slope of a rocker switch. He hesitated a moment and then flicked it. A strong light came on in the room.