Nick Oldham - Bad Tidings

Henry blinked and stretched. He’d been reading for an hour and he needed to check on his mother.

Some Christmas Eve, he thought. .

He locked the room and walked back to the cardiac unit, which was quiet now. He smiled at the nurse and saw there was still at least one more mug of coffee in the filter machine. He filled up and went to see his mum.

She was still asleep but not now snoring. The monitors seemed to indicate that things were OK for the moment.

‘Hi.’

Henry spun around and saw what he thought, not for the first time, was the most beautiful woman ever.

Alison Marsh, owner of the Tawny Owl, whom he’d met on a hike through the village of Kendleton where he had stumbled slap-bang into the middle of a blood-soaked standoff between gangsters. At the time Henry had been married to Kate, and only after her tragic death did anything blossom between him and Alison. In her he knew he had found a gem — and the fact that she owned a great little village pub and hotel only added to her wonderfulness.

They embraced tenderly and Henry seemed to draw energy from her.

When they stepped apart, Alison said, ‘How is she?’

‘Not good,’ he whispered. ‘Not on life support, but not good. Last time she had a heart attack, she was certain she hadn’t had one. This time she knows. And anyway, what are you doing here? Haven’t you got a pub to run? Christmas Eve and all that?’

‘Ginny’s doing it with her boyfriend, and you know the staff are great, so no worries.’

Henry nodded, nudged Alison out of the ward and led her to his new office, where her eyes alighted on the two files.

‘I got collared just as I was about to skedaddle,’ he explained. ‘FB foisted these on me. Two of Joe Speakman’s unsolved murders.’ Henry watched Alison closely as he mentioned the name Speakman. He saw a look of dread come over her face. Her memories of what had happened because of Speakman were very fresh and fragile. Henry went on, ‘They’re connected, we think, and, er. .’ His voice became a man-squeak. ‘I’m going to struggle to get time off this week. . shit, I know.’

Alison’s expression had returned to normal.

‘Even so,’ Henry said hurriedly, ‘I’ll spend as much time with you as I can. I know it’s been a rough few months. .’ His voice trailed off weakly as he thought about how Alison, unwittingly and innocently, had been sucked into Speakman’s violent mess and badly assaulted for simply being connected to Henry. She’d had to undergo surgery to reconstruct part of her smashed-up face. It was only now that she was starting to look completely right again, although to Henry she had always been gorgeous anyway.

Henry knew he was on shaky ground with his announcement. Things had been tough for them and they’d been looking forward to the ‘Twixtmas’ week, just to hang around, do things together, chill.

Alison nodded and gave a long drawn-out ‘Okaaay.’ Then she said, ‘Are we in love?’

Henry said, ‘Yes, course, indubitably.’

‘I mean, truly, madly, deeply?’

‘Yes.’

‘In that case, we’ll work through it. It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it that’s the key.’ She locked eyes with him. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Gutted and drained. I could’ve done without either, but both together. .’ He swished a hand at the two files, then gestured helplessly in the general direction of the cardiac unit.

‘What about tonight?’ Alison asked. Henry started to say something, but bit his bottom lip. ‘Do you want to stay here in Blackpool to be near your mum?’

‘Yeah,’ he admitted.

‘I’ll stay with you then. . I’ll go and sort your house out and I’ll be there when you land, whatever the time.’

Henry shook his head in amazement, but then squinted at her. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Erm. .’ Oh God, he thought inwardly. Not good at this sort of thing. ‘Err. .’

‘You mean because of Kate?’

‘Kinda.’

‘I know it was her house, but it’s part of you as well. She’s gone and you’ve moved on. I know what it means to you and it’s fine. It’s not like I haven’t stayed there before, is it? I even have a key,’ she said grinning. ‘You gave me one.’

‘I know. I just thought you were uncomfortable there.’

‘Henry,’ she began firmly.

‘Fine, fine.’ He held up his hands, palms outward, surrendering.

‘I’ll be there when you get back, whenever that is,’ she stated.

Henry blew out his cheeks and looked at the murder files with annoyance, thinking, Best laid plans and all that crap .

But he was mostly annoyed with himself for having said yes to FB. If he’d said no, at least all he would have had to contend with was his mother. It would have been hard, but he could have handled that — to-ing and fro-ing to Kendleton and back without having to think about work as well. But two murders on top was pushing it.

And it wasn’t as though he could shelve the murders until New Year, as he’d cheekily suggested to FB.

And that sneaky bastard FB knew that.

Henry opened the second file.

Murder number two: David Peters.

A fairly dull middle-aged man who had led, by all accounts, a fairly uneventful life. What made him interesting was that he had been having an affair with one of his employees, and had vanished — on Christmas Eve again, after an assignation with this woman at a motel in the middle of Blackpool — exactly one year after Christine Blackshaw had disappeared off the streets of Blackburn.

He had been reported missing by his fairly indifferent wife on Christmas Day, not having returned after a drink with his mate, but the police did not treat the matter with much urgency. He was a grown man, it was that time of year, and she didn’t seem to care very much. She had reported him missing simply because she felt she had to and the turkey was in the oven. At the time of the initial report there was no mention of Peters having an extra-marital relationship.

Only when he hadn’t turned up four days later did anyone become concerned.

The missing from home (MFH) file landed in the lap of a keen young PC who would rather have binned it, but decided to do some digging. This is how he, without too much difficulty, discovered Peters’ affair and exactly what the man had been doing on the evening he went missing: fucking. Not boozing with an old friend, as he had led his wife to believe.

Even so, this new information led the police to believe merely that maybe he had decided to vanish for a while and contemplate his life, as men of his age often stupidly did.

When his body turned up on New Year’s Day, the cops swung into action. Sort of.

The case should have been allocated to Henry because the body had been found in his area of geographic responsibility, but because he was otherwise engaged it was given to Speakman instead.

At the time it obviously wasn’t known that Speakman had become embroiled in a whole bunch of criminality that emanated from his purchase of a villa in Cyprus and his association with a crooked local businessman in the north of the county. This meant he didn’t concentrate as much as he should have done on David Peters’ death. But Speakman did make the connection with the murder of Christine Blackshaw, something he could hardly miss.

Henry read through the pathologist’s report on Peters’ post-mortem.

The body had been discovered on farmland on the outskirts of Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool. Two bullets to the brain had been what had killed him.

But his body had also been badly burned, set alight having been doused in petrol. The difference between the discovery of his body and that of Christine Blackshaw was that Peters had been found in an unused chicken coop in a secluded copse on the edge of a farmer’s field. It was a wooden building that hadn’t been used for years, but had been well constructed. It looked as though Peters had been held in this location — in the space underneath the floor — since his disappearance and had spent a week of terror at the hands of the perpetrator before being killed. The coop was then razed to the ground, Peters’ body being found in the ashes.