Nick Oldham - Fighting for the Dead

‘Probably. But I never know just how clever until the life sentences are dished out.’

Barlow guffawed. ‘Nice one, but somehow I don’t think this is going to end quite like that. Don’t get me wrong, it will end horribly for you.’

Melanie squirmed, then her eyeballs rolled backwards in their sockets and she fainted in Barlow’s grip. He simply let her fall into an untidy heap at his feet, stepped back from her. Henry moved to get to her, but Barlow said, ‘Leave the bitch.’

Henry ground his teeth.

‘I’m reliably informed you found certain items of property at Harry’s house.’

Henry tried to disguise the physical lurch in his guts. He said nothing.

‘I need to recover them,’ Barlow said. ‘To, um, liberate them from the safe at Lancaster nick, which is why we’ve come to this.’

‘What’s on the phone?’ Henry asked.

‘Nothing I need to describe to you,’ Barlow said. ‘My problem is that you, cheekily, left specific instructions that only you can sign out the property, the phone, the passports… I’m not fussed about the guns, obviously.’

‘I’m not going to sign them out for you, am I, if that’s what you’re thinking? So it’s kind of a fuck up for you, isn’t it?’

‘Not as much as you might imagine.’ He aimed the two-inch barrel of his revolver at Henry, then pointed at the front window — indicating that Henry should turn and look outside.

The life of a landlady/hotel owner is far from glamorous, as Alison Marsh had discovered when she took over the virtually dilapidated business that was the Tawny Owl in Kendleton. The hours are horrendous, the work unremitting, the holidays non-existent, and it isn’t a gold mine. In fact, it sucked money. But it was just what she needed when she left the army some seven years earlier following the death of her husband, also a soldier, in a horrific incident in Afghanistan.

She wanted to get out of the forces and do something that would be a long-term challenge and would keep her busy from dawn till dusk and beyond. The Tawny Owl had done that.

She bought it outright using savings and her husband’s insurance payouts and dragged the pub right back into the heart of the community.

It had been a hard slog and included bringing up her husband’s daughter, Ginny — Virginia — who was only twelve at the time.

But the slog had been worth it. It had been hard and emotional at times. There had been occasions when she would gladly have walked away, but her drive and determination had turned a failed business into a resounding success.

All the while she had kept men at arms’ length.

There had been a couple of weak moments, but nothing serious until Henry Christie came along and changed everything. Not that he had been the one to make the running. It had been her doing, but that said, if Henry’s wife Kate had still been alive, Alison would not have been with him. She wasn’t a marriage-wrecker. But it was her who had made the first, tentative approach a few months after she’d learned of Kate’s death. Things took off slowly from there, going from strength to strength.

What she hadn’t bargained for were the horrendous hours that Henry worked, nor his passion for the job and his inability not to get involved. But she loved those things about him, too. And especially the way he often spoke with such feeling about seeing it as his job to fight for the dead, because they had no one else to do it for them.

She was thinking about Henry that morning after getting up slightly later than him and spending a grim hour in the cellar, playing a form of chess with the beer barrels.

She emerged into the bar area — where she and Henry had made love at midnight — and then went into the kitchen to fire up the cooker and grill for breakfast.

There were only two guests in overnight (she had fibbed to Henry, knowing that he definitely would not have got intimate in front of the fire had he known that people were staying) and she thought they would be last-minuters. She made herself a coffee and some crusty toast which she took out and ate whilst leaning on the bar and surveying her domain, working through the day ahead.

The front door of the premises was unlocked and a man entered.

Alison smiled and greeted him, unperturbed. People came and went at all hours and a visitor at this time of day was not unusual.

‘Good morning,’ she said and placed down her coffee.

‘Good morning,’ the man replied and Alison picked up an accent of sorts in the words.

‘Can I help you?’

The man was in his mid-forties, slim, extremely handsome in a chiselled, harsh sort of way. He had black hair and a nicely trimmed moustache, a hook nose and dark complexion.

‘Yes, I think so.’ The accent again. Think said as ‘zinc’. ‘You are Alison Marsh?’

‘Yes,’ she said brightly.

‘Good.’

He stepped towards her. He was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket, a T-shirt, black trainers and black leather gloves. There was no warning of it. He smiled. His teeth were beautiful and white and even. Obviously he had a good dentist. He pulled up each glove in turn at the wrist, tightening them on his fingers.

Then he hit Alison once. A driving, powerful blow of his right fist, into the centre of her face. She did not see it coming, but it landed with the force of a sledgehammer, crushing her nose and cheekbones, breaking them. It felt as though her whole face had imploded as she staggered back, shocked, disorientated, clutching at her face as blood flooded out of her broken nose.

She swooned.

The man stepped towards her again and delivered a second blow on the exact same spot, equally forceful.

Then her knees buckled and she collapsed on the spot like she was falling into a hole that had suddenly appeared beneath her feet, unconscious before she hit the floor.

Henry lurched to the window, the palms of his hands on the glass panes, unsure initially what he was looking at, then horror-struck by the realization.

A large black Mercedes saloon car had drawn up on the road outside.

For a moment it looked as though a decapitated head was being held up against the window at the back nearside passenger door, a terrible, bloody, and distorted mess, being displayed triumphantly by the man in the back seat whose tightly fisted hand had wrapped the long hair of the head around it and he was holding it pushed against the window, smearing the glass with blood like some sort of medieval war trophy.

Except it wasn’t a decapitated head.

Nor was it some gruesome toy bought at the gift shop of a medieval torture museum.

It was a real head, attached to a real body, and it belonged to Alison Marsh, the woman Henry Christie loved.

Her features had been pounded almost beyond recognition. Nose flattened, both eyes black and swollen, lips cut and bleeding, and looking dead. Then just to reinforce the message, the man smashed Alison’s head against the window again, making the glass vibrate with the impact.

Henry roared with rage, spun away from the window and stepped dangerously towards Barlow, fists clenched, his face a vision of fury.

Barlow had been anticipating the reaction. The gun came up and he aimed it directly at Henry’s forehead, stopping him dead.

‘What the fuck?’ Henry growled, his anger rising beyond anything he had ever known, and way beyond the fear he had felt at being confronted by Barlow and a gun. Now he realized he had walked stupidly into a trap manufactured by Barlow and Sunderland, two men desperate to save their own skins by any means possible, having used Melanie Speakman as bait. He took another menacing step, but Barlow flicked the gun, his finger tightening on the trigger.

‘I’ll tell you what the fuck is, Henry… this is deadly serious stuff… No, no,’ Barlow warned him as Henry’s body language telegraphed another move, ‘I’ll shoot you dead here and now and think of another way through this if you do anything stupid.’