Nick Oldham - Fighting for the Dead

Baines started to fit his own mask and gloves and Flynn pulled on the one he had been given. He followed Baines out of the office and into the mortuary, over to the refrigeration unit. He glanced into the examination room and saw another pathologist at work on a dead body, just extracting a heart between his two hands like taking a delicate present out of a box.

Flynn clasped his hands behind his back and watched as Baines opened one of the chiller doors and drew out the tray on which was the muslin-wrapped body of the young unidentified female, Henry Christie’s cold case. Baines stood at one side of the drawer, Flynn the opposite.

As Baines unwrapped the shroud from around the girl’s head, Flynn drew a breath as he saw the horrific injuries that the girl had sustained. Henry had described them to him when they were on their way to have a look at the woodland area in which her body had been discovered. Henry’s understated description was nowhere near as awful as the reality. And once more Flynn’s respect for Henry as a detective notched up a few degrees, realizing that he had to deal with this kind of thing, day in, day out. The result of another person losing it and beating the life out of another for little or no reason, usually.

He wanted to exclaim something, but kept his mouth closed.

Baines tilted the girl’s battered head back and opened her mouth, then took the tooth Flynn had found. He spent a couple of minutes with his eyes right up to her mouth cavity, fiddling with the tooth, making odd, thoughtful noises, reminding Flynn of someone building a minute scale model.

Then he raised his eyes to Flynn over his mask and stood up slowly. He pulled down his mask, exposing his mouth. ‘This is one of her missing teeth,’ he stated. ‘Obviously I will have to do more work to confirm it one hundred per cent, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s teeth.’

Rik Dean cradled his desk phone and sat back. Not knowing where Henry was did not bother him too much; it was just frustrating because he needed to ask him things about the investigation and where it was going from here. Major things had happened with the release of the two prisoners and he had to know what was on Henry’s mind and how this was all going to be pulled back.

Rik’s PR was standing on his blotter, the volume turned down, a lot of morning chatter going on in Blackpool section, most of it mundane jobs. A minor car accident, a town-centre break in, some criminal damage, nothing really for him as a DI, other than how the crimes would affect the figures overall, which were skyrocketing.

Then the comms operator came on with an urgent tone to her voice asking for patrols to attend an address in Bispham where a neighbour had, apparently, discovered the bodies of two women — one of them the next-door neighbour — in the kitchen and lots of blood.

Two mobile patrols shouted up their attendance immediately. Sounded like a good, juicy job, and there was always competition to get to an incident like this first.

Rik perked up, grabbed his PR and said into it, ‘DI Dean here — can you repeat the address. I can attend, also.’

The comms operator thanked him and as she repeated the address for him, he was already on his way out of his office, keen for something to do. It was only as he walked down the steps towards the police garage that the address rang a very loud claxon for him.

‘Shit,’ he said — and started to run.

They hit traffic on the A6 north into Lancaster, slowing the journey down to a crawl. The Mercedes was two cars behind. Henry glanced in the mirror, keeping tabs on it, but trying not to think about Alison, dragged into this through no fault of her own.

‘How’s this going to work?’ Henry probed.

‘What, exactly?’

‘Are you going to let me walk into Lancaster nick and just get the property from the safe?’

‘No — I’ll be right by your side, Henry, then you won’t be tempted.’

‘OK,’ Henry said, trying to visualize the process. ‘Is the happy killing video of you?’ he threw in.

‘Me and others.’

‘Others being Harry Sunderland?’ Henry guessed. ‘I presume Jennifer Sunderland found it… a wife going through a husband’s phone, sort of thing? Is that why Harry threw her into the river?’

Barlow snorted. ‘Actually he didn’t throw her into the river, but that’s another story. And yeah, she found the phone, had a fuckin’ crisis and wanted to tell the cops.’

‘And it wasn’t as though she could tell you, is it?’ Henry said. ‘Does it show you and him kicking the girl to death? Stomping on her face? Half-strangling her? Was it your tie?’ He was relentless as he put all this together. ‘What the hell had she done to deserve that?’

‘Nothing really, but I enjoyed it, fuck did I enjoy it.’ Barlow’s eyes glazed over as he recalled the killing. ‘We all did.’

Henry felt sick.

Rik drove the CID car through the streets of Blackpool like a maniac and arrived at the Bispham address in minutes, before even the second of the two mobile patrols who had called up. One double-crewed car was there already, pulled up outside the house. A uniformed constable rushed to him, his face ashen.

‘What’ve we got?’ Rik asked, climbing quickly out of the car and walking with the officer.

‘It’s not nice. Two women, one the owner of the house, don’t know who the other is yet. Looks like they’ve both been shot in the head.’

‘Let’s see,’ Rik said. The officer led him to the front door and paused. ‘We’ve been in and out through this door and down the hallway only,’ he explained to Rik. ‘That’s as far as we’ve gone. Just looked into the kitchen and not in any of the other rooms yet.’ He was saying this because he was thinking of scene preservation.

‘Good.’ Rik followed him inside. At the kitchen door, the PC stood aside and allowed Rik to look in. He caught his breath as he saw the bodies and the blood, lots of blood from terrible head wounds sustained by both women, almost now covering the kitchen floor. His eyes roved expertly around the room, just a normal, well-equipped kitchen. Nice, but nothing special. Except for the death it now hosted.

Then he saw something on the tiled floor by the sink unit. A white laminated card, maybe an inch and a half wide, three inches long. And even from where he stood at the kitchen door, Rik could see the Lancashire Constabulary crest on it.

Although wary of spoiling any evidence, Rik stepped across the first body, tiptoeing on tiled areas free from blood, and picked up the card.

It was Henry Christie’s police warrant card.

They crawled along the A6 into Lancaster, a city where traffic probably moved even more slowly than London.

‘I don’t want you to park on the police station car park,’ Barlow said. ‘Pull up on Marton Street, outside the nick, and we’ll use the public entrance for a quick in and out. The inspector’s office is just on the corridor behind the enquiry desk and that’s where the safe is. We walk in, acting all natural, you get the inspector to open up, you sign the property out, then we leave. Seriously, Henry, we’re in and out in five minutes and if you do or say anything ridiculous, she will die — that’s the pay-off for any stupidity. Do I make myself clear?’

Henry shrugged as the car hit the roundabout at the southern tip of the city — known as Pointer Island — and then headed down South Road into Lancaster proper. He took the offside lane at the traffic lights outside the hospital, then moved across again to bear right into Penny Street then first right on to Marton Street, at the end of which stood the crumbling nick that was Lancaster Police station, not the best-looking building in the world and continually in need of refurbishment.