Nick Oldham - Facing Justice

‘Yes?’ he asked sharply.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ she said apologetically.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘Are you a policeman?’ Her eyes took in his appearance, widening as they saw his blood-speckled shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘Please can I come in?’

‘Er, yeah, sure, sorry.’

She stepped into the hallway and stomped the snow off her boots. Henry put her at about twenty years old. She had a pretty face, spoilt slightly by an angular chin and a harsh look in her eyes.

‘What can I do for you?’ Henry asked, hoping it was nothing. He glanced distractedly into the office again, frowning.

‘My name’s Laura Binney.’

Henry forced his attention back to her. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Christie.’ Then he pointed at her and exclaimed, ‘You’ve been sat in the pub all day.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘I’m looking for my boyfriend.’

‘Right… and?’ A domestic situation was the last thing Henry needed. He estimated it would only be a few more seconds before he was propelling her back out the door. ‘Look,’ he said apologetically, ‘I’m just a bit busy right now. Can it wait?’

Her eyes moistened and searched Henry’s face. Her mouth quivered. ‘No.’

‘I’m afraid it might have to.’

Without further warning, she burst into tears with a loud wail, surprising Henry. ‘Hey, what’s up? Surely it can’t be that bad. You had an argument with him.’

‘It is bad,’ she blubbered through a torrent of tears. ‘I think he’s dead, I think he’s been murdered.’

The words, important as they were, desperately as they had been spoken, did not really register in Henry’s distracted mind. The thing that had caught his eye in the office suddenly made sense to his worn-out brain.

‘Shit — sorry love, hang on one second.’ He held up his right hand, palm out, in an ‘I’ll be back’ gesture, and rushed into the office. There was a cordless telephone on a base on the desk and a tiny red light on the base unit was flashing — blink, blink — indicating the line was in use somewhere else in the house. ‘Sugar,’ Henry uttered, thundered back out of the office, past the emotional and bewildered young woman, who watched him slack-jawed.

Alison came to the kitchen door, a puzzled expression on her face. ‘What is it, Henry?’

‘He’s got a phone up there,’ he said, then yelled upstairs, ‘Flynn — he’s got a phone in there.’ He started to leg it up, jarring his injured shoulder painfully with each footfall.

By the time he reached the bedroom door, Flynn was already at the door of the en suite, trying the handle. ‘Locked,’ he said.

‘Boot it down,’ Henry ordered, crossing to him and glancing at the bedside cabinets, noticing the empty base of a cordless phone on one of them. Somehow Tom had managed to sneak the phone into the shower room.

Flynn stepped back. He had kicked down lots of doors in the past, loved doing it. Something he missed. He lined himself up and flat-footed the door by the gold-plated handle. It was a flimsy interior door and splintered spectacularly as it disintegrated and crashed back on its hinges, which only just stayed screwed to the frame.

Henry pushed his way past and found Tom, who had not even stepped into the shower, though he had turned it on in order to fool Henry. He had the cordless phone in his hand and his thumb was frantically pressing buttons. Henry strode to him.

‘Give me the fucking phone,’ he demanded and tried to snatch it.

Tom jerked it away, thumbed the last button, the phone beeped, and then he handed it calmly to Henry, with a sly grin of triumph.

‘Who’ve you phoned?’ Henry asked.

Tom simply gave a weak shrug. ‘Just exercising my legal right,’ he said smugly.

Nine weapons were laid out on the table. Four pistols, four machine pistols. They varied in make, origin and quality. They had however been oiled, cleaned and loaded with ammunition that had been home produced in a back-street industrial unit in Manchester. Each gun had two spare magazines that had been emptied and reloaded so there was certainty that they were full, even if the quality of the bullets was occasionally suspect.

The ninth weapon was a five-shot sawn-off pump action shotgun, made in China, but with professionally produced cartridges.

Jack Vincent put down the phone. He looked at the other two men, Henderson and Shannon. ‘We’re one down, guys,’ he announced gravely. The men said nothing, their faces impassive. ‘But it makes no odds. We’re still going in because that fool Callard couldn’t do a simple thing, and then we’ll have another job to tack on immediately afterwards.’

‘And that would be?’ Henderson asked laconically.

‘To get the boss out of jail.’

Henry scowled at the cordless handset with infuriation stemming from his stupidity in allowing Tom to sneak the damn thing into the shower with him. He kicked himself inwardly. He was fuming for letting himself be lax, for not doing everything he would have done normally with a prisoner, for being seduced into believing that because Tom was a cop he would play by the rules. Cops, he should have known by now, know how to break the rules. But above all, for not sticking to the motto he had adhered to for the last thirty years: trust no fucker.

‘He managed to delete the number he dialled, too,’ Henry said bitterly. ‘That means it’s not recorded on this handset and it won’t even redial the number… bastard!’

‘I don’t like this,’ Flynn said.

The men were sitting on the double bed. Henry had decided to allow Tom to have the shower anyway, but had insisted on making him strip in front of him, then go into the shower and leave the cubicle door open and the en suite door too, whilst he washed himself off. Tom had complied by removing his clothes slowly, dropping them on to a pile in front of Henry, then doing a twirl and making a disgusting remark about not having anything else on him, or would Henry like to have a feel up his arse? It was pretty standard prisoner fare, so Henry held his tongue and watched Tom get into the shower.

He collected the clothing and deposited it on the landing. He knew he was taking an evidential chance by allowing Tom to shower, but he was prepared to take it. Some evidence might get washed away, but in terms of the evidence Henry was slowly amassing, Tom was in a very bad place as it built up. Once Tom was in a proper cell, the work would begin in earnest. At the moment Henry was just making the best of a bad job.

‘I’m not keen either,’ Henry agreed. ‘He makes a call and deletes the number. What does that say?’

‘Come and help me?’ Flynn suggested.

Henry nodded. ‘It’s not exactly Colditz, is it? Tell you what, go and recover that gun from the car, will you, and lock the car up if you can. Then get back here and have a root around.’

‘For what?’

‘He must have had that pistol stashed somewhere, as well as the extra cartridges for the shotgun. Somewhere not too far away. Kitchen, probably. I’ll look after him until you’re back.’

‘Then what?’

‘Handcuffed downstairs, as I said, then batten down the hatches for the night and hope it stops snowing. We need a bit of help here, I’d say.’

‘There’s a lot of we’s in that. I could just piss off and leave you to it.’

Henry could not be bothered to get into this dispute again. ‘You do what you have to do. If you want to go, go. I can’t stop you. I’ve had enough of being wound up.’

The griping pain came again just as Donaldson was falling properly asleep in Ginny’s comfortable girly bed. It was as bad as ever and he sat bolt upright, cursing for even thinking the worst was over. Now he realized he should have starved himself and foregone the wonderful meal provided by Alison.