Tony Black - Murder Mile

Henderson stood still for a moment; he watched Brennan through wide staring eyes and then he took a few steps towards the upturned chair and righted it. He sat down. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

Brennan nodded towards McGuire; the DS removed a cigarette from the pack and handed it to Henderson. As he placed the filter in his mouth, McGuire leaned over to light the tip.

Brennan spoke, ‘Now, Hendy, in your own time… And don’t leave anything out.’

Henderson’s hand shook as he brought the cigarette towards his mouth, ‘He knew what he’d done, knew I was onto him, and he was scared.’

‘How do you know he was scared?’ said Brennan.

Henderson lifted his head, ‘Because he went to the Links, pulled up Ange… He was shitting himself.’

‘But you told him he had nothing to fear, if he paid up, right?’ said McGuire.

Henderson turned his gaze, his voice was a slow trail of words. ‘Yeah… But he got all cocky, after he saw Ange.’

‘What do you mean, cocky?’

‘He’d put the shits up her, he thought she would be too frightened to tell anyone about him… That’s when he said he wasn’t going to pay up again, and I showed him the diary.’

Brennan removed his hands from his pockets, sat forward. ‘And what did he make of that, seeing his name in there?’

‘He was still acting cocky, trying to make out he didn’t care… But I knew he would. I knew he was a fucking beast, he was trash…’

‘But he had something you wanted didn’t he, Hendy? Money. And when that wasn’t getting coughed up easily that’s when you thought you had to up the ante a bit wasn’t it?… You killed Angela to scare him into giving you more money.’

Henderson had smoked the cigarette down to the filter tip. His fingers held the long trail of ash as he sat silently, unmoving. When the ash fell, landed on the floor, something sparked in him. Henderson’s eyes widened as he turned to face the officers, ‘It wasn’t like that, she attacked me with a knife.’

‘You struggled?’ said McGuire, ‘And then what?’

Henderson leaned forward, placed the empty filter tip on the table. ‘She cut me, there was a lot of blood and… I just snapped. It wasn’t until after that…’

Brennan pushed back the legs of his chair; the noise ricocheted off the walls of the interview room. He stood up and leaned on the edge of the table, ‘Hendy, I want you to think very carefully about your next answer.’ He reached out, placed a hand on his shoulder, ‘Did you tell Crawley about Ange’s death?’

Henderson looked towards Brennan’s hand, turned his eyes towards his arm and followed all the way to his shoulder, and then his face. ‘No. I–I was going to wait a bit…’

‘What do you mean wait a bit, until the word got out?’

‘I thought, y’know, after it was in the papers and that… He’d be easier to hit up.’

Brennan turned away from Henderson. He walked round behind the desk, sat down and closed the folder. He turned to McGuire, said, ‘Charge this arsehole.’

DI Rob Brennan stepped from the front door of the police station and removed a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket. There was only one cigarette left in the box of Embassy Regal; Brennan placed the filter tip in his mouth and scrunched the empty container. He lit the cigarette and stood staring into the distance as the tobacco filled his lungs. He could see the roofs of tenements catching the last rays of a tarrying sun. There had been a spill of rain earlier in the day, the pot-holed car park held dark pools of water that reflected the last of the day’s light. It was cooling now, not just the temperature, but the sky’s colour too, the cobalt expanses greying from the edges towards the centre. The scene set Brennan’s pulse racing — time was ticking away. He knew what he needed to do before the sky turned from blue to black but he doubted whether he would be able to achieve it. There were too many uncertainties stacking up around him; too much he couldn’t control.

As he drew the cigarette towards his mouth once more, the DI thought of Angela Mickle and the other girls. He had spent plenty of time going over the deaths of Fiona Gow and Lindsey Sloan but somehow he felt differently towards Angela. Her life had been ruined by what had happened in her past — Brennan recalled the entries she had made in her diary and wondered how the young girl who wrote them must have felt about the world and its new cruelties she was discovering. Brennan shook his head, took another drag on the cigarette and tried to regain his focus. He knew none of this was helping the investigation; was it helping him? He had always tried to compartmentalise his sympathies, store them away. It was a hindrance to have to feel like a normal human being at times like this; he wanted to be able to bring down the shutters, block out his emotions, but it was difficult when the victim was a young woman who had once been a young girl so much like his own daughter. How did these turns of fate transpire? he wondered. How did Angela Mickle go from one day being just another member of her school’s gymnastics team to the object of a predatory paedophile’s fantasy? Her fall from preyed-upon schoolgirl to preyed-upon prostitute looked like a long drop, but in reality — in her mind, he surmised — was probably no more than a matter of weeks. Angela Mickle had lost any grip she held on normality the day Crawley started to take an interest in her; when she met Neil Henderson, she lost everything else. He thought of the shabby flat the pair shared in Leith, the used condoms littering the floor, the dirty, stained mattress in the centre of the living room. They lived like animals, worse than animals. It struck Brennan that, perhaps, she was in a better place now — but he doubted it — it was a preprogrammed part of his brain lobbing out platitudes to make him feel better. One thing was for sure, wherever Angela Mickle was now, she was out of Crawley’s clutches, and as far away from Neil Henderson’s reach as could be.

Brennan scrunched his brows, flicked his cigarette into the car park. The amber tip fizzed as it came into contact with the wet tarmac. He watched the dim embers of the tobacco turn to grey as the white paper absorbed the moisture, and then a gust caught the cigarette butt and blew it out of sight. He felt the muscles stiffening in his shoulders as he braced against the sudden wind, his shirt sleeves billowing. He wanted to be away, somewhere else; he didn’t want to think about the case and the deaths of three young women who he had only got to know once they had been killed. He thought it was too much for one man to have to deal with and then it struck him how strange it was for himself to have such a thought. He had dealt with many brutal murders before, so what was it about this case that sickened him so much? Was it his age, the age of his daughter, the end of his marriage? The fact that he had found one of his own officers covering up important evidence? He resigned himself to never know the answer, but the fact that he no longer had the stomach for the work was something he knew he would have to face.

The station doors swung open; DS Stevie McGuire stood in the jamb for a moment then paced into the cold. He was holding a blue folder. ‘Thought I’d find you out here.’

Brennan nodded to the DS, ‘And you did.’

‘Henderson’s charged…’

Brennan didn’t answer.

McGuire continued, ‘Bri was on the phone: they’re on their way… Look, I was thinking you might want to cast an eye over this before they get here…’

Brennan took the folder from McGuire; it contained the file — so far as it stood — on Crawley and the complete file on DI Jim Gallagher. ‘Cheers, I’ll have a deck at this before I see him.’