Bad Tidings (29 page)

But it had been the FIM – who, having been on duty for most of the previous week, knew what was happening and what Henry was interested in. Hence her opening gambit, ‘Boss, I think this could be one of yours.'

It was now that Henry found himself standing in the en-suite shower room, half-wondering if the FIM was visualizing him naked.

He hunched down into his jacket – a surprise extra Christmas present from Alison, one that was of immediate use – and was about to set off towards the unit when he heard another car pull up on the main road. He turned to see that Rik Dean had also arrived and parked behind the Audi, and was now walking quickly towards him, flashing his warrant card at the PC guarding the entrance and ducking under the tape.

Rik was wrapped up in a thick outer coat.

‘Henry,' he said in acknowledgement. ‘Looks like you were right. What've we got?'

‘I probably know as much as you,' Henry said. ‘Let's see.'

They started to walk. Rik said, ‘How was your New Year's Eve?'

‘Nice, but short of alcohol. Yours?'

‘Ditto – no sex either.'

Henry and Rik were making their way to a light industrial unit at the bottom of the village. Though disused it wasn't old; built of breezeblock and panelled metal, it was the end one of four units. The other three were in use: one as a garage, another by a storage company, the third by a manufacturer of window blinds. All, though, looked dilapidated.

The night duty detective emerged from a personnel door in the wall of the unit, adjacent to a roller shutter, and walked across the car park to meet Rik and Henry. They all knew each other. DC Oxford was a steady detective in the middle years of his service who had the possibility of making DS if he wanted. He briefed them, they fitted their latex gloves and snapped elasticated paper coverings over their shoes, then followed him inside.

It was quite a large unit – Henry would have to be told its cubic area, he couldn't even begin to guess the figure. But as he entered the unit proper through the door, then a small vestibule, he stopped, astounded and almost overwhelmed by the thick aroma that seemed to clog the steamy atmosphere.

‘Bloody hell,' he said.

‘Just had a quick count-up and I reckon there's about eight hundred,' said Oxford.

Henry and Rik blew a low whistle each.

There were rows and rows of them. Eight hundred cannabis plants, all very healthy-looking, with overhead lighting and heating and a sophisticated hydroponics set-up to water and feed them.

Henry was no great whizz at maths, but he knew that the street value of each plant was somewhere in the region of five hundred pounds. Multiply eight by five and add the zeros – that meant he was looking at somewhere in the region of four hundred thousand pounds' worth of illegal drugs. He blinked. Good money.

‘Who found them?' he asked.

‘Local couple came down here in a car for a bit of nookie,' Oxford said. ‘Parked up outside to get down to business, security lights came on and they noticed that the door we just came through was open . . . through their steamy windows. They called it in, and the lad says they didn't even look inside, which I've no reason to doubt.'

Henry nodded, his eyes scanning the jungle of leaves, his head shaking at the enormity of the find.

Which was not the reason he was here.

‘One of the Oswaldtwistle patrols eventually made it up here to check it out and wandered through and poked his head in the office down there.' Oxford pointed to the office at the far end of the unit, door open, light on. ‘And that's where he is. This way.'

Oxford led the two detectives around the perimeter of the unit, using the route that everyone attending would now have to follow. Reaching the office door, he stood aside and let Henry and Rik sidle past him.

Henry stood at the threshold and let his eyes do the walking, as he experienced the strange feeling of dread and excitement that always engulfed him at such a scene.

In terms of an office, there was a desk and a chair and a laptop computer but little else. The walls were bare. His eyes roved. He saw the rucksack propped against the wall, a stack of clothes, the Primus stove with a small saucepan on top of it. There was half a loaf of bread, some cans of soup, a cheap- looking kettle, a carton of milk, a jar of coffee and a mug. Two newspapers were folded up next to two pillows. There was also a small two-bar electric heater of a type he had not seen for years, and a couple of raggy-looking blankets and a stack of clothes.

Someone had been living here, hiding out.

And that person now lay splayed like the letter X on an unzipped sleeping bag on the cold office floor. The head wound was dreadful. The entry of the bullet on the right side of the face was about the size of a five pence piece, the exit wound on the left had removed about a quarter of the skull, most of which was splattered against the office wall. The sight made Henry's lips twitch. Even so, the man was easily identifiable. And very obviously dead.

‘Jeepers,' Rik said. He was looking over Henry's shoulder.

‘Jeepers indeed,' Henry agreed.

‘So this is where he's been hiding out,' Rik said.

‘Looks that way.'

‘Oh dear, Terry Cromer,' Henry said. ‘What a terrible end, even for a man as villainous as you.'

Henry stepped back into the unit, easing Rik back a step with him.

He looked at Oxford. ‘Who've you got coming?'

‘Scenes of crime, and I've turned out a pathologist . . . seemed pretty obvious he was dead. And a couple more uniform patrols, just to get the scene sealed properly.'

Whilst Henry couldn't disagree with that diagnosis, he always felt it prudent to get paramedics on the scene. Cops could make mistakes in assuming that people were dead when actually they weren't . . . But he let it slide. He would bet his commutation that Terry Cromer was dead. ‘Have you checked the rest of the unit?'

‘Not yet.'

Henry looked across the hundreds of plants – clearly one of the Cromer family's cash cows as cannabis was still very, very popular and its possession hardly even merited a slap on the wrist. It was always the importer and distributors the police were interested in cracking down on, not the end users. Along one side of the unit was a set of steps leading up to what appeared to be another office, supported by a metal framework, which would give a supervisor a view across the unit.

‘What you thinking, Henry?' Rik asked.

‘Er, nothing, nothing really,' he said absently.

‘Looks like the Costains found him before we did,' Rik said. He looked back into the office. ‘Also looks like he's been living like a tramp.'

Henry said nothing. He always found it best to ingest serious crime scenes slowly. Soak them in, let 'em permeate; start hypothesizing but don't reach any conclusions. Too early for anything like that. But it did certainly look like this was the place where the fugitive Terry Cromer had been hiding out and living rough, no doubt fed and watered by his family and other members of his organization. Even for someone like Cromer, this was an existence that would have been short- lived, unless it was just a stop-gap before leaving the country. And it was the place where he had met his maker . . . but already Henry had his misgivings.

The Costains were on the warpath and killing Terry Cromer was no doubt high on their agenda, yet it seemed unlikely they would have discovered his whereabouts, unless someone in Terry's set-up had betrayed him. That was a likely scenario in a world where allegiances were fickle, and it would be one line of enquiry . . . but Henry wasn't convinced.

The yellowish glow of the lighting suspended above the cannabis plants made for an eerie radiance, not really suitable for searching properly – that would have to be carried out in daylight, with proper lighting rigs. But before focusing on the body in the office, he wanted to have a quick look around the place without spoiling any evidence there might be to find.

He switched on his Maglite torch and began to edge around the perimeter of the unit, right up by the wall, until he reached the steps that led up to the elevated office. He stopped here and shone his torch up at the office door, which was closed. From this position he looked across the bushes, most of which were as tall as he was, then flashed his torch up the wooden steps again, to the door above him.

Then he froze.

With measured deliberation, he ran the torch beam downwards across each step, and saw what had made him stop abruptly.

Blood. Tiny drops of it on a couple of the steps. He flashed his torch on the breezeblock wall and saw more blood, and in it a big handprint. On the stair rail there was yet more blood where a hand had gripped it. His torch flicked up to the door and there was blood on that, too, another handprint by the door handle that he hadn't seen on his first arc of the torch.

Henry swallowed and turned to look over to Rik and Oxford, chatting quietly by the office door. He could hear the murmur of their voices.

He gave them a little wave but they didn't look over at him.

He coughed – still no response.

He flashed his torch wildly at them and both detectives squinted over at him. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned them over. Rik opened his arms in a ‘What?' gesture.

If he could have read Henry's lips, they would have said, ‘Just fucking come here.'

Instead, Henry beckoned again, this time with a more urgent hand signal, and shook his head despairingly.

They seemed to move with reluctance, but joined him a minute later. As they made their way towards him, Henry kept his finger to his lips.

‘What is it?' Rik asked.

Henry flicked his torch beam onto the wall, up the steps and onto the door of the upper office, showing him the blood smears.

‘Shit,' Rik hissed.

‘No – blood,' Henry corrected him. Then, ‘I'm going to have a look.'

‘Is that a good idea?'

‘Probably not.'

He put his right foot on the first step and went up slowly, avoiding the blood and not touching the wall. At the top of the steps there was a small, railed landing. Having reached it, he touched the door silently with a knuckle to see if it would swing open. It was shut, but maybe not locked.

He crouched low, squatting on his haunches. Rik was three steps behind him. Oxford watched from the bottom of the stairs, mouth agape.

Henry rapped on the door and shouted, ‘Police!' then cowered slightly, expecting bullets to strafe the door from inside the office. There was no response, no indication of movement. Henry knocked again and once more said, ‘Police!', but kept low and to one side of the door.

He gave it a few seconds and then reached up for the door handle, a basic latch type, easing it down with his thumb and forefinger. He pushed the door open and ducked to one side in case anything unpleasant came out of the room . . . like chunks of lead travelling at fifteen hundred miles an hour. The door swung open to an unlit room. Nothing moved or responded.

Henry counted to thirty – not certain as to why, but it seemed a good number to aim for – then shouted, ‘This is the police. Is there anyone in there?'

Still nothing. He shuffled himself around and then, with his back to the wall by the door, he rose to his full height, aware that the wall against which he pressed his back seemed to be made of MDF or some type of hardboard. It wasn't solid . . . and if there was anyone in the office, desperate and armed, the wall would not give him much protection. He reached around the door jamb with the fingers of his left hand, feeling at a height at which he would expect to find a light switch. He touched it and his forefinger ran up the curved slope of a rocker switch. He hesitated a moment and then flicked it. A strong light came on in the room.

Henry jerked away from the door and dropped low again, but nothing happened.

‘Police,' he said again. There was no harm in making sure that everyone knew, he wouldn't like to have anyone arguing in court – either Crown or at an inquest (including his own) – that they had not been clearly informed the police were there. ‘I'm a police officer and I'm going to come in through the door,' he said clearly. ‘I am not armed and you will be able to see my hands . . . OK?'

He had passed the point of expecting feedback. He rose to his full height again and sidestepped into the doorway, his muscles tense, expecting the whack of a bullet.

It did not come.

The office was devoid of any furniture, bare – with the exception of the second body of the night, another male, wedged in the far corner of the small room.

As at the first door, Rik came up behind Henry and peered over his shoulder. ‘Jeepers,' he said again.

Even though Henry could not clearly see the face, he knew it was Freddy Cromer sitting there, legs splayed out, head lolling forwards on his chest which was drenched with blood from his head wound. In his right hand his fingers were loosely holding a snub-nosed, six shot revolver. Henry could see the entry wound in his right temple, half an inch in front of his ear. There was no exit wound this time, the bullet having lodged inside Freddy's head.

Henry edged forward, carefully watching where he placed his bootee-clad feet. Rik stayed at the door.

Henry squatted down again in front of Freddy, peering closely at him, angling his own face into a position to see him clearly.

‘Definitely Freddy,' Henry said.

Then Henry blinked and uttered urgently, ‘Get an ambulance . . . I think he's still alive.'

‘I
heard a breath and then I saw his chest move,' Henry explained to the A&E consultant. This was the same doctor who, a week before, had come to meet Henry at the hospital on Christmas Day – it seemed so long ago now – when Freddy Cromer had taken the poor nurse hostage. Then, physically at least, Freddy had been in excellent health. The same doctor was now battling to save Freddy's life. ‘Just barely,' Henry continued. ‘I didn't know if it was just a death rattle, to be honest – you know, the last expulsion of breath, that sort of thing. Then I heard it again, felt a pulse in his neck and realized there was life still in there.' He did not add, tempting though it was, ‘But not as we know it.'