Judgement Call (16 page)

‘Henry, you can tell the chief constable whatever you bloody well want – if you decide to see him. But remember one thing, he's an ex-detective. Being a jack is in his blood. And he'll understand our response to the problem of an armed gang.' FB smiled cruelly.

Henry swallowed something about the size of a brick.

Throwing his Teddy out of the cot was not a good idea.

‘And no,' FB said calmly, ‘I did not come for that reason.'

‘Why then?' Henry asked quietly. ‘A shoulder to cry on?'

FB regarded the constable critically, his fat jaw rotating as he sized Henry up and down.

‘To tell you that a proper operation is now up and running to catch these cop-murdering bastards … and that before Jo was shot, I was in the process of setting up a bigger operation anyway and you know that.'

Henry fired him a look of disbelief. Stable doors and horses bolting came to his mind.

‘Just ask around if you don't believe me. I was on the blower all morning pulling a team together. The bastards just caught us on the hop and Jo walked into something we couldn't have foreseen.'

‘And now they're unlikely to come back here in a hurry,' Henry observed.

‘Agree,' FB nodded. ‘They'll go to ground in Manchester, which makes it very hard for us to follow up. But I do think they'll be back and we need to be ready for them in that case, which we will be.'

Henry said, ‘So you've come to tell me that?'

‘Yes, and something else. If you're up for it, I want you on the murder squad, but only if you're emotionally stable enough.'

‘Doing what? Brewing up for the detective constables? The numpty woodentop?'

‘No.' FB half-smiled. ‘Well that, obviously, goes without saying,' he teased. ‘You certainly are a woodentop, as they say in the Met.'

Henry shook his head and folded his arms, waited cynically.

‘Clearly this will be a murder investigation now,' FB announced.

‘Clearly.'

FB snapped his mouth shut at the interruption and reconsidered Henry. ‘You know, you really do need to learn to keep it shut, Henry. Big gob achieves nowt.'

Henry pretended to pull a zipper across his lips.

‘You mentioned you thought there might be a local connection … not the most original thought, admittedly,' FB said, just in case Henry might have believed he was the only cop thinking things through. ‘I want you to look into that.'

‘What about everything else I have on my plate?'

‘We've all got shit on our plates,' FB snarled. ‘Man up, deal with it.'

Henry wound his neck in, rather like a tortoise.

‘You're drafted onto the murder squad as of now. Whatever you've got pending, deal with it or pass it on, but you won't be given anything else. You're on the squad, I've sorted it with your crime car boss, so now you can make a valid contribution to finding these bastards who rob, murder and terrorize. How does that sound?'

‘Plain clothes?'

‘Whatever's appropriate.'

‘Who will I be working with?'

‘You'll be all alone.'

‘OK.'

‘And the other thing I want you to spend time doing is mooching in Manchester.'

‘Mooching?'

‘Eyes and ears. In the vicinity of where the second getaway cars are abandoned. See what you can pick up, yeah?'

‘Alone again?'

‘Naturally.'

The first thing Henry had to deal with was making a witness statement. He did this after FB had gone, driving back to the station at Rawtenstall – which was now crawling with cops. A few people stopped, spoke and commiserated with him. Henry was pleasant but he wanted to get the statement written whilst the incident was still clear in his head. He snaffled a few CID 9's and 9a's, the witness statement forms, and did a quick exit, driving back to his house where he pulled out the kitchen table and got writing.

He'd done it in less than an hour, all the while wondering if the man who had killed Jo was the same one who'd fired at him. A man with an itchy finger and a death wish. He made a mental note to read the statements taken from the customers at the shop and see if whatever description they made, vague though it would be because there wasn't a lot to describe – a masked man with a gun – matched his own memories of the masked man.

After that he knew that his next port of call that evening should really be to see Kate and spend some time with her, connecting with his emotions.

The more he thought about doing that, the more his lip curled.

What he needed was a drink. Several. And the fact that his local hostelry was in walking distance sealed the pact. He changed into jeans and a jacket, strolled down and ordered his first pint of the night from Steph, the landlady who he had not yet seen naked that day.

He fell into bed at 1am after staying for a lock-in after the pub closed at 11. The lock-in had turned into a mini-celebration-cum-wake of Jo Wade's life, carried out by the usual in-crowd of cops who often gathered in the pub. By the time the doors were closed, Henry had finished his fourth pint and moved onto whisky. The landlady provided a steaming tureen of chicken curry, a huge bowl of boiled rice and a stack of naan breads. The cops set upon the feast like hyenas on an injured warthog.

They raised their glasses to Jo and then turned as one to Henry and silently toasted him in an unrehearsed, spontaneous gesture which made him blink back a tear and start to blub a little – until someone bought him another Bell's whisky.

He made his excuses after that and headed for the toilets at the back of the pub, bouncing off the walls as he stumbled drunkenly to them.

It seemed to take an inordinate length of time to urinate and he had to steady himself a few times and prop his forehead on the toilet wall to prevent himself from staggering sideways.

When he emerged, zipping himself up, the landlady was waiting for him.

‘Can I assist you in your grief?' Her eyes sparkled enticingly and once again Henry was bedazzled by the prospect of jumping into bed with another female. Such was the simplicity of the life of a single cop in the valley, if he or she wished it to be that way. Henry was finding it hard to break the habit.

Steph took a firm hold of his jacket, then jerked him roughly towards her until their faces were only inches apart. Her eyes stared deeply into his, then she dragged him that last inch and their lips mashed together for a long, slow, drunken kiss. When they disengaged, Henry found himself literally breathless. ‘Have you ever had a landlady?' she asked throatily.

‘It's on my to-do list,' he said in the moment before she yanked him back into a clinch and walked him back against the wall with a crash. He went with the flow, although there was that black cloud somewhere in his mind telling him to do a sharp exit. Not just that when he made love to any lady, he much preferred to have a clear head because he enjoyed it all the more. A bit tipsy was OK, but being stone-drunk was not always that pleasurable. The other section of the cloud concerned Kate and his declaration to her and his half-baked marriage proposal not many hours ago.

Yet here he was, locked in an embrace with a woman at least a dozen years older than he was, pathetically fighting off the urge to drag her to bed.

He extricated himself clumsily. ‘No, this isn't right,' he said and pushed her gently away.

But her eyes were on fire, radiating sexual desire. ‘If you're bothered about Gerry,' Gerry being Henry's housemate, ‘don't be. He's away on a driving course.' She told him something he didn't know. He might have been his housemate but they certainly didn't live in each other's pockets.

She fought back at that, pulling him towards her, unwilling to take no for an answer. One hand slithered around his neck, another grabbed the front of his jeans which, despite Henry's mixed emotions and alcoholic state, bulged. He gasped and she forced her tongue into his ear. He emitted a whimper of submission as this organ worked in and out and she murmured, ‘Let me screw you senseless, Henry.'

It was an offer he failed to refuse. She led him easily up the back stairs into her boudoir and carried out her promise.

Afterwards, Henry scooped up his clothes – they had been flung around the room as Steph had undressed him, half reminding him of a dog digging madly for a bone – and got dressed in the en-suite shower room, although he couldn't be bothered putting on his underpants or socks. He stuffed them into his jacket pocket. The landlady was asleep, having exhausted herself. He gave her a drunken wave, then stumbled back into the pub where the wake for Jo was still strongly underway, with a cop behind the bar serving the drinks and placing the money in an honesty box on the bar top. This is what usually happened at a lock-in.

They gave Henry a victorious cheer as he made his way through the bar, acknowledging the accolade with a shy bow and a royal wave. He let himself out through the locked doors, closing them behind him and, weaving like a stereotypical drunk, walked back to his house and bed, where he fell instantly asleep.

He woke at seven, feeling horrible, crawled on his hands and knees to the bathroom, slid over the side of the bath like a creeping blob from a sci-fi movie and fired up the shower. He sat underneath it until he woke up.

After this he downed three paracetamols, donned his running gear and set off for a three-mile trot to clear his head, even if his brain felt as though it had come free from its moorings inside his skull.

On his return he showered again, then fried up egg and bacon, made a strong filter coffee and devoured this amazing tasting breakfast. Then, dressed in jeans, shirt and a leather jacket, he drove into work, almost fit to face the world.

Henry had claimed that he thought the armed robbers, now murderers too, must be using a local connection to identify their targets. It was unlikely that they would simply roll into town and rob the first place they came across. It would have to be planned. His claim, though, was purely conjecture on his part. They could just as easily be reccying premises themselves, but the thing about crime investigation was that hypotheses were put forward and then followed up, either to be discarded as fanciful thinking, or shown to have some value.

Henry saw it as his job to work out if there was a local connection or not.

If not, so be it. Shrug the shoulders, move on.

But he had to give it a go … plus, there was just something at the back of his mind niggling away.

As he drove into work he wondered how best to go about his task and decided that his first job would be to check if any of the targeted businesses had CCTV cameras installed and, if so, which of the detectives who had been looking into the attacks had reviewed the tapes, what had been seen and was it of any value to Henry's bit of the puzzle.

The station was bustling again. The rear yard was overflowing with cars Henry did not recognize, indicating an influx of personnel from all points of the county. He made his way up to the first floor and discovered that the lecture room had been transformed into an incident room, now crowded with sitting and standing detectives and uniform officers, awaiting a briefing. Henry loved the anticipatory buzz of it, and a shimmer ran through him. He nodded at a few people he knew, including a couple of detectives from Blackburn, then took up a position at the back wall and waited for action.

A couple of minutes later, FB bustled in, followed by the chief constable, and the two of stood in front of the dry-wipe board and flip-chart easel at the front of the room.

A hush descended, the chief took a breath and, as Henry guessed, he gave an emotional and motivational rallying call to the squad about the need for professionalism, diligence and persistence to catch the offenders who had so brutally taken one of their colleagues. A large photograph of Jo, blown up from her personal record, was pinned to the wall. Once that was done, he handed over to FB, who began the briefing proper.

When this finished, Henry made himself scarce for a while to avoid any possibility of contact with the chief. He didn't fancy talking to the guy about what had happened.

Then, when he thought the chief had gone, he went to see the detective who had been allocated the job of exhibits officer, a sensible first port of call, Henry would have thought, but the meeting only really made Henry realize just how amateurish the set-up was.

The officer was an experienced detective, drafted in from Blackburn, where Henry had met him a few times during his recent ill-fated secondment.

He frowned deeply at Henry as the request was made.

‘I need to look at the video footage from the tapes seized from any of the shops that have been hit,' Henry explained. ‘So … can I have the tapes, please?'

‘What tapes?'

‘The CCTV footage from the shops?' Henry's voice had a rising inflection of disbelief in it.

‘Like I said – what tapes?'

‘You mean no one's seized any tapes from the shops?' Henry now tried to keep his voice on a conversational level, trying not to show his utter horror.

‘Well – I've only just started this job yesterday, but so far I haven't seen any tapes,' the DC said. ‘Perhaps you could go and seize them. Might be a good idea.'

Henry had envisaged being given an armful of videotapes containing hours of mostly useless footage, but just to confirm how slapdash the whole thing had been so far, he left with an armful of nothing.

‘You need to generate an action and make sure the allocator has seen it, then no one duplicates what you're doing,' the DC called after him.

‘I will,' Henry said over his shoulder.

‘Hey – aren't you the one who nearly clocked DI Chase?' he called after Henry, mentioning the name of the DI in Blackburn Henry had so nearly decked.

‘No,' Henry denied the accusation, even though it was true.

‘Ah well, shame … the guy needs a seeing to.'

Further enquiries revealed that no one, so far, had had the nous to get the tapes from the shops. This was an important little lesson for Henry, which he filed away in his mind: sometimes even the most obvious, simple things get overlooked, and he was astounded that no one book or document existed, a process map, almost, of how serious investigations should be conducted, what to consider, what to do … but it seemed that investigations were just done on the hoof, based on experience and gut feeling. Some sort of murder investigation manual would be a great idea, he thought. Maybe one day …