Judgement Call (17 page)

He snaffled a set of keys from the sergeant's office again and went on the hunt for some evidence.

He revisited all the shops that had been robbed, including the latest one which was still a murder crime scene. But his hoard was pitiful. The use of security cameras was patchy across the board and only three of the shops had them. One shop had only one tape that was constantly rewound and then reused when it reached the end and the other two had a couple of tapes each but were not automatically set up to record and he learned that the VCRs were often completely forgotten about until someone in the shop just happened to remember to switch them on.

All in all, Henry thought, crap. Big Brother was hardly watching anything in 1982.

He had envisaged having to sit through dozens of tapes that had systematically and chronologically recorded footage of daily life in the shops, but he came away from his visits with only five tapes that had been reused numerous times. He had expected to be sat for days on end in a darkened room, drinking coffee, sifting through hours of boring footage but the reality was it would be just a few hours and if he could find a good quality tape player he would be able to skim quickly through the tapes on fast-forward and save some time.

He returned to the station, labelled the tapes and booked them into the evidence system, then logged them back out to himself.

Next task was to sit somewhere comfortable to watch them – and he had an idea on that score.

In passing, he quickly checked his tray. The two committal files were still on top, their return dates seeming to flash ominously at him. With yesterday's incident he obviously hadn't completed them as intended and had no desire to pick them up today, either.

Underneath the two thick files was a new one, slipped in by a sergeant.

It was Jack Bowman's, stapled to the front of which was the ‘wanted/escaped from custody' circulation and another note pinned to that from FB which simply read, ‘Please expedite.'

Henry slid it out and had a quick glance through it. When he had gone to Dover all he had been in possession of was Bowman's original arrest warrant, but this file contained details of the three house burglaries offences Bowman was wanted for, and made mention he was suspected of about forty others. Henry scanned through them and wasn't surprised to see they were all of a similar nature. Bowman had broken, mainly, into terraced houses, usually through the back door, or by breaking a ground-floor window; sometimes he had shimmied up drainpipes and used glass cutters on windows, showing he was a very dextrous burglar indeed. He had stolen cash and easily portable trinkets and jewellery and often broke in whilst the occupants were asleep, and sometimes he had excreted in hallways or on landings – something Henry wasn't aware of.

And, Henry noted, with a little surge of excitement, most of the victims were old-age pensioners.

Very similar, in fact, to the burglary he had attended the previous day at Mrs Fudge's house.

Some of the MOs were identical, even the type of property stolen.

A silver photograph frame was something that Jack Bowman would happily steal and then try to sell.

‘Little bastard's back in town,' Henry mused.

He stacked the videocassettes on top of his tray and left the station on foot. He intended to make two stops.

First he popped into the insurance brokers on Bank Street. Sitting primly at a desk behind the counter was Kate, whose face rose as he entered. She smiled her customer-focused smile for just a brief moment, but then her expression iced over when she realized it was Henry and that she hadn't heard from him in almost two days.

He leaned on the counter, flashing his boyish half-grin, which didn't seem to have the desired effect. She got up menacingly from her chair, making him quiver with a fear he had never felt before. Why did this woman – this mere slip of a girl, really – do this to him?

As she approached him he changed his own facial expression to one of great sadness, blinking like a little lamb.

It had no effect on Kate.

She jerked up to him and under her breath she said harshly, ‘I haven't seen or heard from you in God knows how long and then you turn up acting like a bloody schoolboy, Henry.'

‘You're cross,' he said, trying to sound puzzled.

‘I'm bloody fuming … What is it, shag 'em and leave 'em? That will not happen to me, Henry James Christie.' Her eyes were like devil's orbs. Henry almost expected to see a trident in her hand and red horns growing from her forehead as she morphed into a devil ready to do battle with the cowardly devil on his shoulder.

‘I … I … er …' he stammered.

‘I … I … er … – what the hell does that mean?' she mimicked him cruelly.

‘I'm sorry,' he ventured meekly.

‘You virtually ask me to marry you and then nothing! Zilch! What was that – just to get your leg over?'

‘No, no, no,' he protested.

‘Did you mean it, or was it just a ploy to get a blow job?'

Kate's voice rose on the last three words and the two other ladies who worked in the office at separate desks, who had been watching and trying to earwig the conversation, looked at each other with shocked, wide open eyes.

‘Both,' he admitted.

Kate eyeballed him steadily.

‘I … had a bit of a busy day yesterday,' he said, still trying to elicit sympathy.

Kate softened. ‘I know, and you should have contacted me, we should have seen each other.' She sighed and nodded towards a consultation room on the public side of the counter where customers were taken to finalize deals. ‘In there,' she ordered him.

She came out from behind the counter and hustled him into the room, almost propelling him through the door. She stepped in behind him and closed the door softly and turned the butterfly lock and leaned on the door.

‘Trapped,' she said.

‘Spider and the fly.'

‘I need to be kissed, Henry.' Her voice had become husky – and not a little threatening. ‘C'mere.'

‘Well that was a first – and on duty,' he muttered whilst walking jauntily up Bank Street. He blew out his cheeks and made another discreet check of his flies, with a little skip and a hop as he went.

He was still grinning as he entered Fat Jack's and negotiated his way through the display goods to the counter where, once more, he found Dominic Tighe, aka Fat Jack, studying a newspaper, cigarette in one hand, brew in the other. He didn't look up.

Henry stood there quietly, arms folded. He could feel his jugular pulsing.

‘Well I did my bit,' Tighe said, turning the pages of his newspaper.

‘So where is it?'

‘He ran with it.'

‘What happened?'

‘Guy came in, tried to sell me a silver photograph frame.' Still he didn't look up.

A beat of silence. ‘And?'

‘I must've given some vibes that made him nervous.'

‘And?'

‘He snatched it back and legged it.'

‘Name?'

‘Jack Bowman – but I didn't tell you that.'

H
enry scurried back to the station intending to root out Bowman's file to remind himself of the burglar's last known address, because he was going to pay it a visit. Not that he expected to find the escapee there, but he would never know until he knocked, or kicked the door in, and he knew he had enough reasonable suspicion to do that if he had to. Or at least he could manufacture some if necessary.

As he took the videocassettes off his tray and re-stacked them on the table, FB swung into the office on the door jamb. ‘Where have you been?' he demanded.

‘Making enquiries,' Henry responded, picking up a tape to show he wasn't lying, and waggling it at FB. ‘Why?'

‘We need more monkeys, that's why.'

‘Eh?'

‘Muscle – we need some muscle. I want to go and hit an address in Salford with the Regional Crime Squad, but I need some cannon fodder.'

‘What address? Why?'

‘Upstairs now,' FB said and swung back out of the office.

Ten minutes later Henry was sitting in the back of a personnel carrier with four other constables, a PC driving with Fanshaw-Bayley and another detective crushed together alongside the driver on the bench seat.

Henry cynically understood the psychology of it. The superior detectives up front, as uncomfortable as it was, and the dumb-ass riff-raff plebs in the back.

He smiled and didn't care. He had a sledgehammer propped up between his thighs and he was going to smash down a door. One of life's little pleasures.

A detective from the RCS joined them at Salford police station, together with a uniformed inspector from Greater Manchester Police who came along for the ride to ensure no funny business happened. The inspector took a list of the names of everyone present in the carrier and issued a briefing about behaviour. GMP was accommodating this raid because of its urgent nature and the fact it was a follow-up to the shooting of a colleague. Normally GMP would have insisted on being fully in control, but acquiesced to the circumstances on this occasion because it was a hot, dynamic operation.

The RCS detective squeezed onto the front seat with FB and the other jack and the inspector sat in the back of the van with the five constables, four of them in uniform, Henry still in plain clothes. The inspector leaned forward and directed the driver to the outskirts of the estate where the raid was to take place and gave a commentary about life in Salford.

‘This isn't like one of your poxy little estates in Lancs,' he boasted proudly. ‘Everyone here hates the cops and if they get chance, they'll have you. There's knives and guns galore and not many people afraid to use them on the police. So watch out.'

‘What's the plan, then?' Henry piped up, as a plan of how they were going to hit this particular address seemed sadly lacking.

‘I'll knock on the front door for you,' the inspector said. ‘A few of you need to be behind me. If I get a reply, I'll step aside and in you go. If not, bring on the sledgehammers.'

A pretty thin plan, Henry thought, knowing it should be much, much better than this, operating on a wing and a prayer, hoping for the best. Disorganized and dangerous, he thought, but exciting nonetheless. He would happily go with the flow.

‘He lives on the top floor of a four-storey block of council houses,' the inspector said, referring to the target. ‘It might be as well if a couple of guys were round the back, just in case he tries to jump for it. It has been known.'

FB, who had been listening to the inspector with his arm draped over the seat, looked at Henry. ‘You and me,' he said. ‘Plain clothes would be better than a couple of uniforms hanging about, spooking folk.' To the inspector he said, ‘Drop us off a short distance from the address and we'll make our way on foot. Give us a few minutes to get into position, then hit the place.'

Henry tried to hide his disappointment. He wouldn't be smashing down a door after all.

They drove to the perimeter of the council estate where FB and Henry dropped out of the carrier and began to walk after getting directions from the local man.

The estate didn't look too bad, Henry thought. Actually not much to choose between here and something similar in Blackburn, despite the smug claims of the inspector. It was a big, densely populated estate dominated by four four-storey blocks of flats, one at each corner, giving it a German prisoner-of-war-camp feel. Henry half expected to see guards brandishing machine guns.

Henry and FB shuffled along, neither under any illusion that the residents who spotted them would think they were anything but cops, or at least someone from the authorities. It didn't help that they had de-bussed from a police van, but at least they'd done it off the estate.

‘So who exactly is he?' Henry asked. ‘Other than his name, he wasn't adequately described.'

FB was already puffing, walking not being his favourite mode of travel. ‘He,' he gasped, ‘is Manchester's best armed robber over the last ten years. John Longridge, forty-five years old, a string of previous convictions since he was seventeen for pointing guns at people and relieving them of their hard-gotten gains. Been sent down four times and got out just over six months ago, just about the time the robberies on our patch started. That said, he's more a planner than a doer these days.'

‘Is there anything to actually link him to our jobs?'

‘Nope … but even if he isn't involved, he'll know someone who is.'

‘So … just a speculative arrest?'

FB merely raised his overgrown eyebrows at what was clearly a rhetorical question.

The two men turned into a high-walled ginnel that led onto the estate and opened out behind the block of flats they were interested in.

‘We're going to do a proper Lancashire job on him,' FB said bigheadedly. ‘Sweat the fucker. He'll know something, or we'll stitch him up with something. Either way, good.'

Henry groaned mentally, and they emerged from the alley and looked up at the flats. As the directions promised, they were at the back of the block in which John Longridge's top-floor flat was to be found. The main entrance was at the front and led to a concrete stairwell and a lift that rarely worked.

FB checked his watch. ‘Five minutes, spot on,' he said, catching his breath. They looked up and saw that each flat had a small balcony and that from the top it was a good sixty-foot drop to the ground. Longridge's flat was one of these back ones. ‘They should be knocking just about now.'

Henry surveyed the block. Built in the 1970s, not much more than ten years ago, it was already showing very obvious signs of decay, crumbling concrete and exposed brickwork where exterior plaster had fallen away as the rain had penetrated shoddy workmanship.

He was also aware of the almost complete lack of communication here. He and FB were equipped with Lancashire Constabulary radios, but these were limited to three or four channels, none of which synched with the channel used by the police in Salford. Nor did the Lancs radios have the range to be used here in Salford, which meant that he and FB had absolutely no clue whatsoever what was going on at the front or inside the block of flats, or even if this was the correct block, though Henry believed it was.