Backlash (43 page)

‘Is this his?' Henry asked Nevison, pointing at the freezer.

‘Yeah – he, uh, sometimes does a bit of rustling.'

‘Rustling?'

‘Uh – yeah, gets lamb and stuff sometimes from a mate he has in Rossendale who works at an abattoir.'

‘Right,' said Henry, unimpressed. ‘What about this motorbike?'

Nevison looked doubtfully at it. ‘No, his was a knackered thing. This is too new. That's his van, though.' Nevison pointed to a Transit van parked behind the flats.

‘OK,' said Henry. He went to the freezer, tried to pull the lid up. It was locked and he could not budge it.

‘Sledgehammer,' he called.

Donaldson responded. He lined himself up in front of the freezer, worked out the necessary upwards trajectory he would need and swung the sledgehammer, catching the freezer lock perfectly, springing it and making the lid fly open to reveal the contents inside, illuminated by a light in the lid.

Henry stared, horrified. The others crowded in behind him and looked over his shoulder.

There were several frozen legs of lamb and beef joints, obviously David Gill's rustling booty – and there was also Mark Evans' body, folded at the knees, lying on top of another body. The detective's throat had been sliced open and copious amounts of blood had run and frozen over the body below. At first Henry thought it was Jane Roscoe, but on closer inspection he saw it was the body of a man.

‘Come and have a look in here,' Henry said to Nevison.

Warily, the big man approached the freezer. Henry shone his torch onto the horror-frozen face of the man at the bottom of the chest.

‘Wauh – fuck,' Nevison said, appalled and recoiling.

‘Who's that?'

‘It's Davey – Davey Gill, me mate.'

‘Anybody got a hairdryer? I'll never be able to get this guy's prints while his hands are frozen solid like this,' the scenes-of-crime officer shouted, leaning over the edge of the chest freezer. ‘Need to get a bit of thawing done.'

Police activity was intense in and around David Gill's flat and garage. Lights had been erected to illuminate the garage. The macabre task of lifting Mark Evans' frozen body out of the freezer had been carried out. He was now zipped up in a bodybag waiting for the hearse to turn up and take him to the mortuary.

Four hours since the discovery of the crime scene, Henry was still pacing up and down, directing operations. He stopped and watched as Evans' body was carried out past him, the bag, literally, containing a stiff. Byrne and Taylor had looked at the other rigid body and neither had been able to identify it positively as David Gill, the man whom Taylor had arrested all those months before. Taylor said the corpse looked ‘familiar', but seeing him frozen solid it was difficult to say yeah or nay. Cops at Blackpool dealt with thousands of lock-ups like Gill, and PC Taylor said he could hardly even recall arresting him. Byrne remembered cautioning him, but again, he was one of dozens he had dealt with that night in the custody office. Henry was waiting for a photograph to turn up but it could be a long wait. Photographs tend to enter the system with less precision than fingerprints, and it was not unknown for them to get lost or mislaid.

It seemed logical, therefore, to take the dead guy's fingerprints and get the on-call expert to do some cross-checking. The first thing Henry wanted to discover was if the fingerprint found at the scene of the murder in Cheshire belonged to the dead man. If it did match, then it raised a whole bunch of questions. If it didn't, then it raised a whole bunch more questions.

Henry decided to take it one step at a time. Make no assumptions, jump to no conclusions, just deal with facts.

‘Hair drier?' a uniformed constable called out.

‘Over hair.' The SOCO laughed.

The constable, who had scrounged the drier from a woman living nearby, handed it over. She would never have offered it had she known it was going to be used to defrost a dead man's fingers.

Henry offered the fingerprint expert a seat in Roscoe's office. The guy was called Lane and he was one of the constabulary's top experts, twenty-two years of cross-matching loops and whorls and providing the evidence that had sent thousands of baddies to prison.

‘Tell me,' Henry prompted.

On Lane's lap were two sets of prints. One from the dead man in the freezer, one from the man arrested six months earlier, giving the name of David Gill.

‘They don't match,' he said flatly.

‘Is that your final answer, or do you want to phone a friend?' Henry said.

‘The prints of the dead man in the freezer are not the same as the prints taken from the man who was arrested six months ago for a public-order offence. However, the partial print recovered from the scene at Cheshire matches the forefinger of the prisoner who gave his name as David Gill.'

‘So if the dead guy in the freezer really is David Gill, then who the hell do the prints belong to which were taken by PC Taylor?' Henry pointed to the offending set. ‘Because they are the prints of a serial killer who, it would seem, has taken on David Gill's identity after killing him – or something,' he finished unsurely.

Henry was suddenly depressed. He felt nowhere further forward and believed that every minute now was wasted time and made it even more unlikely that Jane Roscoe would be found alive, particularly if the abductor knew that the police had found Gill's and Mark Evans' bodies.

Roscoe was dead. Henry was certain of it. But why wasn't she in the freezer too?

Lane, the fingerprint officer, left.

‘It's doing my head in, this,' Henry said when he was joined by Donaldson and Makin. ‘How is it going with Franklands?'

‘Better than good. I'm going to arrange protected status for him. He was there when the two guys kicked Jack to death, but maintains he took no part in it, and I believe him. And he planted the bomb in the club. Both things were done on Vince Bellamy's instructions. So Franklands is going to be a witness for us and one way or another, the demise of Hellfire Dawn is on the cards.'

‘Excellent.'

‘He also told me something else, which is very very interesting.' Makin went on to tell this to Henry. It was fascinating stuff, but did not help Henry with his task.

When she had finished Henry asked her how she intended to take it forward and she said she had an idea, but added nothing more.

Which left Henry holding two sets of fingerprints which did not match and a puzzle that was beginning to stress him out.

He watched with distress as the clock ticked up to midnight.

T
here could be no post-mortems carried out until both bodies had defrosted sufficiently for the pathologist to stick his knife in. Mark Evans' body was less frozen and Dr Baines reckoned he would be ready to start on it in about eight hours; David Gill, literally a solid block of ice, could take up to thirty-six hours before he had thawed enough to be autopsied. Which meant nothing could move forward on the pathology front other than some general observations by the pathologist which boiled down to: it looks like their throats have been cut.

Gill's flat and garage were being top-to-bottomed by all manner of experts, forensic, scientific and search. Henry had decided that this might as well happen. He had thought about withdrawing everybody and mounting an observation on the place on the off-chance that Gill – or whoever the hell it was – would turn up and the police could nab him. He had decided against that because there had been so much police activity anyway that there was a good possibility that whoever was using Gill's ID and home had already been alerted and would not be coming back.

It was half-past midnight. Henry was alone in Roscoe's office, thinking about her.

The office door opened, FB came in. He drew up one of the chairs and plonked himself heavily down on it, throwing his heels up onto the edge of the desk.

‘Y'know what's really shitty?' he asked.

Henry said no.

‘Special Branch have just told me that the Irish cops have uncovered a plot to assassinate the prime minister at the conference this week.' FB laughed, cackled really, as though he was on the verge of going under. Henry had never seen him like this. Normally supremely confident and brash, the stress of the week, the lack of sleep, the pressure of ambition were pulling him down. ‘And you know what? There's absolutely fuck-all I can do about it, and what's more I don't care. I've had one officer seriously injured this week who is still on life support, another has turned up dead in a fridge and a third is missing, probably dead too, and I've just spent two hours with Mark Evans' widow –' he shook his head. ‘She's devastated.' His head continued to shake. ‘And on the back of that the government is in town demanding to be protected. Every available cop I've got is here, looking after the namby-pamby idiots, and I can't even pull a full murder squad together to dedicate to the death of one of my officers and the possible death of another. It's absolute shite. I need a drink.'

Henry remained silent, watching FB open up. It was an amazing sight.

‘It's all power games to them, one big fucking ego trip – then they'll be gone on Friday afternoon and won't even give us a second thought as we clean up all the dross left behind them.'

‘I thought you liked politicians.'

FB gave Henry a hard stare. ‘I was angling for a job, I admit it. Still am. Doesn't mean to say I like 'em.'

‘We need more people on Jane Roscoe,' Henry said. ‘Sooner rather than later. We can't afford to wait till weekend. The trail will be well cold by then.'

FB sighed. ‘If I could give you more, I'd give you more, but I can't and I don't feel good about it because, and you probably won't believe this, I do care. I even care about you, which is why I pulled you off CID. It wasn't a decision I took lightly, Henry. I thought I was acting in your best interests.'

Henry shuffled the papers in front of him and sniffed. ‘Yeah, well, it would have been nice to be consulted about that. Anyway, that's by the by now. Catching the bastard who killed Mark is all I want to think about now, that and finding Jane dead or alive. I hope you won't take me off this.'

FB shook his head. ‘I won't.'

The man who had used the name and taken the identity of David Gill was sitting and thinking about the events of the last few hours.

The police had finally rumbled his address. Mentally he worked through the flat inch by inch, visualising what was there, what he had left behind, what might be used to incriminate him or reveal his true identity. He was pretty certain there was nothing.

The relationship with Gill had been good while it lasted. Gill had been just the sort of low-life thicko he had been searching for. A man of low intelligence, who had few friends, and lived alone with no family who gave a shit about him. A bit of a druggie, a bit of a tealeaf, living for the most part on state handouts in a flat with no neighbours, whose only interest in life was his clapped-out motorbike. He had been perfect. The real David Gill had been the fourth such person he had used over the years to provide a cover for his murderous activities.

He had watched Gill for a while. Learned about him and his habits. Saw his occasional friend. Saw where he lived and had come to the conclusion that he could easily become David Gill whenever the situation required. He could pull Gill on like an overcoat and that would offer him a veneer of protection should he ever get caught – which was something he never intended to happen.

He had befriended Gill, something that had not taken long once Gill's natural reluctance had been broken down. And then he had killed him and frozen the body.

And from that day on he came to believe that it was David Gill who had committed all the murders. It was Gill, not him, who came out of the dark and actually carried them out. But now Gill's body had been discovered. Unfortunate. He would have to find some other poor, sad soul who could be bought for the price of a pint and then disposed of.

But before any of that could happen, two things had to be sorted out.

He had decided Jane Roscoe had lived long enough. He was getting tired of her now. He would just kill her quickly, nothing flashy, just slash her to pieces in a frenzy and enjoy it for what it was. And secondly he had to do the thing that would show the world that the backlash had truly started: kill the wife of the prime minister.

‘Sorry, boss, I was miles away,' PC John Taylor said. He was sitting in the report-writing room. He looked up at Henry Christie.

‘I said, how are you feeling?'

‘Oh, much better.'

Henry hovered by the doorway.

‘Just redoing my statement from last night. Want to get it right,' Taylor explained.

‘Good. I just wanted to ask you something.'

‘Go ahead.'

Henry waved the note Taylor had left him about the neighbourhood watch co-ordinator. ‘I know you got no reply from that neighbourhood watch co-ordinator. It says one of the neighbours told you he'd gone on holiday, didn't say where to.'

‘That's right,' Taylor nodded.

‘Did you find out when he was coming back?'

‘Er . . . next week sometime . . . Tuesday, I think.' Taylor seemed flustered.

‘Can you give me the name of the neighbour?'

Taylor thought for a moment. ‘No, don't recall it,' he said worriedly.

‘Where does he live?'

Taylor scratched his head. ‘Next door but one – no, two.'

Henry sighed. ‘Would you be able to take me there? One way or another I need to identify this military man who Jane spoke to. It's just possible the neighbourhood watch co-ordinator might know who he is if he's a local character, or it could even be the man himself – after all, the co-ordinator is called Captain Blackthorn. But, whoever it is, I need to get hold of him. He's the key to this and the sooner I see him the better.' Henry dangled a set of car keys between his fingers. ‘I'll drive. You show me which house it is. If we can't bottom it tonight, we're going to have to go house to house in the morning, major style.'