Bad Tidings (19 page)

He and Brighouse had not been joined by any backup – mainly because all other available men were now up on Shoreside and there wasn't another cop free within twenty miles. Henry, however, would lay odds that they would be safe now. Whatever had been going on in the club was over with. The job had been done.

He jerked his head at Brighouse to tag along, and they started to make their way through the corridors until they entered the main dance floor and bar area. It had not been touched since Henry had last been there. He quickly scanned the floor for signs of old bloodstains, then glanced up at the ceiling and saw the large number of bullet holes that had been put there on his last visit by killers trying to murder him and John Rider. They had fired upwards, strafing the ceiling, knowing that the two men were hiding in the rafters. Henry shook his head at the memory. The bullets had obviously missed him. They had killed Rider.

He blew out his cheeks, looked around. Brighouse had strolled over to the bar, which he peered over. ‘Oh Jeez . . . here,' he called, and looked at Henry, his face horrified.

Henry walked across, dabbing his face. It was still bleeding and the kitchen towel did not seem to be as efficient at soaking up liquid as the manufacturers claimed. Not blood, anyway.

He went to the open end of the bar and – without surprise – looked down at Runcie Costain's bullet-riddled body. Alongside him was a sawn-off shotgun, a few scattered cartridges and a mangy-looking revolver. His little arsenal, stashed at the club, which he'd hurried down to retrieve and arm himself with after the drive-by, before he was ambushed.

He was on his back, one leg drawn up, between the bar and the shelves. An arc of bullets from the right side of his chest ran up to his left shoulder, probably one burst of the machine pistol that had cracked Henry's head. A curved line from his liver, across his sternum, shredding his lungs and heart, and into his left shoulder, most of which seemed to have been blown away. They must have caught him by surprise, because he had a half-smoked cheroot clamped at the corner of his mouth, still smouldering. He was lying in a steady growing pool of crimson, oxygenated blood.

‘Holy . . .' Brighouse uttered as it truly sank in what he was seeing. It had taken his mind a few seconds to completely assimilate it. Then he started to gag. He pitched away from the bar and ran across the dance floor to its far edge, where he dropped to his hands and knees and heaved up copious amounts of half-digested Christmas dinner. It reminded Henry he hadn't yet been lucky enough to have his.

But at least the crime scene remained sterile thanks to Brighouse's thoughtfulness in spewing up as far away from it as he could manage.

Henry walked over to him and gave him a fatherly pat on the back.

The Force Major Investigation Team maintained a pokey office at Blackpool nick, tucked away in a corridor few people ever seemed to venture down. Nominally it was Henry's office, but he let any of the FMIT team use it as necessary. The department only had a toehold because that was all they needed. When anything major happened in a division which called for FMIT involvement, such as a murder or other serious crime, it was up to the division to provide most of the staffing, resources, space and money. The team, which had such a grand-sounding name, was actually a very tiny department based at headquarters, headed by four detective superintendents (though only three at the moment because of Joe Speakman's sudden departure) with a couple of DCIs and DIs, some support staff – and that was about it.

Divisional commanders – the chief superintendents who ran the geographical divisions – were supposed to find the staff and funding for major investigations from their own budgets, but it wasn't always so clear cut, and they could be awkward about it. The FMIT supers had to be skilled in negotiating and prising cash out of tight-fisted commanders whose budgets were already stretched in a force that had recently been compelled to save over £20 million by a cost-cutting central government.

For a force the size of Lancashire's, such cuts were excruciating. Posts were slashed, people lost jobs, were made redundant. HQ departments were pared to the bone or abolished. Police stations were closed, or opening hours reduced. Communications rooms were going to be closed and centralized, as were custody suites. Front-line cop numbers were reduced, Police Community Support Officers were sacked, and, as Henry discovered (although he already knew it), the number of officers actually working on public holidays, where pay entitlement doubled, were shaved to a minimum. In other words, there was hardly anyone on duty on Christmas or Boxing Day. The knock-on effect was that, if there was a big incident – and there had been two – it was a struggle to police them.

Which was why, at 6 a.m. on Boxing Day, Henry was sitting in that dank FMIT office in a disintegrating police station, still dabbing his endlessly bleeding cut and rubbing his half-strangled throat, trying to get the county's act together.

At least he was being assisted by a much-needed mug of good filter coffee.

He had just finished a dispiriting phone call to the divisional commander at Blackburn, scene of the first shootings at the hospital – which included, of course, a fatal police shooting. Prior to that he had also spoken to the Blackpool divisional commander, on whose patch there had been a drive-by shooting and a murder.

The crime scene in Blackburn was easier to contain, being in the hospital; those in Blackpool not so, mainly because of the outdoor nature of the drive-by. That was skewed because the more criminally minded inhabitants of Shoreside were bubbling with mischief fuelled by the rumour that the police were behind it all. There was no logic to it, they simply wanted a confrontation, and the likelihood was that Shoreside would become a battleground later in the day.

The chief superintendent's perspective was that he wanted to keep the streets safe; neither Runcie's death nor the wounding of one of the partygoers (a completely innocent lad, incidentally) really mattered very much. His priority was maintaining short-term public order, and if extra staff had to be brought on duty, that's what they would be doing, not investigating the death of a toerag. He didn't actually say the ‘welcome death' of Runcie Costain, but Henry caught the insinuation – which riled him: no one's death was welcome in Henry's book. The commander suggested that as the whole thing had kicked off in Blackburn, then any investigation should be run from there . . . with their money, not his.

Henry thought he had a point. Although the commander at Blackburn saw the logic, he wasn't impressed by starting a murder investigation on Boxing Day, because even a very basic Major Investigation Room would need a lot of staff. ‘And I don't have the freakin' money,' he bellyached.

And Henry knew that he needed enough staff to be able to carry out some coordinated raids, because he didn't want Terry Cromer to get comfortable. He wanted to start harrying him now, this minute, with lots of cops with big boots kicking down doors behind which Cromer might be hiding.

The chief super pleaded with him to keep a lid on it for a day, so that it would cost less.

Henry had already deployed a plain police car to park discreetly within view of Cromer's house in Belthorn, just watching and waiting for him to possibly sneak home. Henry doubted he would be daft enough to do that, unless he felt brave enough to bluff things out, but you could never tell. On the whole, most criminals were just slightly more dim than the cops who chased them, and they often did silly things, like go home.

But to the chief super it was a cop sat on his backside in a car doing nothing for double the wages. An expensive resource, though Henry appeased him by offering to pay half from the meagre FMIT budget.

After his conversations with the chief supers, Henry was even more whacked. He breathed, ‘Talk about bad tidings,' as he tried to work out what best to do – what was a ‘must', a ‘should' or a ‘could'. How he could keep people happy by not spending their money. Budgets were a complete minefield. In times past – those hallowed days of limitless government spending – there always seemed to be a spare pot of cash lying about. No longer.

‘Bad, bad tidings,' he whispered again. He leaned back in the rickety office chair that some thieving bastard had left behind in place of the half-decent chair that used to be there. He chugged back through the day he'd just worked, almost twenty-four hours of it.

His mobile phone rang, interrupting his thoughts. It was Rik Dean calling from Blackburn, updating Henry on the hospital shootings, which Rik seemed to have well under control.

From all that Rik said, it was Bill Robbins that bothered Henry the most. Rik said that he'd sent Bill home despite having spoken to some ‘stuck-up bint' from the IPCC who insisted that Bill should be arrested on suspicion of murder.

‘I told her to fuck off,' Rik said crossly. ‘Poor sod's gone home in a bloody Michelin Man suit because all his other stuff's been bagged up for forensics. He's formally had his firearms authorization revoked, he's been swabbed for gunshot residue and DNA and the bitch wanted him locked up to give her the chance to travel up from London. Stuff that! I've arranged for him to come into FMIT at three this aft with a brief, to be interviewed there.'

‘Sounds good. How is he?'

‘Broken,' Rik sighed bleakly. ‘You know, you shoot and kill once – that's OK-ish, if you did the right thing, which Bill did. But do it again, whatever the circumstances, it's the high jump. The force was bad enough with him last time. This time they'll make Pontius Pilate look like the Good Samaritan.'

‘I won't let that happen.' Henry was absently spinning a full three-sixty degrees on his chair and as he looped back to face the office door, he jerked to a halt when he saw that Fanshaw-Bayley was filling the door frame.

‘Everything else sorted?' Henry asked Rik.

‘Yeah . . . Home Office pathologist has been for a look, but it's unlikely the PMs will get done today . . . public holiday and all that.'

‘Tell me about it,' Henry said.

FB entered the office and helped himself to a mug of coffee from Henry's filter machine, then parked himself on an office chair. His weight made the pneumatic workings drop down a level with a fart-like thud. He spilled his coffee on the carpet and shot Henry a dagger-like look as he pumped himself back up, muttering, ‘Shit.'

Henry didn't want the phone call to end. ‘Anything else I need to know about?'

‘No . . . is someone taking this over from me?' Rik wanted to know.

‘No.'

‘How does that work, then?'

‘We stay on duty.'

Rik guffawed uncertainly. ‘Good joke.'

‘No – seriously.'

There was a beat of absolute silence.

‘Gotcha,' Henry said. He was feeling a bit light headed. ‘I've arranged for someone to keep track of things so we can get home and grab some sleep – but I want us back this afternoon, probably for another long day.'

‘Um, all right,' Rik said. ‘What's the point of having a personal life when you can be a cop, eh?'

Henry glanced at FB. ‘Talking of which, have you heard from Lisa?'

‘No.' It was a blunt reply. Only one syllable, Henry thought, but it was incredible what could be read into it. Anger. Hurt. Frustration. Fear . . . Henry's heart, unusually, went out to Rik, who had a lot of years womanizing behind him but then had found someone to really love – someone who, with years of man eating behind her, had rapidly reverted to type.

‘OK,' Henry said, not having time to go there. ‘DCI Leach should be with you soon. Brief him, then get to bed and be at FMIT at Hutton about one this afternoon. We'll have to run this thing from there for the time being.'

‘Eh?'

‘Don't ask. I'll sort out some staffing, but it'll be all our people, not division's at the moment . . . It's all about the money, money, money,' he said with sad cynicism. ‘Pushing bodies across boundaries.'

‘Yeah, understood.' Rik knew what Henry meant. In days gone by, when dead bodies – usually old alcoholics – seemed to turn up face down in canals much more regularly than they did in the present day, the officer who found the ‘floater', if it was close enough to a divisional or force boundary, would often spend hours launching rocks into the water in the hope that the ripples would send the body over the border. Then the police over there could deal with it, though occasionally the reverse happened and somehow, mysteriously, the body would be found in its original location. The good old days, when bobbies really were bobbies, skilled at ducking, diving and avoiding work.

‘It'll be cheaper all round if we can run it from FMIT, at least until New Year kicks in. We're a bit of a halfway house here, between Blackburn and Blackpool.'

He ended the call and smiled at FB. After a pause of consideration, FB said, ‘What I don't get, Henry, is how I give you a simple cold case to deal with and next thing I know, you're in the middle of a real shit storm.'

Henry could have argued the point. He hadn't done any of the stirring, but he was definitely at the centre of a vortex.

His last phone call, using the hands-free in the car, was to Bill Robbins. Unable to sleep, Bill was out walking his dog in the woods close to where he lived in the countryside at Hurst Green, between Longridge and Clitheroe, near the River Hodder.

Bill sounded thoroughly depressed.

‘You know, when that bastard swung around with his gun, I actually thought twice about pulling the trigger. I also thought, should I just try and wing him? That was the worst part. In that fucking microsecond, all the shit went through my noggin, as well as the implications of shooting him. Knowing I was right, that I didn't have a choice, that I had to shoot to stop him, not try and be fancy by just shooting him in the shoulder. I knew there would be months and months of shite to come.'