Bad Tidings (24 page)

‘Following a line of investigation,' Henry said, haughtily this time. ‘And the fact that three murder victims were together at the same school, even though that was years before they were killed, seems a pretty good thing to be banging away at, don't you think?'

‘That's my hand slapped.'

‘Yep . . . so if you do think of anything that David might have mentioned, please give me a call.'

‘You're cross now.'

‘Yes I am.' Henry hung up after a few words of thanks, and his fingers were still on the phone when his office door was flung open and two faces appeared. Rik Dean and Jerry Tope. Rik was marginally ahead.

Neither man actually spoke, the look on Henry's face reminding them they had burst into a superintendent's office without knocking.

Then Henry said, ‘Someone better speak.'

‘We've got something,' Rik said.

‘Me too,' Tope said, dancing behind Rik, a sheet of paper in hand.

Henry cocked his thumb and forefinger like a pistol and pointed at Rik. ‘You first.'

‘Shit,' Tope said, crestfallen.

Rik said, ‘You'll need your kit.'

After leaving his mother's bedside the previous evening and entrusting her to Lisa, who had turned up looking positively radiant following her reunion with Rik, Henry had driven straight to the Tawny Owl, where he ate the apparently legendary Boxing Day curry (turkey, of course) with a couple of pints of San Miguel, followed by a couple of Jack Daniels on the rocks. He crashed out about midnight with Alison beside him and the newly betrothed couple screwed the last dregs of life out of each other before falling soundly asleep.

Henry woke seven hours later with a bursting bladder, but also completely refreshed and ready for what lay ahead.

Alison watched him get dressed after he came out of the shower.

‘This doesn't mean you get out of the “whisking me away, down on one knee” scenario,' she said.

‘Good.' He pulled on his jeans, missed the trouser leg and found himself hopping around in a circle in order to keep his balance. He bounced off the wall twice before the second leg found its rightful place. He sat down heavily on the bed and started to pull on his socks. ‘But it'll still be busy this week . . . we'll get away next week, promise. A hot city somewhere.'

‘How do you think this week will pan out?'

‘Dunno. Bit of a waiting game in some respects. First, Mum. I honestly don't think she'll last much longer, even though she rallied a bit yesterday . . . just a feeling,' he said sadly. ‘Then we'll see if the Twixtmas Killer strikes again, and today I'll need to pull a big investigation together to sort out the mess of the last couple of days. I'll get in early, brainstorm a bit. Loads of things need covering . . . locations, victims, offenders, post-mortems . . . a manhunt for Terry Cromer and whoever was his partner in crime . . . all sorts. Just want the first hour or two alone to get my head around it.' As he talked he continued to dress, staring at the wall for inspiration, assuming that Alison was enthralled and intrigued by his work. ‘Surveillance branch, Intelligence Unit, Fraud, Uniforms . . .' When he glanced at her, she had turned over and seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘So, not really interested, eh? Bloody women . . . That said, I did enjoy last night, especially when you flipped over onto your knees and I got behind—'

‘Oi!' she interrupted without looking round. ‘Save your debriefs for work.'

Henry chuckled, leaned over, kissed her and left.

He was at his office in the FMIT building at HQ three-quarters of an hour later, working out the day ahead.

At 1 p.m. he had a team of detectives in front of him in one of the classrooms at the Training Centre, though not as many as he would have liked; by 2 p.m. they were on the road, fully briefed and tasked. Henry then spent an hour with the IPCC investigators being interviewed on tape, then he was back in his office where he had started pondering about the double murder and had called Bernadette Peters.

‘Surveillance Branch picked him up straight away,' Rik Dean explained. ‘They'd recently done a job for NCIS on him and Terry Cromer that came to nothing. It seems that this guy and Terry had been doing a lot of to-ing and fro-ing together around the north-west and it's possible he could be Terry's partner in crime for the shootings.'

Followed by an irritated Jerry Tope, Rik Dean and Henry were scuttling across to the garage at the rear of headquarters to pick up one of the pool cars. They were moving quite rapidly and as Rik spoke, Henry scanned the paperwork he had been handed.

Kyle Clovelly was the name of the individual Rik was talking about, and he had been mentioned in Henry's briefing. Late twenties, with a long history of crime behind him, including serious assaults, drug dealing and firearms offences. According to the intel he had recently hooked up with Terry Cromer, mainly it seemed, as a heavy and bodyguard. The information was fairly sparse but a few sharp-eyed cops (and Henry was relieved to learn there were still some out there) had seen him with Cromer entering and leaving clubs in Blackburn. It had been this information that had prompted an NCIS operation, but it had come to nothing, not least because Cromer and Clovelly were surveillance smart.

Since the briefing, a couple of surveillance officers had set off on their own initiative to see if they could track Clovelly down and they'd picked him up in a car driving through Blackburn. They followed him as best they could towards Accrington, the neighbouring town, where he had managed to shake the tail.

Undaunted, the officers had stuck to their task and found the car parked in the West End area of Oswaldtwistle, about a quarter of a mile from the house of a woman Clovelly was supposedly seeing.

‘They're not one hundred per cent,' Rik warned, ‘but he has been seen to enter and leave the woman's house on a few occasions recently and they guess he'll be there now. They reckon he was just being ultra-cautious about surveillance and they're certain he didn't actually clock them.'

Henry looked carefully at the photograph of Clovelly attached to the paperwork. He hadn't personally come across the man before, but as he racked his brains and put himself back in Cromer's house a couple of nights earlier, he was almost sure that Clovelly was one of the men glimpsed in the dining room when the door had been opened by mistake by Iron-man Grasson.

‘Right, good call,' Henry said. ‘Let's move as quickly as we can on this. Can you get someone in a plain car to keep nicks on Clovelly's motor and keep the two surveillance bods on the girlfriend's house, if possible. Front and rear ideally.' Rik nodded. ‘Let's convene at Accrington nick and put a quick plan together based on who we have available.'

‘I love it when a plan comes together,' Tope muttered from behind them. Henry shot him a look. ‘Nothing, nothing,' Tope said, holding up his hands in mock defeat.

The semi-detached council house stood in a small cul-de-sac off Thwaites Road in Oswaldtwistle. Clovelly had left his car on a nearby estate and it was still there when Henry, Rik and the small team they had managed to pull together arrived at the end of Thwaites Road. They were still working on the assumption that Clovelly was at the woman's house.

It was almost two hours later. Henry had spent the time poring over intelligence reports, re-checking addresses, confirming the girlfriend's address, and looking at maps and floor plans of similar types of council houses. He wasn't expecting any surprises in the layout, but it was best to be certain.

‘I want to try and keep this low key,' he'd explained to the officers he had cobbled together. This not being a public holiday, he had a few more to look at than over the last two days. ‘It's not a racing certainty he's there, but that's what we're working on. His car is parked nearby and he's been seen coming and going at the address. We haven't got the staff to go piling in, but if he is there – and he could be armed – I want to be in a position to deal with it.

‘I want a discreet perimeter using the support unit, but with every officer in a safe position. The firearms officers' – Henry had two pairs of AFOs to deploy – ‘will be ready to move as necessary, once contact has been made and we know what the subject's reaction is going to be.'

‘Who's going to knock on the door?' someone piped up.

As much as Henry Christie, detective superintendent, a senior manager in the force, had promised himself that he would delegate everything today, he could not stop himself from blurting, ‘That would be me.' And then, internally, he called himself a complete arsehole.

Once they were all in position, Henry drove to the open end of the cul-de-sac, parked the pool car and climbed out. His colleague did the same and Henry watched DC Jerry Tope walk around the car to join him.

At the best of times Henry would have described Tope's facial expression as hang-dog, but now he looked more like a dog that had been hanged.

‘Henry, I'm a desk jockey,' he moaned. ‘You know, a headquarters shiny-arsed bastard that operational officers despise . . . from the Dream Factory . . . I interrogate computers, then the rufty-tufty squad go and kick down doors based on what I tell them. I don't do dirty work, knocking on the doors of suspected armed killers.'

Henry grinned at him. ‘Yeah, me too.'

Both men wore Kevlar bullet-proof vests under their jackets, which bulked out their chests by a few inches.

‘You love it, you pervert,' Tope said.

‘You'll learn to love it again,' Henry reassured him.

‘I won't. My lair is my desk, my jungle the internet.'

Henry put his arm around Tope's shoulders. ‘Stick with me,' he said and ushered the DC ahead of him, along the pavement and up the cul-de-sac.

This was Henry's jungle, had been for over thirty years. Council estates and houses. Some boarded up. One or two with well-kept gardens, but many with rubbish piled up, fridges and other white goods, old bikes and prams. Scruffy kids in the middle of the road, all with very new-looking bikes and mobile phones and designer trainers, scowling at the two intruders walking past them. Most of his business had come from places like this, most of the murderers he had arrested had grown up in such places, and most of the thieves. He knew that criminals were in the minority, but their influence was disproportionate to their numbers and they made others' lives miserable. And sometimes the police didn't help matters.

Henry felt sharp, but also at ease in this environment.

The house was sixth up on the right. A semi, quite substantially constructed, 1960s pedigree.

The two detectives sauntered up to the front door.

‘What were you so keen to tell me back at the office?' Henry asked Tope. They had reached the door. Through the earpiece fitted snugly inside Henry's earlobe he heard confirmation that everyone was in position, including two cops who had sneaked into the back garden in case Clovelly tried to do a back-door run. Something not unknown in these circumstances – a villain trying to leg it.

‘Oh, nothing.'

Henry rapped on the door using the back of his hand. ‘No, tell me,' he insisted.

Tope pouted childishly. ‘Just found your serial killer for you, that's all.'

Henry was about to smack the door again but stopped with his hand half an inch from the door. ‘Really?'

‘Possibly,' Tope said, amending his claim slightly.

Henry beat on the door again. ‘Do tell.' He heard some movement from within the house. He put this over the radio and knocked again.

‘One of the classmates,' Tope said.

‘The kids from the school?'

‘Out on licence as we speak . . . been out for two years now.'

‘Wow,' Henry said.

‘Yeah, what about that?' Tope said proudly.

‘Double brownie points,' Henry said. He squatted down, flipped up the brass-plated letterbox and peered into the hallway. He saw nothing, just a bare, uncarpeted hall and stairs. ‘Hello – open up, please. Police.' He let the flap drop a couple of times, making a metallic rattle, stood up and thumped the door again, this time with the side of his fist.

The door had a nine-inch square panel of frosted glass in it at about head height. Tope put his face to it, shielding his eyes with his hand, and he saw the outline of a figure tearing down the stairs, skidding along the hall towards the rear of the house.

‘Doing a runner,' Tope said excitedly, his voice suddenly high pitched.

‘Patrols at the back of the house,' Henry said into his radio, ‘he's heading for the back door.'

Tope ran towards the edge of the house but Henry grabbed him and raised his eyebrows.

‘Subject emerging from rear door,' one of the officers at the back said.

‘What are we doing here?' Tope hissed to Henry, who still had hold of him.

Henry said nothing, just gestured with his hands:
stay put
. Then he pushed Tope to one side of the front door and flattened himself against the wall on the opposite side, still gesticulating for Tope to stay where he was. Tope got the message as the next transmission from the officers out back went, ‘Subject exiting, running across the garden towards us.'

‘Is it Clovelly?' Henry asked. So far, no one had confirmed that little detail.

There was no time for a reply, because the front door of the house was yanked open and Clovelly himself came out in jeans, T-shirt and trainers. He held a sawn-off shotgun diagonally across his chest, his right hand holding the stock, right forefinger in the trigger guard, left holding the barrels.

Stunned, Henry watched as Tope pivoted, moving hard and fast.

He hit Clovelly on the side of his face, just at the point where the jaw joined the skull in front of his ear.

Henry thought it was one of the hardest punches he had ever seen thrown. Clovelly's face distorted with its power.