Big City Jacks (19 page)

‘There always seems to be a doctor or nurse on the scene on a road accident, doesn't there? Same sort of thing.'

‘Run it by me again – why do you want to see the driver?'

‘Intelligence-gathering . . . the FBI are heavily involved in investigating human trafficking.'

‘I'll let you speak to the driver just so long as the interview is fully recorded and a member of my team is present . . . how does that grab you?'

‘How about if you are present?'

‘OK . . . but remember, I'm only doing this because I'm one of those blokes – and call me old-fashioned if you like – who doesn't believe in coincidence.'

‘Henry, hello,' Tara had responded to Henry's words of surprise in the waiting room at Blackpool police station. She stood up and crossed over to him. She looked as good as ever. Slim, blonde, highly attractive if a little too heavy around the jawline to make her stunning. Since Henry had last seen her, she had acquired a golden tan which set off her azure eyes and blonde hair brilliantly. She took hold of Henry's hand, tiptoed into him and kissed him on the cheek. She was wearing a beret tilted at an angle on her head. Henry knew it was covering the injury she had received to her head, the blow from the handle of a gun administered ruthlessly by the man who had gone on to murder her husband. She'd had to have part of her head shaved for the wound to be treated, but six weeks on, it looked as though much of the hair had grown back, at least enough to provide some cover.

Henry recoiled slightly from her lips, even though they felt soft, warm and wonderful, sending a little twelve-volt jolt through him. She gazed with disappointment at him. ‘What is it?'

‘Nothing, nothing,' he shrugged it off. ‘What can I do for you?'

‘I need to talk . . . talk things through.' She looked awkwardly around the waiting room. ‘Can we go somewhere else? I don't feel at ease here in the police station.'

‘Such as where? It's very late.'

‘I have a suite down at the Imperial . . . maybe there?' She saw his disinclination to say yes. ‘In the bar, I mean.'

He relented. Less than five minutes later he was driving northwards along the promenade, Tara's Mercedes behind him, wondering what the hell he was doing.

The Imperial Hotel is on the sea front at North Shore, Blackpool, a five-star hotel used most famously by visiting politicians during the annual party conferences in the resort. All the great and good had stayed here, some not so good either. Henry knew the hotel well, inside and out, though he was glad to say on that night he did not recognize any of the staff as he sat in the bar being attended by a waiter who brought him a large cappuccino and Tara a black coffee and double brandy.

She took a big mouthful of the spirit and
aahed
as it sank down into her chest and stomach.

Henry waited, sipping his hot frothy coffee.

‘The full inquest is in a month,' she said, opening her gambit.

‘I'm aware of that.'

‘I'm worried about things. About what to say, about being questioned by barristers, about slipping up and telling the truth.' She spoke the last three words in a hush.

Henry rubbed his eyes, scratched his head. ‘Just stick to the script and it'll be fine.'

‘That's easy for you to say. You're used to being cross-examined, I'm not.' She supped the rest of her brandy, gestured for the waiter to return with a refill.

‘It's not like a court of law,' Henry said patiently.

‘That's not what I've heard. They're just as hard on you, or they can be, and I feel like I might crack under pressure . . . this isn't easy, you know.'

Henry could feel his heart changing up a gear, whilst his stomach seemed to contract. This was not a reassuring thing to hear. As he massaged his tired face again, his hands shook slightly as though his sugar levels were low.

‘If you tell the truth, you'll go to prison for murder,' he said harshly. ‘Is that what you want?'

Henry's mind came back to the present. He shivered apprehensively.

‘You OK?' Jane Roscoe asked.

‘Somebody just walked over my grave.' He saw Roscoe smirk.

‘How are you and the chief these days?' she asked out of the blue.

He frowned. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You and FB. Like that, aren't you?' She held up two crossed fingers.

‘Oh,' Henry said dubiously, ‘haven't seen or spoken to him in weeks.'

‘You and he reckon to dislike each other, but actually he looks after you, doesn't he?'

Henry's mouth turned down at the corners. It was true to say that the relationship between him and the chief was a complex one. Henry often thought that Fanshaw-Bayley simply used Henry's skills and abilities callously without any thought to the damage it did to Henry, just so long as a result came about. Having said that, Henry had some things to be grateful to FB for, recently in particular, so there was a two-way exchange, though much of the bias was tilted towards FB. Most lately FB had secured Henry's return to work following suspension, but that in itself was now having repercussions which left Henry feeling a little numb.

‘I think we know each other well enough to call a spade a spade, don't you?' Roscoe pummelled on. Obviously she believed she had a right to say anything she wanted to Henry following the acrimonious end to their brief affair. Henry braced himself for something unpleasant. ‘Dave Anger wants rid of you from the SIO team.' Henry sighed. So what's new, he thought. ‘He's come into the force and been given the job of running the team and he feels hampered by having you in it – someone he first met under very dubious circumstances, someone he suspects is not being quite straight with him. Not a good start, is it? He wants to get people in he knows and can trust.'

‘How many people can he know? He's only just come into the force,' said Henry crossly.

‘He knows people . . . me, for example. I've shown him how well I work and he wants me on the team. There's others, too. Having people like you dumped on him gives him very little room to manoeuvre.' She paused, then pounced. ‘Can I be blunt with you, Henry?'

Henry sighed through his nostrils. ‘Would it make any difference if I said no?'

‘No.'

He waited nervously.

‘This is just between you and me, Henry, and if you repeat any of it, I'll deny it, OK?' Their eyes locked at seventy mph on the M65. Henry had once thought Roscoe beautiful, but now to him her face seemed hard and callous. She had lost a lot of weight and her face had become thinner, chisel-like. ‘He's out to get you and so am I . . . but actually all we want is for you to request a move . . . if you don't, life will be very uncomfortable because we'll keep digging and digging into this Wickson thing. We won't let it drop . . . unless you ask for a transfer out.'

Henry, jaw clamped tight, muscles in his face tense, turned his eyes back to the motorway and felt himself begin to waver.

The chance came as Whitlock had planned. He had been wheeled in to see the duty solicitor in an interview room specifically reserved for such private consultations between client and brief. The room was not monitored by either CCTV or audio.

He spent an hour in discussion, told the solicitor everything that had happened to him. In some ways that was good. A cathartic release, but finally the conversation was over.

‘Are you ready for the police to interview you now?'

Whitlock nodded. ‘There is one thing . . . I don't want to go back into the cell just yet . . . is there any way I could sit here for a while? It's so depressing and claustrophobic, even with the door open. This isn't much better, but at least it's brighter.'

‘I'm sure it'll be all right, but I do need to have a chat with the interviewing detectives first. You could be here for a good ten minutes.'

‘That's OK . . . just as long as it isn't a cell. It's doing my head in.'

‘No probs.' The solicitor pressed the attention button. After a minute the door opened and a civilian gaoler poked his head in.

Karl Donaldson was allowed to listen to Detective Superintendent Brooks's chat with the duty solicitor, together with the two other detectives who would actually be carrying out the interview with Whitlock.

The solicitor did not give much away and the purpose of the interaction was more about setting ground rules than anything else. This was a very big job and everybody wanted to get it right. It took about ten minutes, then they were ready to proceed.

They had been ensconced in one of the interview rooms just off the custody reception area. They emerged like rats out of a tunnel and headed towards the desk.

Brooks said to Donaldson, ‘I want to get the initial interview done before I let you loose on the prisoner. We have the facility to watch interviews taking place, so you and me can sit back and watch my detectives talking to this guy for a while.'

It was as good as it was going to get. Donaldson accepted it.

At the custody desk, Brooks spoke to the sergeant. ‘We're ready now, Colin.'

The sergeant opened the custody record and made an entry in the log. He turned to the civilian gaoler and asked him to produce Whitlock from his cell.

‘He's still in the solicitor's room.'

‘What? Why? He should've gone back in a cell.'

‘The brief asked if it was OK if he could stay there,' responded the gaoler petulantly.

‘And you agreed?' The sergeant stared askance at the duty solicitor, who wilted slightly.

‘Er, yeah . . . didn't seem to be a problem. The door is locked.'

‘Next time, cell, OK?'

‘OK.'

‘Go get him.'

Donaldson watched and listened to the exchange with interest. He knew that there was a move within the British police service to appoint civilian gaolers because they were cheaper to employ than constables. The problem was that, unlike cops, who were steeped in custody procedure and dealing with deceitful baddies, civilian gaolers tended to be rather naïve and trusting.

The gaoler strolled sloppily down the short corridor to the solicitor's room, swinging his keys. He inserted one, unlocked it, pushed.

The door would not open.

He pushed harder, a puzzled expression on his face, which turned worriedly towards the custody desk.

The duty solicitor, Brooks, the interviewing officers and the custody sergeant were huddled in a chat-scrum and were unaware of the gaoler's difficulty. Donaldson, however, had watched him all the way and seen the struggle to open the door. He pushed himself off the custody desk. ‘There's something wrong down here.' He hurried down the corridor. ‘What is it?'

‘Can't get the door open.'

‘It is unlocked – yeah?'

‘Yeah,' snarled the gaoler.

Donaldson pushed the door. It opened an inch, no more. He looked around the door frame and then stepped back, his foot slipping on something. A moment passed before he realized he had blood on his shoe, blood which was seeping underneath the door.

Without further vacillation he placed his shoulder to the door and pushed hard, his feet slithering in the blood. Slowly the door opened, inch by inch. People gathered behind him. He pushed and the door finally opened wide enough to allow him entry, revealing exactly what Donaldson expected to see: Whitlock's body hanging by the neck from the inner door handle, his wrists slashed up each arm.

Donaldson twisted into the room, bending down to look at Whitlock, whose bloodshot eyes bulged, his tongue hanging thickly out of his mouth. The American knew even before he reached for a pulse that there was nothing that could be done for the long-distance lorry driver.

‘S
uperintendent Anger won't be very pleased,' Roscoe pointed out unnecessarily.

‘That doesn't surprise me, but the fact of the matter is that this body is lying within our jurisdiction, so it's our murder.'

Henry spoke with an authority that cut Roscoe dead. She clammed up.

Henry knew the area well from many years before when he had served in the Rossendale Valley. The quirk was that to get to Deeply Vale, you had to drive out of Lancashire into Greater Manchester near Bury in order to get back into Lancashire. Deeply Vale thrust out like a peninsula surrounded by the water of a massive Metropolitan area, and if true logic had been applied then the area should probably have been part of that urban sprawl, but it wasn't. Where Henry was now standing was definitely on his patch, which meant he knew exactly where the body was lying.

The reason why Henry knew it so well dated back to the early 1980s when the phenomenon of travelling hippies hit the country. It was a time when such groups of people would, during summer months, descend in droves on various locations, set up camps for weeks on end, and hold impromptu and illegal pop concerts and smoke a lot of hash. Deeply Vale was one of these locations. A peaceful, picturesque area, accessible only via rough farm tracks. Ideal, it might be argued, for such peace-and-love events, but not so great for local residents, councils and cops who had to clear up the mess.

There had been boundary disputes in those days and it was during them that Henry got to know well what was and wasn't in Lancashire.

A couple of Greater Manchester detectives from Bury huddled near their car, deep in conversation and surrounded by cigarette smoke. Henry walked over to them and explained the situation. They couldn't have left the scene any faster, so relieved were they that a ball-aching murder was not on their area. Henry watched the exit with a shake of the head, then spun round and surveyed the scene.

By virtue of its openness it would be difficult to secure. It also pained him that quite a few pairs of boots and sets of tyres had been across the scene. But there was one thing that Henry knew well and he reminded himself of it at every murder he attended: you didn't get a second chance at a crime scene. He would do all he could to protect it in order to secure and preserve any evidence to be had. That would be his first task.