Critical Threat (20 page)

‘Pit bull,' breathed Bill quietly. His right hand moved slowly to his holster.

‘If you shoot it, it'll get mad,' Henry said seriously.

‘It already looks pretty mad.'

The dog took a few more steps and became clearly visible to the two officers. It was a magnificent creature, even Henry had to grudgingly admit, scared as he was and ambivalent towards canines in general. Basically they did nothing for him. He could see no further than eating, shitting and biting and costing money, which is why he had always declined his daughters' pleas for one.

This animal looked the business. A good twenty-two inches high, probably weighing in about fifty-five pounds, all of it rippling muscle, under a thick, short coat of shiny hair, the colour of which could not be made out in the light available, but was probably a light brown. On top of that, there must also have been a brain inside its thick skull which was intelligent enough to allow two idiots to climb into its den without letting them know it was waiting with bared teeth.

Its ears lay back, its hackles up, head thrust forward, lips drawn back revealing a set of dentures that would do a good job of tearing these intruders apart.

‘Bugger,' Henry said weakly, already imagining his face being ripped away.

The dog took a few more steps in their direction, moving more like a leopard than a canine.

Henry swallowed. Bill slowly withdrew his Glock, his hand shaking, desperate not to make a sudden move.

‘Think it'll let us go back the way we came?'

‘Only minus our balls,' Bill said.

His dithering hand came out with the gun.

Henry laid a hand on his forearm. ‘Back up slowly to the door,' he said. ‘It might be open. One step at a time.'

As they stepped back one, the dog stepped forwards one. It was like some ritualistic dance of death. They dog knew it had them, had all the time in the world. Henry could see its eyes as it looked from one, then to the other human, deciding which to savage first.

Henry caught his heel and nearly tumbled over on to his arse, but steadied himself, knowing that a quick movement could precipitate a charge.

Bill had slowly raised the Glock, easing his left hand under his right to support the weapon, aiming at the dog's head, somewhere at a point where a cross drawn between the eyes and ears met – centre skull.

About ten feet separated them from the animal. If it leapt towards them now, it would be on them in a flash.

Each man stepped carefully back, tension coursing through them.

‘It's fuckin' playing with us,' Henry said, his terror growing. Why couldn't a back yard be guarded by some knife-wielding maniac, or someone with a machine gun? Both would have been preferable to this.

The dog growled again, a primeval sound expertly designed to turn would-be prey into immoveable lumps. It worked.

Then Henry heard something from behind, inside the Class Act. The sliding of a bolt. Yes, he almost jumped for joy; the WPC had obviously managed to get inside. She had made her way through to the back of the premises to let them in.

There was further noise from inside. Keys being turned. More bolts sliding.

Bill removed his left hand, the supporting hand, from underneath the gun and it went to his PR transmitter button and mike affixed to the outside of his jacket on his left shoulder.

‘Get the door open, Carly,' he said urgently, without preamble. ‘Get it open now.'

‘Why?'

‘Because we're about to be attacked by a pit bull.'

There was more noise behind the door, something being dragged away, a scraping. ‘It's stuck,' she said. ‘This bolt is stuck.'

Henry could sense the dog was about to launch itself. It quivered, collecting itself, bracing itself and then it happened and it was hurtling towards Henry.

He saw it rise up into the air, ears pinned back, teeth bared, like a beast from hell. He found himself rooted to the spot, unable to move a muscle. The height it reached was incredible and it could easily have latched its jaws on to Henry's face, but at the last moment, when Henry believed he could smell its deathly breath, his survival instinct cut in and made him move. He twisted desperately away, raised his forearm in self-defence and at the same time, Bill lashed out and kicked the animal in the stomach with his steel toe-capped boots, sending it sprawling across the yard.

But this was no lapdog, which would go away cowering and whining.

As it landed on the concrete, it immediately regained its feet and launched itself back at the cops, its claws scratching the floor for leverage.

In that moment, the WPC wrenched back the sticking bolt and yanked open the door.

Bill scrambled in, leaving Henry still outside to face the oncoming savagery of the dog, which had now got ten degrees madder.

Henry's instinct for self-preservation took over. A slight slip of the pit bull as it clawed its way to him gave him an instant to do something. Stacked up next to him in a precarious pile were a dozen plastic beer crates. He grabbed them and toppled them into the gap between himself and the pooch, pushing them over the dog as they fell. In terms of hurting the dog, they were ineffective, but they impeded its charge and gave Henry that extra moment to turn and throw himself through the open door, which was slammed shut behind him by the WPC.

Henry dropped his hands to his knees, gasping for air, almost retching. Bill had adopted much the same position. They traded glances, blowing out their cheeks, a connection between them having just avoided a mauling. Outside, the dog howled in frustration and clawed at the door like a monster from a horror movie.

Henry stood up.

Bill holstered the Glock. ‘That was fuckin' close.'

Everything on Henry was shaking. He took several deep breaths.

Eventually both got their breath back, and their manhood.

‘Thanks,' Henry said to the female officer. ‘Carly, isn't it?'

‘Yeah – no probs,' she said – but the expression on her face told a different story.

‘How did you manage to get in?'

‘Member of staff turning up for work,' she said, unsteadily.

‘Hey – it's all right,' Henry said, picking up on her voice. ‘We're OK.'

‘I'm not bothered about you,' she said. ‘Back there.' She pointed down the corridor into the building. ‘Blood everywhere.'

‘Bodies?' Henry asked.

She shook her head. ‘I haven't seen anyone, but it's a blood bath.'

‘Let's go see.'

Carly led them through to the main body of the Class Act by way of a storeroom, through another door and they emerged into the main bar room, coming in behind the bar itself, which was long and wide. The lights had been turned on and Henry could see the place was an unkempt dive. It reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke, which was only to be expected, perhaps; but it was also a dirty mess with hundreds of uncollected glasses on the bar top and tables, all the ashtrays full to overflowing. There was a small dance floor to one side, next to which was a raised circular stage from which a pole rose to the ceiling. Henry could visualize the customer base immediately: the best of Blackburn.

A thin blonde woman sat at one of the tables, smoking, looking at them nervously.

‘That the staff member?' Henry asked.

‘Yeah, she's the pole dancer. I told her to stay put.'

‘Where's the blood?'

Carly showed the way across the bar, weaving through tables over sticky carpets, crunching with broken glass and savoury snacks, through another door leading to the tiled entrance foyer behind the front doors. Henry could hear the traffic passing on Mincing Lane. Carly held out an arm to stop them going any further. ‘Here,' she said. Bill peered over her shoulder. Henry was by her side, maybe half a step behind her, her raised arm preventing him from going any further. His jaw literally dropped. Blood was everywhere inside the foyer. All over the floor, up the walls, runny and congealing. ‘I came in, slithered a bit, saw what I'd been standing in and after I'd dumped the dancer in the bar, I ran through to the back door. I know my way round the place,' she explained. ‘Been to a few jobs here in my time.'

There were two more doors off the foyer. One, closed, had the word ‘Private' stamped on it and another, slightly ajar, had a sign with the word ‘Snug' on it.

‘That's the posh bar in there, I take it?' Henry said.

‘And kitchen,' Carly said, missing Henry's stab at irony.

Henry took a few seconds to look at the blood. Something major had taken place here and he would have bet his underwear it was connected to the phone call from Jackie Kippax.

‘Looks like someone's been dragged through there,' Bill said, pointing to the ‘snug' bar. There was a smeared trail of blood leading towards the door.

‘Yeah,' Henry agreed. ‘Let's take a look and do your best to keep your feet out of the blood if at all possible.'

Henry moved in front of Carly and tiptoed across the foyer, trying his best to place his toes in spaces where the blood hadn't splashed, which was incredibly difficult. The two firearms officers followed with equal care.

He stopped on the threshold of the snug and, using the knuckle of his right forefinger, pushed the door fully open, revealing a small bar, but no more appetizing than the larger one on the other side. It was smelly and unappealing. The blood smear continued across the carpet, making Henry wonder who was dragging who. He thought it unlikely to be female dragging male. The trail went through a double swinging door at the back of the room marked ‘Kitchen'.

‘What do you think, Henry?' Bill asked in his ear.

‘Keep your hand on your weapon and don't shoot me in the back.' He moved off, walking alongside the trail as it snaked its way across the carpet to the kitchen door. He held his breath as he pushed open the left side of the swinging door, then stepped in, just knowing this was as far as it went. Here would be answers, he thought – and more questions.

‘Hell,' he said dully at the sight that greeted his eyes.

Behind him, Bill pushed to get a look. Henry heard the breath gush out of his colleague's lungs. He turned when he heard a further groan to see Carly, whose knees had buckled under her, pirouette away in a faint. Henry lunged for her and managed to get his hands under her arms and ease her to the floor, ensuring she didn't smack her head on the descent. He left her in a swoon and regarded the tableau in front of him.

A terrible scene. Two people lay sprawled on the floor in a kitchen aisle between a sink unit and a large fridge-freezer. A single-barrelled sawn-off shotgun was discarded next to them and it was that weapon that had caused the damage.

Henry approached carefully, thinking ‘evidence' all the time, and even though he knew instinctively that this was a tragedy that would go no further than a coroner's court, it still had to be dealt with as though it were a murder, which in part it probably was.

The first body he came to was that of a male, maybe forty years old, dressed in what had once been a white T-shirt and jeans. There was a massive shotgun wound to his neck, a whole chunk of it as big as an apple having been blown out; there was another horrific wound to his lower abdomen, just above the groin area.

He swallowed and glanced at Bill, who rose from attending the woozy Carly.

‘I don't know this man,' Henry said. ‘Could turn out to be Darren Langmead, maybe?'

‘I think Carly knows him.'

Henry stepped carefully past the dead male. ‘I do know this one, though.'

‘Jackie Kippax?'

Henry nodded, a bitter taste in his mouth.

She was a mess, and on the face of it, it was obvious what had happened to her: she had committed suicide.

There was a perfect hole in the soft, fleshy part underneath her chin. Henry knew it would be the exact size of the barrel of the shotgun, which had been held there before being discharged. The shot had entered her at a slight angle, leaving her face virtually intact, or as intact as it could be when the back half of the head had been blown off and was stuck on the ceiling as though a pan of Bolognese had exploded. Henry looked at it and sighed.

More awake than he should have been, Henry sat opposite Angela Cranlow in the deserted canteen at Blackburn police station and handed her a black coffee from the machine. He had worked out that coffee to him was like blood to a vampire – the only thing that kept him going. Their kiss, only a few short hours earlier, was a distant memory, one he was trying to forget completely, pretend it hadn't happened. Unfortunately, he had to admit that despite her tired eyes and hair scraped dramatically back off her face, his boss looked pretty damned good – even at two in the morning. As though she'd just rolled out of bed, which she had.

He reckoned what she was seeing wasn't quite so alluring, though.

‘Thanks, Henry. Reckon you'll ever get to bed again?'

‘I think I'm capable of living without sleep from now on. Sleep's just a bad habit. All you need is a bit of willpower … and amphets, obviously.' He swigged his own coffee and winced. ‘Just kidding.'

‘Where are we up to, then?'

Henry took it to mean the investigation into Eddie Daley's death and the subsequent double deaths of Jackie Kippax and Darren Langmead, erstwhile manager of the Class Act, now closed down for the foreseeable future. He hoped she did not mean him and her.

‘Seems that Jackie believed Langmead was Eddie's killer and she's taken the law into her own hands, gone out to challenge him about it before we got the chance to do it properly. A quick PNC inquiry showed that Eddie was the holder of a shotgun certificate, which accounts for her access to the weapon, though I doubt it should have been a sawn-off one.' He paused. ‘Trying to put it all together isn't easy, but looking at the scene, it seems she's gone to see Langmead at the Class Act, they've had a discussion which has obviously gone pear-shaped. I'm guessing he probably denied killing Eddie, she disagreed and produced the shotgun and blasted him in the gut. They were upstairs in the living quarters at this point. Probably mortally wounded even at that point, Langmead has managed to do a runner and she's gone after him and pumped another into his neck in the foyer, which killed him outright. Somehow and, for the moment, for reasons unexplained, she has managed to drag his body all the way into the kitchen then topped herself. How she had the strength and why she dragged him I don't know. A tragedy on top of a tragedy. But she had nothing to lose, I suppose. She said she was dying of cancer, Eddie had gone and she had nothing left to live for. I'm guessing …' Henry shrugged uncertainly.