Fighting for the Dead (11 page)

The smell was horrendous, invading his nostrils.

He moved his head, opened his eyes and looked down the length of the boat, burning with intense heat, bright flames crackling and heading quickly in his direction.

He attempted to raise himself, but slid back down on weak, rubbery arms that would not hold his weight.

‘Bastards,' he groaned.

They'd set the boat alight with him still in it, unconscious.

Flynn pushed himself up again, head swooning, disorientated slightly, but knowing he had to crawl backwards to the door.

Then his brain cells started working again and he realized that he hadn't been left in the position where he'd been bashed unconscious. The men had dragged him through the galley area, along the floor, through the living room, the full length of the boat and into the bedroom where he'd been dumped. Then they'd doused the boat in petrol and lit it.

Leaving him trapped by the flames.

To get out of the door would mean running through a tunnel of fire, thirty feet long, which was now fearsomely hot and would roast him instantly.

Flynn rose to his knees and peered through the flames at the door beyond, the one which had been kicked off its hinges by the men, and had been loosely pulled back into place when they left.

He felt heat on his face, scrambled backwards against the bed. He kicked the bedroom door closed, and smoke hissed through the gap underneath it.

Now the situation had slightly changed.

Instead of being burned to a crisp, he was probably going to die in the way most people do when trapped by fire – by inhaling noxious smoke. Both were gruesome, terrible deaths.

The bedroom door, thin and not very substantial, even started to glow.

Flynn scrambled across the bed, which almost filled the small room. He ripped the flimsy curtains away from the window, unlatched and opened it and started to squeeze himself out like toothpaste in a tube. It was a very small window. But in his haste to escape the flames he'd forgotten the geography of the boat. It was only when he was halfway out of the window did he realize he should have crawled out of the one on the other side, which would have given him the chance to drop onto the canal bank.

Instead, as he slithered out he dropped straight into the ice-cold muddy waters of the Lancaster Canal just as the flames in the galley burned through the rubberized taps that connected the gas cylinder to the cooker and the boat exploded.

H
enry was about to pour his third generous measure of Jack Daniel's when the phone rang. He picked it up, instinctively checking the time as he did – that ingrained reflex hammered into cops from day one: ‘
Time, time, time.
' It was one of those simple but fundamental things that can always be challenged. If you got the time wrong, what else did you get wrong? A good defence lawyer could easily slide his stiletto into that crack and prise open what should have been a watertight case.

He saw it was 11.12 p.m. Mentally noted it.

He recognized the voice of DI Barlow at the other end and exclaimed, ‘Why are you calling me?' He didn't mean it negatively, just that he expected Barlow to be home by now, off duty.

‘You know how it is,' he said. Henry knew. Detectives worked ridiculous hours. It was in their nature and, mostly, didn't even get paid for the overtime worked. They did it because they liked it. ‘I just happened to be earwigging the PR when a job came up. I recognized the name and wasn't a million miles away, so I checked it out.'

‘Job being?'

‘That guy Flynn, the ex-cop?'

Henry's heart lurched at the mention of the name. ‘Go on,' he said guardedly.

‘Says he's been attacked and that the canal boat he's been staying on has been blown up.'

‘Are both statements true?'

‘Well, I'm standing here on the canal side. Flynn looks a mess and there's bugger all left of the boat . . . and he's demanding to see you.'

‘Bloody drama queen,' Henry thought.

Despite Alison's protestations, he commandeered her four-wheel-drive monstrosity, and with her gentle but insistent haranguing echoing in his ears, he picked his way along the jet-black country lanes, realizing just how hard it was to drive safely with only one good eye and two JDs. Street lighting began to appear spasmodically as he motored into the environs of Lancaster with a sigh of relief, finally dropping into the city from the fells.

He felt haggard and tired and knew he should have left it until morning. He could easily have delegated it to Barlow and the local CID and nothing would have been spoiled or lost. But Henry was insatiably curious, even more so the older he got. He loved to know, see, feel things first hand. This trait actually made him a poor, but popular, manager, always leading from the front, never asking someone to do something he could not tackle himself.

He knew that ‘real' managers delegated, got others to do the dirty work. They dealt with strategy, not tactics, but Henry loved being hands-on, loved ‘playing out' as he called it. So far, by dint of a careful balancing act, he'd managed to survive as a detective superintendent, but occasionally he'd had words in his lugholes from his own bosses. Rein back, let others do.

On that night he knew he could have let others ‘do'. Maybe should have done. But couldn't, especially when Steve Flynn's name was in the pot. To have him involved twice in one day . . . a coincidence even Henry found hard to swallow.

Traffic in Lancaster at that time of night was almost non-existent, in complete contrast to its daytime state of total gridlock. Henry made it through easily and less than ten minutes later was at Conder Green, near to where Jennifer Sunderland's body had been heaved out of the river. Passing the Stork, he then turned right onto the road that led directly to Glasson Dock.

This was a place Henry knew well, somewhere he had a personal history. A place where, over a dozen years earlier, he'd almost died when he came face to face with a Mafia hitman who'd been after his blood.

He shivered at the memory. Even though it was so long ago it occasionally still came back to haunt him. Not simply because of the personal danger he'd faced, but because of the jeopardy his wife Kate had been put in, through no fault of her own. She too had been lucky to survive.

Mentally shrugging off the cloud, he drew onto the rough stone surface of the large car park adjacent to the yacht basin and parked the nose of the four-wheel-drive facing the water.

He climbed stiffly out and was immediately struck by the biting, unforgiving wind coming in from the estuary. It was tinted, though, with a whiff of smoke and petrol which he could smell clearly even through his facial injury.

He palmed a couple more paracetamols into his mouth, swallowed them using saliva and hoped they would complement the painkillers he'd already taken that night. Last thing he needed was to overdose.

Then he started to walk the hundred or so metres to the point where the yacht basin and the Lancaster Canal joined.

There was a line of emergency vehicles nose-to-tail, crammed onto the canal towpath, together with emergency lighting. Two fire tenders headed the queue, so wide they virtually blocked the path. Two marked police cars were behind, then a plain car and then an ambulance on the grassy area at the end of the car park. Lots of blue lights flashed, lots of people scurried around, and it was apparent that the explosion had brought out most of the local population, eager to see some fun. A police crime-scene tape had been stretched across the path to keep the onlookers back.

A little further on, just out of Henry's eye-line, thick, heavy smoke plumed upwards into the atmosphere, visible even against the dark night. He assumed this was from the remnants of the barge.

He walked towards the ambulance which had its back doors open, activity going on inside. As he got closer he could see two people, a female paramedic, clad in the usual hospital green overalls, and a casualty: Steve Flynn.

Flynn was leaning back on the bench seat inside the ambulance holding an oxygen mask over his face whilst the paramedic squatted in front of him, gently dabbing the side of his face that Henry could not see with an antiseptic cloth of some sort. Henry recognized the paramedic as one of the two who had been at the drowning scene earlier and he wondered quickly what sort of hours they worked.

‘That's nice – cool,' Flynn's muffled voice said through the mask, commenting on the work being done by the paramedic. He didn't seem to have noticed Henry yet.

‘You really should let us take you to hospital . . . you need looking after,' the lady paramedic said. The last four words were spoken with more than an undercurrent of suggestiveness and, maybe, Henry thought sourly, a little unprofessional.

‘You're doing a great job as it is,' Flynn said. ‘Lovely touch.'

‘Thanks,' she gasped and dropped her face so she had to angle it at Flynn with a look of lust tempered with shyness.

Henry, trying not to vomit, cleared his throat.

The paramedic's head turned quickly, guiltily.

Flynn turned less quickly and Henry realized he'd known he was there all along and was just winding Henry up by flirting with the lady medic. Henry saw the injuries to Flynn's face and saw they looked similar to his own, though clearly not as serious.

‘What happened?' he asked.

The blast had ripped the canal boat apart. The roof had been blown off, scattering debris across a wide area, and what remained of the boat, basically just the hull, had keeled over and sunk into the canal, which was about six feet deep at this point. It reminded Henry of the German merchant vessels that had been blown up in Bordeaux harbour in a commando raid in World War Two. The boat had slumped over, torn apart by a ferocious blast, and was obviously beyond any sort of repair.

Henry had listened to the early conclusions of the chief fire officer at the scene, which supported Flynn's version of events, at least as to the cause of the explosion, if not what happened beforehand.

A combination of accelerant, gas from the bottle underneath the sink and deliberate ignition equalled big BOOM.

And if Flynn's story was true, he was lucky to have escaped with his life. If he hadn't regained consciousness in time, he'd have been vaporized.

As Henry surveyed the mess, Barlow came towards him.

‘Boss, I take it you've spoken to Mr Flynn?'

‘At the ambulance. You think he's telling the truth?'

‘Not sure. He wouldn't tell me much, wanted to speak to you. What did he say?'

Henry pulled a face. ‘Not much, either,' he replied, uncertain as to why he wanted to keep Flynn's story under wraps for the time being. Detective habit, possibly. The old-fashioned state of mind, knowledge and power, coupled with the mental jigsaw of bits of evidence and information slowly coming together, gradually forming a picture.

‘Surely he must've said something?' Barlow insisted.

‘Well, yeah, something . . . just remembers waking up and finding the boat on fire, so he squeezed out of a window. It was a bit jumbled, though. He must've cracked his head.'

‘You think it's something to do with Jennifer Sunderland? It sounds like it was started deliberately.'

Henry shook his head. ‘Nah – doubt it. Why should it be?'

Barlow gave a little shrug and said, ‘Dunno, just a thought. What then?'

‘Don't know,' Henry said.

The paramedics could not persuade Flynn to let them take him to hospital, so when another emergency call came up, they had to leave quickly.

Henry witnessed the parting of Flynn and the lady paramedic, heart-rending to nauseating. She was clearly smitten by Flynn, even though he estimated Flynn was at least double her age.

The refusal to go to hospital meant Flynn was left abandoned next to the canal, shivering, with an ambulance blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and no home to go to.

Henry felt no sympathy for him, even if his predicament was not of his own doing.

‘What's your plan?'

Flynn shook his head. ‘I'll crash down in the shop.' He jerked a thumb in the direction of the chandlery.

‘When are you going to tell them about the boat?' Henry asked, referring to the friends he had come to help.

‘On top of their already massive problems . . .' Flynn's voice faded out and he sighed, deflated. ‘Maybe in the morning . . . Diane's spending the night at the hospital.'

Henry regarded him. Already he had briefly considered offering him a room for the night at the Tawny Owl, knowing that there were two unoccupied ones, but he'd dismissed that idea, wanting to keep his distance from Flynn, and also keep him away from Alison. But he could already hear Alison's voice ringing in his ears if she ever learned that he had left Flynn out in the cold.

With a reluctant change of mind, Henry said, almost under his breath so Flynn might not hear, ‘You're welcome to stay at the Owl tonight.' His voice sounded like someone else was saying the words. Henry, doing something nice for Flynn. It was like he'd been taken over by some benign spirit.

Trouble was, as much as it irked him, he knew it was the right thing to do. Even so, it made him shiver with repulsion.

Flynn gave him an incredulous look. ‘Seriously?'

Henry nodded. ‘You want to follow me back in Diane's car?'

‘Breakfast, too? Full English?'

‘Don't push it,' Henry growled.

‘I just need to nip into the shop, though – and liberate some more clothes.'

An hour after arriving at the Tawny Owl with Flynn in tow, and Alison meeting, greeting and fussing over them both (did she fuss more over Flynn, though, Henry wondered), Henry was still up trying to chill out with the help of that third JD, but found it hard as his brain churned over the events of what was now yesterday.

His face pounded with pain, which also served to keep him awake.