Nightmare City (6 page)

‘
Very bloody deep,’ said Conroy sarcastically. ‘You sound like
a complete angel.’

Rider bristled. His lips puckered angrily.

Conroy emptied his glass. He shook his head sadly as he spoke.
‘Sorry, mate, but you’ve been involved in it for too long. You owe
too many people and too many still owe you, good and bad. And you
wanna run from it? No chance, because it’s all just caught up with
you today.’

‘
How?’

‘
Talk about ironic. Here’s you, eh? Quits the big time, wants
to be left alone, get respectable - if you can call being a DSS
landlord respectable. To me it stinks. Selling dope to
ten-year-olds is more fucking respectable than what you do. But
then today I come along - someone you haven’t seen for years - and
bang!’ He pointed his right forefinger at Rider’s temple and
clicked his thumb like a hammer. ‘Some bastards with a gun turn up,
try to slot me and you save my life and half kill one of ‘em. Talk
about ironic.’

‘
Why?’

‘
You want to know what this is all about? It’s about me and
Munrow-’

Rider raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought he was still
inside.’

‘
You thought wrong. The bastard’s out and he’s after my
territory. They were his boys today, no doubt about that, so
word’ll get back to him and you’ll be linked to me. And you know
what he’s like - bull in a friggin’ china shop.’

‘
You mean you’re in dispute with him?’

‘
Dispute? That’s a pretty little word. Nah, we’re at war,
John.’ He spoke through gritted teeth. ‘It’s just starting, but
it’ll be big, bad and ugly - just the kinda rumpus you used to
enjoy.’

Chapter
Four

There is one thing about Blackpool, Henry Christie thought
whilst driving south down the sea-front. It is never a dull
place.

Completely unique. The world’s busiest, brashest, trashiest
resort, attracting floods of tourists every year. It is a finely
tuned machine, expertly geared to separating them from their
hard-earned dough.

Even in the low season when all the residents - police
included - can take midweek breathers, the weekends draw in
thousands of day-trippers, eager to enjoy themselves and throw
their money away.

The public face of Blackpool is that of a happy-go-lucky place
where everything is perfect: funfairs, candyfloss, the Tower, the
Illuminations and children’s laughter.

Henry Christie rarely saw this side of Blackpool.

He dealt with the flipside which most people never experience
but which, as a cop, he could not avoid. There was the massive and
continually expanding drug culture and the criminal manifestations
behind it - burglary, theft, violent robberies and overdoses; each
weekend the influx of visitors who attended the nightclubs left a
legacy of serious assaults by itinerant, untraceable offenders;
there was the growing problem of child sex and pornography; and the
explosion of a huge gay culture had brought its own problems to
Blackpool, related more to the prejudice of others, resulting in
many gays being the subject of beatings or even rape by
heterosexual males.

Then, of course, there was murder.

Murder was a frequent visitor to Blackpool.

Mostly the deaths were down to drunkenness and street brawls
between youths, unlike yesterday’s carnage in the newsagents. And
unlike the one Henry was en route to now, that Sunday morning just
before noon.

He slowed and drove off the road, across the tram-tracks and
onto the wide stretch of Inner Promenade opposite the Pleasure
Beach - a huge funfair - in South Shore. Parking in the shadow of
one of the world’s hairiest roller-coaster rides - the Pepsi Max
Big One - he looked up at it and shivered. He’d once been bullied
into riding it by his wife and daughters, and was convinced he was
going to die when the trucks plunged vertically and corkscrewed
impossibly on the tracks at speeds of up to 80 m.p.h.

The souvenir photograph of them all holding on for dear life
revealed the terror in his face.

Never again.

Several police cars and an ambulance were parked on the
Promenade, all unattended. A long black hearse was in amongst them,
with two pasty-looking body-removers on board, eating burgers. A
small crowd had gathered and were peering with interest over the
sea wall, near to the pier.

He pushed his way rudely through them, ducked under a cordon
tape, nodded to the policewoman standing by it and made his way
down the slipway onto the beach.

The sand was firm and dry, fortunately. Henry did not want to
spoil his suit nor take the chance of getting his shoes messed up.
Just like a detective.

The tide had gone out about two hours before and the edge of
the sea seemed a mile away. The beach gave the appearance of being
clean and golden, very much like the town it fronted. The reality
was that it was one of the dirtiest beaches in Europe.

However, it was a peaceful and pretty winter’s day with a low
sun rising in the sky. One of those days when it felt good to be
inhaling breath.

Not a day to die.

A small group of police officers and a couple of paramedics
were gathered around what, at first sight, looked like a bundle of
rags at the foot of one of the pier struts. There was an obvious
pathway in the sand leading to and from the scene.

Henry tried to psych himself into the right frame of mind to
be the senior detective at a scene. The one who would have to make
the decisions. The one everybody else would look to for a
lead.

Oh joy, he thought.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It was
difficult to tell for sure. She was five foot five inches tall,
very thin with spidery arms and legs, all bones, no
muscles.

Henry watched as the deathly-faced undertakers lifted her body
easily from the trolley and onto the mortuary slab, dumping her
there unceremoniously.

Her drenched outer coat had been removed and searched,
revealing nothing. Now she was lying there in what she had been
wearing underneath: a T-shirt top, a short one which was nothing
more than a piece of cloth covering her breasts, and a micro-skirt
in what had once been stretchy black Lycra and would have only just
covered her lower belly and the top of her thighs. There was no
underwear.

Henry closed his eyes briefly. Stay detached, he ordered
himself. She’s a piece of meat, nothing else. Then he opened his
eyes and allowed himself to look again.

But no matter how he tried he could not view her as a carcase.
That was probably the reason why she was here, dead, because some
bastard had thought she was nothing more than meat - something to
be used, abused and discarded.

A scenes of crime officer videoed the body from all angles,
focusing in on several areas. Then he took a few stills, the flash
giving her pale damp body a sickly glow.

‘
Shall I cut her clothes off’?’ a female voice said into
Henry’s ear. It was Jan, a mortuary technician. She smiled brightly
and held up a large pair of scissors, opening and closing them like
a seamstress, indicating her eagerness.

She was nothing like the stereotypical mortuary attendant. In
her mid-twenties she had ashen, pretty features, jet-black hair
rolled into a bun, and large, black-rimmed spectacles. She wore a
green smock which hung from her neck almost to the floor, and
though deeply unsexy as a piece of clothing, it could not disguise
her large, round bosom. She was a constant source of puzzlement to
the majority of male police officers, most of whom fancied the
pants off her but never dared ask her out.

Henry had heard them make many jokes about necrophilia and sex
on mortuary slabs, but he knew no one had ever made any progress
with her. He also knew she was happily engaged to a local jeweller
and was working towards a career as an undertaker. She was odd -
definitely - off the wall and a little bit whacky, but she was also
pleasant and good-natured.

‘
No,’ said Henry. ‘Let’s take ‘em off and bag ‘em.’

‘
OK,’ she shrugged brightly.

In the past Henry had experienced some real struggles removing
clothing from dead bodies: those stiff with rigor mortis being the
classic ones. This girl was easy, pliant, almost
cooperative.

He and Jan hoisted her into a sitting position. Jan held her
there whilst Henry shuffled the T-shirt over her head and eased her
arms out one at a time.

It was like undressing a drunk, though this one would never
sober up. Next he eased her skirt down over the hips, down her legs
and off. Jan placed a wooden block under her neck, like a
pillow.

Henry’s eyes surveyed the naked body ... and the
injuries.

The sea had washed the blood away, but even so, it was
apparent she had been subjected to a violent, sustained attack.
Henry tried to imagine her last moments and felt vaguely
sick.

Before he could inspect the body more closely, the Home Office
pathologist, Dr Baines, came into the mortuary dressed in a smock,
pulling on a pair of plastic gloves.

He looked dreadfully worn out. Henry knew he’d been up most of
the night carrying out post mortems from the shooting. There was
still two more to do, and dealing with the body of this female was
something he could well do without. Had it been any other detective
than Henry, Baines would have said, ‘No, get somebody else in.’ But
he and Henry were old friends, sometime drinking partners; and they
owed each other favours.

‘
Bad business last night,’ Baines commented.

Henry nodded.

‘
So, big H, what’ve you got for me here?’

Baines walked to the slab and cast a critical, professional
eye over the body.

‘
Found on the beach this morning by a jogger, near to South
Pier. No identification yet, but we’re working on it. She had an
overcoat on, a skirt and T-shirt. No knickers.’

‘
Nothing else?’

‘
Nope. Got a search team scouring the beach now before the
tide comes back in. If they don’t find anything we could be
struggling.’

Baines sighed. ‘Nasty. Very nasty.’

‘
How long would you say she’s been in the sea?’

Baines eyes looked up and down the body. He touched her skin,
parted her legs and inserted a thermometer inside her rectum. He
checked the reading. ‘Hardly been in, if you ask me. Doesn’t show
any of the usual signs of long-term immersion. Possibly been tossed
about by the tide, but nothing more.’

He picked up the girl’s left arm and twisted it gently
outwards so he could see the soft skin on the inner elbow. He
tucked the arm back and moved his attention to her legs, looking
behind each knee.

‘
Junkie?’ Henry asked.

‘
Junkie,’ confirmed Baines. He began to count, ‘One, two,
three...’ pointing as he did.

‘
... Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four,’ he concluded a
few minutes later. ‘So that’s twenty-four-stab wounds in the chest,
stomach, upper arms, upper legs,’ he said, very matter-of-fact.
‘Probably had a knife up her vagina by the looks. Her face is a
real mess too.’ He counted the number of punctures around her head
and neck. ‘Twelve facial and neck stab-wounds at least. See?’ he
said to Henry. ‘It looks as if the left eye socket has been
repeatedly pierced. Impossible to say how many times the attacker
plunged the knife in there.’

He turned his attention to her arms again. ‘Numerous incised
wounds - slash-wounds, if you like - on her arms and the palms of
her hands where she tried to protect herself from the onslaught.
She went down fighting for her life; if nothing else. The attack
continued long after she died.’

‘
Can you tell me anything about the knife at all?’

The doctor pondered thoughtfully. ‘Probably not.’ He bent
forwards and peered at one of the stab-wounds in her stomach. ‘My
guess’ll be very imprecise,’ he warned. He put a thumb and
forefinger to either side of the wound and parted it gently. Henry
felt slightly sick when it popped open.

‘
Problem is,’ Baines continued, ‘skin stretches before a knife
actually pierces and when the- knife is pulled out it springs back
into place. Sometimes the hole can look smaller than the knife
which caused it.’

He stood slightly back and looked at the open wound which
reminded Henry of a tiny, thin-lipped doll’s mouth. ‘This wound is
one of the neatest on the body: the knife was plunged straight in
and pulled straight out. Looks like a knife with two sharp edges -
here, you can see the wound has two acute angles at each
end.’

He allowed the hole to close. ‘Probably a slim instrument, but
it’ll be difficult to tell how long the blade is. Might get some
indication when I open her up, but don’t hold your breath. It’ll be
guesstimates. The knife has obviously been twisted about and rocked
backwards and forwards in many of the other wounds. Basically, a
fuckin’ mess - sorry, Jan,’ Baines acknowledged the quiet
attendant, ‘but this girl died a brutal and horrific death and
though it’s a cliché, it was a frenzied attack. Nobody deserves to
die like this.’