‘Sure, boss.’
‘And get PC Bloody Taylor to do his statement immediately — I want it to be as detailed as possible from the moment I gave him the instruction until you arrived on the scene, OK?’ Henry paused. ‘What do you think of him?’
‘PC Taylor?’ Byrne shrugged. ‘He’s OK. I don’t really know him all that well. Bit long in the tooth and needs motivating, but still gets stuck in now and again. He’s just had a good job up at court, a date-rape, which the CPS binned on a technicality, much to his annoyance. He’d done a lot of work on it, so I think that’s pissed him off quite a bit.’
‘I read about it,’ Henry said, now bored with the subject of PC Taylor. He changed the subject. ‘You managed to get here pretty quickly,’ Henry observed innocently.
Byron reacted to the comment by stiffening slightly and pulling at his collar. ‘Happened to be driving past — purely by accident.’
‘Yeah, whatever. .’ Henry’s ponderings had drifted on to the crime scene. Being in a clean and hygienic hospital made it unlike most of the murder scenes he’d had the pleasure of visiting over the years. Henry was aware he would have no further part in the subsequent investigation which had already been allocated to the on-call senior investigating officer from headquarters who was already on his way, but it did not stop him from slipping back into CID mode for a few precious moments.
Detailed analysis of the crime scene was crucial to any murder investigation. At every crime scene the offender leaves messages about him-or herself, indicating what the motivation and drive is behind the crime. As a seasoned investigator, Henry consciously tried to reconstruct what had happened to try and find the links between the location, the victim and the offender and the other things he could not even guess at yet, such as what the forensic and post-mortem investigations would reveal.
Already, this murder troubled him deeply.
He started putting together some hypotheses: firstly that the victim could have been a source of potential danger to the offender; that the crime had links with the dead girl’s knowledge of activist right-wing groups; that she had known too much and was a danger — these would all be areas for detailed investigation. However, Henry realised that to be rail-roaded by such a narrow band of thought could skew the investigation into a direction which could be totally misguided. It could be that this was simply an opportunistic crime: some passing loony who, feeling murderous, might have seen a chance and gone for it. It sounded a faintly ridiculous premise to Henry, but he knew it could not be overlooked. Which brought him back full circle to his initial conjectures. And the one big question which needed to be answered if the girl’s death was connected to the dangerous knowledge she might have possessed about right-wing groups.
‘How the hell did whoever killed her know she was here, at the hospital?’ Henry asked and quickly explained his background reasoning to the question.
Byrne shrugged. ‘Radio transmissions?’ he suggested. ‘Could well have been listening in. We thought they’d been scanning us earlier on Shoreside.’
‘Possibility.’ Henry chewed the inside of his mouth, making a squelching noise. ‘And if that is true, then they also stalked the A amp;E department until Taylor — God bless his socks — went for his fatal coffee break.’ Henry thought about what he had just said. Something clicked in his brain, then went. Probably nothing.
‘It’s a busy department,’ Byrne said. ‘People come and go all the time. It wouldn’t be difficult to blend in and hang around.’
‘My head hurts,’ Henry said prophetically — because just then he was hit by a stinking headache which came from nowhere and lurked nastily behind his eyelids.
David Gill grinned happily to himself. He loved it when a plan came together — and this one was coming together easier than a children’s jigsaw: slot, slot, slot, all the pieces fitting snugly together — fucking wonderful.
First Mohammed Khan’s death — better late than never — then the riots where the detective got torched — a bonus — and now the extra problem solved, the one that could have been a difficulty — the girl. It was unfortunate that she had been arrested in the first place, but because of the liability aspect, she had had to be dealt with.
He was not proud of the way in which he had killed her, though. Because it was something that had had to be done quickly, it had lacked finesse. A pillow over the face, for Christ’s sake. Where was the panache with that one? Just a means to an end, a functional tool. No flair. No fun. He loved to talk to people first. Loved to explain things to them, to outline the reasons for that ultimate question they all asked: Why? Why me?
Because you have to get killed, that’s why. Because you are a cog in the machine and the machine needs to be destroyed. And this week powerful moves were going to be made to destroy the machine and show the country that a sea-change is about to take place. The balance of power was about to shift and return to where it belonged. The old order is going to be restored and revamped for the people.
So he regretted not having had the chance to tell the girl why she had to die. He also regretted that she had been drugged up to the eyeballs because that meant she could not struggle — although there had been the faintest blip of self-preservation when her body found the air had been cut off, but it had been nothing really, just a twitch, a reaction.
Still, David Gill took some solace from the fact that Joey Costain had known full well why he had to be murdered. Gill had talked to Joey for quite a while.
Gill picked up the telephone.
Time to alert the police. What a shame. They were so busy.
‘Here.’
Henry’s eyes opened. He had allowed himself to wallow in his headache and had sat back on the sofa in the staff rest room, closed his eyes and drifted. He hadn’t heard the door open. The next thing he knew was that Dermot Byrne was standing over him, PC Taylor just behind him. Two paracetamols were in the palm of Byrne’s outstretched right hand, offering them to Henry, a glass of water in the other.
‘Thanks.’ He took the tablets and threw them down the back of his throat, swallowing them with the water, which was very cold. ‘Right, let’s get things up and running.’
‘I’ve told John he can go back to the station and get his statement written,’ Byrne said, ‘if that’s all right.’ He looked at Taylor, then back at Henry. ‘I don’t think he’ll mind me saying, but it might be the best use of his time at the moment.’
Henry stared at the constable who looked dreadful.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ Henry said. ‘Best place for him.’
‘Blackpool to inspector,’ the personal radios shouted in unison.
‘Receiving.’ Henry almost tutted. He was beginning to detest having to carry a radio around with him all the time. There was no hiding from it. Not like when he had been a DI, back in those balmy, rose-tinted days, when Henry had only used the radio when it suited him. Being at everyone’s beck and call did not sit easily with him.
‘Can you give me a landline number where I can contact you, please? Or can you phone in?’ the radio operator requested. ‘It’s urgent and not something I want to put out over the air in case of scanners. Don’t want to call your mobile for the same reason.’
‘Give me a minute,’ Henry said. ‘Wonder what it is now?’ he said to his officers. He hurried out of the rest room to the charge nurse’s desk where the charge nurse regarded his approach with some hostility.
‘What d’you want now?’ she asked. ‘Should I close the hospital while you dust it down for fingerprints?’
Henry smiled ingratiatingly. ‘If I was a bit assertive before, I apologise.’
‘Aggressive, not assertive,’ the nurse corrected him.
‘Sorry.’
‘And now you want something else, don’t you?’