Once all that was established, Henry seized Bill’s weapons and sat him in a nurses’ office on ward C14, got him a cup of tea, then carried on with the job in hand.
And despite people having lost their lives, and his day being ruined, Henry relished it.
What astonished him as he began to piece it all together was that as well as knowing Bill Grasson, who he’d seen earlier at the Cromers’, trying to stop Henry from getting an accidental eyeful of a table full of guns, he also knew the other dead men.
As he looked down at them, one in the corridor, the other in the ward, he couldn’t help but say, ‘Well, well, well.’
Because they were members of the Costain family from Blackpool. Rather like the Cromers, Henry had known the family for much of his police service, but unlike the Cromers, he had had regular contact with the Costains because of their geographic location and nefarious activities. They were a very extended family of several generations, mainly resident on one of Blackpool’s most crime-ridden council estates — Shoreside. From ragged beginnings, they had become an organized gang and largely controlled the supply of drugs in Blackpool and Fylde.
The two members of that family lying dead at the hospital were Stuart and Benji Costain. From the younger end of the family, cousins of the main branch, they were ruthless villains of the highest order, doing a similar job for the Costains to that performed by Bill Grasson for the Cromers.
They were enforcers and tax collectors. Finger breakers and ball busters.
And Henry knew it didn’t take the detective of the year — an accolade he had never achieved, incidentally — to know that he had stumbled into a turf war. Either the Costains were expanding onto Cromer territory, or vice versa, or they were in dispute over something else. And if this was the opening salvo, the rest of Henry’s festive season was going to be a real hoot.
It took him two hours to gain complete control, a complication being that the body of Benji Costain was lying in one of the side wards of C10 and there were six extremely old and ill patients in the beds. They had to be relocated into other wards, as well as having their blood-splashed bedding removed, bagged up for forensics, then replaced. Fortunately none of them seemed to have taken a turn for the worse because of the incident, which had happened quite quickly. Henry guessed they probably thought they were hallucinating. . but even so, each would have to be interviewed soon.
As he worked, he was mentally calculating all the time. Not forgetting that he had a prisoner to deal with at Blackburn police station, a picture started to come into focus of what had happened. . and one thing he didn’t leave out of the scenario was the presence of Freddy Cromer at the hospital in the first place, which Henry suspected might be relevant to what subsequently transpired.
Freddy had been discovered by a paramedic on one of the roads outside A amp;E, lying in the middle of it in a state of semi-consciousness, injured, but not seriously. He looked like he’d been dumped there.
He was taken into the department, where after a quick triage examination he was sent up to X-ray; not only did he have a facial injury but he was acting strangely, rambling on that he’d been kidnapped, drifting in and out of sense. Because he’d clearly cracked his head, it was thought best to check whether he’d got a more serious injury underneath his scalp.
As he lay on a trolley in X-ray he had suddenly decided that the nurse with him was one of the kidnappers. A knife was produced from somewhere and it all then kicked off.
Henry had arrived soon after and it looked, even though he couldn’t be certain, as if the Cromer family had been informed Freddy was at hospital, and Bill Grasson and another — as yet unidentified — had turned up to collect him. They had been confronted by the hoods from the Costain crew and a deadly shoot-out had ensued.
One question was already making the back of Henry’s mind tingle: had the Cromers been lured to the hospital? It was just one of the myriad hypotheses tumbling through his grey matter.
Henry snatched a few minutes with Bill Robbins in the nurses’ office.
They had known each other a long time, since being PCs in fact, and recently Henry had used Bill on some enquiries. During one of these Bill had come up against two rogue FBI agents turned vigilantes and shot them dead. The killings had been absolutely justified, but it had taken an agonizingly long time for Bill to be exonerated through the justice system. There was then further dithering by the force before he was reinstated as a firearms trainer, and an even longer delay before he got his firearms authorization back. Bill’s perception was that, apart from Henry’s support, he had been left very much to fend for himself, with the force keeping him at cow-prod length.
And now he’d pulled the trigger again. Killed someone. Again. Not good.
The two men eyed each other acerbically.
‘I think I’m a serial killer,’ Bill said. He looked ill, and pale.
‘No, you just did your job.’
‘Again,’ Bill said. ‘But this time I’ll never see a firearm again, will I?’
‘No, you won’t,’ Henry said. That was a truth Bill had to face. ‘But you did the right thing.’
Bill nodded vacantly.
Henry left him to his thoughts, backing out of the office as his mobile phone rang. It was the custody officer at Blackburn cells, apologetic, although he didn’t need to be.
‘Boss, sorry. Know you’re busy, but. .’
‘I’ve got a prisoner to deal with. Yeah, I know.’
‘’Fraid so. I’ve got Cromer’s solicitors on the blower giving me earache. What do you want me to do with the little fella?’
‘Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be down there,’ he promised, but only because he glanced around to see Rik Dean walking towards him. Someone he trusted to take on the management of the scene. ‘Sorry, bud,’ he apologized to Rik.
Rik shrugged and said, ‘I didn’t even get home, actually.’ He looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Been trying to track Lisa down.’
‘Yeah, she’s still not got back to me,’ Henry said, automatically checking his phone for texts and missed calls, even though he knew there were none. ‘Look — I need you to take this over while I go and process a prisoner.’ He explained quickly what had happened, knowing that to say it out loud would help him get the story, the chain of events, straight in his mind. He would have to tell it over and over to people including the chief constable (already turned out), the ACC (Ops), turned out too, someone from the Independent Police Complaints Commission — already informed — and a multitude of others he could only guess at. It would soon be a very slick story. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can down at the cells, got an idea on that score, and then I’ll be back. Sorry about your Christmas Day.’
Rik blew out his cheeks. ‘Yours looks pretty screwed up, too.’
Suddenly weary, Henry walked back through the hospital. He called Alison — so far away at the Tawny Owl — and was relieved to hear her voice. She sounded tearful and drained, and he heard a little choke in her voice when he told her what had happened and said he thought it unlikely he would get to Kendleton now. It was a tough call to make — she clearly had been looking forward to his arrival at some stage, particularly after a long, tiring day at the pub. The call ended very mutely.
Fuck this job, Henry thought bitterly.
He walked back to A amp;E hoping that Janine Cromer hadn’t got bored and disappeared. He was amazed to see she was still in the waiting room, looking pale, in shock and staring blankly ahead. She shook herself out of her reverie on Henry’s approach.