‘Be my guest,’ he said, flustered, and half-raised himself out of his seat.
‘Don’t get up, duck.’ She plonked herself down, discarding the food and drink for a moment as she unbuttoned her tunic and eased it off, throwing it across another seat, then removed her chequered cravat and unbuttoned her shirt collar. ‘Phew — been a long one already.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he agreed.
She bit into the barm, speaking as she ate. ‘Hate all that secret squirrel stuff, don’t you? MI5, Special Branch … I prefer just good, honest, local coppering.’
‘Comes with the rank, I guess.’
‘Yeah, politics and all that stuff does. Doesn’t mean to say I like it, though.’
She was perhaps two feet away from Henry and he allowed his eyes to quickly take her in. With neatly bobbed light auburn hair and a nice, round face, she was very pretty. There were some lines etched in the corners of her eyes betraying her age in a little way, but her skin was soft and lightly tanned. Henry noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
DCC Cranlow had moved across the Pennines from West Yorkshire, having been promoted to the position after an intense selection procedure in which she fought off some tough competition. Even though there had been a fair amount of coverage about her in the force newspaper, Henry did not know a great deal about her, other than her operational background, which he was impressed with.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come up and see you in Special Projects, yet,’ she apologized.
‘Why would you?’
‘Oh, you might not know — the chief officer portfolios have recently been shuffled around and I’ve got you … in my portfolio, that is, amongst other things, of course.’
‘Oh, right. I didn’t know.’ Chief officer portfolios were shuffled like cards, constantly changing.
‘So I’m your new line manager, sort of … and I intend to come and see you and your team soon.’
‘That would be good,’ he said.
‘Anyway, I just want you to know you did a good job today, Henry, and I’m very pleased, as is the chief.’
‘Believe it or not.’
‘No, he is,’ she defended FB.
‘Me and him go way back when,’ Henry said.
‘I know — I’ve had a look at your personal file.’
‘Interesting reading?’ Henry said, feeling uncomfortable.
‘Yes, it is … quite a history.’
‘I try to put myself about a bit.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Henry, I think Dave Anger has got away with murder and you’ve been shabbily treated. I’m aware of all the problems there.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said pensively. ‘I got that extra pip, bit more on the pension, nice office, cushy job, nine to five …’
‘It’s not about that, though, is it?’
‘You tell me, ma’am.’
She smiled sweetly. ‘You’re a detective, a jack. It’s in your blood. You should be on FMIT or Major Crime or be a divisional DCI, or maybe NCIS. But not Special Projects!’
‘I’m getting acronym overload.’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it? You shouldn’t be getting shiny pants, not really. I want someone in Special Projects who wants to be in Special Projects …’
‘But no one wants to be in there, they get chucked there cos there’s nowhere else to shove them.’
‘I want to change that.’
‘Ahh,’ Henry said, thinking he realized where she was going. ‘You don’t want me in there, do you? Anger doesn’t want me on FMIT. None of the chief supers want me. Makes me kinda stuffed, doesn’t it?’
She reared back with a chortle. ‘Wrong end of the stick, Henry. Know your problem? Paranoia.’ She dipped her face so that her eyes looked up at him in a rather seductive manner, which sent a rattle through him. ‘I do want you, actually … but that’s another story … but I don’t want you in Special Projects. Round pegs, round holes is my philosophy.’ She bit into her butty, wiped a dribble of butter off her chin with her forefinger which she pushed into her mouth and sucked clean.
Henry swallowed, wondering what the hell was happening here. Was she giving him a come-on? Was she toying with him? Or was he, as usual, living in a fantasy world?
Just in case, he kept his lips tightly closed. The worst thing he could do now was to make a flirty remark to a pretty deputy chief constable because he’d misread the signals. That would truly curtail his career.
She gave a half-grin which he found extremely alluring and it was all he could do not to say anything stupid.
‘What I mean is … I’ll see what I can do for you … I want the people who work for me to be totally committed, not cruising, not put somewhere because that’s the only place there is. I do have some clout as a DCC, even if I am a woman … so I’ll look out for you, if that’s OK.’
‘I get your drift,’ he said with relief. His dithering hand picked up his mug and he took a swig of coffee.
Six
One week later
The man was dead — that was for sure. The almost perfectly formed circular bullet hole about the diameter of a five-pence piece just above the bridge of his nose was a good clue. The additional fact that the bullet had then somersaulted through his cranium like a mad circus acrobat on speed, then exited spectacularly out of the back, taking with it a mush of skull and brain, splattering it all over the wall, was a further, even more conclusive clue.
Even a no-good detective could have deduced that, in all probability, and ruling out suicide, this man had been murdered.
Whilst a very rusty Henry Christie was painfully aware of his limitations — and strengths — as an investigator, he knew he was a few rungs above ‘no-good’.
He was confident he would quickly pull together a few known facts, mesh them loosely with a fairly bog standard hypothesis, and come to some early conclusions. All good, routine stuff, which could easily kick-start a murder investigation and get detectives knocking on, or kicking down, a few doors sooner rather than later. Although Henry knew his resources would be severely limited on this one, he had a strip of confidence in him about it which boded well.
He checked his watch, 02:35, mentally logging the time because his arrival at the scene was crucially important. He had known some seemingly rock-solid cases dither at subsequent court hearings just because a sloppy SIO couldn’t remember what time he’d arrived at the crime scene. Evidentially it didn’t usually matter that much, but an uncertain SIO gave a good defence lawyer something to chew on and spit out: if the SIO couldn’t recall exactly the time, what did it say about the rest of the evidence, hm? It was one of those simple things easily overlooked in the vortex of a murder inquiry. And Henry, who knew he’d be under the microscope on this one, as ever, wasn’t about to make mistakes by forgetting the bread and butter.
The call-out had come at 1.15 a.m.
Henry had been at home with his ex-wife, Kate, and the evening had ended on a high note.
Both daughters were out with friends and boyfriends, leaving the parents to their own devices for a change. They had sat through a triple dose of soap operas with Henry whining his way through them, annoying Kate by constantly asking about plotlines and characters and grunting angrily at the ridiculous things they did. ‘Why the hell don’t they just go to another pub?’ was one of his gripes. ‘That way they wouldn’t keep meeting people they didn’t like, would they?’
‘Dear, it’s drama,’ Kate had said irritably. ‘If they did that, there wouldn’t be anything to watch, would there?’
However, when Crimewatch UK came on at nine, he called for hush, sat glued to the screen and refused to speak because this was ‘his’ programme. It didn’t seem to matter he had spoiled her viewing.
Actually, Crimewatch wasn’t something he watched regularly. He found it made him angry at the bad things people could do to each other through either passion, perversion or profit, and even though he had been steel-hardened over the years, some of the reconstructions made him queasy and furious at the same time, particularly those in which lone women or old people were the targets.