However, Henry had a vested interest in that evening’s edition of the show because he’d heard that Dave Anger was taking a starring role to make an appeal about the unsolved murder of a female whose body had been burned to a crisp in the countryside near Blackpool — Henry’s last job as an SIO, the one Dave Anger had gleefully snatched from under his nose and handed to DI Carradine, one of his sycophants.
And they hadn’t solved it. Ha! Six months down the line and they hadn’t got anywhere and as much as Henry liked justice to be done, he did have a smug look on his face as he watched Anger make an appeal for information to the great British public.
‘Your expression is extremely irritating,’ Kate informed him, sipping from a recently poured glass of Blossom Hill red, her favourite.
‘It’s one of superiority … now if you don’t mind, I’m listening.’
There wasn’t a reconstruction of the crime as such because there wasn’t much to reconstruct, but the crime scene itself was shown and a few theories were put forward, but it was all clutching at straws in the vain hope that someone, somewhere might have spotted something.
‘Be lucky to get anything,’ Henry said gruffly. ‘Should’ve kept me on it … their loss,’ he finished with a sneer.
Kate muttered something disparaging and Henry shot her a look.
Back in the studio they cut to Dave Anger, sweating profusely under the hot lights.
‘Look at the twat,’ Henry had muttered, getting a punch on the arm. There were actually some things of interest which could help to identify the victim, Henry had to grudgingly admit.
First there was an unusual pendant on a twisted gold chain which had been found on the victim’s body. ‘No it wasn’t,’ Henry said, puzzled, wondering where it had appeared from. If anyone watching knew the victim, they might have seen it dangling around her neck. Henry generously upped his estimate of the number of calls they might receive — from zero to two — and was still mystified where the jewellery had appeared from. It definitely had not been on the woman’s body.
Next along was a facial reconstruction, a bust of the dead woman’s head and shoulders on a plinth, which Anger revealed with a flourish. Constructed by some whizzo scientist at a university, it was of a woman of Asian descent, who, in life, had probably been a stunner.
‘Maybe they’ll get a few more calls,’ Henry conceded.
The final piece of information that Anger revealed was that the bones of the dead woman had been geologically examined and from their mineral content it had been established that she had been brought up in Blackburn, Lancashire. It was a stunning piece of analytical wizardry carried out by another university, which had the presenters cooing appreciatively and which, Henry had to acknowledge, was a huge step forward in the investigation. A clincher, maybe.
His expression altered to one of jealousy. ‘Bastards!’
Three superb bits of evidence. A piece of unusual jewellery, a face and a place.
On the phone lines behind Anger, Henry spotted a cluster of high-ranking Lancashire detectives wearing headsets, ready to answer calls — something they studiously avoided in the real world. He guessed they’d all trooped to London with first-class train tickets and knew that once the phone lines had closed, they’d all probably be hitting Spearmint Rhino, consuming much beer and curry … and the idea consumed him, ate him up. It was his job. Snatched away. His face tightened enviously. He should be down there getting shit-faced, not them.
‘Whatever you do, don’t stand up and sing “It Shoulda Been Me”,’ Kate chided.
As the programme drew to a close, the cool presenter warmly told viewers not to worry too much about crime because statistics showed that most people never became victims.
‘Tell that to the bloody victims,’ Henry yelled at the box.
He could have necked a beer, but was not drinking that night because this was another on-call week, and he had to satisfy himself with flavoured water whilst Kate worked her way through the wine, muttering, ‘Someone has to do it,’ following one of Henry’s scathing glances.
As the show’s signature tune faded, Kate said bluntly, ‘Are we going to bed then, or what?’
Instinctively Henry’s eyes moved to the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s only ten.’
‘So?’
Henry looked at her. The wine had flushed her cheeks, made them rosy, moistened her wide eyes, dilated her pupils. ‘OK,’ he said, not needing much persuasion. It wasn’t often they had the house to themselves, so the chance to indulge in a bout of noisy lovemaking was a rare treat, whether he was on-call or not. There was nothing in the rules about denying yourself sex, just alcohol. And Henry knew from past experience that it only took a drop of booze inside Kate to turn her from a sometimes hesitant lover into an unleashed tigress … something not to be missed. With that thought uppermost in his mind, Henry was upstairs with her moments later, tearing off clothing with abandon.
It was wonderful, tender, hard, loving, coming to a headboard-crashing finale half an hour later, both of them exhausted by the exertion. Kate rolled off him and quickly drifted into a gentle, purring slumber. He lay awake, deciding whether or not to go for a pee.
He was dreaming about Dave Anger and the reconstructed head of a murdered woman when the phone by the bed rang at one fifteen. The dream evaporated immediately as he fumbled to answer it, muttering a thick ‘Henry Christie’ without any enthusiasm.
‘Henry, it’s Angela Cranlow.’
He sat upright, quickly clearing his mussed brain. ‘Hello ma’am.’ It was more than a surprise to get a phone call from anyone of such rank at any time of day, let alone in the early hours. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Said I’d look out for you, didn’t I?’ Before he could answer, she said, ‘Fancy dealing with a murder?’
‘Yeah, course.’ All vestiges of the shackles of sleep were shaken off. He swung his legs out of bed, turned on the touch light — three taps to the brightest setting — and reached for the pad and pen on the cabinet.
‘There’s a shooting just come in from Blackburn … details pretty sketchy at the moment … as I’m on county cover, I’ve asked to be informed of all serious crimes before anyone else, then I can decide who deals … and also because every detective and his sidekick are in London doing Crimewatch, I can wangle this one for you — if you’re interested, that is?’
‘Yeah, absolutely.’ Henry stood up, naked, and gave a salute to the new deputy chief constable. ‘Ma’am.’
‘Call the force incident manager for details.’ She hung up without another word.
Henry traipsed groggily along the M55, slicing across Lancashire, then cut down on to the M6 and on to the M65 towards the sprawling former mill town of Blackburn. He exited at junction 4 on to the A666 — the Devil’s Road — past Ewood Park, home of Blackburn Rovers. He was a couch-fan of the Rovers, watching their fortunes with interest, but it had been a long time since he had ever willingly gone to see them perform. Half a mile on the town centre side of the ground, he turned right, cutting his way up through a series of terraced streets past Blackburn Royal Infirmary towards the Fishmoor council estate, which clung precariously to the harsh moorland above Blackburn.
He was experienced and well travelled enough to have visited Fishmoor on many occasions during his career. It was a sprawling sixties/seventies monstrosity of an estate and like many of that era probably looked spiffing on the plans, but the reality of living in a place that was a haven for the wrongdoer was much less fun. It was an estate that had had a whole bunch of trouble, mainly based around drugs, ‘acquisitive’ crime and intimidation by gangs of wild youths who kept whole communities in lockdown with their ruthless tactics. It was a busy place for cops and since the advent of the Crime and Disorder Act, also for the local authority and other agencies now obliged by law to get involved in things they had previously avoided.