The wooden structure was ablaze within seconds.
Henry Christie waited in the corridor. Which corridor it was, he could not be certain, but he was waiting his turn, elbows on knees, hands interlocked, fingers twiddling. His stomach churned. He felt sick. He was waiting to go into the hearing, to be called into the internal discipline proceedings which would seal his fate.
Someone drifted by in front of him. He looked up. A woman’s face sneered at him.
‘No chance, Henry. . you’re going. . going. .’ Then she was gone.
Henry suddenly noticed he was not wearing any socks or shoes. He was barefoot and his feet were in sand. He wriggled his toes. The sand was warm.
A bell began to ring.
Henry knew it was his summons to the beginning of the end of his career.
The bell continued to ring.
Henry shook his head. Kate dug him in the side. ‘Answer the phone,’ she muttered groggily.
The ringing continued and somewhere between sleep, dreams and wakefulness, Henry reached out to the bedside phone, fumbling in the dark, almost knocking the lamp off the cabinet.
‘Hello,’ he said. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and the word was more a snorted breath than a properly formed sound.
‘Is that Henry Christie?’ a female voice asked, sounding worried.
Henry propped himself on to an elbow and squinted at the red figures of the digital alarm clock. 03:40. God, it was just like being in the cops and being on call, he thought fleetingly.
‘Yep.’
‘I’m really sorry to disturb you. This is Tara Wickson, we spoke yesterday at the riding school?’
Henry recognized the voice and thought, Twenty to bloody four in the morning! It was the first time for a long time that he’d been woken at this time, other than because of his state of mind. This better be good.
‘Yeah, it’s OK.’ He found his voice. He switched the bedside light on. ‘What is it? Something happened?’
‘You could say that. Someone’s tried to burn down the stables. Could you please come? I’m really sorry it’s such a crap time and even though the police are here, I’d really like you to come and have a look and help.’ She sounded desperate, close to tears and hysteria, just keeping a lid on it. ‘One of the horses has been mutilated, too, others have. .’ There was a sob in her voice as she failed to complete the sentence. ‘Oh God, it’s awful.’
Henry glanced at Kate. She was awake now, listening and glaring.
‘No,’ her lips formed silently. ‘NO WAY.’
Henry dithered. He was stuck between the strong desire to poke his nose into other people’s business and his wish to appease Kate. Both had their pros and cons, but what swung it for him was the arrogant belief that he could talk his way round Kate and make it OK. After all, he had done it so many times before.
He turned away from her and spoke into the phone.
‘Give me half an hour.’
‘Thanks, thanks,’ Tara gushed.
He hung up and swivelled very, very gingerly to Kate. ‘Sorry,’ he said pathetically. She slumped back angrily, defeated, and pulled the duvet over her head.
‘I despair,’ she said.
‘I knew you’d understand.’ He reached for his underpants, a glimmer of a smile on his lips.
His excitement was almost uncontrollable. Adrenalin rinsed through his veins as he drove out towards the Wickson household just as a reluctant dawn was beginning to crack the night sky open. That same old feeling of trepidation and anticipation came back: approaching the unknown, wondering where it would all lead, who he would meet, who he would have conflict with, what would it show him about human nature and — most of all — what it would reveal about himself. It was fantastic, nothing could ever touch it.
The Wickson place was on the outskirts of Poulton-le-Fylde, one of Blackpool’s more salubrious neighbouring towns.
As the sky grew a slightly lighter shade of pale, he could see smoke rising in the distance.
Henry’s throat was parched, mainly because of the beer he had drunk in the pub before bed. He should have thrown some coffee down before setting off, but he had been eager to get going. To get, for the first time in months, to the scene of a crime.
Three
The old feeling stayed with him as he drove down the long driveway towards the house, which was dead ahead of him, and the stables, which were to his right.
Looking across he could see a lot of chaotic activity. Two fire engines, two marked police cars and an ambulance, as well as other vehicles. Blue lights rotated a-plenty. Dozens of people, it seemed, scurried about and the reflective jackets of the uniformed services glistened against the blue lights, headlights and the approaching daylight.
Henry parked outside the house, not wishing to add to the confusion of vehicles and bodies down at the scene. This was an old habit of his. Whenever and wherever possible he liked to approach any crime scene from a distance. ‘I like to come from downwind, with the sun at my back,’ he was fond of saying. He always felt it gave him an advantage. . somehow. It allowed him to make assessments and start shuffling the pack of cards in his head that was his combination of experience, skills and abilities of being a detective.
Not that he was a detective at present, just a cop on suspension.
So what the hell was he doing here?
The question hit him hard as he pulled up and parked on the gravel at the front of the Wickson house. He sat with his hands resting at the ten to two position on the steering wheel and thought seriously about withdrawing.
Curiosity got the better of him.
He looked at the house in front of him, a big, double-fronted, extensively extended and modernized former farmhouse. All the lights were on, the front door open. It was a house that oozed wealth. To the left side of it he could now make out a tennis court and beyond that a helicopter landing pad. He thought it would be safe to assume there would be a swimming pool out back somewhere.
All in all, very nice. The domicile of a rich and successful person, as Henry knew John Lloyd Wickson was. Henry, an avid reader of the county magazine Lancashire Life — mainly to gawp enviously at the property pages — had seen Wickson several times in the social pages. He was always attending charity events, race meetings and had been profiled on a couple of occasions by the magazine’s money section. Henry thought he should re-read one of the profiles sometime. But he did remember enough to recall that Wickson’s wealth was estimated somewhere in the region of about fifty million. Not bad for somebody who began his working life as a bricklayer, or so the story went.
As he got out of the car, he glanced at the other cars parked on the gravel. One was the Mercedes Tara Wickson had been driving, another was a huge Bentley, a lovely car which Henry estimated would cost over a hundred and twenty grand. He was surrounded by big bucks, that much was obvious.
He turned away from the Bentley, then stopped dead in his tracks. There were another three cars on the gravel. One was a Ford Focus with a blue light clamped to the roof. Henry thought it probably belonged to the senior Fire Officer on scene, another, he guessed, was a plain cop car, but it was the third one which he instantly recognized and made him think, Oh bollocks! It was Jane Roscoe’s car.
The sight of it almost made him jump back into his car and tear-arse away immediately. But, valiantly, he braced himself and trudged onwards.
The stables, some 200 metres to the right of the house, were accessed by means of a narrow lane just wide enough to allow passage for one vehicle, with drainage channels and fields on either side. Henry stepped aside to let the ambulance drive away. It did not seem to be in much of a hurry, so he guessed there were no patients on board. Perhaps it had been called as a precautionary measure. He walked on into the stable yard, the ever brightening dawn allowing him to get his bearings and make sense of the geography of the area. It was with a surprised jolt that he realized that the banks of the River Wyre were perhaps only a hundred metres away to his left as he walked to the stables.