Henry and Diane were a few minutes late for Rik Dean’s murder briefing. They had waited for the arrival of the crime scene investigator at Hawkshead Farm and briefed her, which put them back a little timewise.
They then raced to Lancaster Police Station, abandoned Diane’s Merc in the basement car park, blocking several other cars in, and hustled their way up to what had once been the gymnasium on the top floor but was now a briefing room and major incident room. They tried to sneak in at the back unobserved, but Rik – who had just begun the briefing – spotted them, looked daggers at them, and said, ‘As a couple of latecomers have slipped in and I’ve only just started, I hope the majority of you – who were on time – will indulge me and let me start again for their benefit.’
Several pairs of eyes turned and gave Henry and Diane even more hostile glares.
Henry smiled and leaned against the back wall of the room – which still had a climbing frame attached to it – and took it all in. He recalled the days when he would have been up front, standing on the slightly raised stage, confidently briefing the assembled cops and others; the exciting beginning of a serious investigation, full of promise and the prospect of nailing a killer, someone who had violently taken another person’s life. On the flip side, briefings at the far end of an investigation that had failed to find an offender could be very depressing and it could be hard to motivate staff.
As far as the murder of Jack Carter was concerned, and the death of an innocent motorist and the cynical shooting of the woman driving the Mini, this investigation was still in its golden time. That first seventy-two hours when all was possible and detectives were hunting like terriers. After that, if there was no result, everything got much tougher.
Watching Rik speak, Henry could tell he had his audience in the palm of his hand as he regaled them with what had happened the day before, when Henry and Diane had stumbled on a murder in progress while making enquiries linked to the fallout from the deaths at Hawkshead Farm.
Most people in the room were well acquainted with the scenario, but the previous day’s events were an exciting add-on to an already complex and potentially wide-ranging investigation.
Clearly, Henry thought, he had taught Rik Dean well. He was a good orator and motivator – maybe even better than Henry had been.
Just before the briefing drew to a close and all tasks were allotted to the detectives and uniformed personnel, Rik caught Henry slightly off-guard when he pointed over the heads of the assembly and said, ‘Just before we divvy up the jobs, I’d just like to point out that DS Daniels, whom you all know, and Mr Christie have joined us at the back of the room, and I would personally like to say to them: thank you for your bravery yesterday in pursuing, without hesitation, a very dangerous armed man who had already killed one person and attempted to shoot both of you. You’re a credit to this force, although if you’re late again, you’ll be in big trouble.’
There was a laugh, an ‘Oh, yeah’ from someone, a whistle of appreciation and then a round of applause which embarrassed both of them, but then quickly faded when Rik added, ‘Just so you’re not confused … some of you may remember Mr Christie. He is a former detective superintendent and SIO who retired a couple of years ago. He is back now specifically to assist this inquiry as a consulting investigator …’
‘Like Sherlock Holmes?’ someone quipped.
‘Exactly like Sherlock Holmes,’ Rik confirmed. ‘So be nice to him.’
Or I’ll stick my pipe up your arse, Henry wanted to add – but didn’t.
‘OK, people … DS Tomlinson is the task allocator, so you need to see her at the back of the room to get your jobs and pairings for the day ahead. This, I feel, may be a long investigation, folks, so it might be worthwhile warning your loved ones that they might not be seeing much of you. Thank you.’
They began to break up, chattering among themselves; there was a palpable sense of excitement. A few nodded at Henry. One or two scowled at him. A couple of the local detectives spoke quietly and earnestly to Diane, asking how she was doing and telling her what a great job she had done.
Finally, she and Henry approached Rik who was having an urgent-looking heads-together with a couple of detectives, which broke up as they closed in.
‘You were late,’ Rik said to Diane.
‘For the right reasons.’
‘Which were?’
She explained the early-morning hike up the moors, what they had found.
‘Too much of a coincidence not to be connected,’ Henry said.
‘So the CSI has bagged up the bottle and the tape,’ Diane added.
‘Good. Good thinking,’ Rik said. ‘How are you both?’
‘We’re OK,’ Diane said, noticing Rik Dean’s eyes playing over the pair of them and the slight frown on his face as he tried to work out why they had been together so early in the morning. She could see it in his eyes, but she let him stew on it. Not his business.
‘What are your thoughts?’ Rik asked them. His eyes, though, were focused on Henry, the man, who obviously knew everything. Henry noticed this and also the slight tightness of Diane’s mouth at the unintentional but ingrained snub.
Henry looked at her and gestured for her to do the talking. It was down to her to take the lead, and Rik would just have to lump it.
‘Well, I know the financial investigators will be scrutinizing Jack Carter with renewed vigour, and everything that needs doing regarding his death and the motorist’s will be done … I hoped Henry and I could just carry on with what we were doing.’
‘Which was?’
‘I was going to take the photographs of the two dead lads we found in the garage wall at Hawkshead Farm and show them around the travelling community for starters, see if anyone recognizes them.’
‘Why?’
‘We think they might be travellers too, connected to the ones who murdered John and Isobel York. It’s just a hunch as much as anything,’ she admitted.
Rik looked doubtful. ‘Maybe.’
‘We’ll also make sure the mugshots are circulated around the country to any traveller liaison officers other police forces might have, and councils,’ Diane added.
‘I do have another idea, too,’ Henry said, ‘on that subject.’
He didn’t elaborate, kept it enigmatic.
Rik nodded and said, ‘OK, whatever. Do what you have to do, but keep DS Tomlinson in the loop, please. I’m going to two post-mortems today – Carter and the motorist.’
‘Can you keep us posted if anything of interest comes up?’ Henry asked him. He tilted his head towards the allocator’s desk where there was a queue of officers being given their jobs. ‘Has anything come in from the public, by the way?’
‘Lots of stuff; don’t know how interesting, though.’
Henry glanced at Diane. One of the things he always did when he ran murder investigations was to make time to at least skim through anything coming in via crime hotlines or comms rooms.
‘Fancy a look through them before we do anything else?’
Diane nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘We can get a brew, too.’
They walked towards the desk, but Rik took Henry’s arm and pulled him aside.
‘When the fuck are you going to pay us a visit? We’ve been in the house for four months now and we haven’t even had a card from you, Henry. Lisa’s spitting feathers. Come for tea one day.’
Lisa was Henry’s younger sister, married to Rik.
‘I will. Soon,’ Henry promised.
They brought their coffee up from the canteen and commandeered an empty desk in the MIR. Henry snaffled the message pad on which all incoming messages were logged, even if they never became ‘Actions’.
Henry skimmed through them while Diane found the number for the police liaison officer on the Young Offenders Wing at Lancashire prison, near Leyland, to try to arrange a visit with an inmate that Henry thought it would be worth speaking to.
Following the media releases the day before, including a hastily arranged press briefing, hundreds of messages had flooded in. Mostly, they were innocuous – sightings of suspicious men (one, even, from Wales) and vehicles. The task allocator, an experienced detective with an eye for detail, read and graded them. Likely ones were given immediate action and the others would finally get allocated as and when.
Henry had spent many hours sifting through such pads, and one message caught his eye – one that had not yet been allocated, though it had been read. It was one of those seemingly useless, bland messages that probably had nothing to do with anything, but it made Henry frown.
Even though each message was uniquely numbered, Henry left it in the file, lifted the whole folder and carried it back over to the allocator who had just finished dispatching detectives and others to jobs. Henry knew her – an experienced detective called June Tomlinson – and had used her on a few murder investigations.
‘Hi, boss,’ she said automatically.
‘First names, June,’ he corrected her. ‘I’m now a member of the great unwashed.’
They had a very brief ‘How’s it going?’ chat, then Henry, having placed the folder in front of her, asked, ‘Anyone been to this one?’
She checked and cross-referenced it to her own pad and computer and said, ‘Not as yet.’
‘Can you give it to me and Diane?’
‘We need to be at the prison at two,’ Diane told him as she drove through the city of Lancaster. ‘They’ve got a slot, but they’re short-staffed so we can have fifteen minutes tops with our guy.’
‘Should be enough,’ Henry said, ‘to scare him shitless.’
‘So, where are we going now?’
‘Asda.’
‘Well,’ the lady said, ‘just seemed a bit odd … well, normally not perhaps … and I’d probably never have thought about it, but when I got home last night, I watched the news and saw the police press conference thingy about that terrible incident in Silverdale …’
Henry and Diane listened patiently to Edna Moss, a pleasant, slightly plump, hair-dyed-purple woman of sixty-two. Henry knew this to be totally wrong in the world of today, but if he had been asked to describe the type of woman who worked for Asda, he would have described Edna Moss to a ‘T’ and would not have felt guilty because she was nice, smiley, interested in people and just the sort of employee a supermarket like Asda relied on to make customers feel valued. And although she was a similar age to Henry, she seemed a generation older somehow. It probably didn’t help that, in his own mind, he was still nineteen years old.
She talked over her shoulder as she led them through the Asda store situated on the boundary between Lancaster and Morecambe to the security office on the ground floor, opposite the checkouts.
‘I know it said that the guy who got away could have been bleeding from a head wound.’
‘Did the man you saw have blood on him?’ Diane asked.
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘So why call us?’ Diane asked, but in a non-threatening way.
‘Because … er, I don’t know … I just thought about it and it seemed odd.’ Edna stopped outside the security room door. ‘I’ve already been in here’ – she pointed to the door – ‘and I’ve looked at the CCTV stuff again, and yeah, just odd, somehow. He was really furtive.’
She knocked on the door which was opened by one of the uniformed security guards.
‘Bob, we’ve come to have a look at that bit of footage from the camera again,’ Edna said to the guy. ‘These are two detectives.’
‘Yeah, come in,’ Bob said. ‘It’s still teed up.’
Edna said, ‘I hope I haven’t wasted your time. I know you’re chasing a very dangerous man.’
‘You won’t have,’ Henry assured her. ‘It was either come and see you or go to Wales and see a bloke who believes he saw the wanted man on the funicular railway in Llandudno.’
‘Ah, based on that, I don’t feel too bad.’
The three of them shuffled into the office, which was not vast and, for four people, including the security guard, was a tight squeeze. The guard sat at the desk while Henry, Diane and Edna clustered behind him as he logged on to a desktop computer with the footage ready to play. The top of the screen was stamped with the previous day’s date and time – 13:45 hours – which was a few hours after the incidents in Silverdale.
‘I was on the self-checkout, you know, where customers scan their own stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ Henry said.
The screen showed a camera shot from above, which encompassed the whole of the self-checkout area, like a small corral of self-scan tills, two lines of eight with the entrance at the far side and the exit just below the camera.
The shot showed Edna with a woman customer, chatting about something. There were no other customers in the area at that moment.
‘She’s one of my neighbours,’ Edna explained. ‘And this is him.’
As the two women chatted, a man entered the area carrying a clump of items in his arms rather than in a basket or trolley. The image was good, well defined and in colour. Henry could easily tell the man was wearing a Puffa-style jacket over grubby overalls with work boots on his feet. He wore a beanie cap pulled right down to his eyebrows.
The goods he held consisted of a pair of jeans, a shirt/T-shirt combination, a pair of trainers, a pack of underwear and a short jacket. He was also cradling a pack of sandwiches, a bottle of coke and a packet of crisps, a bottle of own-brand whisky, two pay-as-you-go phones, plus various items from the medical shelves – a pack of bandages, a box of plasters and a tube of Savlon. He scanned the alcohol first, which, with its security tag, caused the red light on a post by the checkout to flash and alert a member of staff to come, remove the tag and approve the sale.
Henry saw Edna pat her friend and approach the man at the checkout, who seemed to jump out of his skin when she spoke behind him.
‘I told him I had to take the tag off,’ she explained to Henry and Diane. On screen, she reached past the man and took the whisky from the packing area. ‘He looked scared. Like he was underage or something. Which he wasn’t.’
Edna took the bottle to the control station and removed the alarm tag while the man scanned the sandwiches, coke and crisps, and then began to deal with the clothing. The shirt combo and jeans still had their hangers on them and he made no effort to remove them.
Edna came back. He stepped aside and allowed her to authorize the whisky on the checkout. She spoke to him.
‘I asked him if he was OK. He said yes. I asked him if he wanted the hangers and he said no, so I removed them for him. I also asked if he wanted a carrier bag, but he said he didn’t. I backed off then. He was curt with me and his eyes – crikey! Like a hunted animal.’
They watched him scan the medical items and two phones in boxes and then pay by feeding several ten-pound notes into the checkout, then gather up his purchases and scurry out, keeping his head down as he went past the security camera.
‘That’s it, really,’ Edna said almost apologetically. ‘Now I look again, maybe it’s nothing.’
‘I got him getting into his car,’ the security guard said. He tapped a couple of keys and the screen changed to a shot at the front of the store which recorded the man leaving hurriedly, then cut to another in the car park which caught him going to a vehicle, getting in it, then driving away.
It was a small, white panel van with the name of a company on the side, but this image was less sharp than the in-store one, and it wasn’t possible to make out the name or registration number, though Henry guessed the force’s tech department could probably get a result by enhancing the pictures if necessary.
‘I dunno … it was just like … something not right … an’ I’m not saying that’s the man you’re after. He didn’t have blood on him or anything but he seemed to be really jumpy and I just thought, “Accomplice!” That’s what I thought. The man you’re after must have needed help, surely.’
Henry almost expected her to fold her arms under her bosom and shake with indignation.
‘So he paid by cash, therefore no record of a debit card or anything?’ Diane asked.
‘No. You think there’s anything in it?’ Edna asked her.
‘Maybe he was buying a new set of clothes for the man we’re after,’ she speculated.
‘And even if he isn’t, Edna,’ Henry said, ‘I can honestly say that you have all the instincts of a good detective.’
‘Well … funny you should say. Thing is, that guy is only little and I saw the tag on the shirt/T-shirt combo was XXL, so it wasn’t for him in a month of Sundays.’
‘And the man we’re after is a pretty large guy,’ Henry confirmed.
The security guard had returned to the in-store clip of the man making the purchase. Diane leaned in closer.
‘Just pause it there, please,’ she asked him.
He hit the button and caught the exact moment the man at the checkout glanced ever so briefly up at the camera so that the two-thirds of his features which could be seen below the pulled down beanie hat were clear to see.
‘What is it?’ Henry asked.
Diane’s honey-coloured eyes sparkled when she looked sideways at Henry and said, ‘I know this guy. We ran an operation about four months ago from Lancaster, not long after I was transferred up here – stolen cars and the like – and he was pulled in and given a good shakedown by us and the Major Crime Unit’s stolen vehicle squad. He has a chop shop on White Lund.’ Diane paused.
‘I know White Lund,’ Henry said.
‘However, when we searched the place, it was totally clean. He had a few bangers for sale and second-hand car parts, but it was all low-class stuff. The SVS were after big-timers – sports cars and the like. So he walked.’
‘Name?’
‘Billy Lane. Remember him well – a little rat-faced creep – but there was nothing to pin on him.’
‘Worth a visit?’ Henry asked. ‘Or shall we just leave it?’
‘White Lund is only just over there,’ Diane said, pointing. They were back in her car, approaching the exit to Asda’s car park. ‘Only just over the road, really.’
‘Be rude not to, then,’ Henry agreed.
At the car park exit she turned on to Ovangle Road and headed towards Heysham, then did a right which brought her on to White Lund, a huge and expanding industrial and retail estate with businesses ranging from multinational enterprises and huge car dealers all the way down to scrapyards and backstreet shit holes – places like Billy Lane’s.
It was a huge, intricate maze of interconnecting roads and dead ends, but Diane knew her way.
It was also a place Henry knew well from his past history as an SIO. He had dealt with a few murders that had taken place here or had connections.
Diane drove into a dead-end road called Eastgate, then turned left off that into another cul-de-sac and drew up outside a very untidy unit emblazoned with a sign, Lane Motors.
Which did not seem to have very much going on.
‘Looks shut,’ Diane said. ‘This is the place we raided, though.’
There were a few ropey cars pulled up outside, but the building itself seemed to be closed for business.
‘Spin around and let me out … I’ll go knock.’
Diane swung the car in an arc and pulled in by the roadside. Henry jumped out and went to the front door, tried the office door – locked – and attempted to heave up the shutter door – also locked. He shaded his eyes and tried to peer through a gap in the drawn blinds into what seemed to be a reception area, but it was in darkness. Hands in pockets, he returned to the car and flopped in.
‘No sign of life,’ he told her. ‘How “suspect” was Lane, if you get my drift? Cold, warm or hot?’
‘Hot, hot, hot. From the intel, we were surprised he had nothing on him, so to speak.’
‘Does he have other premises?’
‘One we don’t know about?’
Henry shrugged. ‘Maybe. Because if he is that good, perhaps this one is a front, a decoy, the one he’ll open up to cops if they come sniffing. Meanwhile, around the back …’
Diane considered this possibility. ‘He could’ve duped us. Been done before.’
‘What about a home address?’
‘Can’t remember that; I didn’t visit it.’
‘Custody record?’ Henry suggested. ‘In the meantime, let’s creep around the area, maybe spot his van.’
Diane called into comms via her PR and asked for a check to be made with the custody office, which, she was informed, was very busy, but they would try to get an answer as soon as the custody officer was free.
They cruised the width and breadth of White Lund as they waited for a response to the query but didn’t spot any vehicles that resembled the van they’d seen on the Asda security footage. Even though the actual writing on the side of it, or the van’s registration number, had not been legible, Henry was pretty sure he would be able to recognize it again, as was Diane.
‘He might just have been buying clothes for his bigger brother,’ Diane mused. ‘If he has one.’
‘He might, but I like the way Edna’s mind works. If only for her, I’d like to check out this guy. We could do with more people like her.’
‘Yeah, I get it.’
Diane turned slowly into another dead end, drove to the turning circle and back up again at a snail’s pace.
Henry scanned each premises on his side, and as they passed a detached unit surrounded by a high fence, the gate firmly closed, he said quickly, ‘Pull in here.’
As the wheels stopped turning, he was out and walking towards the gate, which was about ten feet high, about the same height as the fence that surrounded the unit. Both fence and gates were made of a tight mesh with thin steel plates attached to the inside to make them almost impossible to see through, but there were some gaps between the struts, and as they had driven past, Henry had glimpsed some cars in the parking area directly in front of the unit and caught the flash of a badge on the front of a car that he recognized instantly.
The three-pronged trident that was the insignia of the Maserati brand. It was just one of those by-products of more than thirty years as a cop, plus an interest in cars in general, that he could identify most models out there even though the modern, bland, cloned designs sometimes made it harder to distinguish between makes.
But he knew a Maserati badge when he saw one.
He had to get his face right up to the crack where the sliding gates met in the middle, and peer through with one eye.
Definitely a Maserati – but just the body shell of one.
He angled his face to try to see more cars.
A Range Rover and a Mercedes G-Wagon.
And also a white van, though he could not quite make out what was written on its side. However, there was that feeling in his gut: it was the one from the supermarket car park. He looked back at Diane and beckoned to her as she leaned across the centre console of the Merc and mouthed, What?
He pointed excitedly. ‘It’s the van. I’m sure of it.’
‘Shit.’
She switched off the engine, got out and jogged over to Henry who directed her to peer through the gap as he had done.
‘Yeah, I’ll have that,’ she said.
Henry was inspecting the gates. They were on rollers and met in the middle, secured by bolts and a thick chain threaded through the framework which was fastened by a hefty padlock on the inside. They were very secure and impossible to pull open with just brute strength.
‘What do you think?’ Diane asked.
‘Well, there’s someone in,’ he said, ‘unless there’s access at the rear, because the padlock has been locked from inside. Over to you, Detective.’
‘I think it might be worth having some hefty cops behind us this time – just in case. Preferably armed, but otherwise brandishing batons and size elevens. I mean, it’s unlikely we’re going to stumble on a gunman again, isn’t it?’
‘Highly unlikely, unless they act on the bus principle. You don’t see one, then a whole load come along at once. But, just in case, let’s have some backup.’
‘I’ll park down the road a little way and sort something,’ Diane said.
They got back into the Merc and Diane drove fifty yards along the road, spun the car around and pulled up on the opposite side to give them a clear view of the gate while she called it in.
‘Interesting connection if the gunman has gone to ground here,’ Henry mused.
‘Yeah, and it’ll all get more and more complicated.’
‘Something’s happening,’ Henry said.
He’d seen some movement behind the gate, the shadow of feet, and then the chain was pulled off like a snake disappearing. The left-hand gate began to slide open, pushed by a man.
‘Billy Lane,’ Diane said, recognizing him.
He was pushing the gate on its rollers in the opposite direction, then he turned and started to push the other half of the gate open, so that he was now facing Henry and Diane in the Merc. He was dressed in the same clothes as his shopping trip the day before – beanie hat, Puffa jacket over grubby overalls.
Lane was concentrating on putting his shoulder to the gate. It did not move easily on its rollers and took some effort, and his face was mostly turned towards the ground until he had finished. Only then did he look up and around. There was just one second of hesitation as his head rotated, a moment he tried to mask.
Henry knew the significance of the moment. ‘He’s spotted us but is pretending he hasn’t.’
Lane stood in the opening, trying to be casual, lighting up a cigarette, blowing smoke up into the air, pretending to be chilling, kicking the ground with his toe-capped boot, but his eyes kept returning fleetingly to the Mercedes parked down the road. From where he was, Henry guessed he probably couldn’t see who was sitting in it, just two figures. Out of place, but maybe not a cop car. Mercedes sports cars rarely appeared in this neck of the woods and nor were they usually cop cars, and these things, Henry knew, were puzzling Lane slightly.
Eventually, he finished his cigarette, stomped on the butt and screwed it into the ground before stretching and yawning and getting one last look at the mysterious Merc, then turning around and disappearing out of view.
On her PR, Diane asked, ‘Any ETA for this backup, please? There’s some movement.’
Comms replied, ‘There’s an ARV unit en route from the station, be with you ASAP although the city is snarled up with traffic.’
‘Anyone any closer?’
‘All tied up. The job at Silverdale has got us stretched, I’m afraid, Diane, but I have a patrol making from Carnforth, probably ten minutes away.’
‘Roger that.’ She looked at Henry and swore.
‘We wait,’ he said.
‘I don’t know, I can’t fucking tell, can I?’ Lane said to McCabe. ‘It’s just a car that shouldn’t be here, but it doesn’t look like a copper’s.’
‘What sort is it?’
‘A Merc, SLK, blue-grey, sporty thing.’
‘Two-seater?’
‘Yeah, yeah, why?’
McCabe swallowed dryly, remembering fleeing from the scene of Jack Carter’s murder and running past such a car on the road outside his victim’s house.
‘Don’t look like a cop car,’ Lane reiterated.
McCabe’s Browning automatic was on the desk. He’d just disassembled, cleaned and reassembled it, then reloaded the magazine with the spare shells he had been carrying loose.
He picked it up, pointed it at Lane’s head and fired.
Lane crumbled and fell on the spot, blood spouting from the horrific wound in his face. McCabe stood over him and fired another round into the already damaged head. Lane had been twitching. The second shot put an end to that.
McCabe grabbed the keys for the Range Rover parked outside and went out to it, but before getting inside he had a second thought, found his ski mask and pulled it over his head.