Bad Tidings (2 page)

Instead he was thinking, Mm . . . my life . . . shitty . . .

It was about to get even shittier.

He didn't think about the footsteps behind him. Running.

Nor about the double rear doors of the van being flung open from within. And even if he had thought it through, his conclusion would have been that it was probably a van about to disgorge drunken occupants onto the street. More revellers to add to the thousands already in town.

Except no one emerged from the van.

And the footsteps rushed up behind him.

Then there was the blow to the back of the head which turned his knees to squish. His legs folded underneath him, no longer able to support his weight, and he slumped heavily onto his knees.

His eyes were still open, though. Just briefly he saw a dark shape in the back of the unlit van, but could not make out any features of it.

The pain from the blow to the head, still sending spasms throughout his body, rocked him onto his hands, and his shitty life swirled uncontrollably as he looked down at the cracked pavement, tried to raise his head, focus, concentrate, fight or run.

But then a hood was fitted over his head and drawn tightly around his neck. He was dragged and lifted and he knew he was being bundled head first into the van. His head hit something hard, an inner wheel arch perhaps. His hands were pulled behind his back and then he was punched on the side of his head, hard . . . and neither his mind nor his body seemed to work any more. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, then there was nothing.

The sound of approaching footsteps on floorboards – or at least that's what they sounded like to David Peters.

He went rigid, listening, not breathing, trying to work it all out.

His head hurt still, throbbed. It was sore and there were big, tender swellings on it from the blows he had received.

Bang. That first one from behind had really hurt, made him drop like a sack of shit.

He blinked. Listened. Footsteps. They seemed to be . . . above him. Then they stopped. There was a scraping, scuffling sound. Then the footsteps again, retreating, becoming distant . . . the sound of a door clattering shut, like a garden gate. Not a house door. Then the metallic click of a latch dropping into place and a bolt being slid shut.

Peters tried to work out what to do.

So far he had been kidnapped and regained consciousness.

He wasn't sure, but he thought he hadn't made any noise yet, so perhaps the kidnapper believed him to be still unconscious.

Giving him precious time to think.

Why was he here?

Could it be Stella's husband? Had he discovered their sordid little affair – if it could be called an affair – and was he enraged by it and now wreaking revenge?

Peters thought it unlikely. Stella was convinced he neither knew nor suspected anything. And even if he found out he was unlikely to give a toss, she said, assuring him he was only interested in model railways.

Or had his own wife discovered the affair? Peters thought that was unlikely, too. He covered his tracks well, destroyed receipts, paid cash when he could, didn't make a regular habit of fucking his shop manager and always used a different location for each meet-up. No, the wife didn't know.

So who?

He had no money to speak of. A few grand in the bank, a couple of thou secreted in a building society, some cash – literally – stashed in the loft . . . not nearly enough to satisfy a ransom demand.

Which was the truly worrying thing.

His assets were minuscule. Certainly not worth anyone kidnapping him for and putting themselves in jeopardy. He was worth next to nothing and even if the shops – which he owned outright – were sold, they wouldn't really be worth much either. They were both in crappy areas of town.

So no ransom demand.

A squeak of terror formed at the back of his throat.

This was personal.

And making it personal, logically, meant there would not be a pretty outcome to this.

No exchange. No money drop. No freedom.

He had been taken for some other reason.

His mind churned desperately.

Up until the start of the affair with Stella he had led a blameless life. Unspectacular. No cracked pots. Got married. Had kids. Ran a business. Had maybe done a few daft things as a kid, but nothing that bad and such a long time ago.

He was forty-five and innocent.

He inhaled unsteadily. The smell of the hessian sacking. And something else in the molecules he sniffed up his nose. Something familiar, yet difficult to place . . . an aroma from the dim distant past.

At once his whole body felt as if it had been instantly frozen, dipped into liquid nitrogen.

And he knew.

The latch clattered. Footsteps approached again.

David Peters' heart pounded against his sternum.

The footsteps stopped directly above him.

There was a creaking noise as if an old door was being opened, or the lid of a coffin lifted. Peters felt an inrush of air around him. He could sense someone close by, standing over him. There was the sound of breathing.

He swallowed. He had hoped to do it silently, but the swallow became a loud gulp and because of that, it was now obvious he was awake. No more pretending.

The hessian hood was drawn slowly off his head.

He had expected to be blinded by bright lights, but the world his eyes saw was a dark, shadowy place, with a sinister figure standing over him. The figure squatted down onto its haunches as Peters realized where he had been lying. In a cavity of some sort, underneath a trap door, in a space maybe seven feet long, two feet wide and ten inches high, beneath some floorboards.

His heart whammed and crashed. Bitter adrenalin surged into his system and fear creased him.

The figure spoke. ‘Welcome to the chicken shack.'

H
enry Christie opened his eyes at the first low ring of the cordless telephone handset on the cabinet beside his bed. He was on his back, only half asleep, drifting in and out of wakefulness pretty much as per the last seven nights, over which, he claimed, he could probably count on both hands the hours he had slept. Not many. His head twisted to the right – a quick time check of the digital clock, the conditioned response honed by too many years of early morning phone calls and turnouts.

He saw and mentally logged the illuminated display, which read 03:48.

He rolled quietly out of bed, grabbing the phone as he moved, thumbing the ‘Take Call' button before the third ring. He was up on his bare feet in an instant, phone clasped to his ear, plodding naked into the en suite shower room, closing the door softly behind him and only then speaking.

‘Henry Christie . . .' His voice was nervy as he wondered which of the two matters this could be. He didn't really want it to be either, but there was slight relief when the voice at the other end announced, ‘Mr Christie, this is Inspector Howard, force control room . . .'

Henry juddered a short breath. No, he didn't want either call . . . what he wanted was a full night and a long morning in bed for once, and for nothing to happen . . . but the Force Incident Manager's voice made this one infinitely more preferable to the call he could have got. The FIM was calling from Lancashire Constabulary's HQ Communications Room at Hutton, four miles south of Preston. It was the FIM who managed the call-out rotas for the force, deciding which specialist, if any, needed to be turned out to deal with an incident.

Not that Henry was even on a rota that week.

That week – the week between Christmas and New Year – he was technically off duty. Nevertheless he had been out and about all week, from Christmas Eve all the way through to New Year's Eve. He had been involved in a series of incidents that meant what should have been a week of rest and relaxation had been completely ruined by both work and personal business. He'd had less sleep than ten fingers, he claimed . . . at least it felt that way. And he had been waiting for a call each night, and now, on New Year's Day morning at 3.48 a.m., it had come.

Henry listened. Very fleetingly he wondered if the FIM was visualizing him. Did she see a man too quickly approaching his mid-fifties, standing in a chilly shower room, goosebumps all over his naked body, jotting down notes on the writing pad he'd purposely left on the toilet cistern? Probably not . . . the FIM was far too busy to allow such trivial thoughts to enter her head, Henry guessed.

Henry asked questions, clarified any possible misunderstandings, asked her to repeat the location twice. Then he gave some specific instructions to the FIM, who very professionally reconfirmed them, and Henry gave her his estimated time of arrival.

Call over, Henry turned on the shower and stepped into it for a two-minute freshen up, then a shave.

His clothes were already hanging on the door of the en suite in anticipation of the call. It wasn't formal wear – jeans, a shirt, a sweater and leather jacket (with a tie rolled up in the pocket, just in case a degree of formality was required at some stage), thick socks and practical footwear, a cross between trainers and walking shoes.

When fully dressed, he emerged from the room.

He had hoped not to disturb Alison Marsh, his lady friend, but she was fully awake and propped up on one elbow, bedside light on a low setting. She had a concerned look on her face. Henry felt bad about waking her. She had only been in bed two hours and he knew she was as exhausted as he was by the previous week.

‘Sorry. Thought I was being quiet.'

‘And I thought a gorilla had broken in and was smashing the place up.'

‘Sorry . . . I need to go, love.'

‘Which one is it?' she asked quietly.

‘Work.'

She exhaled. ‘Take care.'

He walked to her side of the bed and kissed her cheek.

Henry made his way through the pub, grabbing his Karrimor Chatsworth jacket as he went, knowing it would be cold outside. He let himself out through the front door into the icy blast of the morning in the north Lancashire village of Kendleton. Up until a couple of hours before the place had been heaving with festivities and the pub, the Tawny Owl, being the only hostelry in town, had been the centre of it. And very well it had performed.

Now it was eerily silent. The only visible remnants of the celebrations were streamers, party poppers spider-webbed out across the car park and several of the cars and a few balloons tied to wing mirrors. On the village green across the road, the embers of the bonfire still glowed and smoked and Henry could smell it.

Henry inhaled the chilly air, feeling it sear into his lungs. He shivered, locked the pub doors and trudged over to his car, making the first footprints in a light dusting of snow. The vehicle was a new Audi convertible, the replacement for his previous car which had met its doom in a very ugly incident on the road into Kendleton six months before. That one had been a Mercedes which Henry had loved, and he was now slightly regretting the brand change.

That said, he acknowledged that the Audi was also a great car.

He slid into it, started up and within moments the efficient heating system was belting out hot air. A heated driver's seat also helped matters. Then he was on the road.

Geographically speaking, in terms of the county of Lancashire he was about as far away as he could be from his destination that morning.

Kendleton was tucked away inconveniently in the very north of the county and he had to travel well into the east, but it wasn't a straightforward journey. First he had to get onto the M6 at the Lancaster north junction, then it was pretty much motorway all the way. Head south down the M6, cut briefly onto the M61 at Bamber Bridge, then onto the M65 to travel east into the depths of the county, exit at junction 5, then plough even further east onto the bleak moors above Blackburn on which perched his destination. The village of Belthorn.

Henry didn't need to use a SatNav, and not just because Belthorn had been pretty much his focus of attention for the last week. He hardly ever needed to use one when travelling around the county, except for possibly the last few hundred metres of a journey. Over thirty years of policing the area had given him detailed knowledge of it and its denizens, particularly the criminal variety.

He knew exactly where he was going on that dark, cold morning, the first day of the New Year. He settled down to enjoy the drive along deserted roads . . . and wondered, not for the first time, why he hadn't been strong enough to stand up to the chief constable and refuse the job in the first place, the one that had been the launch pad for everything else that followed over the week. He should have been more assertive and the chief would have had to delegate it to someone else. But he was playing on Henry Christie's weakness.

The bait: two unsolved murders. And like a dim-witted carp attracted by a wriggling worm, there were some things Henry Christie could not refuse, even though his gut instinct was to tell the chief constable to find some other sucker.

He bit the worm, because the challenge of catching a killer was impossible for Henry to swim away from . . .

‘Half a bloody job,' Henry had said bitterly. ‘Half a bloody job.'

‘I know, I know,' the chief constable had responded, accompanied with a ‘so what?' kind of shrug. His name was Robert Fanshaw-Bayley, known to most people as FB, although no one of lower rank would ever be so familiar to his face. Therefore, by default, as everyone else in the Lancashire Constabulary was of lower rank, he was always referred to as ‘sir' or ‘boss', and occasionally – by his deputy or the assistant chiefs – by his first name, when he wasn't chewing their backsides off.

It was possible that Henry Christie, though a mere detective superintendent, could have got away with the informality. He and FB had known each other touching thirty years, ever since Henry had been a PC on the crime car in Rossendale and Fanshaw-Bayley the young, thrusting, obnoxious DI in that neck of the woods, the smug ruler of the roost. Henry, therefore, knew he had certain privileges with FB that others did not, given their intertwined history, but never pushed it. He liked to keep FB at arm's length, as the prospect of cosying up to him in any way made him nauseous.