Judgement Call (2 page)

‘Aaron? Uh, yeah, suppose so.' She took a deep drag of the cigarette and exhaled. A cloud of smoke hung listlessly a few inches above the child's sleeping face. Henry wondered if little Aaron would grow up psychologically damaged with the image of his mother's rape permanently etched into his little brain, and with ravaged lungs from inhaling someone else's smoke. The little guy's future, he thought, was already bleak.

Henry thought he heard a noise at the back of the house. A click. A scrape. A creak. Maybe a soft footfall. He thought nothing of it.

‘Who is your boyfriend?'

‘Vladimir Kaminski … you'll have heard of him.'

He had. ‘Vlad the Impaler' was his nickname. He was allegedly the cock of the town, a young man with a fearsome reputation as a very dirty fighter. No doubt he would have been christened the ‘Impaler' anyway, but there was a certain truth to it. He had once impaled a lad's hand onto an iron fence post. Henry had yet to come across him, but he knew it would only be a matter of time.

‘Real violent bastard, he is,' Sally confirmed.

There was another creaking noise from the hallway, a definite sound of movement. This time Henry knew for certain there was someone else in the house. He went still, then turned his face slowly towards the closed living-room door. He saw a shadow move in the gap at floor level.

He glanced at Sally. The colour had drained from her already pale face, a look of fear in her eyes. He placed a finger across his lips –
shhh
– and pointed to the door and mouthed, ‘Is that him?'

‘Think so,' she mouthed back, nodding.

Henry stood up slowly, reaching his full height of six-two. He reached for the leather strap of his staff and looped it around his hand, ready to draw it if necessary.

Suddenly the door was booted open, clattering back on his hinges, crashing all the way to the wall.

Henry Christie was approaching his sporting prime. He was broad-shouldered, physically fit, a sports fanatic. He played rugby for Lancashire Constabulary, swam for them too, played squash three times a week, seven-a-side football once. He lifted weights and ate like a horse that loved curries. He was pretty big and handy, his police lifestyle – rotten shifts, fast food, greasy pies, beer and little sleep – not yet having taken a toll on him, and he was proud of his physique.

However, the man who had just kicked open the door of Sally Lee's living room, whilst about the same age as Henry, was wider, slightly smaller, but much stronger-looking – and he had a mean disposition that often resulted in violence, whereas Henry was quite mild-mannered and it took a lot to ignite him.

‘Vladimir Kaminski?' Henry said unnecessarily.

‘Who wants to know?' His beady eyes bore into Henry's.

‘Me. My name is PC Christie,' Henry said evenly, trying to work out how he was going to flatten this muscle man, because even before things had got going he knew it would come to a rough and tumble.

‘I don' give a flying fuck who you is,' Kaminski spat. His accent was an uncomfortable blend of East Europe and East Lancashire.

‘You're under arrest on suspicion of rape and assault. You're not obliged to say anything …' Henry began to recite the caution and took a step toward his prisoner to be.

‘You come near me, I kill you,' he warned Henry and pulled his shirt sleeve right up to his bicep to reveal a huge arm with muscles like Popeye's and an array of interlinking tattoos, instantly making Henry think, ‘Steroids.' No one got muscles like that legitimately.

Henry gave him a lopsided ‘Sure you will' grin. He was no fighter, but his strength was the ability to overpower people without the need to punch their lights out. But above all, he wasn't afraid. ‘Like I said, you're under arrest,' Henry told him again. He didn't bother mentioning the ‘easy way/hard way' option. Everything emanating from this guy screamed, ‘Hard way!'

So be it.

Henry wrapped the truncheon strap tightly around his hand as he worked out the best place to whack Kaminski with his rather pathetic light wood stick. At training school he had been taught to go for the upper arm or leg, but he was already thinking, from the bulges under Kaminski's clothing, this would be useless. It would be like hitting a side of beef. It was going to have to be a head shot, even though the guy's skull looked pretty dense, too.

But then Kaminski did the last thing that Henry expected.

He turned and legged it.

Still gasping and gulping for breath, Henry repeated the word.

‘Rape.'

‘Excuse me?' The bulky station sergeant blinked, took a carefully measured sip from his apparently endless steaming hot mug of tea, adjusted his pince-nez and his slightly bemused focus to examine the young, bedraggled constable standing on the opposite side of the charge-office desk. The PC was breathless, almost to the point of exhaustion. His uniform trousers were ripped, Doc Marten boots sodden, he had lost his clip-on tie somewhere down the line – but to his credit, was still tightly gripping the arm of the prisoner, his prize, who was equally out of breath and knackered.

To the sergeant, the tale that this little scenario told was obvious.

During the course of the arrest, the prisoner had done a runner at some juncture (‘juncture' being one of the sergeant's favourite words). The constable had given chase (‘Ah, the eagerness of youth,' the sergeant had thought patronizingly. He had not demeaned himself to run after anyone since the summer of 1962. So undignified, especially in uniform) and the foot pursuit had taken cop and fleeing felon through fields and puddles, maybe a farmyard, and had ended up in a messy rugby tackle and scrum.

‘Yes,' Henry reiterated. ‘I've arrested this man on suspicion of rape.' He drew breath.

The sergeant was correct. It had been a long chase on foot and at one point a nasty little very determined Jack Russell terrier had appeared from nowhere, snapping ferociously at Henry's heels, complicating matters even further when it sank its fangs into Henry's trouser bottom and hung on for dear life. It had taken a well-aimed, brutal kick to send the little beast squealing and cartwheeling over a low wall.

‘Rape,' the sergeant said, drawing out the word and lowering his jaw so his triple chins expanded like a toad.

‘Yes, sarge,' Henry said respectfully.

‘Mm.' The sergeant's lips rubbed together, but in opposite directions, like a loom. ‘OK,' he said at length, and turned to the prisoner. ‘Anything to say about that?'

‘Not guilty.' Kaminski shook himself free from Henry's grip and sneered contemptuously at him. He had stony eyes and a pinched, rodent-like face, his cheeks pock-marked and pitted. Henry glared back with equal contempt, not fazed by the hard man, but aware it had been an uphill battle to subdue him and if the double-crewed section van hadn't turned up when it did, he might have had to admit defeat and let the bastard go.

‘Circumstances?' The sergeant directed the word at Henry.

‘Attended the report of a sexual assault, took the report – and this man is the alleged offender. Ran off when I told him he was under arrest.'

The sergeant pushed his half-glasses back up his bulbous, booze-reddened nose. ‘You're sure about this?'

‘Yes, sarge,' Henry answered, puzzled, wondering why he wouldn't be.

The sergeant's lips now tightened into a disapproving knot, but he reached under the desk and came out with a blank charge sheet which he placed with a flourish on the desktop. He extracted a torpedo-shaped fountain pen from his shirt pocket, unscrewed the lid and dipped the nib into the already open bottle of Quink and refilled the pen using the lever on its side. All the while he kept a beady eye on the two people in front of him. He tapped the tip of the nib on the rim of the ink bottle and was now ready to write and record details.

‘Name,' he said to the prisoner, even though he already knew it.

‘Vladimir Kaminski.'

Once the name, address and date of birth were recorded, then the prisoner's property, the sergeant instructed Henry to take him down to the cells and put him in number one. He could have used any of the cells that morning because they were all empty. It was a quiet morning at this end of the valley.

‘This way,' Henry said. He placed a hand on Kaminski's huge right forearm to direct him to the cell corridor.

Kaminski spun fiercely. Henry reared back, expecting to be attacked as the prisoner bunched his immense fists. ‘Don' you fuckin' touch me again,' he growled.

Suddenly, behind Kaminski there was a blur of speed and power as the sergeant leaned over and smacked the prisoner across the ear with a grizzly bear-like, open-handed blow that sent him spinning across the tiled floor, up against the wall.

Henry knew what he had witnessed, knew he'd seen it, something he'd only ever heard whispered about before – but the stunning blow had been delivered so quickly and accurately and apparently effortlessly that it was almost impossible to actually say it had really happened, other than for the sound of the smack and the prisoner hitting the wall a moment later.

Sergeant Bill Ridgeson's legendary forehand smash.

Kaminski was bent over double, his hands clamped over his head like a protective helmet, glaring at the officers.

The sergeant hadn't moved from his position. Calmly he repositioned his glasses on the bridge of his nose, picked up his mug of tea and said, ‘I do not allow any form of aggression in my police station … except from me.' He took a slurp of tea, nodded at Henry. ‘Cell one, please.'

‘Yes, sarge.' He walked over to Kaminski. ‘Up,' he said, jerking his thumb.

Scowling through a pain-ravaged face, hand cupping a throbbing ear, his head ringing like a church bell in a vestry, he rose and this time allowed Henry to steer him down to the cells and into number one, which was clean and ready for its first occupant of the day. Henry told him to remove his trainers and leave them in the corridor before entering the cell.

Henry slammed shut the self-locking steel door. Kaminski shoved his head at right angles into the inspection hatch.

‘You make big mistake, cop,' he said, exaggerating his Eastern European accent for best effect.

‘Vot you mean,' Henry mimicked him, ‘Igor?'

‘She vill not make a statement. She vill not take me to court. She knows she vill be dead if she does.'

‘Now you shouldn't have said that. Threats to kill can put you away for ten years.' Henry crashed the up-sliding hatch into place and locked it.

‘Ve'll see,' Kaminski's muted voice cried.

Henry jerked a middle digit up at the peephole in the cell door behind which he could see Kaminski's eye and returned to the charge office where Sergeant Ridgeson was inserting the forms into the binder. He glanced at Henry, shook his head sadly and said, ‘Why have you arrested him?'

‘Rape. He raped his girlfriend. Beat her up, too.'

‘Sally Lee, you mean? Sally “Jugs” Lee?' Ridgeson scoffed.

‘Yes, that's her …' A sudden lurch of dread gripped Henry's guts in a clawed hand.

The sergeant's head continued to shake pityingly. He blew out. ‘You'll learn … I took the liberty of calling the DI, just to let him know.'

‘Why?'

‘His patch, laddie. He likes to keep abreast of all serious arrests. What are you going to do now?'

‘Get a statement from Miss Lee … police surgeon and all that, Scenes of Crime … Hopefully she should have landed at the front desk by now.'

‘You'll be lucky if she has,' the sergeant muttered. ‘Just don't let her jerk you around.'

At that moment a policewoman appeared at the charge office door. She looked at Henry. ‘A Miss Lee at the desk for you,' she announced. She kept her eyes on him.

‘Thanks … be there in a moment, Jo.'

The policewoman gave him a slightly quirky half-smile, lowered her eyes coyly and returned to the front office with just another almost imperceptible second glance at Henry, who didn't notice a thing. The sergeant did. He was one of this police station's fixtures and fittings, a font of all knowledge, professional and tittle-tattle, and he rarely missed a trick.

‘What do you mean, sarge?' Henry asked, referring to Ridgeson's last remark.

‘You'll come to realize,' he said patiently, leaning forwards, ‘that there's two sides to every coin and everything is not as it seems. I suspect that Miss Lee simply wants Vlad the Impaler out of her hair for a while. Probably wants some other bugger to shag her without poor Vlad finding out, then when the deed is done, she'll drop the charges, or you won't be able to find her to get her to court and next thing you know, it'll be all lovey-dovey … until next time. You'll look like an unwiped arse and the prosecutions department will not be happy with you.'

‘So you're saying we don't protect her?'

‘Don't waste your time on her … she howls wolf.'

‘But he's beaten her up as well as raped her.'

Ridgeson shrugged. ‘You'd be better off chasing the tail of that bonny police lass … you'd get a result there.'

‘Uh?'

‘Didn't you see the lustful, come-hither look she just gave you?'

‘No.'

‘Having said that, I hear you're courting.'

Henry grinned and reddened up. ‘Wouldn't say courting.'

‘Anyway …' The sergeant waved him away. ‘Get your statement if you must, but I'm telling you from experience …'

‘Waste of time?'

‘And money and resources … and by the way, before you appear in public again, get yourself sorted out. You look like you've been dragged through a hedge backwards.'

After a hasty swill, brush up and tie replacement, Henry walked to the front office of the police station. It was a fairly small room, consisting of a radio console, a telephone switchboard, a teleprinter machine tucked away behind a clear Perspex screen, a narrow public enquiry desk with the foyer beyond, and little else. Not much room to manoeuvre for such an important location – the communications hub for the whole of the Rossendale Valley. It was staffed by a civilian phone/radio operator and a station duty constable who was presently having his refreshment break – refs – in the first-floor dining room. His job was being covered by Jo, the policewoman, whose eyes widened, then narrowed momentarily, as Henry entered.