Judgement Call (7 page)

‘Even if it means almost catching a violent gang?'

‘Even if it means that … but, well done. It could have come out a lot worse, but you're still here to tell the tale. Not many of us have that sort of experience.'

‘Not sure I want it again.'

‘Sometimes it comes with the territory.'

Henry picked up his mug and sipped his tea, now going cold and unpalatable.

‘Fancy a job?' Fanshaw-Bayley asked. ‘Bit of a jolly?'

‘Suppose so. What job?' he asked with caution at the sudden change of subject.

‘Wait here … I'll get back to you.' He pushed himself up, but then leaned over Henry, who could smell garlic on his breath and see a crumb in his moustache. ‘Do you know people call me “FB” for short?'

‘I didn't – but it makes sense.'

‘Fanshaw-Bayley being a bit of a mouthful?'

‘Uh, yeah, suppose.'

‘Wrong. Think about it.' He stood upright. ‘Hang on here.'

Henry went to find another teabag – he had discovered somebody's secret stash at the back of a cupboard in the tiny galley kitchen – and made himself another mug, using someone else's milk also. Then he went to settle himself down on a settee in the lounge area where his intention was to savour his drink in silence, then get back out on the streets. He knew that the DI – ‘FB' – had mustered a few cops and was getting them to do a house-to-house in Crawshawbooth, whilst Henry wanted to get down to the industrial area at the bottom of Holme Lane and do some of his own enquiries around there to see if anyone saw the Rover being parked there before the robbery, and then if anyone saw the actual getaway car, the Vauxhall Ventora, being dumped and torched there, and the transfer of the offenders from car to car.

Whatever plans FB had for him, Henry was determined to get as involved as possible in the hunt for this very bad set of villains (‘villains' was a word he loved) because he knew that if they weren't stopped – and soon – someone was going to get in their way and get blown away. They had fired a handgun at the robbery scene, then fired a shotgun at a police officer, even though Henry realized they were really warning shots and he had been lucky that they were feeling lenient today. These guys were well down the violent-crime continuum and in the near future some poor sod, maybe a cop, would get his or her head blown off.

A fresh shimmer of dread ran through Henry's body as he re-lived the shotgun moment, his mind's eye visualizing the gun pressed against the window next to his head. It would only have taken a nervous jerk of the masked man's finger and Henry would have had no head to speak of.

He placed his mug of tea down, stood up and on very dithery legs he left the lounge, walked along the corridor and turned into the gents' toilet. He entered the single cubicle and locked the door.

Then he knelt down in front of the toilet bowl, hung his head over it and convulsed from his guts upwards.

Afterwards he washed his very pale face and returned to the lounge to continue drinking his tea.

When he next glanced up, WPC Jo Wade, the new-ish policewoman who had been working comms and the front desk earlier, came in, beaming, holding up a sheet of paper that had been ripped from the teleprinter.

Henry managed a sad half-smile in return.

She sat alongside him on the settee and declared, ‘You and me are going to spend the night together.'

H
enry James Christie had been born and bred in East Lancashire and lived with his parents there until his very early teens before moving across to the Lancashire coast – Blackpool – for his father's job. He was still living there when he joined the police at nineteen.

In the 1970s the organization still had a much skewed, authoritarian view on how it treated its employees and had an unwritten policy that all new recruits should be posted as far away from their homes as possible. This could not be applied to every rookie cop, but where possible it was.

Therefore Henry's first posting was to Blackburn, thirty miles away. It made no sense, but it was a time when decisions made in the higher echelons of the force were never questioned or criticized.

It was believed it was the best thing for new officers to work in a completely strange and unfamiliar environment because there was less chance of them fraternizing or being abused by people they knew, nor could they ever be influenced by their own local knowledge.

It was completely ludicrous, of course, but it was a policy that was ruthlessly applied for many years.

So Henry – who considered himself a ‘sandgrown 'un', as the denizens of Blackpool are known – found himself transported from the bright lights of the world's busiest holiday resort to dark satanic mill-land where, much to his surprise, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in the busiest town in Lancashire. What he didn't expect was to be then posted even further afield to Rossendale, which to him was then an unfamiliar area of green valleys, harsh moorland, derelict mills and unused railway lines and a population, half of which it was rumoured had never set foot outside the valley.

Whereas Henry had never set foot in it.

He still vividly recalled the morning he was told he was being posted to Rawtenstall. It was during his refs break on an early shift in Blackburn and his patrol sergeant came to sit next to him as he wolfed his full English breakfast in the station canteen. He could tell the sergeant was uncomfortable as he imparted the information that due to ‘operational reasons' Henry was to be transferred with immediate effect.

‘Rawtenstall?' he blurted. ‘Where's that? And why … I've only just got here, really.'

The sergeant shrugged. Back then, young, single cops were fair game for transfers, and Henry fitted that bill. Rawtenstall was desperately short of staff for various reasons and he was just the officer to plug that gap.

After his breakfast – which stuck in his gullet – he went to find a map of the county to find out exactly where he was going, his head still in a mush from the news. Sitting in the comms room at Blackburn nick, he unfolded a map and stared unbelievingly at it until he pinpointed Rawtenstall and try as he might, he couldn't even begin to work out a route to the place, which seemed isolated, wild and a little scary. There didn't seem to be any main roads to it, although he was sure there would be.

He emerged pale-faced from comms, shell-shocked at his fate: to be cast into the wilderness where, he had been told, men were men and sheep were very cautious. And not only that, it was rumoured that because the sides of the valleys in that part of the world were so steep, the sheep had shorter legs on one side of their body than the other, just so they could balance on the gradients. They could not, however, turn to face the opposite direction or they would topple over.

Despite what the sergeant said about ‘immediate effect', he had just over a month to get used to the idea, during which time he drove to Rawtenstall a few times so he could get the location fixed in his head.

In that time he also had to find new lodgings – or ‘digs' – as it would be impractical to travel every day from Blackburn, especially in winter when the journey could be treacherous – plus Henry didn't like having to travel too far to work. He was given a few addresses to check out and settled on a landlady who lived in a terraced house in Rawtenstall. She reminded Henry of the brassy landlady in the film
Get Carter
who took in and then screwed the Michael Caine character. Henry harboured hopes of the same thing happening to him, being taken in by an older, experienced woman, but it never materialized. Their relationship was purely professional and just a bit chilly. He lived in a single bedroom, bathroom down the hall, breakfast and tea provided with access to the living room to watch TV. There were strict rules on hours and visits by members of the opposite sex, which Henry broke regularly.

He didn't last long there, mainly because the landlady caught him in bed one afternoon, trying to have sex as silently as possible with a policewoman he had sneaked in. He was given a month's notice.

This suited Henry because he ended up living in a rented terraced house with another bobby and his life became much more bearable and liberated, but very unstructured, with the exception of work.

Also, the shock of being posted somewhere he had never heard of soon wore off.

He was ultimately determined to leave the valley for busier police pastures but he did realize the potential of the place as a learning environment, because unlike Blackburn, where backup was never far away, in the valley an officer usually operated alone. It was here he learned how to be a cop, learned to apply law and procedure, learned how to deal with and talk to the public and started to develop his skills as a detective, his ultimate goal.

This was how he had managed to wangle a secondment as a CID aide to Blackburn, but had fallen foul of a DI who kicked him back to Rossendale, an incident that frustrated the hell out of him as he thought it might be a nail in the coffin of his career as a detective.

One thing he knew for certain was that he was starting from scratch and that he would have to remember to keep his mouth shut a bit more, not just declare UDI and do whatever he wanted.

FB was the ruler of the roost in Rossendale and Henry was bright enough to realize that getting him on his side was a good move, even if he already disliked and mistrusted him.

Henry knew that his own biggest problem was seeing things in black and white, right and wrong, and he was only really just becoming familiar with those murky shades between those ends of the continuum.

Not that that made it any easier for him to accept that Vladimir Kaminski was walking the streets when he should really be banged up facing a rape charge.

But Henry had to keep FB sweet – at least until he could fathom how to drag Kaminski back in and nail the bastard to the wall … judicially speaking.

In the meantime, he would just have to go with the flow and hope that nothing worse happened to Sally Lee. He also wanted to be involved in the hunt for the armed robbers who had scared him shitless – and that also meant keeping on FB's good side.

But he also knew he was constricted by doing his ‘day job'. He had a specific area to police and whilst he had a lot of freedom in how he did it, he couldn't just go wandering off into Greater Manchester to make his own enquiries just because he felt like it.

Had he been a detective, things would have been different. They had much more freedom to follow things through, something else that appealed to him.

But he wasn't – yet.

One day, maybe. … So in the meantime he had to play the game by brown-nosing, being buoyant and positive about the dregs that FB might toss to him like a dog waiting for table scraps.

Such as this latest offering … which was why he was rushing from the police station to his rented house to grab a change of clothes and reflect on WPC Wade's suggestive remark about spending the night together.

The words had taken Henry aback. He had looked stupidly at her.

‘What do you mean?'

She grinned teasingly, then raised her finely plucked eyebrows and said, ‘On business.'

She waved the sheet of paper at him. Henry saw it was actually a message sheet ripped from the teleprinter. He made a grab for it, but she snatched it playfully away. ‘Say please.'

‘Please.' He held out his hand. He didn't feel like playing games. His day, so far, had not gone well and he was feeling extremely grumpy.

She obviously considered toying with him but responded to the look in his eyes and gave him the message.

He took it and read. It was from the Kent police in Dover who had apprehended a young man about to board the Calais ferry, a lad who had been circulated as wanted for burglary in Rawtenstall.

‘Jack Bowman,' Henry muttered. He knew of Bowman, one of the valley's most prolific burglars, who had been on the run for about a month.

‘Mr Fanshaw-Bayley wants me and you to go down and pick him up. He's in custody, Dover nick,' Jo said energetically. ‘Isn't it exciting?'

‘Does he now?' Henry muttered, realizing that this prisoner escort trip must be the ‘jolly' FB had referred to. Henry tried to stop his mouth from curling crookedly into a pissed-off snarl. He pretended to read the message again, but in reality he was trying to work out the logistics. The best part of a three hundred mile run down, three hundred back, probably six hours each way at best; it was mid-afternoon now so the journey would necessitate an overnight stay, probably in some shoddy bed-and-breakfast hellhole. On top of that he had a date tonight with his young lady friend, Kate. It was a newish relationship verging on serious and he didn't want to miss that. The prospect of a tedious journey from one end of the country to the other did not appeal in the slightest, even with Jo, who was evidently up for it.

‘We could get down there, go out on the town,' she enthused. ‘Pint or two, curry.'

‘Have you ever been to Dover?' Henry asked grimly. ‘It's not exactly Singapore.'

‘No … anyway,' she burbled on, ‘we need a change of clothes, and there's a car for us at group garage in Accrington. I've sorted it. And I've got some money from petty cash.'

‘You've thought this through.'

Her eyes focused on his. ‘Oh yeah,' she said huskily. Henry was convinced her pupils dilated with a rush of blood and despite himself, and the thought of the planned evening with his girlfriend, he too felt an inner rush that left his mouth dry. ‘It's all arranged. I've even sorted the accommodation … separate rooms, obviously.'

‘I need to speak to the DI.'

He stood up quickly and shot down the corridor to FB's office, the door which, as always, was closed. FB was not one of those bosses with an open-door policy. Henry rapped on it, then waited for the requisite countdown before FB called him in.

‘You again?'