Fighting for the Dead (20 page)

The door edged open an inch. It was the FMIT secretary, a lady who had an office on the same floor. She looked apologetic.

‘Sorry, sir,' she said meekly. Henry bit his tongue and held back from telling her that he'd said no interruptions, which he had. ‘It's just that there's someone at HQ reception who wants to see you. I thought you'd want to know.'

Henry knew the secretary well enough to realize she would not have interrupted unless it was urgent. ‘Who?'

‘It's the daughter of Joe Speakman.'

He could have done without the intrusion. It seemed that just as he was in a position to get his thoughts back in line, something came along and barged him off track. It was very frustrating, mainly because he knew there was so much going on and he didn't want to forget anything, which was a distinct possibility based on the way his brain was spinning now and how tired he was. He knew he had some very important nuggets and to forget them would be catastrophic.

But the family of a victim could not be ignored.

Henry apologized to the men in front of him, bowing and scraping to the chief constable especially, who breathed out long and hard down his hairy nostrils and said, ‘Just give me a call when you're ready to go again.'

Five minutes later Henry led a very clearly distressed lady from reception into a meeting room just inside headquarters, and asked one of the receptionists to go and buy some tea and biscuits with the fiver he handed her.

The woman was red-eyed from crying.

Henry regarded her, wondering if he remembered her at all. He was usually excellent with faces and places – one of his few attributes as a detective – but it was usually where criminals were concerned, not people he might have met socially in the dim, distant past.

‘I know you,' she said.

‘I think I know you.'

‘You came to my twenty-first, just after we'd moved into the barn – you know, Mum and Dad's house in Halton.'

Henry racked his brain cells. That was it! He vaguely knew he'd been to Joe Speakman's house before, but he'd been finding it impossible to say where, when or why. It was for this woman's coming-of-age party, over ten years ago, and he realized why he didn't have a clear memory of it.

‘You're Melanie,' he said, ‘and I was drunk.'

She nodded. ‘And you're Henry Christie and you were drunk to start with, then got very drunk. You did that “Mule Train” thing with a metal tray.'

‘Oh God,' Henry said shortly. ‘Embarrassing.' In days gone by that had been his little party piece, smashing his head with a tray to represent the whip-crack in the cowboy song ‘Mule Train'.

‘And you tried to hit on me.'

Oh-oh
, he thought.

‘I'm really sorry.' Now he remembered going out with the CID from Lancaster and Morecambe for some reason. They'd been for a meal, drinking steadily, then ended up at Joe Speakman's, where they drank even more and . . . from that point Henry wasn't sure. He knew he'd woken up in a friend's front room with his head halfway underneath the sofa, staring at a frightened cat.

She shrugged. The memory went. The present cascaded back and she dropped her head into her hands, started weeping.

Henry let her. By the time she'd got over the bout, the tea had arrived, a cup was poured, a Nice biscuit propped on the saucer. Henry handed it to her.

‘What's happened?' she asked. ‘To Mum and Dad.'

‘Before I get into that, can I just ask how you heard?'

‘From my brother.'

‘Right, OK.' Henry's brow furrowed. She'd almost spat the word ‘brother'.

‘And then I saw the news, even though no names were mentioned.' Her voice faded.

Henry watched her. She was a nice-looking woman, early thirties now with nicely trimmed bobbed hair and a fine complexion. She wasn't wearing a wedding ring and Henry assumed she had travelled alone to get here.

‘You're the officer in charge, aren't you?'

‘I am, and I'm very sorry for your loss.'

‘Thank you,' she swallowed meekly. ‘Can . . . can you tell me what happened?'

Henry blew out his cheeks. Then he took her through his step-by-step guide to the scene of a double fatal shooting, plus dog. He told her enough to fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge, but not too much. Firstly for reasons of consideration. Relatives rarely appreciated gory details. Secondly because, as always, Henry liked to have the upper hand, just in case. Just in case this woman had something to do with the murders. Maybe she'd planned it. Or maybe not, but any half-decent detective kept something back. That said, unless she was a very fine actor, her horrified reactions to his story were very real indeed.

When he'd finished she stared numbly at him, her mouth open. Eventually she said, ‘Unbelievable.'

‘We think the person responsible might be involved with Russian gangsters . . . but we have a lot of things to look at before we are certain of that.'

‘Russian gangsters?' she said incredulously. Her face was screwed up tightly, but her eyes narrowed fractionally.

Henry picked up on it. ‘Do you know anything about that?'

‘Oh Christ, oh Christ,' she said rubbing her face intensely. ‘No, no not really.'

‘I think you do,' Henry said.

Her face then set, as though a decision had been made. Her lips went into a tight line and she breathed through her nose, which dilated.

‘C'mon, tell me,' he said.

‘Ugh,' she said. ‘Look, I haven't had much to do with Mum and Dad for a while now. Not through any fallout, just, y'know – I've been living in London, got a decent job and I don't have a lot of time for travelling up and down the country. So what I'm saying is that I haven't been in their lives much, but we do keep in touch-ish.'

‘When did you last speak to them?'

‘I spoke to Mum about three days ago.'

‘How was she?'

‘Uptight . . . fit to burst.'

‘About what?'

She snorted contemptuously. ‘Fucking Cyprus,' she said with vehemence. ‘I'm sorry, didn't mean to swear.'

‘That's OK – do it myself occasionally.' Henry poured her a refill of tea and gave her a little time to come down. ‘What about Cyprus?' he probed.

She tilted her head from side to side, marshalling her thoughts. ‘Mum and Dad have been going out there for years – holidays, y'know? In fact a few people who live in the village go out there a lot and have property there. My brother moved out there and actually set up in the property business. He encouraged Mum and Dad to buy a place and invest in some land. Dad bought a villa – quarter of a million, I think . . . but I also heard it was a good deal. I mean . . .
way
too good. Tom – my brother – introduced them to a well shady developer and I knew it just wasn't right. But Tom said it was and Dad always believed him.

‘Fancy investing in a property over two thousand miles from home and in a culture you don't understand, with people you don't know. Trouble at the best of times and I bloody warned them! Tom and I had horrible arguments about it . . . and then I started hearing things about . . . stuff . . .'

‘What stuff?'

‘It sounds so unreal and dramatic.' She sighed and gave a helpless shrug. ‘Russians . . . prostitutes . . .' She closed her eyes. ‘Trafficking . . . girls.' Her head was shaking. ‘But I truly don't know the details, honestly. I kept my head in the sand. I think they got into a situation they couldn't get out of . . .'

‘Or maybe they were trying to get out of?' Henry suggested.

‘Possibly.'

‘Does the name Malinowski mean anything to you?'

She looked as though she'd been hit by a truck. ‘He's the property dealer in Cyprus,' she whispered.

‘And did your parents know Harry Sunderland?'

Melanie Speakman's eyes suddenly burned. ‘He's the one who got my parents out to Cyprus in the first place. He's got property there, too. He had something to do with setting Tom up in business . . . I wouldn't trust the slimy bastard as far as I could chuck him!'

H
enry spent an hour talking to Melanie Speakman, after which she said she'd made arrangements to stay over at a friend's house in Bispham, near Blackpool, where Henry could contact her whilst he carried out his investigation.

She got a lot off her chest in that time and although deeply upset and grieving over her parents' deaths – and the dog, of course (who, Henry learned, wasn't Carlo. Carlo had died long ago and been replaced by Milo, same breed) – she seemed more in control when she left than when she'd arrived. Henry Christie the counsellor, acting as a catalyst.

‘I don't know if any of this is any use,' she admitted.

‘It's hard to say, but when we start digging I'm sure that if what you've told me is a factor, then it'll all become very obvious very quickly.'

To be honest, she hadn't told him much – just names and supposition and grim feelings. But that was the start of the route – information, conjecture, leading to intelligence, then to evidence.

‘Thanks.' Her eyes searched his. ‘I hope you don't mind me asking,' she said, ‘but when you came to my twenty-first, I was sure you were wearing a wedding ring. I know it's a long time ago and it's a bit of a girlie thing to remember . . . but . . .' She glanced down at his left hand.

From the shadow that instantly scudded across his face, she knew she had touched a nerve.

‘I'm sorry,' she said hastily. ‘Not my business, just being curious. Women, you know . . .'

Henry's expression softened. ‘It's OK,' he said with a half-laugh. ‘I was married.' Shit, he thought, why is this so hard to say, even to a stranger? ‘She passed away last year. Cancer.' He said the word in the same way Melanie had referred to her brother earlier.

‘I'm really sorry . . . but I'd like to say that if you hadn't been drunk and wearing a wedding ring, there would have been a good chance of scoring back then.'

‘Nice to know,' he chuckled, flushing a little. ‘I hope I wasn't too embarrassing.'

‘No, you were funny.' She inhaled deeply. ‘I'll be off to my friend's, then. Please keep in touch.'

‘I will.'

Henry showed her out of the building and watched her walk across the car park to a red Porsche Carrera in one of the bays. She got into it and drove away. He watched the car pass under the raised barrier at the exit, then turn onto the dual carriageway that ran past headquarters.

His mind churned with the new information as he went back inside, intending to take the tea pot and cups back to the kitchen.

He bumped straight away into Jerry Tope, who, he suspected, had been lurking and waiting to pounce.

‘Boss, can I have another quick word before we all get back together?'

Henry opened the door to the meeting room he'd been using and graciously wafted Tope in, then closed the door behind them both.

Tope's face was lined with worry. ‘I've, uh, been digging again . . . found some more stuff, unpleasant stuff.'

Henry managed to corral his helpers back into his office, with the exception of Steve Flynn, who had felt obliged to get back to Glasson Dock and open up the shop. He wasn't a cop any more and Henry was probably pushing it to have him aboard anyway.

Strangely, Henry was disappointed not to see him, a feeling that made him slightly uneasy. Was he getting to like the guy? Perhaps the life-threatening incidents they'd been involved with in the last couple of days had given Henry a fresh perspective on him.

Henry looked at his assembled crew, although it was not quite true to say that FB was really a crew member. He was just an interested party.

Then he revealed his flip-chart jottings and began to piece together what he knew for certain and what he surmised, and hoped he hadn't missed anything.

‘What's going on, Henry?'

‘Ralph, thanks for calling. Just been a bit delayed at headquarters, all crap stuff mainly,' Henry said. He was talking to DI Barlow, the Lancaster jack, on his mobile phone.

‘No probs . . . just need to know what's happening is all. You can't have had much sleep.'

‘None, actually.'

‘Er, there's couple of guys landed here,' Barlow said. ‘I'm not one hundred per cent sure as to why, but they say you told them to get their arses up here.'

‘Yeah . . . I'm trying to pull one or two people in to kick-start an investigation.'

‘So you're not doing as I suggested?' Barlow said frostily.

‘No . . . thanks for the advice, though.'

‘Well, so be it,' Barlow sighed, which really sounded to Henry like, ‘Be it on your own head, mate.' Barlow was in his office at Lancaster nick and a DI from Blackpool CID was sitting opposite him, lounging indolently in a chair, trying to look bored and pissed off. Barlow made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and jerked his hand up and down and pointed to the phone at his ear for the benefit of the DI.

The gesture meant
Henry Christie: wanker
.

The other DI nodded agreement.

‘Who else has arrived?' Henry asked innocently.

‘Some bloody PC from training school. Christ knows what his skills are!'

‘That'll be the firearms guy. I wanted him to have a look at the weapon that was used, you know, the machine-pistol. Get his take on it.'

‘Oh, right, whatever,' Barlow said rather crossly. ‘What's your plan, then?'

‘To be honest, Ralph, I haven't completely got my head around things . . . but I think my first port of call is Harry Sunderland.'

‘Eh? Why? What's he got to do with you being shot at?' Barlow blustered.

‘I know it's a bit lame, but I need to question him about his wife and the circumstances of her disappearance, just to find out how she really did end up in the river. I'm not completely convinced by his story.'