Seizure (4 page)

‘And all this happened when we were running a crime op in east Lancs, checking suspicious vehicles coming off the M66, to try and catch the bastards?'

The DI nodded. ‘Correct.' Henry tutted in frustration. ‘To be fair, though, it was a pretty high profile operation – Hi-viz jackets, marked cars and everything. Could be why they changed locations, we just displaced them.'

‘Maybe we need to be more subtle in future . . . however, just make sure the crime scene is covered as though we're dealing with a murder – remember, you don't get a second shot at it, so let's miss nothing. These bastards are a dangerous nuisance and need catching.'

‘Already doing that.'

Henry inhaled again. A rush of stress rose through him like a tidal wave, a sensation emanating from his heart. It had been a tough, crappy day and to get this on top of everything else was just short of giving him palpitations. He shook his tired head to rid his mind of a disturbing image, then the two detectives walked to A&E reception and waited impatiently behind a woman with a child which had a small plastic toy inserted up its nose. The harassed receptionist took details and directed her to the waiting area. Henry stepped up to the desk, flashed his warrant card and explained his mission, adding, ‘There's a uniformed officer with the patient, but we can't seem to contact him . . . probably has his Police Radio switched off.'

‘Still in surgery,' the receptionist said after consulting her computer screen.

‘Can you direct us to the appropriate theatre?'

She sighed impatiently. ‘Back through that door, end of corridor, left and left again . . . just off that corridor,' she snapped. Henry was going to ask if there was any news but decided against it. She looked under more pressure than he was. A full whingeing waiting room coupled with a scrolling LED display that declared a three-hour waiting time, and more patients already queuing up behind him, made him give her a quick nod of thanks and withdraw.

‘You OK, boss?' Rik Dean asked Henry, seeing him rub his eyes in exhaustion.

Henry curled his lip, Elvis style, and said nothing, just shook his head in a ‘Don't ask' gesture. The day had taken all the fight and energy out of him and all he wanted to do was go home, dive into a bottle of JD. He also knew that the whisky part of the wish wasn't even a close option. Caffeine was going to have to be his crook for the time being.

He grabbed Rik and propelled him towards a drinks machine from which Henry extracted a frothy, weak coffee that was billed as Americano, but was about as far away from that as the North Pole was from the South. He took a few sips of the burning hot liquid. Even though it was rubbish, it hit the spot quickly and fired him up a gear.

They found the PC who had been assigned to remain with the injured guard sitting outside the operating theatre, bouncing his helmet from one hand to the other like a basketball. Clearly bored. He rose sheepishly when the two senior officers appeared and slid his helmet under his arm.

Henry didn't know the lad – which was all he was, a lad – but Rik Dean did.

‘PC Berry, this is Detective Superintendent Christie from the Force Major Investigation Team,' Rik made the introduction.

Henry gave the young man a curt nod – he did not particularly like anyone today. ‘Any news?' He almost added the word ‘son' but managed to hold it on the tip of his tongue. Being called ‘son' had always irritated him when he'd been a young scamp of a bobby and he promised himself he would never subject anyone, ever, to that patronizing epithet.

‘Er, no sir. He's been in hours now and there's been a lot of doctors and nurses in and out, but none've spoken to me and I felt like I didn't want to . . . y'know? Ask.'

‘Yeah, OK,' Henry said. He should have added it was a copper's job to ask, but he couldn't be bothered to go there. ‘When did you last have a break?'

‘Dunno . . . since he went into surgery.'

‘Go get yourself something and be back in twenty minutes.'

‘Cheers, boss.' The PC did not need asking twice and zoomed off for some refreshment.

Henry paced the tiny waiting room outside the operating theatre, the doors to which had a red warning light above them, indicating surgery was being performed.

‘What's the relatives' situation?'

‘Wife contacted . . . I sent someone down to pick her up. Not landed yet. She lives in south Manchester.'

Henry stretched, cricking his neck, then sat down heavily on a plastic chair. His eyes rose up to Rik, a man he had known for plenty of years. Rik's brow creased. He detected something very clearly amiss with Henry.

Henry could still not quite believe it.

Earlier that day, at eight forty a.m. precisely, he had parked his new car, a top of the range Mondeo (having disposed of the rot-box Rover he had naively bought), on the car park near the tennis courts at Lancashire Constabulary Police Headquarters at Hutton, just to the south of Preston.

He could still not quite get his mind around getting out of the car, walking down the side of the converted student accommodation block in the grounds of the Police Training Centre, now the offices of the Force Major Investigation Team (FMIT), tapping in the entry code at the door – a privilege denied to him not very long ago – and trotting up the steps to the middle floor and walking down the tight corridor to
his
office.

The door had a new sign on it simply saying
Detective Superintendent Christie
– nothing more, but that was how he liked it. He unlocked the door with his own key, another privilege, entered and sat down behind his desk with an air of contentment.

His desk, his office, were provided for him as co-head of FMIT, a job he shared with two other detective superintendents.

It did not detract from his self-satisfaction, nor his cloud nine attitude, that his office had once been two separate student bedrooms that had been knocked into one several years before when the whole block had been commandeered for what was then the Senior Investigating Officer Team. It did not bother him that he vividly recalled using these bedrooms almost thirty years before on his probationer training courses; that he'd peed in the sinks (now removed, of course), been sick on the floor (now recarpeted), and had snuck a female colleague into his room and in his eagerness as a young stallion had, much to the young lady's disappointment, prematurely finished before he'd even reached home and had splattered the floor with what then felt like a bucket of man-juice. Lovely memories.

None of that bothered him because today he was a detective superintendent and this was
his
office. The stains of his past seemed only to add to its ambience.

He gave himself a little pinch just to prove he wasn't dreaming, allowed himself a couple more moments of self-indulgent reverie, then got down to the tasks of the day. These included progress checks on two domestic and easily solvable murders, a stranger rape that was dragging on far too long, and a couple of nasty armed robberies that had come his way even though they had been committed in east Lancashire. It was an area of the county he rarely covered. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

He logged on to his computer, plugged in and replenished his coffee machine, and swept up the phone on his desk before the second ring had been completed.

Hell, he was raring to go.

‘DCI . . . Sorry, Detective Superintendent Christie . . .' The words and rank hadn't yet sunk in and he still stumbled over introductions.

‘Henry, it's Kate . . .' Even in those brief words, he picked up the tone and knew something was very, very wrong. He braced himself.

‘What is it, love?' All the things it could possibly be swarmed through his brain.

‘Henry, it's your mum . . .'

He knew she was going to die. He blinked back a tear at the thought, sat back in the uncomfortable chair and felt his stamina drain out like water down a plug hole. He rubbed his eyes, which squelched with a noise that turned Kate's stomach. They were tired and gritty and he realized he needed to get them checked. His vision had deteriorated noticeably over the past twelve months. Somehow he had to find time to get to an optician. But it was one of those things he constantly deferred, maybe because it was a tip and a wink to his own ageing process.

Which brought him right back to his mother propped up in a bed in the cardiac unit at Blackpool Victoria. The warden of the sheltered housing in which she lived had found her face down in the bathroom and had called an ambulance. With a suspected heart attack, Henry's mother had been rushed to A&E, then up to the specialist ward – still alive, obviously, but very ill.

Now attached to a machine that ‘pinged' occasionally, she was sleeping open-mouthed, drugged up and, Henry was certain, very close to the end of her life.

On receiving the phone call from Kate, Henry had made some immediate calls to colleagues, asking them to cover for him. Then he'd hurried to the hospital, met Kate there and found his mum being treated in the cardiac unit, having been transferred from A&E.

He had heard her voice before actually seeing her. High pitched but croaky – and insistent: ‘I think I'd know if I'd had a heart attack, don't you?' She was clearly annoyed and upset. As Henry pulled back the cubicle curtain, she said to the doctor treating her, ‘I don't need a drip, thank you.' He was fiddling with a needle on the back of her left hand, trying to find a vein. She saw her son and breathed, ‘Henry,' in relief. ‘Would you mind telling this . . . this man of colour I'm here under false pretences?'

Henry stepped into the cubicle, a little embarrassed by his mother's ingrained racism. The doctor turned and Henry introduced himself, then looked sternly at the woman who had borne him. ‘Mum, you were found collapsed on the bathroom floor.'

She blinked her glassy grey eyes. ‘Was I?'

‘That's why they brought you here in an ambulance.'

‘An ambulance? I don't remember that.'

‘Just let him give you a drip, will you?' Henry said gently. He sat by the bed, taking her other hand. She squeezed it and looked at him, then smiled as if she was having everybody on. Then she presented the back of her hand to the doctor.

An hour later she was asleep. Henry was talking in hushed tones to the doctor.

‘She's actually very ill and she has had a major heart attack, believe it or not. If she hadn't been found . . .' The doctor let Henry finish that sentence.

‘OK, what's the plan?'

‘The next twenty-four hours will be critical . . . once we get beyond that we'll have to look closely at the care she'll need.'

The conversation lasted a few more minutes and didn't fill Henry with any great hope. He sat at the bedside and simply stared at his mother's ashen face, more thin and wrinkled than usual because her false teeth were smiling at him from a glass on the cabinet. He knew she was in trouble.

Kate's gentle touch made him look around. She handed him a cup of tea she'd cadged from a nurse and pulled a chair up beside him, resting a hand on his leg.

Henry pulled a face that could have been jokey or desperate, he wasn't sure which. Part of him felt hysterical, another part completely lost. Kate moved her warm hand from his leg and clasped it over the back of his hand, her shining, probing eyes showing deep concern for the man she had loved – on and off – for twenty-odd years. Henry raised his face and caught her expression, then out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother move and groan. When he looked properly, wondering if she had woken – she hadn't – she seemed to be nothing any more, just a ghost. Now he truly realized what the phrase ‘a shadow of your former self' could mean.

It hit him like a sucker punch.

He swallowed, but could not hold it back. He began to cry.

Kate hugged him tightly until the body-jerking sobbing had subsided. Then, faintly embarrassed by his less than macho display, he disengaged himself gently from Kate's embrace, stood up and crossed to a sink. He swilled his face with cold water and rubbed himself dry with rough paper towels.

‘Got a dribbly nose,' he said with a sniff and a rueful laugh. ‘Sorry about the blubbering.' He pouted with his bottom lip just in time to catch a wet drip from the end of his nose.

‘It's OK,' Kate said with a sad smile. ‘It's what I'm here for.'

They held each other for a few seconds, then Henry felt his mobile phone vibrate in his trouser pocket and eased himself free again with a muted apology. Rik Dean's name lit up the caller ID.

‘I told them not to call me,' he whined.

‘It's fine,' Kate assured him. ‘Answer it – it might keep your mind off things.'

He gave her a weak smile, stubbed his thumb on the disconnect call button. ‘I'll call him back from the corridor. Here's not the place.' He glanced guiltily at the wall notice clearly indicating that mobile phones were not allowed.

Once in the corridor he returned Rik Dean's call. The DI informed him about the supermarket raid and the fact that a guard had been shot and was now in hospital. A short while later he went back inside and whispered to Kate.

‘That's handy,' she said ironically.

‘Life's full of good surprises. I'll bob down and see Rik and see what's happening.' He turned to his mother and looked at her for a few seconds, composing himself with a jerky inward sigh. He touched the back of her bony, liver-spotted hand, then left the unit, striding towards A&E. On the way he met Rik Dean, who briefed him and handed over a rough draft of the crime report. Henry read it as he walked. A few minutes later they were outside the operating theatre, inside which was a critically injured security guard with a bullet in the face.

‘Ahh,' Rik Dean nodded sagely as Henry regaled him with succinct details of his torrid day hovering around the cardiac unit at Blackpool Vic. He didn't say, ‘That explains it,' although it did clarify Henry's demeanour and the reason why he was already on hand at the hospital, something that had initially puzzled Rik as he'd scurried behind Henry down the corridors.