Seizure (12 page)

‘Certainly not in its present format.'

‘Oh?'

Her eyes played over his face. Flynn eventually got it.

‘Oh,' he said again, but more like an ‘Ooh', ‘OK, who's supposed to say it first?'

‘You,' Gill said firmly.

‘Well, I, er . . .' he began. If he'd had a shirt collar to pull on, he would have been tearing it by now. ‘I kind of think I've fallen for you.' He gave a simple smile and shrugged.

‘That it?'

He looked at her in bewilderment. ‘Um, I love you?' he whispered.

‘Better.'

‘Maybe I should get a couple more beers.'

Rik Dean and Henry drew up outside Henry's at the same time. Henry would have pulled into his drive alongside Kate's Ford Focus, but a battered Mercedes coupé was in his parking spot. It was an old model, one Henry usually thought of as a tart's car. In this case the tart happened to be his sister, Lisa. He was unsure of her present surname. It depended on her mood as to which one she chose to use.

He climbed out of the Mondeo and went to Rik, still in his car. ‘I need to bob in and say hello to my sister.'

Rik perked up. ‘Your sister? Younger? Older? Married? Single?' Rik was a serial womanizer and his radar was always erect.

‘Younger, but older than you, single, fit – and out of bounds,' Henry responded. He wagged his forefinger at Rik. ‘And I mean it. She's a very vulnerable person at the best of times – in other words she's barking mad – and doesn't need a guy like you.'

‘Vulnerable is good,' Rik said.

‘Down, boy. I'll be back in a few minutes.' He headed up to the house.

As ever, Lisa looked stunning, and he had a hard time believing she was really his sister. At forty she was slim, attractive and as flighty as a bumblebee. She threw her arms around him dramatically and began weeping into his shoulder. He gazed over her head at Kate with an expression of terror in his eyes.

‘Henry, oh Henry, I can't believe she's so ill,' she said when she pulled away. Her meticulously applied make-up had run with her tears, smudging her eyes. ‘Will she live?' she snuffled.

‘She is eighty-eight, but let's hope so.' He eased her away to get a good look at her. Despite himself, her tearful appearance did have an effect on him, and with a surge of emotion he dragged her back to him and fought to quell his own tears. ‘Thanks for coming. She'll be overjoyed to see you.' A fact which stuck in his throat. As was so often the case, the wayward member of the family was the one most adored. Those who stayed and did their steadfast duty were usually merely tolerated. Henry knew for a fact that Lisa hadn't seen Mum for six years, and a little part of him hoped she wouldn't even recognize her daughter. It was a mean-spirited hope that he immediately shelved.

‘You're not coming to the hospital?' Lisa said accusingly.

‘I have to go to the other side of the county.'

They were in the hallway, just inside the front door, which was open. Contrary to Henry's orders, Rik had followed him up the drive and now stood on the front step, a few feet behind Henry.

Lisa spotted him and her eyes zoomed in. ‘Is that a detective too?'

Henry twisted around and frowned at Rik. ‘Yeah – not for much longer, though.'

Lisa edged past and strode, hand outstretched, to meet the DI. ‘I'm Lisa, Henry's sister.'

Henry caught Rik's eyes appraising her quickly and liking what he saw. He turned back to Kate, enraged.

‘Two rutting . . . somethings,' he muttered. ‘What's her present situation?'

Kate was unable to conceal a smirk. She had two brothers and they all got on well, a sane, well-adjusted family. ‘Not sure yet – manless, in debt probably, a mess left behind, I'd hazard.'

‘If she's here for any length of time, I'll lay odds he'll be up to the maker's name before the week's out. Fortunately, they'll just toss one another aside.' He rubbed his face and was aware this was not a good way to talk about his sibling. Outside, Rik and Lisa were inspecting the Mercedes, Rik hanging on her every word. Henry gave Kate a quick kiss and a hug. ‘Whatever happens, I'll pop in and see her later – Mum, that is.'

‘Do you have to go?'

‘If I didn't, I wouldn't.'

‘OK.'

He strode out, cocked his finger at Rik, then jerked his thumb at him to get back into the car. Lisa watched them drive away with a sad pout and a come-hither stance that had Rik transfixed, even though he was driving.

‘Eyes on the road,' Henry snapped. ‘Erection lowered.'

Flynn knew there was a saying that men talk to women so they can have sex with them, and women let men have sex with them so they can talk to them. That evening didn't quite follow the pattern, because both of them suddenly opened up to each other in a torrent, before and after the sex.

Flynn began hesitantly, finding that probably for the first time in his life there was someone he could confide in. Even so, he prefaced each major revelation with a warning and one of those statements that went, ‘I'll understand if you want to get up and leave after I've told you this and I won't blame you if you do.'

There was something about Gill he hadn't seen before, and he wanted to tell her everything in the vain hope that there could possibly be something solid between them. And that wasn't something he considered lightly. He hadn't opened up his heart to a woman for many years.

‘There's some bad stuff,' he said.

Gill regarded him over the rim of her wine glass. They had gravitated to a bar within one of the hotel complexes overlooking the harbour, found two chairs in an elevated position with a good view of everything going on around the resort. She saw a tough-looking man, bronzed by years of sea fishing, with hard muscles and secretive eyes. Up until the moment he had dived in to rescue that baby and put his life in jeopardy, she had seen him as nothing more than a great lay and an extra treat on her yearly blow-out. His incredible bravery and then his genuine modesty had captivated her whole being. Somehow, this ruthless career woman had had her heart melted by what could only be described as a rough diamond.

How the hell a relationship like this could work was another matter.

‘Somehow, I guessed,' she said. ‘You're not on the run or anything, are you?'

‘Nah, nothing like that. I came out here to lick my wounds. It was a place I'd come to for years and I was comfortable here. I wanted to keep my head down, get my life on an even keel and get a job on a boat. I managed all three.'

‘And to keep women at arm's length, metaphorically speaking?'

‘Very much so.'

‘And have you – maybe – come out of that phase?'

‘To put it in
Cosmopolitan
terms, do you mean am I ready for a relationship?' He didn't need to tweak his fingers to emphasize the last word. ‘I'd never actually thought about it until now, I suppose. Maybe the immigrants thing was the catalyst. Us two involved. A life and death thing.'

‘Incidents like that can draw people together.'

‘Quite often people who have no possible future together.'

‘People who are sucked in by the moment and don't realize they're going to make fools of themselves in a completely unworkable relationship.'

‘But then again,' he said, his eyes softening as he looked at her. He had known what a stunning woman she was, that she was high powered and ambitious – his complete antithesis . . . but when he'd seen her dealing with that child, the expressions on her face, he'd been breathless. ‘I know it's a corny line, but it's better to lose in love . . .' He felt stupid saying it, but Gill helped him finish it off. Both raised their glasses and said, ‘Than to never love at all.'

Then, both highly embarrassed, they burst into fits of giggles.

Rik hit the M6 within twelve minutes of leaving Blackpool, veered south, then cut on to the M61, then the M65, east across the county.

It was a pleasant enough evening. A bright orange sun was setting behind them and the sky ahead was cobalt blue, sliced across by stiletto-like clouds. Henry had always loved skies. When he'd been a kid he had been able to let his eyes mist over, defocus and imagine he was heading into another world, usually populated by knights and dragons. But that evening, as lovely as the sky was, he knew the world he was heading towards was grim and violent.

He emitted a low whistle then blew out his cheeks before his jaw clanged open. It was one of those moments of stomach-churning disbelief, causing him to wonder what the hell made him stupid enough to be a detective investigating murder.

‘Times like this,' he said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I wish I'd kept my shiny wide arse fitted firmly into a comfy chair in a comfy office at headquarters.' Even as he said it, he knew it wasn't true, because investigating murder was what he believed he'd been set on this earth to do. It was just that, occasionally, the enormity of the task, or the sheer brutality of a crime scene, slammed into him like a sledgehammer.

It had been the smell that first alerted the suspicions of a neighbour. A smell of rotting, decomposing flesh creeping out from a slightly open window. A smell that wafted on the breeze, just catching the neighbour's senses, making him raise his head while out in his back yard, sniff up and wonder. Did he smell it, or not? Until eventually the smell was always there. Putrid, clawing, nauseating.

That's when he'd been drawn to the house, flipped open the letter box when his persistent knocking had failed to get a response, looked inside and was overpowered by the whoosh of stink. And without ever having smelled something so awful before in his life, the neighbour knew instinctively he smelled death. It was one of those odours already implanted in the brain.

When Henry and Rik pulled up at the end of the pleasant terraced cul-de-sac in the area known as Strongstry on the Lancashire/Manchester border, the smell hit them too as they climbed out of the car.

‘Hell, I'd know that whiff anywhere,' Rik said.

Henry looked along the terrace. He knew the place, having attended occasional jobs there when he was a PC on the crime car in Rossendale in his early years on the force. It was a well-tended, picturesque row, formerly houses for workers in now non-existent mills, now inhabited by the younger end of the Manchester commuter fraternity. A BMW sports and an Audi coupé were among the tightly parked cars on the narrow street, once cobbled, now tarred. Flower baskets hung from many of the house fronts.

Residents milled about with cautious interest at the police activity. If Henry had taken a photo in black and white, other than the clothing and the cars, it could almost have been a pre-war scene.

But death had visited this street at one of the houses halfway down the left-hand side and each person was holding a handkerchief or cloth to their nose.

Two marked police vans prevented any vehicular access into the street. There were two plain police cars, a van inscribed ‘Scientific Support' and a muster of bobbies, more than necessary, drawn to the scene by the prospect of a gore-fest. Cops are cops: they need to see things like this.

Henry spotted a Jaguar XK9 parked a short distance away and recognized it as belonging to the Home Office pathologist.

The two newest arrivals on the scene went to the Scientific Support vehicle, where they were kitted out in the requisite crime scene gear – baggy paper suits, slip-over shoes, a mask – and booked on to the scene by a uniformed PC who recorded all comings and goings.

As they got nearer the front door, the stench strengthened, sweet and sickly at the same time.

Rik fitted his mask. Henry tutted, stretched his own over his head and let it swing around his neck.

They ducked under the crime scene tape stretched outside the house and approached the front door where they were met by the local DI, a sound, grizzled jack near to the end of his service, someone who'd seen many things over twenty-nine years. He looked shaken.

‘Bad 'un,' he said. ‘Tortured.'

Henry and Rik eyed each other. If Bill Hendry said it was bad, then . . . Henry decided to fit his face mask. And a few moments later he was having that moment of doubt about the wisdom of being a murder investigator.

Body one, white male, late twenties, naked, was in the lounge strapped to a dining chair by plastic ties. The chair seat had been cut out so his backside and genitals hung below the level of the chair, as though he was sitting on a toilet. The ties tightly fastened the wrists, forearms and ankles to the arms and legs of the chair, digging deeply into his skin, effectively securing him to the chair as though he had been superglued to it.

The reek appalled Henry, his hand instinctively covering his nose and mouth even though he wore the mask. Even so, he was fascinated by what he saw, even the deep black pool of viscous body fluid that had formed underneath the chair, drip by drip, from the guy's anus as his insides had rotted away. Henry could see the puddle was alive with a squirming mass of insect life.

He stepped into the room, cautiously using the preordained pathway around the edge which everyone entering or leaving was obliged to follow.

The dead man's head was tilted backwards acutely, his mouth agape, the angle suggesting a broken neck. It was more than a suggestion, Henry thought.

The man had been savagely beaten, that was obvious. He'd also been burned and the triangular imprints on his chest, stomach and legs from a steam iron confirmed this.

Drip. A blob of something plopped from underneath the man on to the carpet.

There was also a noose of some sort of cord around the dead man's neck.

Henry leaned in close, still trying to keep his distance from the body, but needing to see. The cord was actually the stuff found in builder's yards, where it was used to keep bricks together: a thin, metallic strip. Henry knew it well. Early in his service he had carried a length of the stuff inside his peaked cap. It came in handy for breaking into cars; it could be slipped down inside between the window and door and used to click up the locking mechanism, though it wasn't so useful on modern cars. It was handy, flexible and very strong stuff.