Seizure (24 page)

‘I've been trying.'

‘Try harder.'

‘OK . . . but I've come across a couple of things you may want a face-to-face about. One is about Flynn, the other about that delicate matter you asked me to look into.'

‘Is it bad?'

‘Could be.'

Henry floored it back across the county to HQ. It took about forty minutes, then he almost dragged Jerry to the canteen where he plied him with victuals and made him divulge what he'd discovered.

THIRTEEN

A
s it turned out, Henry didn't have time to deal with either of the issues Jerry Tope had unearthed for him. As he walked back across the sports pitches from HQ to FMIT, his mobile phone rang. He fished it out and answered with a gruff ‘Hello.'

‘That Henry Christie?'

‘Yeah, who's that?'

‘You dealin' with Felix Deakin?'

‘Who is this?' Henry insisted.

‘You need to go and visit Richard Last's missus – now, in person. She won't talk to anyone else.' Behind the voice, Henry heard a metallic clang and echoing voices. ‘But she'll talk to you, 'cos I told her to.'

‘Who is this, please?'

‘Just do it. I can't talk to you. I've already had a whackin' just 'cos I got a brother – who's now dead. Go see her. You need to.' There was another metallic clang and a shout behind the voice. Then the line went dead.

When he'd answered the phone he hadn't bothered looking at the caller ID. On checking, surprise, surprise, he saw the number was withheld. He hurried the last fifty metres to FMIT and went to his office on the middle floor, sighing in agitation at everything. He phoned the murder incident room he'd left ninety minutes earlier at Rawtenstall nick and got through to the office manager, a DS Henry knew well.

‘Bernie, Henry Christie – I need the name and address of Richard Last's wife.'

‘OK, hang fire.' Henry heard tapping at a computer keyboard. ‘Sharon Dawn Last, née Roche.' He read out the address. It was in Rochdale, but wasn't the one Henry had raided in his initial arrest of Last. ‘Why do you need to know, if you don't mind me asking? She has been spoken to, and a statement taken.'

‘Can you put the statement up on the screen?'

‘Yep, already done that.'

‘Anything of interest?'

‘Mmm, not much really. They were actually separated, but still saw a lot of each other . . . in fact she had a kid by him a few years back. Not much to tell, though.'

‘Is anyone free up there?'

‘Everybody's out, I'm afraid.'

‘Bernie, make out an action sheet for me, to revisit her today. I've just had a call from an unidentified male, must have got my number from the media circulation, asking me to go and see her. I'm pretty sure it was Richard Last's brother, Jamie, who's in prison at the moment. Is there a phone number for her?'

Henry took down a landline and a mobile, frustrated. He didn't really want to traipse back across the county, but he shifted himself into action.

Always one to move several paces behind technological advances, Henry had only recently had a SatNav fitted to his new car. Although he knew Rochdale reasonably well, he used the device to take him on the last stages of his route through the streets of what had become a pretty mean town on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. He drove there via the M61, M60 and M62. Not a long journey, but a depressing one with little to recommend it. It did nothing to revive his mood, which was as bleak and edgy as the moorland he crossed.

He followed the directions, spoken in a tone he soon found annoying, and found himself driving across the town and towards Whitworth, which was actually in Lancashire. Sharon's address though was just in Rochdale – a tiny terraced house off the main road out of town.

He parked at the end of the street and called Sharon Dawn Last's mobile number.

‘Shazzer here,' came the accented voice.

‘Sharon, I'm Detective Superintendent Christie from Lancashire Police . . . I believe you want to talk to me. Are you in at home?'

‘In at home?' Her voice rose immediately. ‘In at fuckin' home? You must be jokin', pal. Have you seen the friggin' state of the place?'

‘No,' Henry said, getting a mental image of the sort of woman he was dealing with. He could even hear her chewing gum as she spoke. ‘So where are you? Can I come and see you?'

‘How do I know you are who you say you are?'

‘Look, I've just had a call from Dick's brother,' Henry said impatiently. ‘From prison, saying you wanted to see me.'

‘I'm in hiding – at my sister's house in Whit'orth,' she said, pronouncing the name in the local manner.

‘In hiding from who?'

‘Felix Deakin and his crew.'

‘And you've run to your sister's house?' Henry tried to conceal the sarcasm in his voice.

‘Couldn't think where else.'

‘Have you spoken to the police about this?'

‘Beg pardon, but you're a shower of shit. No offence, like.'

‘None taken. Give me the address.'

Henry implanted it in his memory, then inputted it into the SatNav. He then drove slowly down the terraced street he'd parked on, stopping outside Sharon's address. The front door and all the windows had been boarded up and the scorch and soot marks on the stonework surrounding them told the story. The place had been gutted by fire.

Henry was immediately on to the murder incident room at Rawtenstall asking if anyone knew about this. The answer was no, so he requested them to get details of what had happened, if possible, from the police at Rochdale.

On the way up through Whitworth, Henry had to avoid several ponies in the road, a hazard everyone living in that area knew well. The main road sliced through a large area of common land on which animal owners through the centuries had exercised their ancient grazing rights; sheep, cattle and horses were allowed to roam freely on land that, lawfully, could not be fenced. He drove on to a small private estate and parked outside the address Sharon had given him, a semi-detached dormer bungalow that had seen better days. There was a fridge on the front lawn, a wire contraption of some sort that Henry could not identify and an old Ford Fiesta on three wheels and a stack of bricks. A wheel brace and various other tools littered the drive.

There was a front door, but it was the side door that opened before he had chance to knock. A young woman peered out.

‘Sharon?'

‘You Mr Christie? ID please.' She jiggled her fingers.

Henry approached her and extracted his warrant card. She gave it a brief glance, then said ‘Come in.'

The door led into the kitchen, every surface of which was stacked with clutter. Clothing, broken electrical goods, a carburettor, a hamster cage with no sign of life in it; broken crockery, cutlery. The sink was a precarious mountain of dirty washing up. Newspapers were stacked high on the floor and Henry had to step over a long, green tarpaulin, which could have been wrapped around a tent or a dead body. He hoped it was the former. It was difficult to tell because a blanket of cigarette smoke polluted the atmosphere. He followed Sharon through to the living room.

She was dressed in a tracksuit and the loosely fitting bottoms had slid down to expose an expanse of skin at the base of her spine. Henry saw a thong and a strange, oriental sort of pattern tattooed across the space, which on closer focus was revealed to be the words
Love Fucking
.

The living room was desperately untidy, with the added nicety of a kiddie's potty on the floor, containing liquid and solid deposits from a child who didn't appear to be present in the house.

Henry had been in much worse.

Sharon sat in an armchair and pointed to the settee for Henry. He shifted away a pile of washing and found room while Sharon produced a ciggie and lit up. Henry caught sight of the tattoos around her neck as she tilted her chin upward and exhaled smoke through pursed lips.

‘I'm sorry about Dick,' Henry said.

Sharon squinted at him. ‘You and me both, but you mess with the big boys, you get fucked, doncha?' Her voice was matter of fact and she wafted the subject away with her hand.

‘Still, doesn't make it right,' Henry said, raising his eyebrows. ‘What happened to your house in Rochdale?'

‘I got a visit from the taxman,' she said. ‘Don't know the guy, but he was after dosh that Dick owed.'

‘To whom?'

‘He didn't actually specify – but I knew it was Deakin.'

‘How did you know that?' Henry asked, astounded by his piercing questioning skills. All those training courses had come in useful after all, all those grab-a-granny nights in town with the rest of the detectives in his classes.

‘I have ears, I see things, too.'

‘What exactly did you see and hear?'

‘Dick and Jack were last employed' – and while her cigarette hung at the corner of her mouth, she tweaked her fingers to indicate ironic speech marks around the word ‘employed'. Henry saw her nails were chewed to the quick and the first two fingers of her right hand were stained nicotine-brown, something Henry didn't see too much of these days. He almost had to pinch himself at being in the presence of an almost perfectly stereotyped council house tenant, even if neither this house, nor her own, was council owned. She continued – ‘by Felix Deakin. Some of his guys did the legwork for the jobs and stupid Dick and Jack did 'em, bringing their own muscle in to help out. They got a cut, Deakin got most of it, thick twats, but it's what they did. The last one went to rat-shit, though.'

‘The one with the security guard?'

‘Aye, poor sod.' She took a deep drag of the cigarette and blew out a grey cloud.

‘So how did it work?' Henry asked, amazed anyone could be dim enough to carry out robberies on someone else's behalf. By the same token he knew that was how much of the organized criminal world ticked over. Those with power and influence used those without. Maybe that was just the way the whole world operated, he thought cynically – and was reminded of the famous nugget of wisdom from the movie
Forrest Gump
: ‘Stupid is as stupid does.'

‘Like I said, Dick and his crew took a cut and the rest went to Deakin.'

Henry's eyes narrowed. He had an awful lot of questions to ask all of a sudden and needed to get a long statement from her, but this wasn't the place to be doing that. He had to get the lovely Shazzer down to the nearest cop shop pronto, but without frightening her off. He shuffled ideas around in his mind.

One of the questions he knew he needed to ask was, why did she suddenly feel the need to blab? But because the interview had gone the way it had, it was something he would leave till later. He didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth by spoiling things. They would come to it in good time, he guessed. For the time being he would go with the flow and let her speak.

‘I assume they fell out,' Henry prompted.

‘Proper little Poirot, you,' she chided him with a smile, pronouncing the name of the famous Belgian detective as ‘Pwarrott', revealing an array of stained teeth that matched the colour of her fingers. ‘Yeah, it were all over that last job. I don't know the ins and outs, but yeah, as ever, the dimbos fell out about money.'

‘And yet Deakin's in the slammer. Someone must be acting for him.'

Sharon snuffled a snort. ‘Every crim's favourite brief . . .'

And the connection finally slotted into place like the dovetail joint Henry had made for his woodwork O-level. ‘Barry Baron?' he asked cautiously.

‘The one and only.'

It was Henry's moment of epiphany, the coming together of all his subconscious ideas. His ring piece twitched almost uncontrollably. Had he been Poirot he would have twiddled his moustache. In Henry's case, his arsehole simply tightened like a drawstring being pulled on a pump bag.

‘Cunt's on a retainer,' Sharon revealed. ‘Does a shit-load of work for Deakin and goes around scaring the living shite out of people, creepy, nasty bastard. And if he doesn't get what he wants, he gets the heavies in.'

‘He wasn't the one who visited you, though?'

‘Nah, some numpty gofer with a brain like a brick, came asking me where Dick'd stashed the money from the robbery. I told him to eff off, I didn't know owt, didn't know anything about where the money was . . .' At this point she looked Henry squarely in the eye as if daring him to challenge her on this. Then she adjusted her large saggy boobs in her brassiere.

Henry was fascinated, could hardly contain his interest. ‘So Deakin, through Baron, kept his business interests ticking over when he was in prison?'

‘Sort of, I suppose. I don't know
everything.
'

‘But what I know about Deakin doesn't necessarily fit in with armed robbery,' Henry said, puzzled. He even scratched his head like a confused silent-movie comedian. ‘He's a big-time drug dealer, not a blagger.'

‘I just know he was short of dosh, needed some, and set up the robberies that Dick and Jack pulled for him.' Her face dropped sadly. ‘Fools.'

‘And then they fell out about money? About what, percentages?'

‘Hey, I don't know exactly . . . me and Dick weren't living together any more, so I didn't know everything he was up to. We were still mates, though, and we used to meet up for, y'know – rumpy-pumpy. He is the father of my kid, too . . . at least he thought he was.' She shrugged. ‘No point telling him any different if he kept paying up, was there?'

‘Suppose not,' Henry agreed. ‘What I don't get is why Deakin organized three armed robberies from his prison cell, one of which went wrong when a security guard got shot . . . You don't happen to know who pulled the trigger, do you?'

Sharon reddened and shook her head. ‘I just know that Dick came back from it in a bad way, that's all. Take from that what you want. He didn't give details, but he was as jumpy as fuck.'