smelled of alcohol, sweat, cigarette smoke and cheap perfume — a heady mixture, no doubt. Behind her, the living room door opened and a male appeared, several years older than the girl. He was smoking and drinking from a beer can.
‘What’s going on, babe?’
‘This cop,’ she said, ‘yeah, wants to speak to an adult…’ She jerked her head in Henry’s direction.
Henry took a steadying breath. It was never — never — easy at this household. It consisted of numerous relatives claiming descent from Romany gypsies and therefore stealing and hatred of authority ran in their blood. It was their default position. However, the Costains went far beyond simple theft. They were like a mini-Mafia family that existed by theft, yes, but also burglary, drug dealing, intimidation and violence. The Costains had a very firm grip on the estate, controlling much of the drug trade and acting as fences for stolen property. Henry had a very chequered history with them.
‘The first thing I’ll do,’ Henry said, ‘is exercise my lawful right to enter this property and rip the plug out of your hi-fi system, because you are causing a breach of the peace. Next, I’ll arrest you both for obstructing me, and then I’ll look into under-age sex.’ Here he gave a meaningful look to the young man. ‘And then, maybe, I’ll do what I came to do — which doesn’t involve arrests or anything like that.’
‘Oh just piss off… I can’t be arsed with cops,’ the girl said, unimpressed by Henry’s threats. She put her weight behind the door, crushing Henry’s trapped foot.
He uttered a gasp of pain, pushed back hard, caught the girl, sending her staggering back down the hall, where she tripped over her own feet, lost her footing and thumped on to her backside in a very unladylike manner, revealing all.
The young man fronted Henry with aggression, but Henry gave him a withering, daring stare and a tiny shake of the head, and growled, ‘If you’re over twenty-four you have no defence to having sex with an under-age girl.’
The lad’s face dropped.
‘What the friggin’ ’ell’s going on down there?’ a huge, booming voice bellowed from the top of the stairs. A man large enough to carry the voice came down a few steps from the landing in a silk dressing gown, his black curly hair in disarray. He saw Henry. ‘You, you fucker.’
‘Good morning,’ Henry said, ‘I need to have words with you urgently, please.’
It was old man Billy Costain, the ruthless patriarch of the family, the ruler of the roost, the father of at least seven Costain children, including Rory.
The estate known as Shoreside was one of the most dispossessed, dangerous and crime ridden estates in the country. Many houses were boarded up, others frequently damaged by rampaging gangs. Residents tried desperately to be rehoused. Unemployment was about eighty-five per cent. Drugs were rife. Gang feuds were a constant. A row of shops within the estate was now a pile of rubbish. Cops, generally, patrolled in pairs.
Henry knew it was a very complex social scenario, a build-up of issues over many years and although he couldn’t actually blame the Costains for the downfall of society on Shoreside, it was families like them — feral, ruthless and without conscience — that played their part and thrived, whilst other, decent, law abiding ones suffered greatly.
And the master of all the Costain strategies and tactics was now sitting opposite Henry in one of the two living rooms in the interconnected home they owned. Billy Costain was head of the family, although describing him as an old man was not really accurate. He was about sixty-two, but still big and strong, a physical force to be reckoned with. He had a fearsome reputation as a pub brawler that age hadn’t diminished.
The family’s claim to be descended from gypsies could have had a grain of truth to it. Certainly they had the looks of stereotypical gypsies and no doubt there was some of those genes in their bloodline. In fact their main ancestors were Irish, having come across to the north of England in the nineteenth century to make a living as navvies, digging canals and laying railways.
Henry could not be sure when they came to Blackpool, but he knew they’d been here for at least thirty years and in that time had caused the police a mega headache from generation to generation.
What none of the family knew was that Billy’s oldest son, Troy, had been an informant for Henry for many years. Henry had used him mercilessly after he had once arrested him and found that he suffered from severe claustrophobia and could not bear being in a cell. It drove him completely mad, terrified him, and Henry used this knowledge and the threat of incarceration in order to get Troy to pass him information. Unfortunately, Henry had used Troy once too often and the lad had ended up being murdered by a top-line crim Henry was investigating — and the Costains were still seeking answers about how and why Troy had met his untimely end.
Henry glanced around the room. It was plush and well-fitted to the extreme, with a huge L-shaped sofa, a massive TV on the wall with surround sound, a state of the art hi-fi and many expensive looking pieces of garish pottery. He took in all the opulence, juxtaposed against the lack of employment and visible means of support.
‘You, pal,’ Costain said, jabbing a finger at Henry, ‘are the kiss of death to my family.’ His jowls wobbled. He looked at Keira O’Connell. ‘But you’re a bonny thing, lass. You a cop, too?’
‘Home Office Pathologist,’ she said.
Costain’s eyes darkened. He looked accusingly at Henry. ‘Fuck d’you want?’
Henry had been to the house on two occasions previously to deliver death messages, not including Troy’s. One had been for Troy’s brother, who had been murdered, and another time for a cousin who had been killed in a road accident in a car driven by another cousin who’d survived and gone on the run. Though Henry had nothing to do with these deaths, the family was quite happy to blame him.
And now, here he was, about to deliver another blow, and as much as Henry knew Rory was a wild, villainous boy — a chip off the old block — he felt extremely sorry for the family.
He and Billy were still standing, facing each other with hostility, on the living room carpet.
‘Mr Costain,’ he said softly, using calming hand gestures, ‘Like I said, I need to speak to you and what I have to say is very important.’
‘Do I need my brief?’
‘No.’ Henry shook his head, but avoided an impatient tut.
‘Please. Mr Costain,’ Keira O’Connell intercut with a soothing feminine voice, stepping between the men. ‘Please take a seat, and if we may, could we sit too?’
Costain eyed Henry, then nodded begrudgingly and edged back into a leather armchair, slightly pacified by her words.
O’Connell looked at the couple hovering in the hallway, keen to be part of this scenario. ‘We need a little privacy,’ she said and tried to close the living room door. The nightie-clad girl said, ‘Oi,’ to her, then, ‘Gramps?’ to Costain.
‘Bugger off,’ he told her, ‘both of you.’
O’Connell closed the door, the girl eyeing her malevolently as the gap closed, mouthing the word, ‘Bitch.’ O’Connell merely smiled and arched her eyebrows, then she sat next to Henry on the sofa.
‘This better be good,’ Costain said.
‘Mr Costain, I’ll just cut to the chase… the thing is, Professor O’Connell and myself have just come from the scene of a murder on the car park behind the chippy just off Preston New Road. You know where I mean?’
‘Yuh.’
‘A young lad has been shot…’
‘Oh, aye, and you think one o’ my lads had something to do with it, don’t you?’ Costain concluded instantly, his blue touchpaper being lit. He leaned forwards. ‘Well I can vouch for all of my family, you vindictive bastard.’
Henry simply stared at him, then said evenly, ‘Mr Costain, I’m pretty sure the victim is Rory, your youngest lad.’
The words stopped Costain in his tracks.
‘Say that again.’
‘I’m genuinely sorry, but I think the dead boy is Rory.’
From the hallway came a scream of anguish and suddenly Old Man Billy Costain seemed to age ten years.
