fuckin’ hate you, Henry. You’ve done nothing but screw me over since we met.’
Henry took a step back at that point. He did what he should have done in the first place and let Rik Dean appoint two detective constables to interview Mark. He briefed them on what he knew so far, then let them loose on Mark, who had become unresponsive — to him, anyway. He knew their shared history would be a bar to any meaningful interview, so Henry did what any good superintendent was skilled at doing: delegated the job.
This gave him time to ensure the investigation as a whole was moving forwards. If he’d been tied up in interview he could easily have lost the bigger picture and then would have been criticized from on high.
It was all looking good. There was a semi-suspect in the traps, other jacks were out following leads, the scientific people were on top of things, doors were being knocked on, the MIR was almost up and running. Henry was reasonably confident with progress. Now he just had to find out what Mark Carter had to say.
That was when his mobile phone rang. He answered it absently as he skimmed through the first few pages of the murder book.
For a moment, there was silence, then came the hesitant voice.
‘I… I was wondering about that coffee… really, I’m not being pushy… it’s just, I’m in town for the day.’ The voice rushed on a little now. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ Henry said, reshuffling everything in his mind, trying to work out if he had time.
‘I know you said you were busy and you’d phone me this afternoon
… and I know all the other personal stuff must be hell…’
‘I’m really glad you called, Alison,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if I would’ve had the nerve to call back to be honest… so, where are you right now?’ She said the name of a town centre street. Henry said, ‘You’ll find a Starbucks on that street, yeah?’
‘Yes, I can see it.’
‘Go in, grab a table and give me ten minutes to get there.’
His thumb was dithering so much he could hardly press it down on to the end-call button. He took a few breaths to ward off hyperventilation, then gave Rik Dean a quick call as he trotted through the police station. It went to voicemail and Henry left a message to say he’d be otherwise engaged for an hour.
For some miles, the car in which Karl Donaldson, Martin Beckham and Robert Fanshaw-Bayley were sitting — a powerful Jaguar being driven by a brilliant driver from the Road Policing Unit — had reached speeds of over one hundred and thirty miles per hour. That meant the journey from Blackpool to Liverpool John Lennon Airport took somewhere in the region of thirty-five minutes. The slowest part of the journey was actually the last five miles of dual carriageway on which ninety was about the safest maximum.
The driver pulled in directly at the front of the terminal building and was told to stay in the car and wait. The three passengers hurried into the airport where they were met by a DCI from Merseyside Police, who led them quickly through to the security and customs and immigration services offices behind the line of check-in desks. The DCI ushered them into an office with nothing on the door; inside was a sparsely furnished room — table, four plastic chairs — and a wall-mounted large screen TV and what looked like a DVD player.
‘Gents, if you’d like to take a seat,’ the DCI said. His name was McMullen and he was emitting nervousness.
Silently the three visitors did as bid.
Then Donaldson, who was bursting, said, ‘What’ve you got?’
‘Your man, I think.’
The three men were only at Liverpool Airport because of a tired, but sharp-witted and well-informed, Spanish cop who had been dragged against his will by a worried airline official out of his cosy office — just to have a look at a bloodstain on an airplane seat.
The cop actually hadn’t seemed sharp-witted at all when the official had knocked on his door at three that morning. Detective Luis Delgado was working the night shift, six p.m. to six a.m. After the last plane had landed at one a.m. without any problems and the passengers had filed wearily through the almost farcical customs check, observed by Delgado through a two-way mirror, he’d settled himself down for the night with the intention of getting in some serious sleep before the next flight landed at five thirty, just before he finished. He had a comfy chair, footstool and pillow, and if those bastards wanted him to work at Las Palmas Airport, then he would, but only on his terms. Because he didn’t want to be here.
His eyes had only half-opened when the sharp, urgent knock came on his office door. His arms were folded tightly across his chest, feet were up on the stool, and he was snug, certainly did not want to move.
‘ Si? ’ he grunted in an off-putting way. The door opened a fraction. ‘ Que? ’ Delgado said, his mouth turned down underneath his heavy moustache.
‘Detective Delgado,’ the man said. His name was Ceuta, and Delgado knew him as a representative of one of the budget airlines that provided a service to Gran Canaria. ‘Please, I apologize. I know you are busy, but could I ask you to come and have a look at something the cleaning crew have found on one of my planes?’
Delgado’s tongue smacked the top of his mouth. He shook his head at the thought of the loss of sleep. ‘ Vale,’ he said, meaning OK. He rolled himself reluctantly to his feet, expecting to be told they’d found a stash of drugs or money, which was fairly common.
But blood?
Delgado bent over and looked closely at the stain on seat 39E. He was as sure as he could be that it was blood — quite a lot of it. Working out the position of whoever had been on the seat it looked as though the injury, or source, was from either the back of the right arm or the right side of the chest.
‘Leave it,’ Delgado ordered.
‘But Senor, the cleaning staff need to do their work and this plane will be back in the air in four hours, on its return journey,’ Ceuta pointed out.
‘To where?’
‘Liverpool.’
‘As I said — leave it until I say anything different. For the moment, this area is a crime scene,’ he declared. ‘You may clean the rest of the plane.’ Delgado was nothing if not a realist. ‘But leave these three seats.’ He leaned over and touched the stain with the tip of his little finger. It was still wet.
His next step was to return to the security offices and access the computer hard drives that stored the CCTV footage of passengers who had disembarked this flight as they went through passport control. He also had access to the passenger manifest. He had been well in the background as the passengers from the flight had filtered through and, as is usual, they had all entered the island quickly, without challenge, their passports only cursorily examined by gritty-eyed customs officials. No record was even taken; the passports were just fleetingly shown and individuals waved through. Delgado printed off the passenger list and then watched a recording of the passengers with a mug of strong coffee at his lips, his eyes narrowing as he tried to recall them. Truth was he hadn’t been taking too much notice. There were two hundred and sixty people going through and none of them had seemed suspicious, out of place or injured.
Maybe the blood meant nothing anyway, and for a moment he felt a little foolish declaring the seat a crime scene.
The passenger list was nothing special, and nothing struck him as odd. And there was no way of telling which passenger sat in which seat because seats on this flight were not allocated to individuals. Boarding was a free for all, where everyone scrambled for seats.
He sat back and pondered. Blood on a seat. So what?
Then his heavily lidded eyes glanced up at the TV monitor affixed high in one corner of the room, permanently tuned into a twenty-four-hour Spanish news channel. Headlines scrolled across the bottom of the screen as newscasters relayed stories above. The sound was muted… but Delgado jumped off his chair, crossed to the TV and stood right in front of it, willing the news loop to come round again. For once, news of a Real Madrid signing was of no interest to him.
It came and suddenly Delgado realized he might have something to throw into the pot in the hunt for a major terrorist. Even if he was wrong, he knew he had a duty to reveal what he had. First he would check all international police bulletins on the computer in his own office. Then, even if there was nothing on them, he would still make the phone call.
The image on the TV screen behind DCI McMullen was paused. He said, ‘This is security footage of the passengers going through Liverpool passport control. As you know in this day and age, with on-line booking and
