‘Naked?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Completely,’ she said.
The inflatable beds came with inflatable pillows and two pushed together worked very well as a double, as did two sleeping bags, unzipped, then zipped together to form a wide blanket.
The make-do approach certainly sufficed for Flynn and the paramedic, two people who also made love in a fairly unusual location. This time, though, the upstairs storage room above the chandlery.
In fact they had a wonderful time, laughing intensely as they screwed with abandon, taking their joining to new levels of intimacy on the air beds, flipping from one position to the next and back again, not forgetting other forms of stimulation either.
They finished in a blur of orgasmic speed and loud moans before flopping back, exhausted and laughing.
Flynn managed to stay awake for a few minutes of blown-up pillow talk, but then, shattered, he was asleep.
Flynn slept deeply until six-thirty when he rolled off the bed onto the hard, uncarpeted floor of the storage room and banged his forehead. He lay there face down, staring at the grain of the exposed wooden floorboards. Then he eased himself up, blinking the sleep out of his eyes and wondering, for a moment, where he was. Over the years he had woken up in many peculiar places.
He sat up, glanced across and saw that Liz, the paramedic, had gone. He vaguely recalled her saying something and him responding and presumably making some sense. She had probably been saying goodbye, he thought muzzily.
He exhaled, scratched the back of his leg and tried to get his mind to function. His body was stiff and sore and creaky but he forced himself up to his feet and padded naked and shivering into the tiny toilet where he relieved himself, a function that seemed to last a very long time.
Empty of bladder he came back and got back on to the inflatable bed, pulling up the sleeping bag. He lay on his side, blinking, thinking about the day ahead.
The crown of his skull was quite close to the wall and from where he was he could see along the skirting board running along the bottom edge of the wall, where it met the floorboards at ninety degrees. It wasn’t a well- fitted skirting board, not helped by the unevenness of the floorboards themselves, several of which were loose, as he had discovered.
He wasn’t really looking for anything. He was thinking about running a shop. Quite looking forward to it. Trying to remember how to use the till. Still feeling quite sleepy. But also looking along the bottom edge of the skirting board, which narrowed as it reached the corner of the room because of his perspective.
And then he saw something wedged underneath it in one of the gaps made by a loose, badly fitted floorboard. At first it didn’t seem like anything. Something off-white, cube-like. He didn’t even care what it was.
Just a bit of rubbish, an offcut from a piece of wood, perhaps. Smaller than a sugar cube. A broken piece of tile?
He could not tell… in his mind he was still visualizing how to use that till and asking an imagined customer to enter his PIN number.
Then he remembered… Liz wasn’t saying goodbye, she was saying, ‘See you later. I have to be in work by eight. I finish at four today… can I see you tonight?’ Flynn remembered saying yes, absolutely. He also remembered the night. And smiled contentedly. And he looked along the skirting board again at that small object wedged under it.
He yawned and flipped on to his back, still smiling. A paramedic. Fancy. He’d always liked paramedics… he kept smiling and remembering… and then his face creased into a frown as he suddenly realized what the object was underneath the skirting.
In disbelief he scrambled off the bed and scuttled along the floor and tried to prise the object out from where it was by using his thumb and forefinger to grip it. He couldn’t quite… He cast around and saw Alison’s car keys which he grabbed and using the ignition key he started to gently tease the object out. It was tightly stuck in there, but eventually it came out with a pop and rolled a few inches across the floor like a dice. Flynn stared at it, then picked it up, sat back on his naked bottom, and held it up to the light filtering through the curtained window, like it was a precious diamond.
It wasn’t a gemstone, though. It was a tooth. A premolar with a gold filling.
SIXTEEN
As Flynn was frowning at the tooth and twirling it around between his fingers, Henry Christie was pulling up on the driveway of Harry Sunderland’s house on the banks of the River Lune at Halton.
For five and a half hours, Henry had slept soundly — the culmination of exhaustion and exertion. He had risen as fully rested as possible — he rarely slept more than six hours anyway — and had a shower, kissed a sleepy Alison, and set out on the road in the Vectra for what he knew would be a hell of a day, one way or the other. He was relishing it.
His journey took him, once more, past the point where his Merc had been forced off the road. He stopped for a couple of minutes, got out of the pool car and stood by the roadside, hands on hips, considering just how lucky he had been to survive, first the accident, then what happened after.
He didn’t dwell on it, although the horrendous bureaucratic repercussions yet to come did weigh heavily on him.
A man had died, killed in self-defence and quite deservedly so, but one could never predict what a coroner or the CPS might conclude from it. Henry knew that Steve Flynn had done absolutely the right thing, others might be swayed to think differently. Henry knew there was going to be a mighty judicial battle ahead. But he was up for it.
He arrived at Sunderland’s house just a short time later.
The room in which Flynn had spent the night was the first-floor store room above the chandlery and he had made room for the makeshift double bed between various stacked boxes and equipment. The bed had gone on the only space on the floor.
Still naked and holding up the tooth, Flynn glanced around the room.
He shivered, placed the tooth down and decided to get dressed, so he pulled on his clothes and started to rearrange the room.
The support unit search team had already arrived, together with a dog handler, Henry was pleased to see. These kinds of cops were a keen bunch, very professional, and Henry had a lot of time for the specialists.
The sergeant from the previous night approached him with two brews in hand from the urn that the support unit always seemed to have with them on their travels, topped up with boiling water from some source or other. It seemed to Henry that the job description for the sergeants must include having the skills, abilities and resourcefulness of a spiv.
‘Took a chance, boss,’ he said, handing Henry a Styrofoam cup. ‘Coffee, milk, no sugar… real coffee, by the way.’
‘Nail on head, Dave. Cheers.’ Henry took a sip of the drink and it tasted wonderful in the circumstances. For some reason he had never had a bad brew whilst out on a police operation.
‘We’ve already started,’ the sergeant updated Henry. ‘In the house and I got the dog man in just to have a quick skim along the river bank with Fido and also to work out how best we can fingertip-search it later and to see if there’s any likely point at which Mrs Sunderland might have gone in. I dunno,’ the sergeant said, ‘maybe signs of a scuffle of something.’
‘Sounds good,’ Henry said, pleased they’d got things going so quickly. He sipped the coffee and two things happened simultaneously: his own mobile phone rang and the sergeant was called up on his PR.
Henry flipped open his phone.
The sergeant turned away and said, ‘Go ahead,’ into his radio.
Before Henry could finish saying his name, the voice at the other end of the phone said immediately, ‘Henry, it’s Rik — you need to get yourself down here pretty fuckin’ quick.’ It was Rik Dean calling from Blackpool police
