against the window, smearing the glass with blood like some sort of medieval war trophy.
Except it wasn’t a decapitated head.
Nor was it some gruesome toy bought at the gift shop of a medieval torture museum.
It was a real head, attached to a real body, and it belonged to Alison Marsh, the woman Henry Christie loved.
Her features had been pounded almost beyond recognition. Nose flattened, both eyes black and swollen, lips cut and bleeding, and looking dead. Then just to reinforce the message, the man smashed Alison’s head against the window again, making the glass vibrate with the impact.
Henry roared with rage, spun away from the window and stepped dangerously towards Barlow, fists clenched, his face a vision of fury.
Barlow had been anticipating the reaction. The gun came up and he aimed it directly at Henry’s forehead, stopping him dead.
‘What the fuck?’ Henry growled, his anger rising beyond anything he had ever known, and way beyond the fear he had felt at being confronted by Barlow and a gun. Now he realized he had walked stupidly into a trap manufactured by Barlow and Sunderland, two men desperate to save their own skins by any means possible, having used Melanie Speakman as bait. He took another menacing step, but Barlow flicked the gun, his finger tightening on the trigger.
‘I’ll tell you what the fuck is, Henry… this is deadly serious stuff… No, no,’ Barlow warned him as Henry’s body language telegraphed another move, ‘I’ll shoot you dead here and now and think of another way through this if you do anything stupid.’
At Barlow’s feet, the blood must have worked its way back to Melanie’s brain. She stirred and opened her eyes, uncomprehendingly. Then they focused, she realized where she was, and they closed again.
Barlow took a pace back. ‘Now then, Henry old son, I want you to drag this nice lady into the kitchen and lay her out there. Don’t want any nosy postman peering in, do we.’ Barlow waited. Henry did not move. ‘Do it, Henry.’ He stepped back further and Henry moved behind Melanie, hooked his hands under her armpits and slid her gently backwards out of the living room, into the hallway, then into the kitchen.
Reversing in, Henry didn’t at first notice the other body by the back door, but as he laid Melanie out, he turned and saw another woman, shot in the head, her body crumpled up on the floor, lying in a large pool of deep, red, almost black, blood, obviously dead.
‘Oh, Jeez! What the hell are you doing, you complete…’ Henry guessed this was the body of Melanie’s friend, the owner of the house.
‘Stand back,’ Barlow warned and waved the gun, then straddled Melanie and shot her in the head, twice.
Henry staggered back against the sink, dumbstruck by the excessive and casual violence, noticing that the bottom half of his trousers had been splattered by Melanie’s blood. It was as if everything had been squeezed out of him.
Barlow stood upright, but still standing over Melanie. ‘Now then, Henry, where were we?’
‘You murdering bastard. What has she ever done to you? You utter cunt!’
‘Words, Henry… now then,’ he said as though he was simply changing the subject of discussion about world affairs or pop music. ‘Ahh, yes, property… it was very sneaky of you to make sure only you could access it.’ Henry waited, boiling inside, wanting to leap at Barlow and take his chance, but knowing that was a stupid move. He had to stay with this for Alison as he realized that this lack of concern for human life would also apply to her and the image of her dead tore at Henry. He could not shake the sight of her battered head being held against the car window outside. Suddenly hot rage was replaced by ice-cold calculation.
‘So what do you want?’ Henry asked.
‘That’s better,’ Barlow said triumphantly. ‘We need to go for a little ride and retrieve it. All nice and friendly, like, and when you’ve given it to me, we’ll see where we are with things.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I get the stuff, your little landlady goes free… as for you, dunno yet.’ Barlow smirked as Henry looked at Melanie, still in death, but the blood from the terrible wound in her head still collecting and running across the kitchen floor to join up with the coagulating blood of her friend to form a lake.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Henry said.
EIGHTEEN
They were in the pool car, Henry driving, Barlow sitting alongside, his body turned slightly towards Henry, the revolver pointed at Henry’s left hip. Henry’s mouth was clamped tightly shut as he steered the vehicle, as per Barlow’s directions, towards the M55 motorway.
‘Now, you drive sensibly, don’t do anything rash, keep to the speed limit, don’t draw attention to us, because if you do, she’s dead — and then you are, too. Got that?’
Henry nodded, re-gripped the steering wheel with his sweaty hands, controlling the urge to back-hand Barlow.
‘Good man. OK — M55, then M6 north, off at junction 33, drive up the A6 into Lancaster, pull in at the nick, then we do the business and after that, who knows? But no shenanigans or I’ll… well, you know, don’t you?’
Henry sped on to the M55, heading east out of Blackpool.
The Mercedes with Alison in it had shot away from the front of the house as Henry and Barlow got into Henry’s transport, but as he drove onto the motorway, Henry saw it was behind them.
‘And just to confirm matters,’ Barlow said, ‘just drive along in the inside lane at about fifty for a while.’
Henry did that and the Mercedes pulled out from behind into the middle lane and drew level with them. Henry glanced to his right, saw the profile of the driver, then the Mercedes accelerated slightly so it was a nose ahead of the pool car and for a few seconds the man in the back seat held Alison’s face up to the window again, squashing it against the glass.
Then the Mercedes decelerated and dropped back into a following position.
‘Now you can achieve the national speed limit, seventy,’ Barlow said.
Henry took the car up to this speed, seeing the blue smoke trail behind. Waves pounded through him, his skull doing a dull thu-dud, his vision seeming to have contracted into a tunnel. He did not dare to even glance at Barlow, because if he did, he knew he would lose it and probably kill them both in the process. The by-product of this would be to ensure that Alison also died.
He had to keep himself in check. Do as they said. Bottle his rage. Use his brain and figure a way out.
First thing: get a grip.
With this in mind, he told his body to relax, take it down a notch. Stop the beating heart that felt like an alien trying to explode out of his chest, get rid of the awful noises in his head.
There was at least a half-hour journey ahead. Use that to his advantage, and learn what this was all about.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t even want to get involved in Jennifer Sunderland’s death. As far as I was concerned it was a job for the uniform branch, not FMIT.’
‘So why did you?’
‘I was asked to attend and then I got interested… and even up to the point of getting her to the mortuary, I wasn’t that interested. It was just a drowning, f’God’s sake. If those guys hadn’t shown up, you’d still be in charge of it.’
Barlow gave a dismissive, ‘Phtt.’ Then said, ‘Two fuckin’ hot heads.’
‘So you know them?’
‘Course, I do… well, knew them until you came along and that Flynn guy. Thing was,’ Barlow said, as though it was painful to speak, ‘if I’d gone to the mortuary instead of you, none of this would have happened. We’d all be happy pigs in shit — but because you wanted to maintain a chain of evidence, that meant I couldn’t go through her belongings. I didn’t get a chance at the scene of the drowning — too many people around — and I didn’t get a chance at the mortuary and those guys were getting jumpy and I couldn’t stop ’em, silly twats! I told ’em not to,
