Bad Tidings Read Free Page A

village green across the road, the embers of the bonfire still glowed and smoked and Henry could smell it.
    Henry inhaled the chilly air, feeling it sear into his lungs. He shivered, locked the pub doors and trudged over to his car, making the first footprints in a light dusting of snow. The vehicle was a new Audi convertible, the replacement for his previous car which had met its doom in a very ugly incident on the road into Kendleton six months before. That one had been a Mercedes which Henry had loved, and he was now slightly regretting the brand change.
    That said, he acknowledged that the Audi was also a great car.
    He slid into it, started up and within moments the efficient heating system was belting out hot air. A heated driver’s seat also helped matters. Then he was on the road.
    Geographically speaking, in terms of the county of Lancashire he was about as far away as he could be from his destination that morning.
    Kendleton was tucked away inconveniently in the very north of the county and he had to travel well into the east, but it wasn’t a straightforward journey. First he had to get onto the M6 at the Lancaster north junction, then it was pretty much motorway all the way. Head south down the M6, cut briefly onto the M61 at Bamber Bridge, then onto the M65 to travel east into the depths of the county, exit at junction 5, then plough even further east onto the bleak moors above Blackburn on which perched his destination. The village of Belthorn.
    Henry didn’t need to use a SatNav, and not just because Belthorn had been pretty much his focus of attention for the last week. He hardly ever needed to use one when travelling around the county, except for possibly the last few hundred metres of a journey. Over thirty years of policing the area had given him detailed knowledge of it and its denizens, particularly the criminal variety.
    He knew exactly where he was going on that dark, cold morning, the first day of the New Year. He settled down to enjoy the drive along deserted roads . . . and wondered, not for the first time, why he hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to the chief constable and refuse the job in the first place, the one that had been the launch pad for everything else that followed over the week. He should have been more assertive and the chief would have had to delegate it to someone else. But he was playing on Henry Christie’s weakness.
    The bait: two unsolved murders. And like a dim-witted carp attracted by a wriggling worm, there were some things Henry Christie could not refuse, even though his gut instinct was to tell the chief constable to find some other sucker.
    He bit the worm, because the challenge of catching a killer was impossible for Henry to swim away from . . .
    â€˜Half a bloody job,’ Henry had said bitterly. ‘Half a bloody job.’
    â€˜I know, I know,’ the chief constable had responded, accompanied with a ‘so what?’ kind of shrug. His name was Robert Fanshaw-Bayley, known to most people as FB, although no one of lower rank would ever be so familiar to his face. Therefore, by default, as everyone else in the Lancashire Constabulary was of lower rank, he was always referred to as ‘sir’ or ‘boss’, and occasionally – by his deputy or the assistant chiefs – by his first name, when he wasn’t chewing their backsides off.
    It was possible that Henry Christie, though a mere detective superintendent, could have got away with the informality. He and FB had known each other touching thirty years, ever since Henry had been a PC on the crime car in Rossendale and Fanshaw-Bayley the young, thrusting, obnoxious DI in that neck of the woods, the smug ruler of the roost. Henry, therefore, knew he had certain privileges with FB that others did not, given their intertwined history, but never pushed it. He liked to keep FB at arm’s length, as the prospect of cosying up to him in any way made