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With Woodcock, Henry counted a hundred and sixty-two diamonds, all cut and finished. Henry could not even begin to imagine their retail value. A thousand pounds each, maybe … he didn't have a clue, but knew that when they were fitted into a ring or necklace, they could easily sell for five grand each.

Either way, the sums were astronomical.

‘What are you going to do with them?' Woodcock asked.

‘Keep them safe and see how Archie fares. Let's just hope he recovers and, if he doesn't, that he's made a will. We need to find his solicitor and hand them over as soon as possible … if we can't do that, I'll get them put into a safe deposit box … I'll work on it. Whatever, I don't like the thought of them being with us for longer than necessary.'

On a cage perched on the bureau top, one of Archie's rats surveyed them, its eyes as black as anthracite.

Henry gave it a wink. ‘RSPCA for you, mate.'

The scene was secured at midnight. The police dogs had not found anything of interest in the surrounding fields, which tended to firm up the belief that the offender had escaped in a car. Henry left a fully briefed uniform cop outside the farmhouse in a vehicle and made the decision to resume in the morning.

He then phoned BVH and after much arguing – because he wasn't an actual relative of Archie's and therefore no information concerning his condition could be released – was eventually put through to the consultant who was treating Archie. She had no problems in talking to Henry and informed him that Archie was very, very poorly, not expected to survive the night.

Henry assured her the police were doing their best to chase down relatives. They chatted on about the incident itself and Henry was a little surprised that she hadn't been told to keep an eye out for anyone turning up at A&E with possible shotgun injuries. She put Henry on hold just to double check with reception, came back a few moments later to say that the department had been informed but had been given a mobile phone number to contact, rather than the police station.

‘OK,' Henry said tiredly. He was fading fast and his brain wasn't operating as well as it should have been. He gave the consultant his mobile number to call if there was any significant change in Archie's condition.

He drove away from Archie's, down the narrow lanes that brought him out on the A586, where he had a decision to make. If he turned right he would head back to Blackpool, left would take him towards Lancaster where he could soon be on the A6, then on to the M6, on his way to Kendleton.

In one place – the house he owned in Blackpool – he would be cold and alone, but be in bed in less than twenty minutes; in the other, which was probably forty minutes away, he would be able to spoon up to his wife-to-be, all warm and fuzzy after a nightcap. He'd actually told Alison he would be home by nine, but events had conspired against him and he had phoned to apologize and she had been lovely about it. Disappointed, but lovely.

In one place he would wake up with no food in the house; in the other he could have another great breakfast waiting for him.

‘No contest,' he shouted to no one in particular. He turned left and floored the Audi, slamming on for the speed cameras when necessary.

He also figured that the drive would give him a chance to mull things over and plan ahead.

He had reached the point where the A586 met the A6, and the nose of the Audi was just pulling out to go north, when his phone rang. As he hadn't connected to the hands-free system, he drew on to the forecourt of a service station and answered it.

‘Mr Christie?'

‘Yes.' Henry recognized the voice of the nice lady consultant – and a feeling of dread coursed through his system.

‘This is Kelly Longton … we spoke a few minutes ago regarding Archie Astley-Barnes?'

‘Yeah?' he said dubiously.

‘I'm afraid I have some terrible news … I'm sorry, but he has just died. The brain trauma from the assault was too severe, we think he had a blood clot there, too, but he's just suffered a major heart attack and we couldn't save him.' Her voice was choked.

Henry stared ahead into the distance, completely devoid of emotion.

His house felt chilly and inhospitable. The heating had been left on a programme which only activated the system if the outside temperature dropped below a certain level. No one had been in the place for over a week and it was beginning to feel slightly neglected. Even his youngest daughter Leanne, who had a tendency to use the place as a hotel when things weren't going too well in her love life, hadn't been near for a while. She was ‘shacked up' (as Henry derisively called it, much to her annoyance) with her latest badly chosen boyfriend, but so far they hadn't fallen out. Henry wondered what she would do when the house was sold and she had nowhere to run and hide when the relationship went south, which it surely would.

Henry closed the front door behind him and stood in the hallway, then walked into the living room and sat down heavily on the sofa. Quite a lot of the furniture had now been disposed of, mainly to charities, but the basics would remain until the house was sold. That included a bottle of Jack Daniel's in the kitchen cupboard, which Henry suddenly remembered was there.

He poured himself a large measure into a cheap glass and wandered through to the extremely cold conservatory overlooking the back garden and farmland beyond.

From here, late at night, Henry had often seen foxes, stoats, deer and badgers. It had been a good place to chill and he and Kate had often cuddled up close in the darkness.

The JD tasted good, setting his throat warmly alight.

He filed away the memories before he became maudlin, necked the JD and went to pour himself another, realizing how far his life had moved ahead, even in the relatively short time since Kate's death. Maybe the biggest change was that Alison lived and worked miles away in the country and his work was usually in Blackpool or Preston or Blackburn, the big towns of Lancashire, where the biggest crimes were usually committed. Although it was nothing more than a commute, the hours he put in were still often horrendous, especially when a big job kicked off, and it was bound to have a negative impact on the new relationship.

Putting the job first was the one mistake he did not want to make with Alison. Kate had often suffered in silence and that would never happen again.

Nor did he like sleeping alone.

Standing there in his marital home he determined to solve the murders he was working on, tie up loose ends, then call it quits, no matter what carrot might be dangled in front of him to get him to stay. He wanted to be with Alison full time.

That was his future, not attending A&E units at midnight to see the sad spectacle of an old man who had been beaten to death, probably just for the sake of some chunks of compressed coal.

It had been a pathetic sight.

After the phone call from the consultant Henry had rushed back to A&E so he could follow Archie's body down to the mortuary and start a chain of evidence. Once there he had helped the uninterested, pasty-faced mortuary attendant strip the old man, bag and tag his clothing for evidence and heave him, covered by a muslin shroud, on to a tray which was then inserted into the body chiller, then slam the door shut.

Another one for the coroner.

Henry was at least glad he had made the decision to treat the crime scene as a murder scene and keep it secure.

By the time he had finished at the hospital it was just after two a.m. For Henry it was too late to drive all the way back to Kendleton. What he realized, though, standing in his kitchen with a bottle of booze in his hand, was that if he didn't have this house as a crash pad, then he would have no choice but to drive all the way to Kendleton.

‘So why am I here?' he asked out loud.

He was just about to tip the JD into the glass, but stopped short. He did not want to be alone, chilly, melancholy.

It would take a fair chunk of time to get to the Tawny Owl and he would hardly get any sleep before he had to get up again, but that was where he belonged and going back was the right thing to do, both for himself and Alison. And it was what he wanted to do.

He screwed the top back on the JD, decided to take the bottle with him and left the house. Two minutes later, he hit the motorway.

The roads were virtually deserted and he made good time and drove into the car park at the front of the Tawny Owl forty minutes later. Five minutes after that he crawled into bed with Alison, who acknowledged his arrival with an irritated murmur.

‘H
ow exactly do I work this thing?'

Henry had been avoiding the moment, but it had arrived.

He held up the iPad and showed it to Ginny, Alison's stepdaughter. Most of the senior officers in the constabulary had been issued with one but Henry had studiously avoided using his although he was sure that the benefits were, well, beneficial.

Ginny laughed patronizingly, took it from him and switched it on. ‘That always tends to help,' she winked.

Henry gave her his best pissed off look.

‘You use a laptop, don't you?'

‘It's in the office.'

‘This is much the same, really.'

‘Mm. Even though I have a phone that has a touch screen or a swipe screen or whatever the heck it is, I have a bit of an aversion to it. I think my fingertips are far too thick.' Ginny gave him a look and he said, ‘Don't you dare say a word. I just have a heavy touch.'

She sat down next to him and said, ‘Look …'

It was six forty-five a.m. the following morning. Henry, Alison and Ginny were in the dining room of the Tawny Owl, the two ladies about to kick start the day in the hostelry, which included being ready to serve six breakfasts for walkers who had landed last night without warning.

Henry munched his way through a bacon bap, having decided to forgo the full English. Two days running might have slammed his ventricles shut, but the smell and quality of the cooking made him slaver like Pavlov's dog. As he ate he watched Ginny with the iPad. She had reached the point where he had to input his password to get on to the constabulary system.

From there he sort of understood things.

Ginny stood up, left him to it, but was replaced by Alison, who came up behind him and draped herself over his shoulders, kissing his ear.

‘I'm glad you made it home last night,' she said.

‘Yeah, me too. Good decision. Not a lot of sleep involved, though.'

She stuck her tongue in his ear, then walked away chuckling dirtily.

With a grin, he continued with the iPad and logged on to the email system. Since his last check, he had received eighty-one messages. He groaned, especially annoyed at those senders who had the audacity to mark their particular one as urgent.

He went to the one from Karl Donaldson he had been about to open at his desk in the MIR just as the call came in about Archie's assault. He opened it and saw there was a photograph attached to it. Before clicking on it Henry read the email, which told him nothing more than he already knew about Jason Hawke.

As he touched the screen to open the photograph the internet connection went down, as it often did in this remote area where gas pipes were quite a new thing, let alone broadband.

The hotel phone rang somewhere in the kitchen. He heard Alison answer it.

He folded the last piece of the bacon bap into his mouth, then picked up his coffee, refilled it from the filter jug and turned to head outside for an early morning intake of fresh air.

It was a nice, cold, dark morning. His eyes widened as he spotted a huge male red deer strolling arrogantly across the village green. He watched in awe as it stood there for a moment, threw back its head, then with one bound leapt across the tiny stream to the other side of the green; then it was gone like a ghost into the mist of the morning.

Henry exhaled appreciatively.

‘For you, David Attenborough,' came a voice from behind him. Alison handed him the phone.

‘A deer,' he mouthed, with the excitement of a kid.

‘I know,' she said, unimpressed. ‘There are hundreds of the buggers around here.'

‘I know, but …'

Alison spun away shaking her head, whilst Henry thought to himself,
Never ever allow yourself to become numb to the wonders of nature
. Into the phone he said, ‘Superintendent Christie.'

‘Red deer or fallow?'

‘Eh? Oh – red,' Henry stuttered.

‘Beautiful … anyway, sorry, boss … Chief Inspector Carney, FIM,' the man at the other end introduced himself. FIM stood for Force Incident Manager, the officer in charge of the main control room for the constabulary at the comms room at headquarters at Hutton, near Preston. The FIM controlled major incidents, deployed appropriate personnel and was responsible for turning out specialist officers according to the on call duty rotas. ‘Sorry to call so early, but I know you're interested in the Costain family and I thought, possibly, you might want to deal with this, or at least decide how it is dealt with.'

‘Go on,' Henry said.

‘We've just received an email, which I've verified, from the police in Gran Canaria. A detective called Romero says he's investigating the murder of a man called Scott Costain and his girlfriend Trish Mason. Apparently they've been shot to death in their villa in Maspalomas and this detective would like us to do background checks on the two victims and, of course, inform the families.'

‘Scott Costain?' Henry mused. He knew the Costains very well – was in the process of doing all he could before he retired to dismantle and disrupt their criminal enterprise. But Scott's name wasn't familiar. ‘I don't know him.'

‘I've just checked him out on PNC, too.'

‘OK. Is there anything more, is this something I can look at when I get in to work?'

‘There are a few things, actually, boss. This detective, Romero, actually mentions you by name.'