NO AGE TO DIE: The release of a dangerous prisoner leads to murder (DCI John Blizzard Book 9)

past 10.00pm. It had been a long day and he was sitting in the detective superintendent’s room as Arthur Ronald took yet another call from the worried chief constable.
Blizzard gave his boss an affectionate look. Few officers were better in such situations. They were long-time friends, having worked together as rookie uniform officers before being reunited many years later – Ronald to assume overall command of CID for the southern half of the force area, Blizzard to run Western, one of its main divisions. They were very different men. University-educated Ronald was a pudgy, balding man with ruddy cheeks and eyes with bags that sagged underneath them. A smart dresser, he was a charming man with an easy manner and a gift for diplomacy. Blizzard, for his part, had gone into the police straight from school and developed a reputation for straight-talking. It was why Ronald’s career had prospered more than his friend’s, and it was his diplomatic approach that was proving the most helpful now. The superintendent replaced the phone.
‘He a happy bunny?’ asked Blizzard. He drained his mug of tea and placed it on the desk.
‘Of course, he’s not a happy bunny!’ Ronald reached for his own tea, took a swallow and grimaced when he realised it was now lukewarm. ‘He’s concerned that the situation will escalate out of our control. We need to make progress and make it quickly, John. Ideally, an arrest.’
‘It might not be that easy, Arthur. The only person we have found who was on the towpath at the time was the angler and he wasn’t much use. The boy’s friends know nothing and Mum couldn’t add anything new when Sarah went to see her. The boy’s father works on the oil rigs and is travelling back at the moment. We’ve arranged to go back in the morning.’
‘But we still fancy Albert Macklin for it, yes?’ said Ronald.
‘It’s a hell of coincidence if we don’t, Arthur. Same stretch of canal, same MO, same method of covering up the body. Victim of a similar age…’ Blizzard hesitated.
‘And yet I sense a “but” coming.’
‘Surely, Macklin would know that we would go straight for him, wouldn’t he?’ said Blizzard. ‘Would he really be that reckless?’
‘Depends how strong his urges were,’ said Ronald. ‘Regardless of what the psychiatrists say, Albert Macklin is a dangerous man and one who’s been locked up for the best part of twenty years. That’s a long time to suppress your base instincts. I take it that we still don’t know where he is?’
‘Afraid not. We searched the hostel and he’s definitely not there. I’m not surprised. When the city council found out what had been happening, they made their views very clear to the church. It’s a bloody disgrace that they offered to take him in the first place.’
‘Yes, well, be that as it may, we stay out of it,’ said Ronald. He gave his friend a sharp look. ‘Like I keep telling you, we don’t involve ourselves with politics. I don’t want us to do anything that inflames things further. Anyway, sounds like there’s not much more we can do until tomorrow.’
‘Not really,’ said Blizzard. He stood up. ‘Might as well head for home…’
‘Afraid not, gentlemen,’ said Colley as he walked into the room and gave them an apologetic look. ‘It seems that the locals have taken things into their own hands again. Someone’s put Jacob Reed in the hospital. Sarah’s gone to the church. I said we’d head for A & E.’
* * *
Not long afterwards, Blizzard and Colley were standing in the casualty unit of the general hospital’s accident and emergency unit, waiting for one of the nurses to finish with an elderly cyclist who had gashed his head when he fell off his bike on the way home from the pub. Even though the unit was relatively quiet, there were still plenty of people requiring treatment, most of them as the result of drunken incidents.
As so often when Blizzard visited A & E, his mind went back to one of the biggest decisions of his career. Several years previously, he had been offered the chance to return to uniform in the city centre in return for promotion. It had been a tempting offer; single in those days, he had just bought a detached house in a village on the western edge of the city and the mortgage payments were keeping him awake at night. At the time, he was one of two detective inspectors responsible for a series of sprawling housing estates on the eastern edge of Hafton. The pay was not brilliant, the hours were long, the work was unforgiving and, for a few moments, he had seriously considered the move back into uniform. Then he thought about the city centre with its posturing young bucks and shrill mini-skirted women tanked up to the eyeballs, of the streams of urine trickling across the pavements and of Friday and Saturday nights in Casualty. He rejected the offer and, within a few months, was back in Western Division heading up the drugs squad and on the road to his promotion as a detective chief inspector.
All those memories came flooding back now as Blizzard and Colley watched the nurse direct the old man to the front entrance.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said when she had returned. ‘You want to know about Mr Reed?’
‘We do, yes,’ said Blizzard. ‘I understand that he has serious head injuries?’
‘The doctor thinks he may have a fractured skull. What happened to him?’
‘Someone threw a brick through a window. Is it life threatening?’
‘We’ll know better when the doctor has seen the scans,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s certainly serious.’
‘Can we talk to him?’ asked Blizzard.
‘Not for a while. I’m sorry, I have to go.’
The nurse headed off to deal with a teenager who had just been brought in by two uniform officers after being