Copyright

AVON

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Paul Finch 2014

Cover photographs © Shutterstock

Cover design © Andrew Smith 2014

Paul Finch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007551255

Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007551262

Version: 2017-10-26

Dedication

For my children, Eleanor and Harry, with whom I shared many a chilling tale when they were tots, but whose enthusiasm is as strong now as it ever was

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Gull Rock was just about the last place on Earth.

Situated on a bleak headland south of that vast tidal inlet called ‘the Wash’, it was far removed from any kind of civilisation, and battered constantly by furious elements. Even on England’s east coast, no place was lonelier, drearier, nor more intimidating in terms of its sheer isolation. Though ultimately this was a good thing, for Gull Rock Prison (aka HM Prison Brancaster) held the very worst of the worst. And this was no exaggeration, even by the standards of ‘Category A’. None of Gull Rock’s inmates was serving less than ten years, and they included in their number some of the most depraved murderers, most violent robbers and most relentless rapists in Britain, not to mention gangsters, terrorists and urban street-hoodlums for whom the word ‘deranged’ could have been invented.

When Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper drove onto its visitor car park that dull morning, her aquamarine Mercedes E-class was the only vehicle there, but this was no surprise. Visits to inmates at Gull Rock were strictly limited.

She climbed out and regarded the distant concrete edifice. It was early September, but this was an exposed location; a stiff breeze gusted in across the North Sea, driving uncountable whitecaps ahead of it, lofting hundreds of raucous seabirds skyward, and ruffling her tangle of ash-blonde hair. She buttoned up her raincoat and adjusted the bundle of plastic-wrapped folders under her arm.

Another vehicle now rumbled off the approach road, and pulled into a parking bay alongside her: a white Toyota GT.

She ignored it, staring at the outline of the prison. In keeping with its ‘special security’ status, it was noticeably lacking in windows. The grey walls of its various residential blocks were faceless and sheer, any connecting passages between them running underground. A towering outer wall, topped with barbed wire, encircled these soulless inner structures, the only gate in it a massive slab of reinforced steel, while outside it lay concentric rings of electrified fencing.

The occupant of the Toyota climbed out. His tall, athletic form was fitted snugly into a tailored Armani suit. A head of close-cropped white curls revealed his advancing years – he was close on fifty – but he had a lean, bronzed visage on which his semi-permanent frown was at once both dangerous and attractive. He was Commander Frank Tasker of Scotland Yard, and he too had a heap of paperwork with him, zipped into plastic folders.

‘I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, Gemma,’ Tasker said, pulling on his waterproof. ‘But we’ve got to start making headway on this soon.’

Gemma nodded. ‘I understand that, sir. But everything’s on schedule.’

‘I wish I was as sure about that as you. We’ve interviewed him six times now. Is he going to crack, or isn’t he?’

‘Guys like Peter Rochester don’t crack, sir,’ she replied. ‘It’s a case of wearing them down, slowly but surely.’

‘The time factor …’

‘Has been taken into consideration. I promise you, sir … we’re getting there.’

Tasker sniffed. ‘I don’t know who he thinks he’s being loyal to. I mean, they didn’t give a shit about him … why should he give a shit about them?’

‘Probably a military thing,’ she said. ‘Rochester reached the rank of Adjudant-Chef. You don’t manage that in the Foreign Legion if you’re a non-French national … not without really impressing people. Plus they say he commanded total loyalty from his men. And that continued when he was a merc. You don’t carry that off either unless you give a bit back.’

‘You’re saying Rochester’s lot like each other?’

‘Yes, but that’s only one of several differences between them and the run-of-the-mill mobs we usually have to deal with.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not going to argue with that. You’ve done most of the homework on this case. The original question stands, though … how long?’

‘Couple more sessions. I think we’re almost there.’

‘And you’ve borne in mind what I told you about DS Heckenburg?’

She half-smiled. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘We don’t want him anywhere near this, Gemma.’

‘He isn’t.’

‘He’s a loose cannon at the best of times, but he could really screw this up for us.’

‘It’s alright, sir.’

‘I’m surprised he hasn’t at least been asking questions.’

‘Well … he has.’

Tasker looked distracted by that. ‘And?’

‘I’m his guv’nor. When I tell him it’s off-limits, he accepts it.’

‘Does he know how many times you’ve interviewed Rochester?’

‘He’s been too busy recently. I’ve made sure of it.’

Tasker assessed their surroundings as he pondered this. Continents of storm clouds approached over the sea, drawing palls of misty gloom beneath them. Plumes of colourless sand blew up around the car park’s edges. The hard net fencing droned in the wind. In the midst of it all, the prison stood stark and silent, an eternal rock on this windswept point, nothing beyond it but rolling, breaking waves.

‘Hellhole, that place,’ Tasker said with a shudder. ‘I mean, it’s clean enough … even sterile. But you really feel you’ve reached the end of the line when you’re in there. Particularly that Special Supervision Unit. Talk about a box inside a box.’

He glanced uneasily over his shoulder.

‘Something wrong, sir?’ Gemma asked.

‘Call me paranoid, but I keep expecting Heckenburg to show up.’

‘I’ve told you, Heck’s busy.’

‘How busy?’

‘Up-to-his-eyebrows busy,’ she said. ‘In one of the nastiest cases I’ve seen for quite some time. Don’t worry … we’ve got Mad Mike Silver and whatever’s left of the Nice Guys Club all to ourselves.’

Chapter 2

In a strange way, Greg Matthews looked the way his name seemed to imply he should. Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg, or ‘Heck’, as his colleagues knew him, couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something forceful and energetic about that name – Greg Matthews. As if this was a guy who didn’t waste time dilly-dallying. There was also something ‘Middle England’ about it, something educated, something well-heeled. And these were definitely the combined impressions Heck had of the man himself, as he watched the video-feed from the interview room at Gillbridge Avenue police station in Sunderland.

Matthews was somewhere in his early thirties, stockily built, with ashen features and wiry, copper-coloured hair. When first arrested he’d been clad in designer ‘urban combat’ gear: a padded green flak-jacket and a grey hoodie, stonewashed jeans and bovver boots, as they’d once been known. All of that had now been taken away from him, of course, as he was clad for custody in clean white paper, though he’d been allowed to retain his round-lensed ‘John Lennon’ spectacles, as apparently he was blind as a mole without them.

None of this had dampened the prisoner’s passion.

Three hours into his interview, he was still as full of his own foul-mouthed righteousness as he had been on first getting his collar felt. ‘It’s not my problem if someone thinks they’ve had it up to here with these neo-Nazi pigs!’ he said in a cultured accent, far removed from the distinctive Mackem normally found in these parts. ‘The only thing that actually doesn’t surprise me about this is that another bunch of Nazi pigs, i.e. you people, are in a mad rush to find out who’s responsible.’

‘The question stands, Mr Matthews,’ Detective Inspector Jane Higginson replied. She was a smooth, very cool customer. Her dark hair was cut short but neatly styled; her accent was much more local than Matthews’s, betraying solid blue-collar origins. ‘Why aren’t you able to tell us what you were doing on the night of August 15?’

‘Because it was five fucking weeks ago! And unlike you and your little wind-up clockwork toy friends, I don’t have to keep a careful account of everything I get up to in an officious little pocket-book. Not that I think you do, by the way. We could look through your notes now, and I doubt we’ll find any reference to harassment of ethnic or sexual minorities, intimidation of protest groups, illegal searches of private premises, brutality against ordinary working-class people, or general, casual misuse of authority in any of the other ways you no doubt indulge in on a daily basis …’

Matthews was articulate, Heck had to concede that, which was probably par for the course. He was leader of a self-styled ‘action group’ loosely affiliated to various militant student societies. He and his cronies were political firebrands, anarchists by their own admission … but did that make them killers?

‘What about August 15?’ Higginson persisted. ‘Let me jog your memory … it was a Saturday. That must help a bit.’

‘I do lots of different things on Saturdays.’

‘You don’t keep a record or diary? An industrious man like you.’

That was a sensible question, Heck thought. He’d been present when Matthews was arrested that morning inside his so-called HQ, which was basically a bike shed, though it had been packed with leaflets and pamphlets, and its walls were covered with posters and action-planners. Two state-of-the-art computers had also been seized. Matthews didn’t just talk the talk.

‘The only reason you can be refusing to cooperate on this, Mr Matthews, is because you’ve got something to hide,’ the Detective Constable acting as Higginson’s bagman said.

‘Or because you’re so deluded that you’re more concerned about your street-cred than your personal liberty,’ Higginson suggested.

Matthews bared his teeth. ‘You really are a prissy, smarty-pants bitch, aren’t you?’

‘Moderate your language and tone, Mr Matthews,’ the DC warned him.

‘Or what? You’ll beat me up?’ Matthews laughed. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t already. Go on. There’s nothing to stop you. I think you’ll find I can take it.’

That depressed Heck, at least with regard to any chance these arrests might lead to a conviction. The guy didn’t even realise the films and tapes made of interviews in custody were carefully audited; they couldn’t just disappear. Along with Matthews’s refusal to ask for legal advice, not to mention the ‘no result’ search they’d placed on him and his group with Special Branch, it all combined to suggest they were dealing with a pretender rather than an actual player.

‘If only beating was where you lot drew the line,’ the DC said. ‘When did you decide you were actually going to murder Nathan Crabtree?’

‘This is such bollocks.’

‘Before or after the twentieth time you threatened to kill him online?’ Higginson asked.

Matthews feigned amusement. ‘If that’s the best you’ve got, I pity you.’

Online, Matthews had regularly visited a number of rough and ready social-networking sites, usually hosted overseas, which catered for extremist ideologies. Their stock-in-trade were bitter, rancour-filled exchanges between anonymous individuals with ridiculous monikers. In normal times, any political forum would have been a strange place for an uncouth bunch like Nathan Crabtree and the other two victims, John Selleck and Simon Dean – quasi-political boot-boys with scarcely an educated brain-cell between them – to finish up, but from what Heck could see, the internet was increasingly allowing crazy activists to find an audible voice.

Heck turned from the video monitor, and ambled across the ‘Operation Bulldog’ Incident Room to the display boards bearing images of the crime scenes. There were three in total, and each one was located in a different corner of Hendon, Sunderland’s old dockland.

The first, where Selleck had died, was inside a derelict garage; the second, the site of Dean’s death, on a canal bank; and the third – the death-scene of Nathan Crabtree himself – under a railway arch. From the close-up glossies, it ought to have been easy to distinguish the victims as white males in their mid-to-late twenties, but it wasn’t. So much blood had streamed down the faces and upper bodies from the multiple contusions to their crania, and had virtually exploded from the yawning, crimson chasms where their throats had once been, that no facial features were visible. Even distinguishing marks like tattoos, scars and piercings had been obliterated – at least until such time as the medical examiners had been able to move the bodies and wash them down.

The murders had happened over a three-week period the previous August, and though they’d raised a few eyebrows among the police, that had been more through surprise than dismay – because Crabtree and his crew had been well-known scumbags. Members of a semi-organised group called the National Socialist Elite, they were basically skinheads without the haircuts, but also football hooligans and small-time drug dealers. They’d spent most of the last few years menacing local householders, drinking, brawling and alternately bullying or trying to indoctrinate younger residents with their unique brand of hard-line British ‘patriotism’. They’d been against Muslims, queers, lefties and – taking a break from the political stuff, just to win some brownie points with the common man – nonces. They were believed to be responsible for the brutal beating of an OAP in his own home after the rumour had got around that he was listed on the Sex Offenders’ Register. The rumour had later turned out to be incorrect, but either way, the case against them was unproved.

‘No, he was a paedo, for sure … and the lads knew it,’ Crabtree was reported to have said, after the revelation the victim was innocent. ‘Someone needed to sort him.’

The problem was, someone had now sorted the lads.

And in spectacular fashion.

The first victim had simply been dragged into a garage, and there beaten unconscious before having his throat cut with a sharp, heavy blade. At the time it could have been anything from a mugging gone wrong to a personal score. But then the other two had been nabbed over the following two weeks, and it became apparent that something more sinister was going on. The second victim, after being hammered with a blunt instrument, had been bound to a fence on the side of a canal, and had his throat cut with the same blade as before. In Nathan Crabtree’s case, the perpetrators had gone even further. Though his body had been found under a railway bridge, it had first been bound upright to a brick pillar with barbed wire, before his throat was slashed.

Heck appraised this scene the longest.

The wire was a nasty touch. Not just a sadistic measure designed to inflict maximum pain and distress, but indicative of enjoyment on the part of the killer. Whoever the perpetrator was – Heck wasn’t convinced they were dealing with more than one, but then he wasn’t in charge here – he’d displayed an aggressive loathing of his three targets, particularly Crabtree. Okay, that put Greg Matthews back into the picture – he’d clashed online with these right-wing apes more times than Heck could count, but there was still nothing in his past to suggest he was capable of such violence.

And then there was that damned barbed wire.

Heck couldn’t help thinking the use of such material was trying to spark a dim and distant memory – but it was proving elusive.

‘You’re not convinced we’ve got the right people, are you?’ someone said.

Heck turned. Detective Sergeant Barry Grant stood to his left, wearing his usual sardonic smile. Often, when Heck was posted out to Counties in his capacity as SCU consultant – or rather, a specialist investigator from the Serial Crimes Unit – he encountered a degree of resistance, though not in the case of DS Grant, the taskforce’s File Preparation Officer, and a chap who had so far proved very amenable.

Grant was a shortish, older guy but rather dapper, given to matching blazers and ties, buttoned collars and pressed slacks. He had a well-groomed mop of chalk-grey hair and horn-rimmed glasses, the net effect of which was to make him look a little old to be a serving copper – not an inaccurate impression, as he was well into his fifties. But as Heck had already discovered, Grant was here for his brain, not his brawn.

Heck shrugged. ‘I’m not saying there wasn’t enough for us to pull Matthews in … but whoever carved these ignoramuses up was seriously driven. I mean, they were on a mission … which they planned and executed to the letter.’

They assessed the gruesome imagery together. Alongside Grant, Heck looked even taller than his six feet. He had a lean but solid build, rugged ‘lived-in’ features and unruly dark hair, which never seemed neat even when he combed it. As usual, his suit already appeared worn and crumpled, even though it was clean on that day.

‘I hear you think we should be looking for a single suspect?’ Grant said. ‘Rather than a group like Matthews and his people.’

Heck pursed his lips. He’d made the comment a couple of times during the post-arrest debrief, but had thought no one was listening.

‘I know it doesn’t look likely on the face of it,’ he said. ‘But here’s my thinking. Crabtree and his gang lived and breathed urban violence, and they were usually team-handed. There’s at least five or six of them still at large. They’re also connected with various football factories, which means they can call an army into the field if they need one. On top of that, they have local credentials. They know every alley and subway. The whole East End of Sunderland is their turf.’

‘All of which makes it less likely that one bod could do this on his own,’ Grant said.

‘Not if he knows the ground too,’ Heck argued. ‘In all three cases, the vics were skilfully entrapped. Witnesses say Crabtree chased someone half a mile before he was killed – in other words he was lured. Course, they didn’t say who by. They didn’t get a proper look.’

‘They never do, do they.’

‘And apparently he was led a merry dance … all over the housing estates.’

A different display board featured a large, very detailed street map of the Hendon district. Trails of red felt pen, constructed from the fleeting glimpses witnesses had admitted to, indicated the zigzagging routes taken by the three victims, each one of whom – for reasons not yet known – had suddenly taken off in pursuit of someone in the midst of their everyday activities, the subsequent footrace leading each man directly to the spot where he was murdered. All three had been on their own at the time, which suggested they’d been observed beforehand, and stalked like prey.

‘We’re talking careful preplanning here and good local knowledge,’ Heck said. ‘Greg Matthews and his mates aren’t urban guerrillas … they’re student gobshites. On top of that, none of them are Sunderland natives.’

‘I’m not sold on Matthews either,’ Grant said, ‘but another crew could easily be responsible. I don’t see why it needs to be one man.’

‘Call it a hunch, but I keep thinking … Rambo.’

‘Rambo?’

‘First of all, we’ve canvassed all the main gangs on the east side of town. None of them are a fit. Secondly, none of your team’s grasses are talking, which more or less rules out the rest of the local underworld. That knocks it back into the political court – Matthews and his like. Except that no … they may say they’re fighting a war, they may dress like commandos, but whatever else they are, they aren’t that. Not for real.’ Heck rubbed his chin. ‘We’re looking for someone below the radar. Someone who knows every nook and cranny, but who’s a loner, a misfit …’

‘Could it be you’ve forgotten we’re in the Northeast?’ Grant chuckled. ‘A violent misfit? Won’t be a piece of piss singling him out.’

Heck pondered the question in the station canteen.

It was lunchtime so the place was crowded: uniforms and plain clothes, as well as traffic wardens and civvie admin staff. Heck had only been up here in the Northeast five weeks thus far, and aside from Grant, hadn’t made friends with anyone locally, so he sat alone in a corner, sipping tea and hoping the DSU in charge of the enquiry would eventually bail the suspect downstairs. It didn’t help that there were no alternative faces in the frame, but even if there had been Heck hadn’t made enough of a mark on the enquiry yet to expect his opinion to carry any weight. His SCU status, while politely acknowledged, didn’t cut much ice on its own – which in some ways he understood. The Serial Crimes Unit might be good at what they did, but they were based in London, which as far as many northern coppers were concerned was a different world. It didn’t matter that SCU had a remit to cover all the police force areas of England and Wales, and subsequently could send out ‘consultant officers’, like Heck, who had experience of investigating various types of serial cases in numerous different environments – there were still plenty of local lads who’d view it as interference rather than assistance.

‘Mind my whips and fucking stottie!’ a voice boomed in his ear.

A chair grated as it was pulled back from the table alongside Heck.

‘Oh … sorry,’ the uniform responsible said, noticing he’d nudged Heck’s arm and slopped his tea – though he didn’t particularly look sorry.

Heck nodded, implying it didn’t matter.

The uniform in question was one of a group of three, all loaded down with trays of food. The other two were younger, somewhere in their mid-to-late twenties, but this one was older, paunchier and of a vaguely brutish aspect: sloped forehead, flat nose, a wide mouth filled with yellowing, misaligned teeth. When he took off his hi-viz waterproof and hung it over the back of his chair, he was barrel-shaped, with flabby, hairy arms protruding from his stab-vest; when he removed his hat, he revealed a balding cranium with a thin, greasy comb-over. He ignored Heck further, exchanging more quips with his mates as they too sat down to eat.

Uniform refreshment breaks wouldn’t normally coincide with lunchtime, which on Division was reserved for the nine-till-five crowd, so this presumably meant the noisy trio had been seconded off-relief for some reason, most likely to assist with Operation Bulldog. Heck relapsed into thought, though at shoulder-to-shoulder proximity it was difficult for their gabbled conversation not to intrude on him, despite the strength of their accents. Heck was a northerner himself. He’d initially served in Manchester before transferring to the Metropolitan Police in London. Even though he’d now been based in the capital for the last decade and a half, there were many ways in which the north still felt more familiar than the south, though the north was hardly small – and Sunderland was a long way from Manchester.

The PC who’d nudged his arm was still holding the floor. Heck could just about work out what he was saying. ‘Aye t’was. Weirdest lad I’ve ever seen, this one.’

‘Ernie Cooper, you say?’ a younger colleague with a straight blond fringe replied.

‘Aye. Bit of an oddball.’

‘You were H2H off Wear Street?’ asked the other colleague, who was Asian.

‘Aye.’

‘Bet you didn’t get much change there?’

‘Wouldn’t think you’d find Ernie Cooper there,’ the older PC added. ‘Two-up-two-down. Bit of a shithole outside. Aren’t they fucking all, but that’s by the by. He answers the door – suit, tie, cardy. Like he’s ready to go to church or something.’

‘I know what you’re gonna say,’ the blond said. ‘It’s inside his house, isn’t it?’

‘Aye.’

‘Was in there last year. Reporting damage to his windows. Bairns chucking stones.’

‘Thought he was off to work, or something,’ the older PC explained, ‘so I says “Caught you at a bad time?” He says, “no, come in.” What a fucking place.’

‘Shrine to World War Two, isn’t it?’ the blond agreed.

Heck’s ears pricked up.

‘Everywhere,’ the older PC said. ‘Never seen as much wartime stuff. And it’s neat as a new pin, you know. It’s orderly. Like it matters to him.’

The blond mused. ‘Bit of an obsessive, I think. His dad, Bert, was a commando or something. Got decorated for bravery.’

It was a simple association of ideas, but Heck had been brooding on his own comments from earlier and the thought processes behind them – ‘they may dress like commandos, but whatever else they are, they aren’t that.’

‘And then there’s that bloody big knife on his living-room wall,’ the older PC added. ‘Enough to scare the crap out of you.’

Heck turned on his chair. ‘Say that again?’

At first the three PCs didn’t realise he was talking to them. When they did, they gazed at him blankly.

‘Sorry … DS Heckenburg. I’m on Bulldog too.’

‘Aye?’ the older PC said, none the wiser.

‘I’ve been attached from the Serial Crimes Unit in London.’

‘Oh aye?’ This was Blondie. He sounded less than impressed.

‘It’s what you were saying about this bloke … Something Cooper?’

‘Ernie Cooper.’

‘His father was a veteran, yeah?’ Heck asked.

‘Was, aye,’ Blondie said. ‘Been dead five years.’

‘How old is the younger Cooper?’

The older PC, who wasn’t bothering to conceal how irked he felt that his meal had been interrupted, shrugged. ‘Late fifties … more.’

‘You know him?’

‘Not well.’

‘Has he got form?’

The older PC frowned. ‘Bit. From way back.’

‘Violence?’

‘Nothing serious.’

‘But now you say he’s got a big knife?’

‘Aye, but it’s not what you think. It’s a wartime memento … something his dad brought home. A kukri knife, you know. Antique now.’

Heck’s thoughts raced. The kukri knife – or khukuri, to be accurate – was that sharp, heavy, expertly curved weapon still used by Gurkha battalions in the British Army. It was infamously well designed to deliver a fatal stab wound, but was also known as a powerful chopping tool. And what was it one of the medical officers who’d examined the three murder victims had recently said? Something like: ‘The lacerations are deep – they’ve gone clean through the muscles of the oesophagus in a single incision. We’re talking a finely honed, but very heavy blade …’

‘Was Ernie Cooper a military man himself?’ Heck asked.

The older guy shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘Factory worker,’ the Asian PC said. ‘Retired early.’

‘Is he fit?’ Heck wondered. They exchanged glances, now more bewildered than irritated by the protracted nature of the interrogation. ‘What I mean is … can he run? Seriously fellas, this could be important.’

Blondie shrugged. ‘Seen him jogging. Used to be part of the Osprey Running Club, I think … ultra-distance. Probably knocking on a bit for that now.’

‘Nah, I still see him running,’ the Asian PC said. ‘On his own, like. Don’t see him running with anyone else. Never have, to be honest.’

‘And you say his dad was a commando?’

‘Aye …’ Blondie confirmed. ‘Bert Cooper. Well-known character up the East End. War hero like.’

‘Commando?’ Heck said. ‘Don’t suppose you can be any more specific?’

‘He wasn’t a commando,’ the Asian replied. ‘I read his obit in the paper. He was a para. He was in the desert and at Pegasus Bridge.’

‘Aye, Pegasus Bridge,’ Blondie said. ‘That was where he won his medals. Remember my dad saying.’

Heck sat back. ‘I’d like to meet Ernie Cooper, if you don’t mind.’

The older PC shrugged. ‘We don’t mind. Why should we?’ He rummaged in his jacket pocket. ‘Can give you his addy right now.’

‘Might be easier if you were to introduce me to him,’ Heck said. ‘Help break the ice maybe.’

The older PC glanced at his mates as if he couldn’t believe the audacity of such a request. ‘Before or after I’ve had my nosh?’

Heck stood up. ‘I’ll probably need an hour actually. Can you meet me downstairs at two?’

‘Well … suppose I can put this lot away in an hour.’ The older PC indicated his plate, which was piled with chips, eggs, sausage, beans and buttered bread. In less charitable mode, Heck might have commented that considering his bulk, which, now he was seated, bulged over his waistband and utility belt like a stack of tyres, the guy would be lucky to live through the next hour, but that would hardly help.

Besides, his thoughts were now on other things.

Like the Leibstandarte.

‘What?’ Jerry Farthing said – that was the older PC’s name. ‘The Leibstan-what?’

‘Full title … 1st SS Division Leibstandarte,’ Heck said from the front passenger seat of Farthing’s patrol car.

Farthing drove thoughtfully on. ‘Nazis, yeah?’

‘Frontline shock-troops. Total fanatics. Most of them had been recruited from the Hitler Youth when they were still too young to see through the Führer’s bullshit.’

Farthing looked puzzled. Up close, he gave off a faintly sour odour – sweat, unwashed armpits. He hadn’t shaved particularly well that morning; his leathery, pockmarked cheeks were covered with nicks. ‘I’m sure this is leading somewhere … I just hope it’s worth it.’

‘There was one place where we saw the Leibstandarte at their best.’ Heck checked a mass of notes he’d recently scribbled in his notebook. ‘Wormhoudt. A farming area near Dunkirk. That’s where they murdered a bunch of British POWs with machine guns and grenades. Eighty men died … after they’d surrendered.’

‘Nasty.’ But Farthing still looked baffled as to how this concerned him.

‘That was in 1940,’ Heck said. ‘In 1945 it was the other way around. Then, the 1st SS Division were in the rear-guard as Hitler’s forces fell back into Germany. That April, quite a few of them got captured by British airborne forces at Luneburg. Ever heard of Luneburg, Jerry?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Well … if someone else had won the war, it would have gone down as a place of infamy. It’d be regarded as the scene of a notorious war-crime.’

‘I’m guessing we got payback for Wormhoudt?’

‘At least forty members of the Leibstandarte were executed on the spot.’

‘What goes around comes around.’

‘Yeah. It was war. What’s interesting to us, though, is the method of the execution.’

‘Okay …?’

This train of thought hadn’t occurred to Heck straight away on hearing that Ernie Cooper’s father had been a commando in World War Two, or that Cooper himself was a World War Two obsessive. But then the word ‘para’ had been mentioned, and it had jogged Heck’s memory again – this time significantly.

The other thing, of course, was the wire.

‘The British paratroopers who grabbed those SS men made them run the gauntlet,’ Heck said. ‘You know what that means?’

‘Aye. Blokes line up on either side and hit them with rifle butts while they run down the middle.’

‘Rifle butts, spades, trenching tools, anything,’ Heck said. ‘After that – and this is something I knew I’d read about once before – they tied them to posts … according to some accounts, with barbed wire.’

‘Jesus,’ Farthing said. Then the parallel seemed to dawn on him. ‘Jesus! … Are you serious?’

‘Then they cut their throats.’

‘Throats …’ Briefly, Farthing was almost distracted from driving. ‘Okay, there’s a similarity with the way Nathan Crabtree copped it …’

‘More or less with the way they all copped it …’

‘Yeah, but that was probably nothing to do with Bert Cooper.’

‘On the contrary …’ Heck flipped a page in his notebook. ‘Bert Cooper’s unit, the 15th Air Pathfinder Brigade, were implicated. In fact, our Corporal Cooper was one of ten men arrested by the Special Investigation Branch. It was even suggested he did the throat-cutting. He was held for six days while the evidence against him was assessed.’

Farthing had turned a slight shade of pale. ‘And?’

‘He was released on grounds of “battlefield trauma”. Instead of being charged and sent to the glasshouse, he received four months “psychotherapeutic counselling”.’

‘And … where’ve you learned all this?’

‘It’s all in the public domain, Jerry … you have heard of the internet?’

Farthing shrugged. ‘Aye, but … even so.’ He clearly wasn’t enjoying hearing these revelations. ‘What’s it got to do with his son? I mean it’s seventy bloody years ago.’

‘Well for one thing, his son’s still got the knife. Or so you said.’

‘Hang on … we don’t know it’s the same knife. It probably isn’t.’

Heck glanced sidelong at him. ‘Seriously? Why else keep it in a place of honour?’

‘He told me his dad took that knife off a dead Gurkha at Medenine in 1943.’

‘Even if that’s true, doesn’t mean it wasn’t the weapon used two years later on those SS prisoners. Might even have been a kind of poetic justice in that.’

Farthing shook his head. ‘I’m sorry … this is a stretch.’

‘Well, let’s look at Ernie Cooper himself. You told me he’s got form for violence.’

‘Nothing serious.’

Heck flipped another page. ‘Wounding his wife?’

‘That was quite a while ago, wasn’t it?’

Heck read on. ‘1977, to be precise. He actually assaulted her twice that year. On the second occasion, which was so serious that she subsequently left him, he received a two-month prison sentence. In 1979, he served time again, this time six months for threatening to kill members of a local Irish family. Apparently the Irish dad had been mouthing off down the pub about the Warrenpoint massacre of eighteen paratroopers by the IRA, saying it was justice for Bloody Sunday. Ernie Cooper went round that night, banging on their door and windows, threatening to burn the place down while they were all asleep. Two years later, he got locked up again … drew a suspended sentence for assaulting a bunch of CND members who’d tried to lay white poppies at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.’

Farthing shrugged. ‘Aye, but if that was his last offence … I mean, 1981. It’s no wonder he’s not on our radar.’

‘That was the last time he got arrested,’ Heck said. ‘It wasn’t his last offence. Seems our Ernie’s a bit of a letter-writer. He’s had stuff in all the local rags, having a pop at drug addicts, prostitutes, child molesters and “bad families”, as he calls them. Saying they should all be wiped out, quote, “to make the streets decent again”.’

‘Alright, so he’s a right-wing nutter …’

‘He got cautioned only five years ago for forcibly confiscating some kid’s skateboard because he said it was annoying the whole street. He was also advised after another bunch of kids said he’d called them “dope dealers” and threatened them with a baseball bat.’

‘Okay, I get it. He’s got a temper.’

‘He’s also got a big bloody knife that was once used to murder a number of SS men,’ Heck said. ‘So what do you reckon, Jerry?’

Farthing nodded resignedly. ‘I suppose we can have another chat with him.’

Chapter 3

Time hadn’t made much impact on the Hendon district of east Sunderland.

It mainly comprised rows of age-old terraced housing, scruffy high-rise apartment blocks and the odd derelict industrial unit. A notorious area in law and order terms even during its docklands heyday, now it was largely unemployed, which made things even worse. The street they pulled up in was typical; a single row of houses facing onto a low-lying stretch of overgrown spoil-land cordoned off by a rickety old fence. The house fronts were black with grime, many of their doors dented and battered. It boasted ten dwellings in total and was bookended by two corner shops, which, as far as Heck could see, contained nothing but rubbish.

They parked Farthing’s Vauxhall Astra patrol car opposite number three, alongside the only gate in the fence. As soon as they climbed out, the September breeze took hold of them. There had been squalling rain that morning and the road was still damp, its gutters lined with puddles. Now the sun had emerged, but rags of grey, wind-tossed cloud were strewn across it, absorbing any warmth. There was no one else in sight. No curtains twitched either in the house directly facing them, or in those next to it. No lights were on.

PC Farthing knocked on the front door and waited, while Heck stood behind him. There was no response. The interior lights remained off. Farthing knocked again. Still there was nothing; not a sound from inside.

He glanced at Heck and shrugged. ‘Well … we tried.’

Heck ignored that, crouching at the letter flap and pushing it open. ‘Mr Cooper!’ he shouted. ‘This is the police. Can you open up please?’

Still there was no sound from inside. Heck tried again twice, to no avail, before straightening up.

‘Satisfied?’ Farthing asked.

‘Far from it. If you were under suspicion of murdering three gang members, and the police came round before you’d got a chance to do the rest of them, would you open the door voluntarily?’

‘You can’t be bloody serious … I only spoke to this fella as part of a house-to-house. To ask if he’d seen anything the day Crabtree got chased.’

Heck dug under his jacket and produced a folded document, scanning quickly through it. ‘We’ll never know how much he saw until we check him out properly.’

Farthing’s eyes bugged. ‘Is that … is that a warrant?’

‘No, it’s a beautician’s appointment. Course it’s a bloody warrant.’ Heck tested the front door with both hands, but found it unyielding. ‘This is pretty solid. Let’s try round the back.’ He set off along the pavement.

‘You’ve had a busy lunchtime, haven’t you?’ Farthing said, hurrying to follow.

‘Couldn’t have done it without you, Jerry. Told the beak about Cooper’s track record of political violence.’

‘Political?’

‘Picking on hippies and IRA supporters. Told him about that nasty knife you saw too. I’ll need a statement about that, of course.’

‘Jesus H … I told you that knife was an antique.’

‘A combat knife’s a combat knife, Jerry.’ They turned the corner at the end of the row, and entered a squalid backstreet. ‘Anyway, we’ve got the warrant now … and this is more like it.’

The rear gate to number three was missing from its hinges, revealing a tiny paved yard. Unlike the surrounding environment, this area was cleared and well-swept. A clothes prop was leaning against the coal bunker, with a basket of pegs next to it.

‘I’m not sure about this,’ Farthing said as they entered. There was a rear ground-floor window to the house and a rear door. Both looked to be closed and locked. ‘I don’t like forcing entry, even with a search warrant.’

In response, Heck rapped loudly on the rear door and shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Mr Cooper … we are police officers! This is really quite important! Could you open up please!’ They waited for half a minute. Heck tried again. A further wait brought no reply. Heck glanced at Farthing. ‘The occupier was definitely at home when you called this morning?’

‘Aye … he let me in, gave us a brew.’

‘Okay … well he’s pretty clearly absent now. Would you agree?’

‘Suppose so.’

‘Good.’ Heck put his shoulder to the rear door, and it crashed inward, its rusted lock flying off with the first impact. Inside, the house stood in sepulchral dimness.

‘Mr Cooper, it’s the police!’ Farthing called as they shuffled through a narrow scullery into a small, tidy kitchen. ‘We have a warrant to search these premises!’

There was no reply, but Heck glanced around. ‘Place is immaculate,’ he observed.

‘He’s always a well-turned-out bloke.’

‘Bit like a soldier, eh?’

In the hall, a shoe rack stood close to the door, on which Heck noted two pairs of muddy trainers. A raincoat was draped over the foot of the banister. Aside from these mundane items, this part of the house also looked neat. Its linoleum floor shone, as if mopped regularly. But the real surprise came when they moved sideways into the lounge, which in the past had been knocked through into the dining room to create one large living space, the walls of which had since been completely covered with sepia-toned news cuttings.

Fascinated, Heck’s attention flitted from one headline to the next.

Soviets launch winter offensive

British triumph in desert battle

As he’d heard in the station canteen, this was World War Two. Every aspect of it. But it wasn’t like a temporary display. The thousands of carefully interlocked cuttings here had literally been turned into wallpaper, incorporated into the fabric of the house’s interior. And it was a professional job; there wasn’t a square inch of plasterboard exposed. Heck glanced into what had once been the dining room.

Mussolini snatched from mountain redoubt

Royal Navy enters Pacific

Grainy images had been mounted to create maximum impact: frostbitten German troops surrendering in Russia; British tanks rolling over the sunburned plains of Alamein; U-boat survivors bobbing like driftwood in an oil-filled sea.

In addition, there were four framed black and white snapshots on the mantelpiece, each one depicting the same toothily grinning face: a young squaddie, usually with tousled hair and dust on his cheeks. In one, he’d been photographed in what looked like a desert graveyard, and had a small mongrel dog sitting on his left shoulder. In another he was hefting a Bren gun.

‘I’ve heard about living in the past,’ Heck said. ‘But this …’

‘Fuck!’ Farthing interrupted. ‘The knife’s gone.’

He was standing by the lounge sideboard, where other items of memorabilia were arranged. Two of these were cruciform medals done in black metal with white edging, attached to black, white and red ribbons – Heck recognised them as Iron Crosses, second class. In a glass case on the wall there was a faded red beret, with a silver badge attachment depicting an eagle clutching crossed daggers. Also fixed on the wall, as Farthing now indicated, there was a bent wooden scabbard, bound with black leather and clad at its sharpened tip with slivers of plate metal.

Heck didn’t need to be an expert to recognise the sheath for a khukuri. Though the knife itself was absent, its two smaller cousins – the chakmak and karda, utilised for sharpening the main blade, were still in place.

‘He might just have taken it to get it cleaned, or something,’ Farthing said.

‘That in itself would be a tad suspicious, don’t you think?’

Before Farthing could reply, a shudder passed through the house, and then another, and another. Heavy feet were descending the stairs, and at speed. Heck and Farthing both lurched to the lounge door at the same time, briefly hampering each other. When they finally burst into the hall, they caught a fleeting glimpse of a tall shape in a fawn tracksuit vanishing out through the front door, slamming it closed behind him. Heck reached the door first, but was briefly foxed by its special security lock. He twisted and turned the handle and hit the button repeatedly, all without consequence.

‘Here,’ Farthing said, pushing past.

He managed to get the door open, and they blundered outside.

The street was empty again, but two things struck them simultaneously: the front nearside tyre of the police Astra had been slashed to the ply-cord – as though someone had dealt it a passing blow with a heavy blade; and the gate in the fence opposite was now open and swinging.

‘Shit!’ Farthing shouted, heading across the road to his car.

‘What’s on the other side of that fence?’ Heck replied, going for the gate.

Farthing was now busy filching his radio from its harness. ‘What … oh, wasteland. Industrial wasteland …’

‘Can you get the car round there?’

‘Not without changing the tyre, obviously …’

‘Sod the bleeding tyre!’ Heck ran through the gate. ‘And get us some support!’

On the other side, a beaten earth path wove crazily down a shallow slope, looping between dense stands of Indian Balsam, their September seedpods now loaded to capacity and exploding as Heck barged against them. The path unfurled ahead of him for dozens of yards, but there was no sign of Cooper, which was disconcerting, given that he was in his fifties. Though what was it they’d said about him – that he’d formerly been an athlete? Heck swore under his breath. He’d known fitness fanatic coppers who were still ripped and energetic in their mid-sixties.

He fished his own radio from his pocket as he circled a thicket of hogweed and found himself following a rusty wrought-iron fence. Thirty yards ahead, there was a gap in this; on the other side of that, a muddy lane led beneath a dripping black railway arch. Heck kept running, doing his damnedest not to slip and slide in his leather lace-up shoes.

‘Alpha-Echo control from DS Heckenburg, Operation Bulldog, over?’

‘DS Heckenburg?’

‘I’m pursuing a suspect in the neo-Nazi murders. I could use some back-up, and some geographical guidance, over?’

It was several seconds before he received a response, which was no surprise as the passage under the arch ran forty yards at least. When he re-emerged into the open, Heck found himself on a dirt track strewn with bricks and twists of wire, which led past a broken-down gate onto the forecourt of a nondescript derelict building.

‘Excuse me, sarge … can you confirm that you’re pursuing a suspect in the Hendon murders, over?’

‘That’s affirmative. His name is Ernest Cooper, male IC1, tall, six-two or six-three, late fifties, over.’

‘Whereabouts are you, over?’

‘That’s the problem. I don’t bloody know.’ Heck could have beaten himself up at that moment. He hadn’t even memorised Ernest Cooper’s address, and he’d dropped the warrant back in the house, so he had no point of reference at all. All he knew was that he was somewhere in Sunderland’s East End.

‘Can you contact PC Jerry Farthing?’ Heck hadn’t memorised Farthing’s collar number either, which was another black mark against him. ‘He’ll tell you where we are, over.’

‘Affirmative. Stand by.’

‘I can hardly stand by,’ Heck said under his breath, as he jogged through the gate onto a broad, cindery parking area. About thirty yards ahead, the scabrous edifice of the main building was visible. Its upper windows were yawning cavities. A protruding lattice of rusted metalwork ran along the front, about fifteen feet up; the relic of a canopy, beneath which wagons would have idled. Fragments of mildewed signage remained, but were unreadable.

Heck hesitated to go further. Was it feasible that Cooper, fit as he was, could have got this far ahead? The problem was there didn’t seem to have been anywhere else he could run to. It was all a bit worrying, of course, because if Cooper was the perp, and it now seemed highly likely he was, there were only three reasons why he’d run like this: either there was somewhere else he could go, some bolthole where he could lie low; his personal liberty was less important to him than finishing off the work he’d set himself, eliminating Nathan Crabtree’s gang; or both of the above.

In no doubt that he needed to catch this guy right now, Heck advanced towards the building, scanning it for any identifying marks he could pass to Comms. Most of its ground-floor entrances were covered by wooden hoardings, but the most central one had collapsed, exposing black emptiness.

He stepped through this, ultra-warily.

Total darkness enclosed him – but only for a second. Very rapidly, dimmer light sources became apparent, and his eyes attuned to an area that was like a small lobby, half-flooded with water, crammed with broken bricks and masonry. Anyone attempting to dash through here would likely have fractured an ankle. Instead, Heck tip-toed through it, balancing on planks and fallen joists. A secondary door led into a cavernous inner chamber, the entrance to which was only accessible at the end of sixty yards of cage-like corridor, lagging and bits of cable hanging down through its mesh ceiling.

Again, Heck halted. Going further on his own was asking for trouble. Cooper had the khukuri knife – and he was clearly a dab hand at using it. With a single blow, he’d disabled a police car. Speaking of which – Heck gritted his teeth with fury at Jerry Farthing. Any bobby with his experience ought to have known that checking damage to a company vehicle was of less importance than apprehending a suspect. In fact, he would have known it. The reason Jerry had refused to join the chase was a lack of motivation. Whether that was down to fear or laziness, Heck wasn’t entirely sure, but the bastard was clearly past his best.

Then, to his surprise, he heard the chugging of an engine outside.

He scrambled back through the brick-strewn lobby, and felt a vague pang of guilt at the sight of Farthing’s Astra wallowing to an unsteady halt on the forecourt, its front nearside tyre hanging in ribbons. He walked quickly over there. ‘Have you put Comms in the picture? I wasn’t able to …’ His words petered out.

Farthing, white-faced and sweating, climbed slowly from the driver’s side, while someone else climbed from the passenger side. The newcomer was slim but tall, about six-foot-three. He was in his late fifties, with lean, angular features and pale blue eyes. He had grey hair cut so short that it was really no more than a circular patch on top of his head, and a clipped grey moustache. He wore a fawn tracksuit, and a khaki belt, into the left-hand side of which the khukuri knife was tucked. This was a truly admirable object – its blade shone wickedly and there was a carved steel lion’s head at its pommel. But he also wielded a firearm: a Luger nine-millimetre, that most iconic weapon of the Third Reich, which he now trained squarely on Farthing’s head.

They’d been fooled, Heck realised. He’d gone straight through that gate in the fence without considering that their quarry might be somewhere closer to home – hiding under the police car perhaps, or squatting around the back of it.

‘Please tell me you managed to get a call out first?’ Heck said to Farthing.

But Farthing was too busy jabbering to his captor. ‘Mr Cooper … this is ridiculous. You’re not going to shoot us. I mean, come on, you can’t …’

‘Shut up,’ Cooper said, quietly but curtly.

‘Look, we were only here to ask you a couple of questions …’

‘I said shut up!’

‘Jesus, man … you can’t just fucking shoot us!’

‘Don’t do anything rash, Mr Cooper,’ Heck advised.

‘Rash implies unnecessary, pointless, futile.’ Cooper’s accent was noticeably Sunderland, but more refined than most. He waggled with his pistol, indicating that Farthing should walk over and stand alongside Heck, which he duly did. ‘I assure you, Sergeant Heckenburg … the action I take here today will be none of those things. Now empty your pockets, please. Every weapon you’re carrying, every communication device. I want them placed on the ground. When you’ve done that, put your hands up.’

Heck stooped, laying down his radio, mobile phone and handcuffs. Cooper watched him intently and yet unemotionally. His pale blue eyes were like teddy bear buttons; it was quite the most unnatural colour Heck had ever seen.

‘That looks like an original 1940s Luger to me, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Another spoil of war?’

‘Inside!’ Cooper indicated the yawning doorway behind them.

Heck held his ground, fingers flexing. He glanced around. There wasn’t a building overlooking them. The only high points in sight were the towering hulks of disused cranes. Directly overhead, the sun had gone in, tumbleweeds of cloud scudding through a colourless sky.

Cooper pointed the Luger directly at Heck’s face. ‘I said move.’

Heck turned, hands raised. Farthing did the same, half-stumbling, the eyes bulging in his sweaty, froglike face.

‘I’m guessing you haven’t tried to fire that before?’ Heck said over his shoulder.

‘It’s fully loaded, I assure you,’ Cooper replied.

‘Yeah, but what do you think’ll happen if you fire it now … for the first time in seventy years?’

‘Keep walking,’ Cooper instructed.

Farthing whimpered as the dark entrance loomed in front of them. Heck glanced sideways; tears had appeared on the chubby cop’s milk-pale cheeks.

‘You still need a way out of this, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Shoot us now, and what happens next?’

‘That hardly matters to you.’

‘But what about you? Won’t be much chance of getting the rest of Crabtree’s gang if you’re sitting in jail. It might be the other way around. Crabtree’s lot will have friends on the inside …’ Bricks and other rubble clattered under their feet as they stumbled into the mildew-scented interior.

‘If I feared retaliation, I’d never have embarked on this course,’ Cooper said.

‘And what course was that?’ Heck wondered. ‘Bumping off some Nazis? Carrying on your father’s good work?’

‘Father was the finest of the fine. During this nation’s darkest hour, fighting men like him shone.’

‘Pity he didn’t restrict himself to the fighting, eh? Pity he became a war criminal.’

‘It’s no crime to execute those responsible for heinous deeds.’ Cooper’s voice had imperceptibly tautened. ‘Father was always an honest man. He believed in justice and a firm response to wickedness. Along there … all the way to the end.’

They now faced the meshwork corridor with its hanging cables and rags of lagging. The open spaces beyond it were hidden in funereal gloom.

Farthing all but sobbed aloud.

‘And what wickedness were Nathan Crabtree and his cronies committing?’ Heck asked, starting forward, eyes darting right and left.

‘The mere fact you have to ask that condemns you … but their main fault is simply being who they are.’

‘You don’t share their views? I’m surprised.’

‘Which again shows how little you know, sergeant. Animals like that … they call themselves British. And yet they terrorise the weak, punish the innocent. They call themselves patriots … even though they defame our flag, besmirch our name …’

‘So how’d you do it?’ Heck asked. ‘Lure them to their doom. I’m guessing they didn’t know they had a runner on their hands?’

‘What are you doing?’ Farthing blurted, suddenly jerking out of his tearful reverie. ‘We don’t want to know, okay Mr Cooper? We don’t want to know anything.’

Cooper appeared not to have heard the outburst. ‘I propositioned the two henchmen. Made sexual remarks to them. One while he was using a public lavatory. The other while he was crossing a public park.’

‘As easy as that, eh?’ Heck said.

‘Dumb animals follow their instincts. As for Crabtree, I presented him with certain photographs I’d discovered on the internet. Offered them for sale to him in a pub. I knew he would pursue me for as long as was necessary.’

‘And in each case, when you got to the pre-prepared spot, you just turned around and pulled your Luger?’

‘The brutes are so easy. They were even easier to render unconscious. If your forensics people were ever to examine my khukuri, they’d find as many blood flecks lodged in its lion head hilt as they would in the grooves or bevels of its blade.’

‘They aren’t going to find it, Mr Cooper,’ Farthing said in an attempted manlier tone. ‘You have my word on that. Look … we couldn’t stand Crabtree and his Nazi pals either! We’re glad they’re dead. We weren’t investigating this case very hard …’

‘I’d like to believe you, PC Farthing,’ Cooper said, ‘I really would. But in modern Britain, the establishment – an amoral, drug-addled band born of the 1960s and 1970s, of whom you are the willing servants – have proved numerous times how uninterested they are in finding justice for the oppressed, and in fact have expended much more energy defending the rights of the vile. So no, I don’t believe you.’

Heck said nothing. They were now approaching the end of the meshwork passage, though just before that a sheet of grimy polythene part-hung down overhead.

‘Okay … you don’t like us.’ Farthing’s voice turned whiney again. ‘But what good is killing two bobbies? Look … I’ve got a wife and three daughters! What’s it going to do to them if they never see me again? How will they cope?’

‘Widows and fatherless children were left equally bereft in the years following the war,’ Cooper replied. ‘They managed.’

‘Oh, cut the crap!’ the PC snapped in a strangled tone. He swung sharply round, the eyes bulging like wet marbles in his pallid, frightened face. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it! Don’t bore us with your good old stiff-upper-lip “who-d’you-think-you’re-kidding-Mr-Hitler” bullshit!’

Heck spun around too, taking advantage of the distraction to grab the edge of the hanging polythene and yank the entire thing down; a crumpled mass of water-laden sheeting, which covered their startled captor head to foot.

Cooper didn’t fall beneath the weight of it, but it hampered him and blinded him. He never even saw the rocketing punch that Heck threw at his face, but grunted on impact. There was a splat of scarlet on the other side of the sheeting, and yet he remained upright. Already he was fighting the encumbrance off, levelling his Luger.

‘Leg it!’ Heck shouted, snatching Farthing by the sleeve.

‘What … where to?’

‘Anywhere! Just bloody leg it!’

Chapter 4

They ran together, but in no particular direction. The wilderness of the shop floor lay all around them, littered with rubble – but it was wide open. There was nowhere to duck or hide. Heck glanced back. Cooper was stumbling out from the mesh corridor.

‘Down here!’ Farthing squawked. To the left, a steel stairway dropped through an aperture into dimness.

They descended without thinking. Some ten feet down, it deposited them in a concrete corridor with numerous doors leading off it, though at its farthest end, maybe eighty yards away, there was a smudge of light. They ran towards this, but only seconds later heard the heavy clunking of feet on the stair behind.

‘Oh Christ!’ Farthing gasped.

Passing door after door, they saw nothing but mould-streaked walls, rotted pipe-work. Heck glanced back again. The tall, rangy form of Cooper was pursuing them along the passage, silhouetted on the light seeping down the stair. He was walking rather than running, but with long, loping strides. Heck was confused as to why, in this narrow field of vision, he hadn’t already opened fire. Possibly, just maybe, it was his eyes. Cooper was nearly sixty, and perhaps didn’t have his glasses with him. It was certainly the case that he’d had to get close to his other victims. This gave them a chance, of sorts.

Heck bundled Farthing around the corner onto another shop floor. This one was dimmer than the first, and strewn with further rubble, but still there was nowhere to hide.

‘Oh … shit!’ Farthing stammered.

Heck pushed him towards a double-sized doorway, and beyond this into a tall timber passage that was broad enough for forklift trucks to drive down it. Their footfalls echoed as they hammered along, emerging fifty yards later in what had once been an internal loading bay, a series of concrete platforms abutting into a hangar-like space where HGVs were once accommodated. It was filled with litter and old leaves, and stank of oil.

There was no further access from here. Panting, Heck could only gaze at the huge folding steel doors that separated them from the outside. Again, they heard feet reverberating along the service passage behind.

‘Fuck!’ Farthing hissed.

They scrambled through a smaller-sized doorway on the right, entering a confused sprawl of interconnecting offices and corridors. Again, all were cluttered with rubbish and cross-cut by shafts of light penetrating from various external windows, though most of these had been closed off with corrugated metal. They turned several corners, before blundering into a final room, and finding there was nowhere else to run.

They slid to a halt, sparkling with sweat. Farthing made to double back, but Heck motioned for silence.

Seconds passed as they listened.

Suddenly, there was no other sound.

‘Let’s kick our way out,’ Farthing said, lurching towards the window, which no longer sported glass beneath its metal cladding.

‘Wait!’ Heck whispered.

They froze again. Still there was no sound. Had the maniac lost them? Or was he creeping up even now?

‘Fuck this!’ Farthing said, but Heck grabbed his arm.

‘Just wait! He’s had a couple of chances to pop us, and he hasn’t taken them. It may be he needs to get close.’

‘So?’

‘So hang on! We don’t know how solid that shutter is. It could take us five minutes, and if we make a racket it’ll bring him right to us.’

Farthing licked his lips. ‘You go see where he is … I’ll try and get it loose quietly.’

Heck padded back to the door, stopping alongside a low shelf, on which someone had left a wrench. It was old and rusty, but still satisfyingly heavy. He grabbed it, and peered out into the half-lit corridor. To his left it right-angled out of sight; to his right it ran straight for forty yards before vanishing into shadow. He glanced back, to where Farthing was feeling around the edges of the corrugated metal. With a slight creak, it shifted. The PC gazed at Heck.

‘Couple of kicks and this is gone, I’m telling you!’

Heck motioned to him to wait just a second, and slipped out into the corridor, walking to the nearby corner. Around it, the passage led twenty yards to what looked like a fire-exit. He hurried up there and shoved down on the escape-bar, but there was no budge in it. As he pondered this, there came a series of thundering blows from behind. He knew that it was Farthing – hammering on metal.

He darted back to the corner and around into the main corridor, just in time to see the tall shape of Cooper loom out of the shadows at the far end, gun levelled.

‘You total prat!’ Heck shouted, barging back into the office.

Farthing was still working on the corrugated metal, half of which had been bashed through, though the rest of it wouldn’t shift. ‘Didn’t know where you were!’ he wailed. ‘I thought he’d nabbed you!’

‘Fucking idiot!’ Heck grabbed up an office chair, hurling it through the air.

The impact was cacophonous, and the rest of the corrugated shutter fell away, more dim light spilling inward. Farthing vaulted out through the empty frame first. Heck followed, sensing the figure appear in the office door behind.

‘Oh shit!’ Farthing screamed.

They weren’t outside.

They were in another enclosed space; some kind of garage, empty except for dust and debris. Farthing staggered across it towards a set of double doors, the central cleft of which promised daylight. Heck twirled back to the window. Cooper was framed on the other side, bloody-chinned, gazing along his pistol barrel.

Heck threw the wrench.

It flashed through the air, a spinning blur, and struck its target in the middle of his chest. Cooper went down with a choked gasp and Heck tensed, ready to pounce back through the empty frame and overpower him, but there was no clatter of a firearm dropping loose. So he turned and hurtled across the garage, to where Farthing was throwing his shoulder at the double doors. Heck joined him, left foot first. With a splintering crash, the bolt on the other side gave way. The doors swung open, and fresh air poured in. They tottered out into a yard which seemed to run along the back of the main building and was dotted with the relics of cars and trucks. Another brick wall, maybe twelve feet high, hemmed them in.

‘That way,’ Heck said, pointing left.

About seventy yards in that direction stood a pair of tall wrought-iron gates. They were closed and chained, but there was a gap between the top of the gates and the overarching brickwork. It was a climb, but it wouldn’t be impossible.

Farthing shook his head. ‘N— no … that way!’

He pointed right, where only thirty yards away, beyond the gutted shell of a van, stood a single gate – this one wide open. Some instinct told Heck this was a mistake – but Farthing was already stumbling towards it. Heck followed, glancing over his shoulder. There was still no sign of Cooper. The wrench had caught him a good one; there was even a chance it had done the job for them, but that would be a hell of a gamble.

‘Bloody hell, no!’ Farthing cried. Now that he’d circled the van, he could see through the narrow gate – into a cul-de-sac; a smaller yard encircled by yet another high wall, this one surmounted with shards of glass.

With a creak of hinges, the garage door opened behind them.

Heck snatched Farthing’s collar and dragged him down to his knees, so the wrecked van would fleetingly screen them. He flattened himself on the concrete to gaze underneath it. Cooper’s feet limped into view on the other side. The guy was obviously hurt, limping and breathing heavily; he moved away from the garage slowly, warily – scanning for his prey.

‘Doesn’t give up, like, does he?’ Farthing breathed. He slumped alongside Heck, shoulders pressed back against the crumpled bodywork. His face was pasty-white, and dabbled with beads of hanging sweat. ‘Really … really wants to kill us.’

‘Got no choice,’ Heck mumbled, still watching.

Cooper had advanced about ten yards, and now appeared to be pivoting around. If he ventured right, he’d locate them almost immediately. But if he went left, towards the double-gate, there was a possibility they could sneak into the garage and double back.

Only after several torturous seconds did the gunman make his choice, cautiously edging left. Heck held his breath, though Farthing appeared to be struggling with his. He gave a slow, sharp gasp.

‘Shhh!’ Heck said.

Cooper progressed into the wider yard, checking every nook and cranny.

‘Can you make it back through the building?’ Heck asked, glancing up.

Farthing looked dismayed. ‘All that … all that way again?’

‘I’m guessing he already knows that smaller gate leads nowhere. So he’s covering the other one. He’s got us bottled up in here. All he needs to do now is find us. We’ve got to make a run for it.’

‘I don’t know …’ Farthing shook his head, clutching the side of his chest. ‘I don’t know if it’s my heart, but …’

‘Your heart?’

Fresh sweat streamed down the older PC’s face; he wasn’t so much white now, as green. ‘Something’s wrong. I’m not in shape … as you’ve probably seen.’

Heck glanced back under the vehicle. Cooper’s legs were a considerable distance away – maybe sixty yards. If he was short-sighted, that might be an adequate distance for them to chance it. But now Farthing had a problem with his heart …?

‘It never bloody rains,’ Heck said under his breath. He glanced back up. ‘And you’ve got a wife and three daughters, haven’t you?’

Farthing nodded and swallowed, his brow tightly furrowed.

Heck sighed and made his decision. ‘If I can get back inside and leg it through the interior, it may draw him away. If I manage that, can you at least make it to that double-gate over there?’

‘Don’t know if I’ll be able to climb over it …’

‘Jerry … rough as you may feel, you’re going to have to do something. The SAS aren’t going to turn up!’

Farthing looked agonised by the choice he was facing, but finally nodded. ‘Suppose I’ve … more chance getting over that gate than of making it all the way back through this place … especially if you’ve drawn him off. But … what if you get lost in there? He knows his way around!’

Heck shrugged. ‘Chance I’ll have to take.’

‘A bloody hell of a chance!’

‘Least there’s no one at home who’s going to miss me.’

Heck glanced under the van again – Cooper had reached the far end of the yard. It was now or never. He turned to Farthing and offered his hand. Farthing at first looked surprised, but then nodded and gripped it, his palm moist, clammy.

Heck got up and ran, bombing the short distance towards the garage.

It hadn’t been so complex a route through the old factory, he was sure – but he couldn’t picture it easily. All he could do was keep going – and yet that resolve faltered when he was halfway over and spied the tall shape of Cooper sprinting back towards him. Heck had the brief, crazy notion to swerve away from the garage and barrel straight at the nutter, taking him down with a head-on rugby tackle. But no … all the bastard needed was proximity. The second he got Heck in range, he’d shoot.

So thinking, Heck veered into the garage. The window yawned ahead of him, and he was so pumped with adrenaline that he felt he could dive straight through it. Maybe get hold of the wrench again, maybe peg it at Cooper a second time, wind him even more badly …

He tripped.

His toe caught on the corrugated sheet when he was ten feet short of his goal. He went sprawling forward, landing hard, the palms of his hands grinding over the glass-strewn concrete, his jaw striking it with dizzying force.

Struggling against grogginess, Heck rolled over onto his back – only to see the rangy form of Cooper come ghosting through the gloom of the garage and stop about three feet away. Despite his exertions, the oldster looked remarkably cool; aside from the sweat on his brow and dabs of dried blood on his chin, he was amazingly unflustered. He’d drawn the khukuri, and now raised it aloft with one hand. With the other, he pointed his Luger down at Heck.

‘For all the trouble you’ve put me to, sergeant,’ he said, ‘I still regret this. You were a worthier opponent than the others. Please take that as a compliment.’

And he fired.

Or tried to. It was the aged, internally rusted mechanism that betrayed him. It detonated in his fist with a blinding blot of flame and a clung of rending metal.

Heck blinked and flinched as hot fragments scattered over him: splinters of scalding metal, and flecks of softer, wetter material. His heart almost skipped a beat as he lay there, but he was unhurt. Warily, he opened his eyes again – to find that Cooper was still on his feet, but white-faced, and glassy-eyed. Only slowly did he twist his head around to survey the smouldering lump of meat where his right hand had once been. Ironically, what remained of the gun was still present, dangling from his sole remaining finger, though that was more bone than flesh.

The knife fell to the floor with a clatter, but the shriek of agony rising in Cooper’s chest didn’t get a chance to erupt before Heck had sprung upright and rammed two heavy punches into his lower body. The third caught Cooper in the mouth, and knocked his head spinning.

‘I don’t often hit the afflicted,’ Heck said, circling as the guy tottered, and then firing in a fourth and a fifth blow, the latter hurling the gunman senseless to the ground. ‘But at least it’s the kind of firm response your dad would have appreciated.’

‘I guess I’m somewhat diminished in your eyes,’ Farthing said.

Heck glanced around. He stood by the garage door, sipping coffee from a paper beaker. His clothes were still damp, the palms of his hands stinging where they’d been skinned, though a couple of light dressings had since been applied. The factory yard was alive with radio static and filled with police vehicles, their blues and twos swirling in slow, lazy patterns. The ambulance carrying Ernest Cooper, now cuffed safely to one of DI Higginson’s oppos, pulled slowly away through the open double-gate. The DI herself followed in an unmarked car.

Farthing, still pale around the gills, clutched his hat to his belly – a vaguely sheepish gesture. His expression was tense, worried.

‘Diminished?’ Heck still had half an eye on the garage interior, where the firearms team, who, having made safe the bloody tangle of metal that had once been the Luger, had picked it up with a pair of forceps and were feeding it into a sterile sack.

‘Well if I’m not, I should be. I was shit scared.’

‘You think I wasn’t?’ Heck replied.

‘Aye … but you kept it together. Me … I just sat there, like.’ Farthing’s cheeks reddened. ‘Didn’t know what to do. Just sat there, waiting for it.’

Heck shrugged. ‘You were tired … and you weren’t feeling so good.’

‘That’s another thing. There was nothing wrong with me.’

He let that point hang, waiting nervously for Heck’s response – which, when it came, was no more than a raised eyebrow.

‘I know I’m not fit,’ Farthing said. ‘Let’s face it, I’m a fat bastard … I couldn’t have run much longer. But I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was just paralysed with fear. I’d have done anything to get you to take the risk … while I sat it out.’

Heck shrugged again. ‘My head was scrambled too. I’d already figured he couldn’t see very well. I mentioned that his gun was probably kaput … the odds would likely have been better if I’d just taken him on.’

‘What a thought.’ Farthing shuddered – he’d already vomited once, not long after support units had arrived; briefly, Heck thought he was going to do it again. ‘Taken him on? A madman like him?’

‘It’s about survival,’ Heck said. ‘If you’re worried you let me down, Jerry, you didn’t. Your wife and daughters are more important to you than I am … course they are. No one would argue with that.’

‘That’s the other thing.’ Now Farthing really did avert his gaze. ‘I haven’t got a wife and daughters. Haven’t even got a girlfriend. I mean, face it … who’d have me?’

Heck regarded him long and hard, too tired to voice the brief, fierce annoyance he suddenly felt.

Farthing shrugged as he watched the ground, shuffling his feet. ‘Might as well own up to it now. We’ll be living in each other’s pockets for the next few days, getting the story straight. Bulldog’ll be all over us …’

‘And I’d learn the truth from someone else?’ Heck said. ‘And as a result, I might inadvertently let it slip how you behaved back there? So even though you’re coming clean now, you’re not exactly doing it for honourable reasons, are you?’

But just as quickly as his anger had risen, it subsided again. Shouting and kicking-off would serve no purpose now. Plus he had no energy for it.

‘It was just chat,’ the PC added unnecessarily. ‘I was trying to save my own arse.’

‘Well … it worked. In a roundabout sort of way. Don’t knock it.’

‘I’m sorry, like.’

‘Let’s just say you owe me one.’

‘I’m sorry about something else too.’ Farthing blew out a long, weary breath. ‘Sorry that I don’t have anyone to go home to. First time I’ve ever thought that … just about now, that little house of mine is going to feel a bit empty.’

‘We’ve got our lives, haven’t we?’ Heck grunted. ‘Bloody hell, Jerry, we can’t expect everything.’

Chapter 5

It was another of those mid-September nights that left you in no doubt autumn had arrived. Darkness came early, and with the darkness an unseasonal chill. The trees were still in plumage, but strengthening winds rattled their dank branches, whipping their leaves, sending black, cavorting shadows along rain-damp city streets.

Heck saw none of this as he drove his white Citroën DS4 into the personnel car park at New Scotland Yard. He’d travelled all the way from Sunderland that afternoon without taking a break: nearly two hundred and fifty miles.

Sallow-faced and unshaved, wearing jeans, trainers and a sweatshirt, he made his way upstairs to the Serial Crimes Unit offices, which, as he’d expected at nine o’clock in the evening, were largely unmanned.

The first person he met was DCI Ben Kane, who, having recently been promoted from DI, was now second-in-command at SCU. While overall boss, DSU Gemma Piper, was engaged on other matters, he was currently running all day-to-day operations, including the delegation and supervision of routine assignments. He was a squat, bespectacled forty-year-old, whose sensible short hair, tweed jacket and chequered bow-tie gave him a nerdish air. Heck had always regarded Kane sceptically, thinking he seemed more like a teacher than a senior investigator in one of the Yard’s frontline units – his unofficial nickname in SCU was ‘Schoolmaster Ben’ – but on the upside, as deputy-gaffer, Kane’s role here was now mainly administrative, which meant he’d be out of their hair a lot more.

Kane was closing up his briefcase when he spotted Heck approaching along the central corridor. He regarded him quizzically. ‘You back already?’

Heck shrugged. ‘Cooper’s on remand, guv, awaiting trial … all my arrest papers are in. Job done.’

‘Yeah, I’ve read the file. Not your most straightforward arrest.’

‘No … got there in the end, though.’

‘This lad, Jerry Farthing. You’ll be on the witness stand with him. He up to it?’

In his arrest report, Heck had downplayed PC Farthing’s loss of control on the day in question, but there’d been no way to hide the Sunderland bobby’s ineptitude when it came to the cat-and-mouse game they’d been forced to play with Ernest Cooper, not to mention the actual arrest.

Heck shrugged again. ‘He’s a bit of a headcase, if I’m honest. Not sure he’s long for this job. But I’ve had a couple of sessions with him … to get the facts straight. Think he’ll be okay.’

Kane shoved his briefcase under his arm. ‘Do you always have to do things the hard way?’ It wasn’t as harsh a question as it sounded. Kane seemed genuinely fascinated to know.

‘We pull them in any way we can, guv. You know that.’

‘Well … Northumbria are happy. These are the results we want, I suppose. Well done.’

Kane nodded and continued down the corridor to the lifts. Heck slouched on through the department. One or two individuals were around, finishing paperwork, waiting on phone calls and such, but the Detectives’ Office, or ‘DO’ as SCU members preferred to call it, was deserted.

He humped his sports bag, currently stuffed with miscellaneous toiletries and unwashed clothing, over to his desk, dumped it in the aisle and slumped into his swivel chair, which, having moulded itself neatly to his buttocks over so many years, was such a relief that it induced an audible sigh.

Heck stretched, switched on his anglepoise lamp, then unlocked one of his lower drawers and rummaged through the bric-a-brac for the half-full bottle of Chivas Regal he usually kept in there. Grabbing a mug from the tea-making table behind, he was about to pour himself a couple of fingers when he noticed Gemma Piper leaning in the doorway.

‘Ma’am …’ he said, making to stand up.

Gemma gestured for him to sit. She looked as tired as he felt, which was not her normal form. Her top two buttons were undone, her sleeves rolled back to her elbows, one blouse flap hanging over the waistband of her skirt. She still looked good of course, but then she always looked good to Heck.

‘Dare I ask what you’re doing here?’ she said.

‘Well … I’m not needed back in the Northeast until the trial, so I thought I’d come home for a bit.’

She arched a pencil-thin eyebrow. ‘Heck … you consider this place home?’

‘It’s a bit functional, but SCU are the only family I’ve got, so … yeah.’

‘Bloody drama queen.’ She entered, suppressing a yawn. ‘Unfortunately, there’s only me here at present.’

‘Don’t worry, ma’am … you’ll do.’

‘You’ve already got a big sister, Heck.’

‘Who’s talking about a sister?’

She regarded him coolly, until he refocused on the whisky bottle, carefully unscrewing its lid.

He glanced up. ‘You mind?’

‘You’re off duty … why should I?’

‘Fancy one?’

‘I’m on duty, I’m afraid.’ Gemma leaned back against the facing desk, while he poured the golden spirit. ‘Sounds like we almost lost you?’

‘Nah, you’re not that lucky.’

She paused for a lengthy moment. ‘Want to talk about it?’

‘It’s okay. It’s just the streets.’ He sipped, unable to conceal the pleasure it gave him. ‘They get dicey.’

She nodded, respecting that. ‘So … Cooper’s banged to rights?’

‘Sure is, but I’ll be amazed if he doesn’t go down for diminished capacity.’

‘They’re already making that call, are they?’

‘No, but he’s evidently three sheets to the wind.’

‘You think?’

‘Do you want to know what I really think, ma’am?’ Heck sat back, puffed out his cheeks. ‘For the first time, I think it’s shades of grey.’

She frowned. ‘This case?’

‘This job. It happens more than we may realise. Some things about Ernie Cooper made him okay. He believed in decency, justice. He had that wartime generation attitude off pat …’

‘Except that he wasn’t of that generation. He just wished he was.’

‘Those guys he murdered were out-and-out scumbags.’

‘They were sadistic crimes, Heck. Cooper enjoyed killing those men … I read that in your own progress report. Plus it was premeditated. Plus he was going to kill you.’

‘I could have been the last casualty of World War Two,’ Heck mused, smiling at the curious thought.

Gemma smiled too – which was a rarity and a treat.

She was famous in the job for her good looks, but also for her efficient and authoritative manner. As head of SCU, Gemma didn’t tolerate fools or slackers. She ran an elite department, which alternately made her proud and frustrated. They were only as good as their worst failure, she would say. She didn’t like loose ends or open cases. She demanded regular results and hard work, but in return would defend her staff to the death if she felt they were in the right. All over Scotland Yard, they called her ‘the Lioness’ – as much for her willingness to scrap as for her wild blonde mane. Gemma didn’t mind that, so long as it was never to her face.

In the past, when they’d been junior detectives working together at Bethnal Green, she and Heck had been lovers. It seemed an age ago from his perspective, but he’d been in her proximity ever since, and it never ceased to enthuse him – in various ways. She drove him mad on occasion and their former relationship had never meant that she wouldn’t severely discipline him if necessary; but she set the standards he aspired to, and yet would still tolerate the instinct and imagination he brought to his investigations, because she also knew the value of those who thought outside the box.

In the words of Gemma’s own mother: ‘They were two peas in a pod; who on earth had thought it a good idea to shell them?’

‘You say you’re on duty,’ Heck said. ‘At this time?’

‘Rochester paperwork,’ she replied. ‘Interpol don’t keep the same hours we do.’

Heck tried not to let the mere mention of the name Peter Rochester – or Mad Mike Silver as he was more often known – ruffle his feathers. He poured more whisky, drank it in a gulp. ‘He may be in Gull Rock, but they say the lifers there get it easy these days.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘I hear they’ve even given him a Malacca cane to walk around with. Like he’s some kind of plantation owner.’

‘He’s crippled,’ she said. ‘So he needs a stick. To deny him that would be to deny him his basic human rights.’

Heck snorted as he drained his mug. ‘Human rights … he’s lucky he wasn’t in Gull Rock fifty years ago, when it was all treadmills and whipping-posts.’

‘Take it from me, Heck, there isn’t much happens around Mad Mike Silver that has anything to do with luck.’

‘Is he still stonewalling you?’

‘What else?’

‘So he hasn’t even dropped any of the bit-players our way yet … like Jim Laycock for instance?’

‘Even if he had, which he hasn’t – because the Laycock link is a total non-starter, Heck – I wouldn’t tell you.’

‘And no leads on Nice Guys’ underbosses overseas? Nice Guys’ operational bases? Dumping grounds for Nice Guys’ victims in the Baltic, the Med, the Caspian …?’

‘Heck, stop … okay!’

‘Well, you know my feelings on Mad Mike …’

‘Course I do. Which is why you’re going nowhere near him. Ever again.’

Heck put his bottle away, took his mug to the sink and washed it. ‘We’re all law-abiding people in here, ma’am.’ He grabbed up the few bits of paperwork he’d actually come in for, and crammed them into his sports bag. ‘We have a system, and we stick to it. We respect all human life – that’s why we do what we do.’ He headed for the DO door, turning once before leaving. ‘But there are definitely times when a lamppost and a good piece of rope wouldn’t go amiss.’

Gemma let that pass, nodding as he waved goodbye and listening to his footfalls recede down the corridor. Eventually, after the lift doors had slid shut, she walked back to her own office, where she closed the door behind her and stood staring at the mobile phone on her desk. Waiting tensely for a call which, in all honesty, she hoped would never come.

Chapter 6

It was just before midnight on September 19 when alarm sirens began sounding through the concrete corridors of the medical wing at HM Prison Brancaster, amber lights flashing at each electronically sealed checkpoint, the wards going into lockdown as the officers’ hobnailed boots hammered up and down stairs and gangways.

Medical emergencies were not uncommon in a jail where the inmates were exclusively the most volatile and unstable in the penal system. Despite Gull Rock’s tough but on-the-whole progressive regime, violent assaults among prisoners were a daily event, suicides occurred with regularity, and homicides were not infrequent. On top of that, there was grave ill-health: STDs were transmitted widely, while drugs were still smuggled in and often led to ODs; there were also a number of older men housed there – full-term lifers now in their seventies and eighties.

The upshot was that, though medical staff responded swiftly and efficiently if they thought someone might die, staff from other parts of the prison almost never came running.

Until now.

Until word got around that the casualty on this occasion was Inmate 87156544, real name Peter Rochester, also known as ‘Mad Mike Silver’.

For quite some time, Peter Rochester had been Britain’s unofficial Public Enemy Number One, and where the tabloids were concerned, a hate-figure on a par with Osama bin Laden. Even the chattering classes, those who habitually attempted to grapple with the psychology of ultra-dangerous offenders rather than condemn them outright, had difficulty finding anything positive to say about him. The problem was Rochester’s intellect. He wasn’t some drooling madman; he wasn’t bipolar; he wasn’t schizophrenic; he didn’t have mummy issues. He was quite clearly a psychopath – but of the most organised and calculating variety. To start with he was aloof and confident, unfazed by the extreme emotions he aroused among his fellow inmates, amused by the frustrations of his captors. He could withstand the fiercest interrogations; he didn’t respond to threats, bribes or trickery, never giving anything away unless it served his purpose. As such, any information the authorities had accrued on Rochester was paper-thin. Even his basic background remained sketchy; his full list of criminal activities was incomplete, his catalogue of known associates empty. It was some considerable time after he was first incarcerated before the British police were even able to establish his true identity.

Rochester, it was now known, was a British national, a native of the Home Counties, who, having been rejected by the British Army on medical grounds when he was still only seventeen, joined the French Foreign Legion, later seeing action in Bosnia, Kosovo and Ivory Coast, and impressing in almost every theatre. It was only afterwards, when he felt he’d risen as far as he could in one of the world’s official military elites, that he became a mercenary soldier and in due course an international criminal, peddling drugs, guns and even human cargo, and finally forming the so-called ‘Nice Guys Club’.

The subsequent British investigation into this previously unknown organisation uncovered evidence that was almost too horrific for words. The Nice Guys’ modus operandi was alarmingly simple: for seventy-five thousand pounds a shot, they would abduct any woman a paying client nominated, and provide a safe, private space where said client could rape and abuse her to his heart’s desire. The Club would provide the necessary security, and undertook to dispose of all the evidence afterwards, including the woman – none of their victims were known to have survived.

The case was finally broken by one Scotland Yard detective in particular, DS Mark Heckenburg of the Serial Crimes Unit, though he was shot and almost killed in the process. The Nice Guys also suffered fatalities – five died in total, but despite this, and despite the conviction of Peter Rochester, there was dissatisfaction at various levels: the Club’s numerous British-based clients got away scot-free thanks to the untimely disappearance of some very vital evidence, whilst Heck himself was never convinced the Nice Guys had all been accounted for, especially those he suspected of running parallel operations overseas. A series of internal investigations at Scotland Yard attempted to ascertain the reason why a general police response to the crisis had been so slow to emerge, and finally punished those senior officers deemed culpable for this – but that didn’t make anyone especially happy.

The key to everything, of course, was Peter Rochester – now serving a full-life term in Britain’s toughest high-security prison, and yet increasingly a man with leverage. Heck’s comments about the possible existence of foreign Nice Guys Clubs hadn’t gone unnoticed, and Interpol and Europol were now handling daily communiqués from police forces across the world concerned about their own extensive lists of inexplicably vanished women. It was anyone’s guess whether Rochester would eventually play ball, so when he’d gone into apparent cardiac arrest without warning, Gull Rock had suffered a collective nervous breakdown.

Though medical staff managed to stabilise him, he’d now slipped into a coma, and the next response was to have him transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn, where there was a fully equipped cardiology unit.

Transfer of any prisoner beyond prison walls when he was deemed as high-risk as Peter Rochester was a complex task, and would almost always fall to SOCAR, Scotland Yard’s specialised Serious Offenders Control and Retrieval division. By pure good fortune, an armed SOCAR unit was on-site at the time, having just returned several members of a notorious gang of London blaggers to Gull Rock, after supervising a day out for them at the Old Bailey.

Chief Inspector Andy Braithwaite had tactical command. He was a rugged Yorkshireman with lean, pitted features, a shaven head and a huge handlebar moustache. A former Royal Marine, even at forty-seven he was wiry and fit, and suited his Kevlar body armour with POLICE plastered across the back of it. If he ever drew the Glock nine-millimetre that he wore at his hip, you’d have no doubt – and you’d be right – that he was ready, willing and able to use it.

Braithwaite listened intently, chewing gum, while Maxine Mulgrave, Security Governor at Gull Rock, outlined the circumstances to him in the outside corridor connecting to the prison infirmary. ‘The ambulance has got here already, but obviously we need an escort urgently,’ she said, pale-faced. ‘You couldn’t have come at a better time.’

‘We’re ready to go now,’ Braithwaite said, affecting his usual nonchalant air when taking custody of an offender whose potential for wreaking havoc registered on the seismic scale. ‘I’ve got two gunships, containing six men each. We’re all kitted out for a spin.’

‘Good. There’s no time to waste.’

And within less than ten minutes, just after midnight, an armoured cavalcade left HM Prison Brancaster, bound for King’s Lynn, a journey of just under thirty miles. Two motorcyclists from the Norfolk and Suffolk Road Traffic Unit, who’d accompanied the SOCAR team on their initial journey to the prison with the blaggers, now rode at the point. Next came the SOCAR command car, a sleek high-performance BMW, white but covered with bright orange flashes, asterisks and other insignia to enable friendly forces to identify it quickly. The two gunships came next – heavily armoured troop-carriers bearing similar markings to their command vehicle, both filled with highly trained, heavily armed men, though an ordinary civilian ambulance, containing prison staff as well as two medics and the actual casualty, was sandwiched between them.

‘Road should be clear enough at this time of night,’ Braithwaite said to his number two, Sergeant Ray Mulligan, a burly, bull-necked former rugby player with a battered face and a blond crew-cut, who was wedged behind the BMW’s wheel.

Mulligan merely grunted.

The coastal road from Gull Rock wasn’t a coastal road as such – it curved inland around the edge of the North Norfolk coast, but it was hemmed in from the north and east by mile upon mile of barren saltmarsh. It was a desolate enough scene by day, but now, in the pitch dark, there was an awesome blackness broken only occasionally by sentinel streetlamps, these usually located at sharp turns or unexpected bends. To the right, where the marshes lay, was a solid void with only tiny pips of light to denote the fishing boats out on the Wash. At least the road was high speed. Sightseers almost never had cause to drive along here, so though it was narrow and inclined to weave, the cavalcade proceeded at a steady fifty miles an hour.

‘How’s he doing?’ Braithwaite asked his mobile phone.

‘No change,’ came the tinny voice of the prison officer riding in the ambulance. ‘We need to get there soon.’

‘ETA twenty-five,’ Braithwaite said.

Mulligan grunted and continued driving, the reddish glow of the motorcyclists’ tail-lights reflecting on his tough but solemn features.

Braithwaite checked his watch. Everything was going to plan so far.

They’d proceeded about ten miles, but were still in the midst of marshy desolation, when the motorcyclists flashed their hazard lights and started slowing down.

Braithwaite’s eyes narrowed. He felt for his Glock, but then reached for his radio instead, passing a quick message to the team in the first gunship. ‘Possible hold-up ahead. Everyone stay loose … looks like an RTA.’

Mulligan worked down through the gears. ‘See something, guv?’

Braithwaite pointed. A wrecked vehicle emerged into view on the road ahead, framed in the glare of the motorcyclists’ headlamps: a white Peugeot 106, lying skewwhiff across both carriageways, upside down. Its front end had caved in, and a column of steam rose from its exposed engine. Braithwaite checked his wing mirror as, one by one, the other vehicles in the cavalcade slowed to a halt.

In front, the two motorcyclists pulled one to either side of the road, and quickly dismounted. It was now evident that a body lay on the blacktop alongside the upended wreck. It wore jeans and a tracksuit top, but by its slim form and mass of splayed-out golden hair, it was a young woman. The immediate signs weren’t good – she lay motionless and face-down in a spreading pool of blood.

‘Shit!’ Mulligan said, grabbing for his radio. ‘This has only just happened …’

‘Wait!’ Braithwaite signalled for caution, before opening the front passenger door and climbing out.

‘Guv, what’re you …?’

‘Don’t touch her!’ Braithwaite hollered at the two motorcyclists.

Both had removed their helmets and knelt down alongside the casualty, checking for vital signs. The first glanced around at the commander, startled. But the second had seen something else. ‘Oh Christ …’

Braithwaite walked forward, his gaze riveted on the arm of a second casualty, broken and bloodstained, protruding through the Peugeot’s imploded windscreen. He halted, before swivelling around and peering back down the length of the cavalcade. SOCAR Sergeant Alan Montgomery was climbing from the cab of the first gunship. Unlike his gaffer, he was helmeted, but his visor was raised. He evidently couldn’t see what had happened, and was seeking an explanation.

But Braithwaite was too bewildered to offer one. ‘This … for real?’ he muttered, glancing to the front again, and noting with a deep chill the trickles of blood coagulating on the tarmac.

Mulligan, who’d also climbed from the command car, joined him. ‘Guv?’

‘I thought …’ Braithwaite stuttered. ‘I mean …’

‘Sir …?’ one of the motorcyclists interrupted. ‘We need to …’

Which was when the roadside explosive concealed near the rear of the cavalcade detonated with a volcano-like BOOM.

They spun around, eyes bugged, faces lit brightly by the searing, fiery flash.

The noise alone was agony on the ears – a devastating roar accentuated by a twisting and rending of steel as the second gunship was flung over on the blacktop, reduced in less than a second to a smoking mass of blistered scrap. They tottered where they stood, red-hot shards raining down around them, too stunned to respond.

At a single guttural command, the darkness came alive, spangled with blistering, cruciform gun-flashes. An echoing din of automatic gunfire accompanied it.

Sergeant Montgomery was the first to go down, flopping to his knees, both hands clutched on his groin, jack-knifing backwards as more rounds struck his face and upper body. But only as the first gunship began jerking and shuddering to repeated high-velocity impacts did it actually strike Braithwaite they were under attack.

He and his men had been through all the specialist training programmes. They were tough and experienced, routinely armed; an elite cadre within the British police. High-risk prisoner transport was their forte; pursuit and capture of fugitives and escaped convicts their bread and butter.

But anyone can be taken by surprise.

The first gunship’s immediate reaction was to get the hell out, but its cab was already so peppered with lead that its supposedly bulletproof windshield collapsed inward, and it skidded and slammed into the back of the command car, which, as it was also armoured, wasn’t shunted sufficiently to allow it through.

And still Braithwaite and Mulligan could only stand there, rounds whining past them like a swarm of rocket-propelled hornets.

With a dull metallic clinking, two small objects came dancing out of the darkness and across the road surface. Braithwaite watched them incredulously as they rolled to a halt by the front offside of the first gunship.

Hand grenades.

They detonated simultaneously.

Their combined explosion was not adequate to throw the heavy troop-carrier over onto its side. It was a smidgen of the power applied by the IED that had done for the second gunship, but it mangled the driving cab, in which Montgomery’s sidekick was still taking shelter, blowing out all its windows, shredding the guy in a hailstorm of glass and metal. The rearmost section buckled with the force, the blazing gunfire increasingly ripping through its reinforced bodywork.

Braithwaite was still helpless, still frozen – unable to comprehend the unfolding events. When a brutal implement smashed without warning into the back of his unguarded skull, sending him reeling to the floor, it might almost have been expected. There was a resounding thud as Mulligan suffered the same fate.

The blacktop backhanded the side of the chief inspector’s face, yet somehow he retained consciousness, and despite the hot red glue dripping through his vision, found himself staring again down the length of the cavalcade, against which numerous figures were now moving, having emerged from the darkness on the right. Some were attacking the ambulance by hand, working with tools on its battered doors, prying them open. Others were still shooting – particularly down at the far end, Braithwaite realised, which meant they were drilling bullets through the burning, blasted scrap remaining of the second gunship, finishing off any poor devils who hadn’t yet been turned to a mess of meat and bone. Though dazed, Braithwaite was struck with wonderment at the variety of reports issuing from the weapons on view. But one was louder than the others: a repeated deafening clatter, as though a dozen men were beating iron frames with hammers.

He craned his neck up, blinking through the crimson stickiness. And he saw it.

A Hotchkiss Portable Mark 1 machine gun, already fixed on its tripod and with a two-man crew operating it – one to fire, one to feed the belt. It was on the road to the rear of the first gunship. Stupefied as Braithwaite was, a terrible understanding struck him. With no other choice, the surviving SOCAR team – so well armoured, so expertly trained – would have extracted their MP5 assault rifles from the safe in the troop-carrier’s floor, and would now be disembarking from their vehicle in ‘stick’ fashion, as they’d rehearsed so many times – straight into that focused fusillade, the stream of red-hot .303 slugs cutting through them like a buzzsaw.

‘No … pleeease …’ screamed a shrill voice behind.

Though it required a heart-straining effort, Braithwaite managed to roll over and look the other way. His eyes alighted on Sergeant Mulligan, lying face-down, a wound like an axe-chop in the middle of his stiff blond crew-cut. But he also saw their assailants, for the first time up close: ski-masked, gloved, wearing dark combat clothing. They stood around on the road in no particular formation, talking idly, dressing their smouldering weapons down.

‘Tavor TAR-21 … Beretta MX4 …’ he mumbled, eyes flickering from one gun to the next. ‘Chang Feng … SR-2 Veresk … SIG-Sauer MPX … Mini-Uzi …’

No doubt it was the stock of one of these that had crashed against his cranium, and Mulligan’s too … but in Christ’s name, this was a devil’s brew of hardware! Where had the necessity arisen to pack such firepower?

Behind him, meanwhile, the heavy machine gun had ceased to discharge. One by one, the other, lesser arms also fell silent … so now he could hear additional voices. These too sounded relaxed, some were even chuckling. It was over, the fight was won – and they were enjoying the moment.

‘Pleeease …’ the frantic voice cried again.

Ahead, a small clutch of gunmen pushed and kicked the two Norfolk motorcyclists across the road. The motorbike cops hadn’t been armed to begin with, and had now been stripped of their helmets and hi-viz jackets; their faces were badly bloodied.

‘Into the ditch,’ said a casual voice.

The ambushers did as instructed, shoving the motorcyclists down into a muddy hollow running along the verge, where they were told to sit and keep their hands behind their heads. None of this made sense, Braithwaite tried to tell himself. This was ridiculous, insane …

One man in particular emerged from the ambushers’ ranks. He too wore gloves and dark khaki, while an assault rifle – an L85 – was suspended over his shoulder by a strap. But he was more noticeable than the others, because if he’d been wearing a woollen balaclava before, he had now removed it – which was never a good sign. He was somewhere in his late thirties, with smooth, clean-shaved features and a head of tousled sandy hair.

Braithwaite tried to swallow a spreading nausea as the man strode up to him and peered down, almost boyishly handsome and yet with an ugly right-angled scar on his left cheek. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. His accent was vaguely Scandinavian.

‘B … Braithwaite …’

‘You command here?’

Braithwaite tried to nod, but the pain in his head was turning feverish and the vision in his right eye blurring. He had a horrible suspicion his skull was fractured. ‘My … my sergeant,’ he stammered, indicating Mulligan’s body, though another of the ambushers was already kneeling beside it.

The kneeling man glanced up and shook his head with casual indifference.

‘Make sure,’ the Scandinavian said.

A pistol appeared – an Arcus 94, and three quick shots rang out, each one directed into the back of Mulligan’s already shattered skull.

‘What …’ Braithwaite tried to speak, but phlegm-filled vomit frothed from his mouth. ‘What the … the fuck do you think you’re … what the fuck …?’

‘Put him with the others.’ There was no anger in the Scandinavian’s voice, but it was firm. It brooked no resistance.

Braithwaite was taken by the elbow and yanked to his feet. He went dizzy, pain arcing down his spine, and had to be forcibly held upright while they patted him down. His Glock, the only weapon he was carrying, was confiscated and he was walked – though it was all he could do to stumble – across the road, and dumped down into the ditch alongside the motorcycle cops, both sitting hunched forward, hands behind their heads. There were others there as well: the two prison staff and the two medics from the ambulance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, but no less horribly, there was no one from either complement of men who’d been riding in the gunships.

Fleetingly it seemed as if the hostages were forgotten, some of their captors keeping half an eye on them, but the rest moving back and forth along the cavalcade, which was now a scene of unprecedented carnage, the police vehicles reduced virtually to wreckage. There was still fire and smoke, and a stench of burning flesh. The crew from the first gunship lay in shapeless bundles, rivers of blood crisscrossing the road on all sides of them. The ambushers stepped into and around this without any concern.

Braithwaite, who thought he’d been about to faint as they’d steered him towards the ditch, had now recovered his composure a little. He eyed the ambushers as closely as he could. For the most part they were nondescript even in their urban terror gear, the masks rendering them indistinguishable from one another. They seemed fit and organised, and something else was now clear – they were multinational. They openly conversed, and though it was all in English, he heard various accents – one was Cockney, another sounded Russian, another Australian; in another case, he detected a twang of the USA.

The thing was, they were so calm. The men they’d just mowed down were on-duty cops – at least some of them might have got radio messages out, and yet these guys were walking around as if they had all the time in the world. But then, maybe they did. The nearest place was still the prison, but that was ten miles away, and no help could be expected from there anyway. It was easily another twenty miles before the next area of conurbation, but what use was that? This prison transport had been kept well under wraps. The best they could hope for was a response by routine unarmed patrols – but how could they cope with a situation like this? With such overwhelming firepower?

A sudden clanking of gears drew his attention elsewhere. A monstrous vehicle, previously hidden in the darkness beyond the smashed Peugeot, rumbled to life, a battery of brilliant headlights glaring out from it. Slowly and noisily, a bulldozer came shuddering into view, its huge steel digging-blade canted downward. It briefly halted, but when orders were shouted by the Scandinavian, it altered direction and continued apace, connecting with the Peugeot, and with a clangour of grinding metal, shoving it sideways across the road. Braithwaite’s injured scalp tightened as he watched the massive mud-caked tracks pass over the body of the fair-haired girl, crushing her flat, pulped organs splurging outward.

When the wreck had been thrust across the ditch and into the marshy blackness on the other side, the dozer straightened up and halted on the verge, its engine chugging. A second vehicle emerged from the darkness behind it, this one reversing. It was an everyday high-sided van, but its sliding rear door was already open and inside Braithwaite glimpsed the sterile whiteness of an improvised medical chamber. It bypassed the prisoners and continued down the bullet-riddled ruins of the cavalcade, finally stopping next to the ambulance.

With great care, several of the ambushers lifted the prone shape of Peter Rochester, now on a wheeled gurney, neck-deep in woollen blankets, from the back of the ambulance, and placed him into the van. One of them climbed in after him, carrying his drip. With a clang, the sliding door was closed, and the prisoner’s new transport jerked away, accelerating up the road and vanishing into the night. About fifty yards ahead, on either side of the tarmac, other vehicles now throbbed to life, their headlight beams cross-cutting the dark in a shimmering lattice.

The ambushers sloped idly in that direction, guns at their shoulders, chatting. There was no triumphalism, no urgency – they’d got what they came for, and the job was done. The sandy-haired Scandinavian strode among them.

‘Are you … are you maniacs out of your minds?’ Braithwaite couldn’t resist shouting. ‘What the hell do you think you’ve done here? Do you really think you’ll get away with this?’

Almost casually, the Scandinavian diverted towards the ditch side, a couple of his comrades accompanying him. ‘A timely intervention, Mr Braithwaite … I almost left without saying goodbye.’

He and his compatriots cocked their guns and levelled them.

Braithwaite could only stare, goggle-eyed.

The rest of the captives begged, wept, whimpered.

All came to nothing in the ensuing hail of fire.

Chapter 7

Heck was seated in his favourite breakfast bar at the bottom end of Fulham Palace Road, waiting for eggs Benedict, when his eyes strayed from his morning paper and happened to catch a breaking-news bulletin on the portable TV at the end of the counter.

Thanks to the twisted metal coat-hanger serving as the TV’s aerial, the image continually flickered, but Heck, slumped at the nearest table, was too close to avoid the photographic mug-shot that suddenly appeared on the screen. It portrayed a man in his late thirties or early forties. He was handsome, with a square jaw, a straight, patrician nose and a mop of what looked like prematurely greying hair. Even though the shot had clearly been taken in custody, he wore a sly but subtle grin.

Heck sat bolt upright.

‘Rochester,’ the newscaster intoned, ‘who was convicted of abducting and murdering thirty-eight women across the whole of England and Wales, was serving life at Brancaster Prison when he developed chest pains late yesterday afternoon. It was during his subsequent transfer to hospital when the incident occurred …’

The scene switched to an isolated road, possibly on the coast somewhere, though a barricade of police vehicles with beacons swirling prevented further access to the camera crew. Beyond them, police, forensics and medical personnel were glimpsed moving around in Tyvek coveralls. In front of the barricade stood two firearms response officers, MP5 rifles across their chests.

The gorgeous Jamaican lady behind the counter leaned over to switch the channel.

‘Whoa, no Tamara … please, I was watching that!’ Heck shouted.

She relented, sticking her tongue out at him as she moved away.

Heck remained transfixed on the screen.

‘There are reports of at least sixteen fatalities,’ the newscaster added, ‘though that number is yet to be confirmed, and of course it may increase. None of those listed, or so we’re told, is Peter Rochester … better known to the public of course as Mad Mike Silver. Rob Kent is on site with the latest …’

Rob Kent appeared on screen, a plump reporter with a balding head and wire-framed glasses. He looked pale and harassed. ‘It’s … well, it’s a terrible scene here,’ he began. ‘As you can see, the place is flooded with security personnel. Not to mention ambulances, though I have to say … I’ve yet to see any ambulances leave, though I have seen several undertakers’ hearses moving away, carrying what looked like closed caskets. This obviously means they’re moving, or have started to move, some of the dead …’

‘Do we have a clearer picture of the circumstances, Rob?’

The reporter raised his mike. ‘Well … no one’s saying very much yet, but it seems pretty clear to me. To start with, this is an incredibly bleak spot. We’re over twenty miles from King’s Lynn, nearer thirty miles from Fakenham. There is literally no other habitation anywhere near …’

He walked to his right, the camera panning with him, catching open grassland, ripples of wind blowing across it towards a flat but hazy horizon.

‘So this is the ideal spot to launch an ambush … if indeed an ambush it was. From what we can gather, the security detail taking Rochester to hospital was subjected to a highly disciplined assault. I haven’t had this confirmed by any senior members of the police yet, but those are the words I’m hearing: “a highly disciplined assault”.’

Kent shook his head; doubtless he was a seasoned reporter, a man who’d witnessed the aftermath of many atrocities, but he looked genuinely shaken by what he’d witnessed on the lonely road from Brancaster to King’s Lynn.

‘Can you confirm whether or not Peter Rochester is on the casualty list, Rob?’

‘The official line is that we have no word about Rochester’s location or condition at this time. Of course, he was being transferred to hospital because he was thought to have suffered a heart attack yesterday afternoon, so what state he’s likely to be in now is anyone’s guess …’

Heck stood up, his chair scraping back so loudly that other customers jumped. ‘Tamara, love!’ he shouted. ‘You’re going to have to cancel those Benedicts.’

She turned from the range, dismayed. ‘They’re almost done!’

‘Sorry darling … I’ve got to go. I’m sure someone else’ll appreciate them.’ He hurled the requisite money onto the counter and dashed from the café.

‘Heck … you’re flaming murder!’

Various SCU detectives were present in the DO when Heck barged in, still in his day-off gear of jeans, sweatshirt and trainers. The first one to see him came hurriedly across the office. It was DC Shawna McCluskey. Originally, like Heck, a member of Greater Manchester Police, she was short, athletic and dark-haired, but a toughie too, whose pretty freckled face belied her blunt, blue-collar attitude.

‘I bloody wouldn’t, Heck!’ she advised. ‘I genuinely wouldn’t.’

‘Seriously, pal,’ DS Eric Fisher added, lumbering up. He was SCU’s main intelligence man, and possibly the oldest officer still on the team. He was heavily built and pot-bellied, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and boasted a massive red/grey beard that the average Viking would have been proud of. ‘This has hit Gemma too … like a bombshell.’

‘Yeah, she’s been up half the night and she’s at her wits’ end,’ Shawna said.

‘So she’s in?’ Heck replied.

‘For the next few minutes, yeah. Then she’s off to Norfolk.’

‘She taking point on this?’

‘Deputy SIO,’ Fisher said. ‘They’re putting a taskforce together as we speak.’

Heck gave a wry smile. ‘Let me guess … Frank Tasker’s running it?’

‘He’s in there with her now.’

‘SOCAR …’ Heck shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t pay them in washers. I presume “we have no word about Rochester’s location or condition” is a euphemism for the bastard’s been sprung, flipping us the finger as he went?’

Fisher shrugged. ‘They haven’t got a clue where he is.’

‘And I suppose SOCAR were in charge of the transfer?’

‘Yeah, but that means they’ve taken the most losses,’ Shawna said. ‘Look Heck, Tasker seems an okay bloke … but he’s going to be feeling it today.’

‘I knew we weren’t done with these murdering, raping bastards …’

‘We are done with them,’ Shawna insisted. ‘You’ve heard what Gemma said. You’re not involved.’ But he was already backing to the door. ‘Heck, don’t do this.’

He left the room.

‘Oh shit,’ Shawna said.

‘You got that right,’ Fisher agreed.

Heck walked up the central corridor to Gemma’s cramped little office. The door stood ajar and he could hear voices inside. They weren’t heated or raised, but there was tension there – he could tell that much already. He knocked.

‘This had better be really important!’ came Gemma’s whipcrack response.

‘I’d say it was important, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘Can I come in?’

There was a brief, telling silence.

‘Yeah … come in, Heck.’

He entered, finding Ben Kane in there as well as Frank Tasker.

For her part, Gemma was slumped behind her desk, while Tasker was seated on the edge of it – which posture irked Heck no end. Okay, the guy was likely to be under pressure and probably in mourning for the personnel he’d lost, but from what Heck knew of Tasker’s reputation, he was one of those ultra high-ranking cops who always made themselves at home whoever’s office they were in. His jacket was draped over the only other chair – while Kane stood.

The next thing Heck noticed was that both Gemma and Tasker had drawn pistols from the armoury: Tasker wore his in a shoulder-holster; Gemma’s lay on the desk in front of her, alongside a glossy photograph. Guns were never ever a good thing.

It was still relatively early in the day – Heck had made it from Fulham to New Scotland Yard in near record time – but Gemma was already less than her usual pristine self. A strikingly handsome woman anyway, she didn’t need much makeup, but she believed in appearances, in making a lasting impression; and yet today she looked tired and worn. Tasker, who if Heck recalled rightly, was also known for being a snazzy dresser, was suited, but in a similarly rumpled state. Even his artificially bronzed looks had paled to an ashen hue. Only Kane seemed relaxed, maintaining his usual air of scholarly attentiveness.

‘Heck,’ Gemma said. ‘You know Commander Tasker? Serious Offender Control and Retrieval. He heads up their Special Investigations unit …’

‘I know him, yeah,’ Heck replied.

‘Sergeant Heckenburg,’ Tasker said with a curt nod.

‘Sir.’ Heck turned back to Gemma. ‘What a bloody disaster.’

She sighed. ‘By any standards. Before you ask, we’re working on the basis it’s down to a Nice Guys team who’ve come in from abroad. Somehow or other, they managed to bring an entire arsenal of high-tech weapons with them …’

‘Unless the weapons were already here,’ Heck said. ‘I know two or three underworld quartermasters we can lean on straight away …’

‘For the record!’ she interrupted. ‘We’ve lost sixteen officers, two prison personnel and two ambulance crew. There are no wounded … no survivors.’

‘A courting couple got the chop too,’ Tasker added. ‘Two civvies.’

‘How’s that?’ Heck asked.

Tasker glanced at Kane, who rummaged through his pocket-book. ‘A Jenny Barker and Ronald Withersnap,’ Kane said. ‘Looks like they were out for a late-night canoodle when the Nice Guys ran over their parked car in a JCB, killing them both in the process. They then used their bodies and the wreck of their car to stage the accident.’

‘Jesus Christ …’ Heck breathed.

‘Worst of the worst, this lot,’ Tasker said, his eyes meeting Heck’s – their gaze was cold, distinctly unfriendly. ‘Which of course you won’t need us to tell you about. Anyway, now you’re as clued-in as we are, sergeant.’

It seemed to be a morning for euphemisms. That one clearly meant ‘so fuck off back to your own office’.

Instead of taking the hint, Heck continued to ask questions. ‘What about Silver?’

‘No sign of him,’ Gemma said, with another ill-disguised sigh.

‘They just whisked him away?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Isn’t he supposed to be ill?’

‘Not “supposed to be”,’ Tasker said. ‘He is ill. The prison infirmary confirmed it.’

‘Is it serious? I mean, how far do we expect him to get?’

‘We don’t know, Heck … okay?’ Gemma replied in a patient tone. ‘It’s too early to say.’

Heck pondered. ‘Well, I suppose the next question is did he actually tell you anything useful before he disappeared? I mean during the prison interviews?’ Their expressions remained blank. ‘Surely you’re allowed to discuss that now he’s gone?’

‘We’re not going to discuss it at this stage,’ Gemma said.

‘Which means he told you nothing …’

‘Which means we’re not discussing it,’ Tasker asserted.

‘Heck,’ Gemma said. ‘You know the kind of intel we were trying to glean from those interviews. We wanted to know about other Nice Guys associates. About Nice Guys operations abroad … how many there are, where they are, who they are. Regardless of where Peter Rochester is now, there’s still a significant amount of sensitivity surrounding that information.’

Heck shook his head. ‘I don’t see why.’

‘Because if you must know, sergeant,’ Tasker interjected, ‘the various law enforcement agencies we’re in contact with overseas are well aware of the damage done to your own enquiry into the Nice Guys by a British police insider. They don’t want their investigations to suffer in the same way.’

Which, Heck had to admit, made a kind of sense.

‘Subsequently, all info related to the prison interviews with Peter Rochester is still being handled on a need-to-know basis,’ Tasker added.

Heck nodded. ‘Okay, okay … but just out of interest, what’s this?’

He indicated the photograph on Gemma’s desk, which appeared to depict a dented car door, marked here and there with bullet holes, but in the centre of which a jumble of apparently meaningless letters had been crudely inscribed in the paintwork.

BDEL

‘That was carved into the driver’s door of the SOCAR command vehicle,’ Kane said. ‘We’re not sure what it means yet … if it means anything.’

‘BDEL …?’ Heck mused.

‘We’re not going to town on that yet,’ Gemma added. ‘For all we know it could have been done before – at the prison, maybe even before then. The car was a fully marked police vehicle. If the driver had parked up somewhere, I dunno … to buy chips. Some lowlife with an attitude comes along …’

Heck looked sceptical. ‘Wouldn’t the driver have noticed? It’s on his door.’

‘We don’t know what it is yet,’ Tasker replied. ‘All options are still on the table.’

‘But in the event it turns out to be relevant,’ Gemma said, ‘and is perhaps some kind of signature, we’re keeping it in-house, yeah?’

Heck shrugged. ‘Yeah, sure. So … I suppose it’s down to practicalities. Do we know how many casualties we inflicted on the ambushers? If we bagged a few of them, we can be checking hospitals and …’

‘None,’ Ben Kane said.

‘You mean none that we know about?’ When Heck received no answer, he glanced from one to the other. ‘What’re you saying … our people didn’t even return fire?’

‘A couple of the police weapons found at the scene had been discharged, but it looks as if that was in panic,’ Tasker said.

‘Seems like they were taken totally by surprise,’ Gemma added. ‘And by overwhelming forces.’

Heck could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Hadn’t SOCAR known they were escorting one of the most dangerous criminals in Britain? Or had they been too busy taking it all in their stride, playing it cool? He wanted to ask that question aloud. Wanted to give full voice to exactly how such arrogant incompetence made him feel, but of course it would be impolitic – it was always impolitic. ‘I hear you’re forming a taskforce to go after them, ma’am?’

She appraised him carefully. ‘It’s a SOCAR taskforce, Heck. That means we’ve more than enough bodies. Every spare officer Frank’s got is now on the case.’

‘Well … you’re not SOCAR.’

‘DSU Piper has maintained a dialogue with Silver for the last few months, as you’re no doubt aware,’ Tasker said. ‘She probably knows the guy better than anyone else in the job.’ He made a point of stressing anyone else. ‘It would be impossible to leave her out.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Gemma replied. ‘Frank and his team are well-resourced and very experienced.’

But they’re not detectives, Heck wanted to say. They’re like Special Branch; knuckle-dragging ex-squaddies or pumped-up government agents playing at being CID.

‘We’ll be getting used to each other in the future, anyway,’ she added. ‘You know National Crime Group is moving from the Yard next year?’

‘Yeah …?’ Heck said, baffled as to where this might be leading.

‘It’s early days yet, but we’ll likely be sharing a building with SOCAR. We may even be on the same floor.’

Heck gave her a long, blank look. ‘That’s marvellous, ma’am. Truly. Any more good news today?’

‘Look … what’s your problem, sergeant?’ Tasker asked. ‘You’ve had an attitude since you came in here. Call me an idiot, but I can’t think there’s anything about me or my staff that might have got on your nerves.’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Heck said. ‘If we spent a couple of days together, I’m sure I could produce a catalogue.’ He turned and left the office.

For a second, Tasker looked astounded. ‘What the actual FUCK!’

‘Leave this to me, Frank,’ Gemma said, jumping to her feet. ‘HECK!’

She caught up with him twenty yards down the corridor.

‘You’ve got five seconds to tell me what that was all about!’ she said, pinning him to the wall with her index finger. ‘And make it good, because trust me, I’m not in the mood for any chip-on-the-shoulder bullshit today!’

‘I don’t like seeing fellas I don’t know treat your desk like an armchair.’

‘I’m not going to dignify that garbage with a response. Try again.’

‘Ma’am … I should be the one going after Mike Silver. Two reasons. First of all, I have unfinished business with him. Very unfinished. Secondly, I’m the one who caught him last time. No one else managed it.’

‘Oh yes?’ She folded her arms. ‘Who made the arrest?’

‘Okay, me and you should be going after him then.’

‘You know it doesn’t work like that.’

‘Says who … SOCAR? The fucking idiots who let Mike Silver go?’

‘Hey! Now just watch how you talk to me, sergeant … alright?’ She kept it low-key, but as always with Gemma when her back was up, there was intense ferocity in her tone. ‘And you might try showing a bit of respect, and remember that most of those “fucking idiots” are dead! And that they were fellow police officers! And that they died in the line of duty! And that they left young families, children …’

‘Okay …’ He already regretted that part of his outburst. ‘That was out of order …’

‘We’re all upset, Heck … but at least stop embarrassing yourself, and more importantly, stop bloody embarrassing me! And get your sodding head screwed on! You know you can’t be involved in this enquiry. I’ve explained it to you half a dozen times, so I’m not going to explain it again. Your job, as far as the Nice Guys is concerned, is done.’

‘No disrespect, ma’am … but that’s what you think.’

‘Heck …’ Gemma gave him a searching gaze. ‘Be absolutely one hundred per cent sure, I will not tolerate any monkey business from you on this. Operation Thunderclap – yes, it’s got a name and everything – Operation Thunderclap is way too serious to be jeopardised by an officer as emotionally scarred by past events as you are.’ Her tone levelled off, but she continued to nail him with those laser-blue eyes. ‘You and me have been close for a long time, but trust me on this, Mark … I will take any disciplinary measures necessary. Any at all … to protect this SOCAR enquiry from interference by outside elements, especially you.’

‘Ma’am, Mad Mike Silver will be overseas in a day or so. He’ll be gone from these shores, we’ll never see him again … we’ll never get another chance.’

‘Commander Tasker’s team is already on the move.’

‘They don’t know what they’re doing …’

‘Are you serious? Tasker is SOCAR Special Investigations …’

‘And what does that mean exactly?’

‘I’ll be there too. Maybe you don’t trust me either?’

Heck shrugged awkwardly. ‘I always trust you.’

‘Which is more than I feel about you.’ She paused. ‘When are you back on duty?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Excellent. Until such time as you’re needed in the Northeast again, we’ll have you here at base, doing everyone’s housekeeping. In fact we’ve got a dozen new case files that need our attention too. So you better get home before I send you in there right now.’

Tasker reappeared outside Gemma’s office. He stood with hands on hips as she traipsed back towards him.

‘You need to put someone on Jim Laycock, ma’am,’ Heck called after her.

She glanced back. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘If he removed all those files containing the names and addresses of clients the Nice Guys provided totty for …’

‘Heck, we’ve been over this as well!’ She was clearly trying not to look as exasperated as he was making her feel. ‘There’s no evidence it was Laycock. You were being paranoid to the nth degree.’

Heck had never been able to shake the suspicion from his mind that former National Crime Group commander Jim Laycock had been a client of the Nice Guys. All through the original investigation, the murdering bastards had benefited from having a police insider; it was the only way they could have continually stayed one step ahead. And then, to top it all, right at the death, the files containing extensive details of all the Nice Guys’ clients in the UK – a full list of names and addresses – had simply disappeared, even though their existence was only known about inside the National Crime Group. Which had meant the insider was very close to home.

Heck had come to suspect Laycock, firstly because the bloke had done his level best to reduce the manpower available to the original enquiry, finally closing it down entirely before it managed to gain any real results – and for what Heck considered to be spurious reasons. And secondly, because Laycock, with his background in the military police, was better-placed than most officers in NCG to have known some of the Nice Guys from an earlier career. Of course, Gemma never felt there was any proof of this, and had many times expressed concern that Heck was letting his personal dislike for Laycock cloud his professional judgement. However, after the dust had all settled, she had forwarded a written opinion that Laycock’s initial handling of the Nice Guys affair had been ill-judged. In consequence, though the resulting internal enquiry kick-started by Heck finally cleared Laycock of having any connection with the Nice Guys, he was still disciplined for ‘displaying a level of ineptitude in office that verged on criminal negligence’. That said, Laycock’s demotion from the rank of commander to the rank of inspector hadn’t returned the missing dossier of names, nor did it explain who the mole had been.

‘Whether I was or wasn’t being paranoid, Laycock sank that investigation for no good reason,’ Heck reminded her. ‘He did everything he could to hamper us …’

‘For which he got busted down five ranks,’ she retorted. ‘Good grief Heck, that’s not an insignificant punishment.’

‘He’s a DI at Wembley, ma’am. He’s still higher up the food chain than me.’

Tasker snorted. ‘So that’s it … you’re jealous?’

Heck ignored the comment. ‘The main thing, ma’am, is that Laycock was one of the few people who knew the client list was there. One of the very few who had access to it … if it was him who removed it, this new crew could be after him next.’

‘Why?’ Tasker wondered. ‘You think they’re going to spirit him off to the Bahamas for the rest of his life … in reward for sparing their client base?’

Heck shrugged. ‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind, sir, but hey … you’re the one in charge now. Perhaps it’s time you gave it some thought.’

Tasker bared his teeth, but managed to keep his temper in check as Heck headed back to the DO.

‘He can be an irritating sod at times,’ Gemma said quietly, ‘but he’s right about one thing. We never recovered those missing details of the original Nice Guys’ clients. I’ve always wondered about that. Someone moved them, even if it wasn’t Laycock.’

‘It’s not like you didn’t look for them,’ Tasker replied. ‘Anyway, it’s history now.’

‘Maybe sir, but I’ve never been totally comfortable with the idea that all those rapists are living free among us.’

He shrugged. ‘Now the Nice Guys appear to have returned, maybe we’ll get their clients by a different route. I’m more concerned at present about Heckenburg. He’s going to give us problems, I can sense it already.’

‘He won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to it.’

‘You used to be his girlfriend, didn’t you?’

‘That was a long time ago, sir.’

‘Maybe there’s something you can do on that front.’

She glanced around at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Throw him a little something. Keep him sweet.’

Despite all the chauvinism she’d experienced in her eighteen years as a female police officer, this left Gemma virtually gobsmacked. ‘Are you really asking what I think you’re asking?’

‘It’s a suggestion, that’s all. Oh Christ … don’t start going all “inappropriate comments” on me, Gemma. Let’s live in the real world for a change, eh? We’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands here. We need to keep the lid on it any way we can.’

She lowered her voice. ‘If you think I’d stoop to that, you’ve got the wrong person.’

‘What’s the matter, don’t you fancy him anymore?’

Gemma was acutely aware they were out in the corridor and that ears could be waggling in half a dozen adjoining offices. That Tasker wasn’t was perhaps a bit worrying. ‘Maybe we could just get on with what we’re supposed to be doing,’ she hissed. ‘Like you said, Frank, we’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands … if we ignore it much longer, it’s going to burn both our departments to the ground!’

Chapter 8

The landlord of The Maypole Tavern was a pain-in-the-arse wanker.

At least, that was Detective Inspector Jim Laycock’s view. To start with, his first name was Hubert – who the fuck was called ‘Hubert’ in the twenty-first century? – and though he possessed the sort of build that might have been designed for innkeepers in North London – broad, sloping shoulders, brawny, apelike arms and a big square head – this was offset by the immensity of his beer belly, which was so grotesque that it wobbled over the front of his waistband as he walked, and meant he had to lean backwards to effect any measure of decorum. He had a receding hairline, but there was still sufficient left of his greasy, greying mane at the back for him to tie it in a pretentious pigtail. Laycock didn’t know which he found the more revolting, this, or the round, soft, permanently sweat-shiny ‘baby’s arse’ that Hubert had for a face.

Of course, appearances weren’t everything.

If they were, Laycock himself – with his handsome looks and impressive physique (though it might be a little flabbier now than it used to be) – wouldn’t be in such a rut as this: disliked by his juniors, mistrusted by his seniors, despised by the villains to a degree where they’d probably kill him if they got half a chance, and more than happy to drown these sorrows each night with as much beer as he could get down himself.

‘Kill me, eh?’ he muttered, propping up the Maypole bar. ‘Yeah … let them try!’

They’d get what was coming. And so would that scrote of a landlord, Hubert Mollop – or whatever his full fucking name was. The bastard thought Laycock didn’t know he allowed rent-boys on the premises. This wasn’t a gay pub, not officially, but Mollop was a shirt-lifter of the first order – Laycock felt certain. He’d had it on good authority there was a private room here, a place unknown to regular patrons, where underage male prostitutes came to entertain their clients, paying the sympathetic landlord a generous cut of their earnings.

As usual, the problem was proving it.

The bastard was too clever to leave anything lying around that might incriminate him, or to trust his dirty little secrets to anyone he didn’t know intimately. The local catamites might be able to help – the trouble was that Laycock, though he was now running day-to-day divisional CID operations at Wembley nick, hadn’t been there long enough yet to develop contacts with that particular crowd, which meant he had to rely on the two informers who’d first tipped him off about Mollop, neither of whom was totally reliable due to their both having been banned from The Maypole in the recent past. That was one reason the rest of Laycock’s CID team didn’t feel the info was kosher, and the main reason he hadn’t tried to share what he’d learned with the local vice squad.

But there was no rush. Laycock wasn’t going anywhere – so he could afford to watch and wait. In any case, this was only one of several pubs on his patch that he increasingly found he had a problem with as he made his nightly rounds of them. There was low-level dealing going on in some of them, not to mention regular underage drinking. In all cases, it stemmed from the uncouth bastards who ran these establishments. They were all either slobs or nonces or druggies themselves. At least, this was the impression Laycock got, and his grasses tended to support this view, even if his team didn’t.

Not that he cared what those tossers thought.

It amazed Laycock how the rest of Wembley CID thought he didn’t know about the dissent-filled discussions they held behind his back, how they’d tell any senior guv’nor who’d listen how unimpressed they were by his sour demeanour and vindictive attitude – and all because of that one bad call he’d made. They didn’t know what a sleek, sharp animal he’d been in the days when he was a high-flyer; how much of an achiever he was; how much of a moderniser. Good Christ, there were five women in the Wembley office. What chance would those dozy bints have had making it into CID if it hadn’t been for supervisors like him pulling rank on the old dinosaurs in the job, suppressing the ‘canteen culture’, paving the way for the advancement of minorities?

Yet it was curious – he finished his tenth pint of the evening in a single swallow and called curtly for another – how right-wing he himself now felt he’d become. It was disturbing how personal disaster, not to mention the ruination of all your dreams and ambitions, could bring out the beast in you.

The slatternly crowd who filled these problem pubs and bars, who even now were milling around him, binge-drinking, puking, falling on their faces – these drunks, these drug addicts – he’d once felt sorry for them, had only been able to imagine the pain of their abusive upbringings, the desolation of their everyday lives … and yet now he regarded them as vermin wallowing in sewers of self-inflicted degradation.

Who knew? Maybe he’d always felt that way deep down.

He quaffed another pint. Perhaps all that politically correct stuff – the diversity seminars he’d made his managers attend, the positive discrimination he’d practised – had been so much pointless fluff, so much pretence, so much … what had that maniac Heck called it … ‘spin’? Perhaps at heart Laycock had been just like the rank and file, mainly interested in clearing the trash off the streets. Maybe he’d just been playing at being the good guy. And perhaps now, with the bastards on the top floor having rejected it, he’d decided: What the fuck? You might as well see the real me, a humourless, judgemental SOB, who’ll happily bracket all lowlifes together and pull the trigger on them at the same time if that’s the quickest, easiest way to do it.

He’d show the bastards, he thought, as he left the dregs of his pint on the bar top and tottered to the door connecting with the toilets. He’d make the arrests, get the convictions, clean up this fucking cow-town, and when the pompous shithouses from New Scotland Yard came to give him his medal, he’d tell them to fuck right off.

There was no one else in the toilets, which Laycock supposed he ought to be thankful for. There were far too many scrotes with sleeve tattoos, crappy earrings and Burberry caps loitering in mysterious little groups in pub bogs these days. They really must think the rest of society was stupid. Well, their time was coming. At least in this neighbourhood. He wandered to the nearest urinal, unzipped and let it go – four pints’ worth. That was as many as he’d thought he’d had since he’d last taken a leak.

It wasn’t something to be proud of, he supposed. It even made him feel a little hypocritical. But then Laycock drank for a reason; for one thing it helped cushion his monumental fall from grace, and at the same time, in a weird contradiction he felt no inclination to try and explain, he fancied it clarified his thinking, focused his aims. And of course he needed to be in these pubs; needed to find out for sure what was going on; needed to know indisputably who the lice were he could earmark for elimination.

So absorbed was Laycock in this line of thought that he only vaguely noticed someone else had come into the toilets. A brief glance over his shoulder detected a man wearing a grey hoodie under a khaki flak-jacket, now with his back turned as he too stood at a urinal. Another fucking hoodie, Laycock thought. Antisocial bastards. Terrorising the world with their pseudo-American gangsta wannabe attitude. No doubt, when the time came, he’d be rounding a few of those losers up as well. But first he needed the evidence to answer those all-important questions. Who actually was it? Who was dealing, who was fencing, who was catering to the kiddie-fiddlers …

He didn’t really feel the bang on the back of his head. Or rather, he felt it and at the same time heard a dull, hollow thump – but he didn’t notice any pain.

Not at first.

Not until he’d slumped down amid a deluge of cheap wine and a shower of broken glass, hitting the rim of the urinal with the bridge of his nose, causing an instant fracture. His head flirted backwards, the rear of his slashed-open scalp impacting hard on the dirty, piss-stained floor tiles.

Laycock was so fuddled that he didn’t even realise the guy reaching down towards him, the guy in the khaki jacket and hood, was the same guy who’d attacked him. Only when a pair of gloved hands took him by the lapels of his jacket and dragged him across the lavatory floor to the exterior exit, did an alarm bell start sounding in the back of his mind. He struggled, began to feebly kick. But his assailant was strong, hauling his twisting form effortlessly out over the step and down onto the gritty tarmac of the pub car park, from the opposite corner of which the rumbling of an engine, a pair of white reverse lights and the open rear doors of a high-sided van revealed a vehicle backing at speed towards him.

Two indistinguishable figures jumped from the rear of the van as it screeched to a halt in a cloud of murky exhaust. Laycock was in so much pain and confusion that he could barely burble, but this didn’t stop him writhing in his captor’s grasp, which he did increasingly as his senses seeped back. The guy in the hood responded by punching him, delivering a hard, clean shot to the middle of his solar plexus, driving the wind out of Laycock’s lungs. A savage nausea clenched his lower belly. As he doubled up, they clamped him by his knees, his ankles and his elbows, lifted him and slung him into the darkness of the vehicle’s interior – where more of them were waiting to receive him.

‘What … why’re you …?’ Laycock stammered, only for more blows to rain down.

One smashed his gagging mouth; another slammed his already broken nose, sending a jagged lance of pain through his head. Another caught him in the solar plexus, in the same place as before; maybe by accident, maybe by design – either way it induced such pain that Laycock thought it might kill him. For several seconds he couldn’t breathe, while one by one, his abductors climbed into the van, and the doors slammed shut, locking him in a stifling void where the stench of his own blood mingled with oil, sweat and the choking stink of carbon monoxide.

‘Who the … who the fuck …?’ he blubbered, but another gloved hand, this one spread wide, closed over his mouth, blocking out further words, pressing his lacerated head hard into the corrugated iron floor.

The engine growled, drowning out his muffled whimpers, and the vehicle juddered as it pulled out of the car park onto the road network. Laycock struggled harder, but they were literally on top of him, a mass of booted feet and heavy muscle swathed in canvas and waterproofs. Noticeably, no one spoke; there was no reassurance that everything would be okay if he complied; no consolation offered that this would all be over in the morning; no attempt of any sort to reason with or calm him.

Laycock wasn’t sure how long they were on the road for; maybe half an hour, maybe less. All he knew in that time was the darkness, the airlessness, and the pain of his injuries, the crushing weight on top of him, and the violent banging and jolting of the vehicle – and then the abrupt crunch of a loose surface beneath tyres, and the prolonged squeal as brakes were applied.

When the rear doors were yanked open, only very little light was shed in – the result of a waning half-moon passing through autumnal clouds – but it was sufficient to show the tall, angled outline of an unlit building, the exposed ribs of its rotted roof suggesting it was derelict. Yet more men were waiting there – in an orderly row, like a bunch of soldiers on parade.

Despite the violence he’d so far been subjected to, the first bolt of genuine horror only passed through Laycock’s rapidly sobering mind when he realised they were all wearing black ski-masks. With a wild lurch, he attempted to fight his way out of the van. He was a big guy himself, in his youth a military policeman, and he could pack a punch and a kick. But he didn’t get more than two or three inches before he was again restrained. One of the figures outside leaned in. With a metallic click, torchlight speared through the entrance.

‘Let’s at least make sure it’s the right guy,’ an American voice said.

The light hit Laycock in the face, penetrating to the backs of his aching eyes, causing him to blink involuntarily. A damp rag was moved vigorously back and forth across his face. He realised they were mopping away the clotted blood.

‘Yep,’ the American voice confirmed. ‘Check.’

The light went out and Laycock was taken by all four of his limbs and flung – literally flung – out onto the ground. He rolled over, thinking to jump to his feet, but when he looked up, the ramrod-straight silhouettes of his captors hemmed him in from all sides. Man by man, each one of them drew something from out of his clothing, and held it up. Laycock’s eyes had attuned sufficiently to the dim moonlight to observe that in every case it was the same thing – a claw-hammer.

‘What is this?’ he gabbled. ‘Whoever you are, you’ve got the wrong fella!’

‘No we ain’t,’ came that casual American voice.

‘Are you fucking mad? I’m a cop, for Christ’s sake!’

‘We’d hardly have gone to this trouble if you flipped burgers.’

‘Wait … just fucking wait!’ Laycock half-screamed, holding up empty palms, trying to press his abductors back with a helpless gesture. ‘Whoever you are, whatever I’m supposed to have done, I can fix it … there’s nothing that can’t be undone …’

But the first of the claw-hammers was already hurtling at his face, unseen in the gloom. It connected with a smack of meat and cracking bone.

‘Ouch!’ the American said, and chuckled.

The other hammers arced down from all sides, over and over, thwacking into limbs, torso, skull, shattering those flailing hands like they were porcelain.

Chapter 9

It wouldn’t be true to say that Heck didn’t dream.

He did dream occasionally, or maybe he dreamt every night and only recalled vague snippets in the morning. But as a rule his sleep was deep and undisturbed. Perhaps this was down to his own body, some internal mechanism looking out for his welfare, preventing him reliving the worst events of each day as he tried to rest. Either way, all he ever knew of his dreams were brief, hazy recollections, though these could be disturbing enough: a prostitute’s severed foot still in its pink high-heeled shoe; a female body lying naked in a bathtub, its face covered with clown makeup. But for the most part, given how disjointed and out of context this fleeting, broken imagery tended to be, it was easy enough to shrug off.

Not so on this occasion.

This time he was in his sister’s house, which was located in Bradburn, a post-industrial town in a depressed corner of South Lancashire. It was the same house where his late parents had lived, where he had grown up as a child. Normally it was clean and tidy, yet now it was filthy and dilapidated. Heck wandered helpless and teary-eyed from room to room, appalled by the dereliction. What was more, he could hear the giggles of two children playing games with him – darting around, staying constantly out of sight. He never saw them, but somehow knew who they were: Lauren and Genene Wraxford, two pretty little black girls, sisters from Leeds, who as young women would be murdered by the Nice Guys. He shouted at them not to grow up, not to leave this place, which though it was dirty and crumbling – fissures scurried across the walls, branching repeatedly – they would be safer in if they just stayed here. But still he couldn’t see them, and now bricks and plaster were falling. He blundered through the dust to the front door, only to find it was no longer there – solid brickwork occupied its former place.

Frantic, Heck scrambled back through the building, which now consisted of empty, cavernous interiors, many made from rusty cast-iron and fitted with grimy portholes for windows. When he reached the back door, he saw that a heavy iron bolt had been thrown. This too was jammed with rust, and only by exerting every inch of strength did he manage to free it. The door opened – but not onto the paved back yard where he’d kicked a football during his childhood, onto another vast interior, this one built from concrete and hung with rotted cables. At its far end, a gang of men were waiting. All wore dark clothes and ski-masks. They approached quickly and silently, and now he saw they were armed with punk weapons – logs with nails in them, bicycle chains, lengths of pipe.

‘By the time we get bored with you, son,’ a gloating, Birmingham-accented voice whispered into Heck’s right ear, ‘you’ll wish we’d finished you the first time.’

He spun away, stumbling along a passage, at the end of which stood a bathroom, clean and well appointed, filled with warm sunshine. Heck recognised it from a holiday cottage he and Gemma had rented in Pembrokeshire when they’d been dating all those years ago. At its far side, a shapely woman stood naked in the shower. She faced away from him; her long fair hair flowed down her back in the stream of water. He knew it was Gemma – her hair had been much longer then. Before he could speak, the bathroom window exploded, and those hostile forms – more like apes than humans – came vaulting in. Heck shouted, but no sound emerged, and the bathroom door slammed in his face, another bolt ramming home.

His eyes snapped open in the dimness of early morning light.

For several seconds he could barely move, just lay rigid under the duvet, sweat soaking his hair, bathing his body. At last his vision, having roved back and forth across his only vaguely recognisable room, settled on the neon numerals of the digital clock on the sideboard, which read 5.29 a.m.

Gradually, he became aware of a need to urinate. At length, this propelled him from the warmth of his bed and sent him lurching along the chilly central passage of his flat to the bathroom. On the way back, he was still attempting to shrug off the soporific effects of sleep – for which reason he was caught completely off-guard when there came an explosion of breaking metal and rending timber downstairs.

Heck stumbled to a halt, damp hair prickling at the sound of furious male voices and the thunder of hobnailed boots ascending the single stair from the front door.

In a state of confusion, he backed into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. Whatever was happening here, it struck him vaguely that he had options. He could try to escape, though his sole bedroom window opened over a fifty-foot drop into a litter-strewn canyon, through which an exposed section of the District Line ran between Fulham Broadway and Parsons Green. Alternatively, he had his mobile with him, and could call for back-up if he first shored up the door – but in truth there was nothing in here with which to create such a barricade; no chest of drawers, no dressing table. The other option – and this looked like the only realistic one – was to fight.

Heck kept a hickory baseball bat alongside his bed. He snatched it up just as the bedroom door was smashed inward. When he saw a gloved hand poking through, clutching a pistol, he swung at it with all the strength he had.

The impact was brutal, the smack resounding across the room, a squawk of agony following it. The pistol, a Glock, clattered to the floor. Heck made a dash for it, but the injured intruder, who was wearing a motorbike helmet, dived in, catching him around the waist, bearing him to the carpet. Other intruders followed, also armed with pistols, shouting incoherently – and wearing police insignia all over their black Kevlar body-plate.

What Heck had first taken for motorbike helmets were anti-ballistics wear, but he’d already rammed his elbow down three times between the shoulder-blades of the first assailant before realising this. ‘Bloody hell …!’ he said.

‘Armed police!’ they bellowed as they filled his room, seven of them training pistols on him at the same time. ‘Drop the fucking bat! Drop it now!’

‘Alright, alright,’ he said, letting the bat go, showing empty hands.

‘Nick …?’ one of them shouted, crouching and lifting his frosted visor to reveal that he, in fact, was a she.

‘Don’t you fucking move!’ another shouted.

The point-man, the one called Nick, still lay groggily across Heck’s legs. He groaned with pain as he tried to lever himself upright. Heck assisted with his knees and a forearm, shoving the guy over onto his back.

‘I said don’t fucking move!’ another officer roared, aiming a kick at him.

‘What’s your problem, dipshit?’ Heck retorted. ‘I’m a bloody cop!’

‘Shut up!’ the girl replied, hoisting her fallen colleague to his feet.

Whoever ‘Nick’ was, he was a big fella, Heck realised – at least six-three and broad as an ox. It had been a stroke of luck to get those early shots in. In contrast, the girl was about five-eight, but lithe, and from what he could see of her, handsome in a fierce, feline sort of way.

Gemma Mark Two, he thought to himself.

‘You fucking little shit, Heckenburg,’ she snarled, ruining the illusion – Gemma rarely used profanity. ‘Get on your face now, or I’ll put you there permanently.’

Behind her, more of the arrest team were piling into the crowded bedroom, several armed with staves as well as handguns. Heck supposed he ought to be flattered, but he was too busy listening to the crashing and banging elsewhere in the apartment.

‘What’s the matter with you people?’ he asked. ‘You obviously know who I am!’

‘I said get on your face!’ she reiterated. ‘Ignore me one more time, and I swear I’ll put a bullet straight through that empty braincase of yours.’ Her eyes were a piercing cat-green; her gloved finger tightened on the trigger of her Glock, which she pointed straight at Heck’s face.

He rolled over, arms outspread.

‘Too right we fucking know you!’ she said. ‘Hands behind your head!’

He complied, and then they were onto him – she and several others landing knees-first, driving the wind out of him.

‘Lie still!’ she said. ‘Keep your hands away from the bat!’

‘You idiots have screwed up,’ Heck grunted. ‘Whatever intel’s brought you here, it’s either fake or very flawed.’

She holstered her Glock, and twisted his arms behind his back, quickly and efficiently inducing two painful goosenecks, which suggested she knew her martial arts. She slipped his hands into a pair of nylon cuffs, and cinched them tight.

‘Save that famous motormouth of yours for the judge,’ she said into his right ear – in the same gloating tone he’d heard in his dream, which gave him a mild jolt, though of course the accent was different; this one was Home Counties, strictly Middle England.

They lifted him roughly to his feet.

‘I’m DS Fowler from the Serious Offenders Control and Retrieval unit,’ the girl said, ‘and I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.’ She gave him the full caution. ‘Any questions?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘What do you do for an encore?’

One of her male colleagues punched him in the side. Heck winced but managed to stay upright. Though he was still barefoot, dressed only in shorts and a sweat-damp t-shirt, they frogmarched him into the corridor, where personal items and bits of furniture were already being tossed out from the other rooms. By the continuing roar of destruction, they were leaving no stone unturned. Someone Heck recognised stood in the midst of it, apparently supervising. He was a short, paunchy man, with podgy, hog-like features scrunched under his helmet, though his general proportions – which were globular in shape – seemed equally uncomfortable squashed into his black coveralls. His name was Derek O’Dowd, and he was an officious little twerp formerly of the Met’s Accident Investigation department. It was no surprise that he’d wound up in SOCAR. More unexpected, perhaps, were the inspector’s pips on his shoulders.

‘Just remember, guv,’ Heck said to him, ‘… anything you break, you buy.’

O’Dowd swung around, his mouth fixed in its usual O of outrage when someone had disputed with him. Immediately, he began shouting. ‘Have you ever – ever in your fucking life! – tried showing respect for rank, Heckenburg!’

‘You ever tried ringing a doorbell? What did you think I was going to do, flush myself down the toilet?’

‘Good Christ!’ O’Dowd bellowed. ‘Get this fucking sociopath out of my sight! If he opens his trap one more time, one of you stick your fist in it!’

DS Fowler and the guy called Nick, who apparently was another sergeant, a DS Gribbins – hustled Heck to the top of the stairs, and walked him down between them, though Gribbins cringed as he rotated his wrist and flexed his fingers.

‘Looks like you’ve got full movement,’ Heck said. ‘Not broken, at least.’

‘Don’t push me, Heckenburg,’ Gribbins snarled.

They arrived outside, where the presence of several police vehicles, including a couple of divisional units, and numerous other armoured SOCAR personnel, ensured that, despite the early hour and milky light of dawn, curtains would be twitching up and down Cherrybrook Drive, a typical nosy Fulham street.

‘I’m just saying it’ll be okay,’ Heck added.

Even though they were out in full public view, Gribbins spun around, snatching Heck by the collar of his t-shirt. Briefly they were nose to nose. Gribbins’s thick brown moustache made him resemble some TV cop from the 1970s. But he was currently flushed with anger and streaming sweat.

‘It may have escaped your notice, pal! … but we’re not taking this as lightly as you seem to be.’

‘I kind of got that,’ Heck replied. ‘But just out of interest … maybe as a common courtesy to my fellow-police status, who am I supposed to have murdered?’

‘No one important,’ Fowler said, stepping between them. ‘Just a DI in the Met.’

Heck’s mouth dropped open. ‘What …?’

‘Laycock.’

‘You mean Jim Laycock?’

‘Why … how many Laycocks are there on your personal hate list?’

‘You …’ Heck was only fleetingly lost for words. ‘You better had take me in.’

‘Oh … had we?’

‘Right now.’ Shaking free of their grip, he turned and headed to the prisoner transport parked at the kerb, climbing straight into the back of it.

There was no cage inside this one, so when Fowler climbed in as well, looking a little bemused, she sat on the facing bench and pointed a warning finger at him. ‘Don’t even think about trying something. I’m a karate fifth dan.’

‘Suppose that makes me feel a bit safer,’ Heck replied.

‘And that smart mouth is going to make things even tougher on you.’

The engine started, the vehicle lurching away.

‘I’m totally serious.’ Heck glanced up at her. ‘The only thing is, I’m not sure a bit safer is gonna be enough.’

Chapter 10

‘I’m guessing interrogation’s a skill you guys haven’t mastered yet?’ Heck said. ‘Because in the last five minutes, your questions have revealed to me that Jim Laycock was abducted last night from a pub in Kilburn at roughly eleven p.m. … that he died sometime between twelve and one, and that his body was found this morning in an abandoned vehicle in Hornsey. All stuff which, if you’d kept it quiet, you could have used to trip me up.’

‘And in return you’ve told us nothing,’ DS Fowler said. ‘Which hardly looks good from your point of view, does it?’

‘I’ve told you nothing you want to hear,’ Heck replied. ‘But it happens to be the truth … which is sometimes pretty boring, I’ll admit.’

He was clad in a paper custody suit, and slumped in an interview room at Hammersmith police station. On the other side of the table sat SOCAR detectives Gribbins and Fowler, first names Nick and Steph. Though now in civvies, the former of these appeared no less a thug, his brutish looks topped by a curly brown mop. His corduroy jacket and open-necked plaid shirt somehow accentuated his big, powerful frame. Also out of battle-dress, the latter had a rather cool ‘Mrs Peel’ kind of aura. Her slim-fit pinstripes hugged her athletic form, but she wore her jet-black hair gathered in a severe bun. Detective Inspector O’Dowd was nowhere to be seen, though he was probably watching through the two-way mirror on the wall. Maybe Frank Tasker was through there as well, though Heck hadn’t seen the SOCAR boss in the custody suite when he’d first been brought in.

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