Ashes to Ashes: An unputdownable thriller from the Sunday Times bestseller

Chapter 6

Following one behind the other, Heck and Gemma crossed the Thames at Tower Bridge and cut northwest through the City, Shoreditch, Islington, Camden Town and Finchley, before heading west on the North Circular. It all sounded quick and straightforward on paper, but in midday traffic it still took close to two hours, and the new HQ at Staples Corner was a very unrewarding sight for those who’d had to fight through rivers of exhaust fumes and contraflows to get there.

It had previously been some kind of transport office, and it looked the part: a functional, flat-topped structure resembling three stacks of overlarge shoeboxes jammed unceremoniously together, its roofs covered with dishes and TV antennae. It wasn’t exactly prefabricated, but it had the distinct air of something that had never been intended to last. Its once weedy car park had been tarmacked over, and, as a beefed-up security measure, the rusty metal fence that had formerly encircled it had been replaced by a tall perimeter of slatted, spike-headed steel. But its best defence was still its anonymity. It could have been any one of the thousands of nondescript semi-official buildings dotted across the various boroughs of Greater London, blending perfectly into its drab but noisy location.

Heck and Gemma parked next to each other, and headed in through the personnel door, which was at the back. The ground floor housed the SCU garages, equipment and evidence store, and armoury. Admin and civvie staff were located on the first floor, while the detectives’ office, or DO as it was known in the unit, was on the second. The Command Centre and Press and PR Suite were on the third. There was also a conference room up there, but that had now been co-opted by Wandering Wolf as an Incident Room.

It still felt like alien territory to Heck. They had only been in here a few weeks, having made the move from Scotland Yard in late February. Certain members of the team, who’d been assigned to enquiries elsewhere in the country at the time, were only just arriving and discovering their new workplaces. Two cases in point were DCs Andy Rawlins and Burt Cunliffe. When Heck entered the DO, they were arguing bitterly.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, pulling off his jacket.

Cunliffe and Rawlins occupied facing desks in a recessed bay, with a large, horizontal window directly behind them, though at present both were standing nose to nose.

Cunliffe gave his side of the story first, demanding to swap desks with Rawlins as otherwise the sun would shine in his eyes all day. Rawlins’s response was to argue that if he was next to the window, he’d get vertigo.

‘OK, here’s the deal,’ Heck said tonelessly. ‘Burt, the sun is not going to shine in your eyes. You’ve got a motorway over the top to block it. And you, Andy, are not going to get vertigo! Now plant your arses where you’ve been told, and get some sodding work done!’

‘This dump’s crap,’ Cunliffe muttered under his breath.

‘Yeah, welcome to the rest of your career.’ Heck turned from the disgruntled twosome in time to see DS Eric Fisher amble in from the side-stair leading up to the Incident Room. Fisher had a pile of buff folders in his arms, which he slammed down on Heck’s desk.

Heck regarded him blankly. ‘What’s this?’

Fisher was the unit’s main intelligence analyst, and a permanent inside-man these days given that he was now in his mid-fifties with a waistline to match.

‘You’re taking Shawna’s gigs, apparently.’ He rubbed the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief so grubby that it surely couldn’t make any difference.

‘Already?’ Heck protested. ‘I was just about to come upstairs.’

‘Forget it,’ Fisher replied. ‘Apparently you’re at the Central Criminal Court tomorrow?’

‘Yeah … so?’

‘So Gemma says there’s no point you coming back on Wandering Wolf until you’ve been discharged from the trial. That means there’s no point you coming back today either – so you can crack on with this lot. New referrals from Division. Yours plus Shawna’s.’

There was a muted snigger from the direction of Rawlins’s desk.

‘This is all?’ Heck said.

‘Hey, there’s a bigger pile on my desk if you want some of them.’ Fisher sloped off towards his own corner of the room without awaiting a response.

Heck slumped into his chair, glowering at the tower of documentation. One of the least enjoyable aspects of working in the Serial Crimes Unit was trawling through paperwork forwarded to it from other divisions. SCU had a remit to cover all the police force areas of England and Wales, and had recognised expertise with regard to serial violent offenders – mainly murderers. If they weren’t pursuing investigations they’d generated themselves or had been assigned to by the Director of the National Crime Group, SCU would provide operational, consultative and investigative support to other forces who might have uncovered evidence that they had a serial murderer or rapist on their patch. A national general order now ensured that details of all homicides or violent sexual attacks satisfying certain specified criteria (the ‘weird and wonderful’ as Heck tended to think of them) must be sent to the SCU office for assessment at the first opportunity.

Heck grabbed himself a tea before leafing through the top two folders on the pile.

At first glance either one might have heralded the arrival of a new kid on the serial killer block. A female torso had been found on a rubbish tip in Hull; it had been identified as belonging to a forty-year-old prostitute who had vanished two weeks earlier. OK, there was only one victim here (thus far), but immediately there were signs of excessive violence and bizarre post-mortem behaviour in the form of the dismemberment, while the aggrieved party had been a sex-worker – so that was three boxes ticked straight away. The second file described two homicides in the space of two weeks in Coventry. An elderly bag-lady had been found in a subway, her skull shattered by an estimated twenty blows from a hammer. Six days later, a homeless man was found brutally kicked and beaten in a backstreet some three miles away. He was alive when discovered, but died en route to hospital without ever regaining consciousness. That case carried the ultimate red flag in that already there was more than one victim.

Both these submissions required analysis, yet conclusions could never be jumped to.

Murder was rarely what it appeared to be at first glance.

It could be that the Hull prostitute had been a victim of domestic violence – apparently her common-law husband, from whom she was estranged but whom she’d fought with constantly while they were together, had dropped out of sight several months ago and his whereabouts were still unknown. Likewise, violent assaults on street-people were sadly common. The old Coventry woman had been a known heroin-user, but was not in possession of any drugs or drugs paraphernalia when her body was found, so the motive in her case might have been robbery. In contrast, the homeless male had a reputation for being an argumentative drunk, so he could have been beaten simply because he’d picked a fight with the wrong person.

Heck would need to wade through the directory-thick wads of affixed notes and photos sent down from the investigation teams up at Humberside and West Midlands before he could make a judgement. But before he had a chance even to start on this, his mobile rang.

The name on the screen was Penny Flint.

He walked out to the adjoining corridor before answering it.

‘Don’t take me off the register,’ she said.

‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.’

‘I can still be useful to you, Heck.’

‘Penny, you should be thinking about being useful to that kid of yours. Get your tail out of town before someone comes along and really damages it.’

‘You want Sagan?’ she said.

He moved to the window. ‘However did you guess?’

‘I’ve not lost track of him totally.’

Heck stiffened. ‘What’re you on about now?’

‘He’s left London.’

‘Penny, you’re in hiding. You’re not talking to anyone if you’ve got any sense. How can you possibly know this?’

‘I have my informers, just like you do.’

‘You’d better hope yours are more reliable.’

‘Do you want this intel or not?’

Heck gazed across the river of traffic flowing along the North Circular.

‘What do you propose, Pen?’

‘I give you info on Sagan’s new location, and in return you keep me on the register and never tell anyone that I’m the one who set Cowling and Bishop up.’

The mere thought of this stuck in Heck’s craw.

‘Penny … a police officer died.’

‘I told you, Heck, that wasn’t the plan. It was Sagan who was supposed to die.’

‘Tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what it’s worth.’

There was a lengthy silence at the other end, as she considered this. She knew Heck didn’t trust her any more. The question was: did she trust him?

‘He’s gone north.’

‘I need specifics.’

‘Not at the moment. Not till I get what I want.’

Heck pondered. Though he was loath to admit it, it kind of helped him out. A good lead was something he could take straight upstairs to Gemma. It might also help him clear his conscience about the info he was currently sitting on.

‘I’ll need to tell my gaffer what you’ve been up to,’ he replied.

‘No way. They’ll lock me up.’

‘Not necessarily. If your intel bears fruit, chances are they’ll make an executive decision to keep using you. And it’s not like you pulled the trigger on Cowling yourself. All we have to say is that you tipped off your various police handlers. It wasn’t your fault the OC guys decided not to tell anyone what they were doing.’

‘No deal, Heck. I know your gaffer. Piper, isn’t it? She’ll chuck the fucking book at me.’

‘Not if I can persuade her otherwise.’

‘Sorry, no deal.’

‘Listen, you stupid cow!’ He checked there was no one else in the passage behind him. ‘A copper died! And you’re asking me to sit on vital information. Not just now but maybe for the rest of my career. If you seriously think I’m carrying that burden, you can forget it.’

‘Heck –’

‘Shut up, Penny! This is how we play. I’m going up to the Incident Room in approximately one minute’s time. And I’m going to tell Superintendent Piper exactly what I know, namely that you contrived that clusterfuck. I’ll probably get suspended for not telling her sooner, but even that’s better than looking over my shoulder for the rest of my career on the off-chance you suddenly get tempted to spill the beans and drop me in it. The alternative is that I go up there with your red-hot tip and the mitigating circumstances I’ve just laid out. You don’t have to be a genius to work out which’ll be better for you.’

When Penny spoke again it was in a distinctly worried voice. ‘Even if they don’t lock me up, won’t they at least take me off the register?’

‘Not if you’re giving us good stuff. Why would they? It’d be shooting themselves in the foot.’

‘I don’t want to go into protective custody or anything like that.’

He laughed. ‘You’d be lucky. It’s not easy selling supergrasses to the top floor these days. Anyway, it depends what you know.’

‘Manchester,’ she said sullenly.

‘Manchester?’

‘Somewhere in the Manchester area. That’s where Sagan’s parked himself. It’s the usual thing. He’s gone there as muscle, and he’s getting well paid for his services.’

‘Somewhere in the Manchester area?’ Heck said slowly. ‘Seriously? That’s the best you can give me?’

‘Christ’s sake, Heck! I’m not his babysitter. I just hear things. He’s in the Manchester area, and he’s signed on for a firm who are in a bit of trouble. Jesus wept, you know his form … it’s not like you won’t know what to look out for.’

He didn’t answer.

‘So where do we stand?’ she asked.

‘Get out of London, Penny.’

‘You deceitful bastard! You just said –’

‘I said I’d put a good word in for you, which I will. But if you get out of London – like now! – I won’t know where you are if they decide to pull you in as an accessory, will I? On top of that, I can’t protect you from yourself, love. Whichever mob you’ve fucked over south of the river, they’ll be looking for you as we speak.’

She gave a heartfelt sigh. ‘How long do I have to duck out of sight for?’

‘That’s your call. If it was me, till the kid’s eighteen at least. But either way, do it quick. And when you do, make sure I’ve still got a number I can contact you on.’

He hung up before she could argue further, and wandered back into the DO, halting in the doorway. Everyone was beavering away at their paperwork, but then Eric Fisher glanced up and spotted him. He arched a bushy eyebrow.

‘I don’t suppose we’ve had anything from the Northwest?’ Heck asked, acutely aware that it sounded ridiculously vague.

Fisher sat back. ‘Anything what?’

‘Let’s say, for the sake of argument … any recent torture-murders.’

Fisher remained blank-faced. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Eric!’ Heck approached him. ‘Have we or haven’t we?’

Almost theatrically, Fisher pushed an open file across his desk. ‘Came in this morning.’

Heck picked it up and flipped through the various photographic images paper-clipped on top.

They were Greater Manchester Police crime-scene glossies, and they depicted two vaguely recognisable forms – naked males, by the looks of it – lying half-buried amid broken, mouldy furniture and other manky, rat-infested rubbish, and covered with filth and thick, clotted blood.

‘Found by scavengers on a landfill,’ Fisher added.

Heck flipped more pages, but barely saw the text. He knew already that he’d found what he was looking for. ‘When did this happen?’

‘March 24 or 25, GMP reckon. Seen the location, mate?’

Heck focused on the name of the Greater Manchester township where the double slaying had occurred. And it couldn’t have hit him harder had it been inscribed on a house-brick.

Bradburn.

His home.

Chapter 7

‘How long have you known about this?’ Gemma asked coolly.

Heck, who was standing in front of her desk, made a vague gesture. ‘Just since today.’

She tapped the pile of documents with a neatly manicured fingernail. ‘This morning?’

He shrugged. ‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of.’ She nodded and sat back. ‘So let me understand this … when you told me earlier that this morning’s lead didn’t pan out, it was a barefaced lie? Is that what you’re now admitting to me?’

She didn’t look surprised by any of this, which, on reflection, he realised he ought to have expected. There was rarely any point trying to deceive Gemma Piper. Her will was iron, and she had a built-in bullshit radar.

‘Ma’am,’ he tried to explain, ‘if I’d told you where Penny Flint was, you’d have had to act. You’d have her in custody by now, and we wouldn’t have got this juicy titbit.’

Gemma remained calm, remarkably so given her infamously volcanic temper. She glanced again at the spillage of paperwork and crime-scene glossies. ‘You think we wouldn’t have assessed this at some point under our own steam and detected John Sagan’s handiwork … without a hooker who’s got a screw loose needing to show us the way?’

‘Not as quickly, ma’am. This file was sent to SCU, not the Incident Room.’

Gemma said nothing else for some time, but perused the paperwork again.

Heck stood waiting, stiff-shouldered, feeling like a convict facing a hanging judge. They weren’t in the Incident Room now but Gemma’s own office, which conveniently was only located across the corridor from it.

‘You take the bloody biscuit, Heck.’ She glanced up again. ‘Did everything I said to you back at the hospital go in one ear and trickle out the other?’

‘No,’ he assured her. ‘I absolutely guarantee it.’

She spoke on as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘And of course, much as I’d like to kick you off Operation Wandering Wolf, I can’t, can I?’ Her voice rose, that old familiar whip-crack no doubt penetrating the closed door and echoing along the main corridor. ‘Because the likelihood now is that we’ll have to go all the way up to Bradburn, and you being a Bradburn native are probably the best weapon in that fight I could possibly have!’

That explained a lot actually, Heck realised. This time she needed him for more than his ability as a detective. But also, he couldn’t help thinking that she wasn’t giving him the total third degree because this latest little white lie of his had been well meant. Even the most productive police informants could be troublesome customers. You had to play it canny with them.

‘So you want me to go up to Bradburn?’ he said.

‘I want you to sit down. We’re not making hasty decisions.’ She aimed a finger at him as he pulled up a chair. ‘And don’t think this means I’m not thoroughly pissed off with you, Heck! If it wasn’t for the fact I’ve already lost Shawna from the team today, I’d be much more inclined to kick your impertinent arse all the way back to Division.’

Heck sat down while she read again through the GMP dossier. He glanced around her office, which, while it was larger than the cubby-hole she’d occupied back at the Yard, still didn’t bespeak the rank of Detective Superintendent.

Gemma Piper was a conundrum to many who knew her: handsome and fiery, two traits that combined well when she fought her corner in this most competitive and male-dominated of environments. But at the same time she didn’t routinely favour the trappings of power. She was forceful enough to pull rank any time she felt it was necessary, her bollockings were legendary, today’s relatively painless session notwithstanding, and when she gave evidence in court or to a House of Commons Select Committee, she radiated strength and competence. But, possibly because she’d done her stint in the lower ranks, and had scrapped tooth and nail for every promotion she’d ever had, she didn’t like to paint herself as an aristocrat of the job. Hence the Spartan décor and bare furnishings in this dull little room at the top of their dull new building.

‘Four murders in Bradburn inside five weeks,’ she said. ‘Is that your hometown’s normal strike rate?’

‘Not when I lived there,’ he replied. ‘But times change.’

‘Does this surprise you?’

She dropped another glossy onto her desk. It depicted two hunks of human-shaped charcoal laid side by side on a rubber sheet. This image had been inserted at the bottom of the file. Heck had only found it several minutes after seeing the pictures of the corpses in the landfill. It depicted the remains of two Bradburn porno merchants, Barrie Briggs and Les Harris, who early last March had been cremated alive in their own sex shop.

He pursed his lips and nodded. ‘A bit, yeah.’

‘It’s pretty extreme stuff.’

‘If what you’re asking, ma’am, is: can I equate this kind of violence with the town I grew up in?… then no. We had crime. Of course we did – plenty of it, it was a rough old place. But there was a kind of moral focus in those days. At least in general terms. This is way off the scale in comparison, but I don’t think these are normal times, are they? GMP Serious reckon Briggs and Harris were the first shots fired in an underworld war. The bad boys in the landfill – Calum Price and Dean Lumley – were probably retaliation.’

Gemma read more of the attached notes, this time concentrating on the latter two victims.

‘Lots of form,’ she said. ‘Lots of it. For which they paid a very high price. Both castrated, eyes slit, tongues cut out, nipples scissored off, fingers removed with an electric saw. They finally died when a power-drill penetrated each of their brains through the left ear.’

Neither needed to give voice to what they both were already thinking: that, even given the two deaths by fire, this was a further escalation still, and to some tune.

‘Put two and two together often enough, ma’am, and sometimes you get four,’ Heck said. ‘Those two torture-killings have got Sagan written all over them, especially now we know he’s in the Manchester area. A war’s erupted up there. A real one and Sagan’s taken sides.’

‘Taken sides or hired himself to the highest bidder?’

‘Probably the latter. He doesn’t have friends. But he does have chloroform.’

She glanced up from the file. ‘Sorry?’

‘You’ll note from the post-mortem reports, ma’am, that both Price and Lumley’s bodies contained traces of chloroform. Penny Flint told me that was how Sagan subdued her when she tried to fight back inside his caravan.’

‘So chloroform’s his signature?’

‘One of them, yeah. Though this one, I’d argue, is the smoking gun. It makes sense that he would use it too. According to Penny, he’s punished a lot of wayward underworld guys in the past. Some of them will have been pretty handy, and John Sagan’s no Arnold Schwarzenegger. Chloroform would have helped him overpower them. Plus, it’s not a long-lasting anaesthetic – would give him just enough time to strap them down, and then they wake up bang in time for the fun to start.’

‘OK.’ She spread out more paperwork. ‘So what do you know about this guy?’

These particular notes originated from the GMP Local Intelligence Office, and referred to one Vic Ship, a notorious Manchester gangster who had been an associate of Briggs and Harris. GMP now believed him to be engaged in a power-struggle with the smaller Bradburn faction with whom Price and Lumley were connected. If Sagan had signed on for anyone up there, it was most likely to be Ship given that he was the bigger fish. Ship’s mugshot in the file portrayed an overweight, brutal-looking guy in his mid-fifties, with pudgy, pock-marked cheeks, a small mouth and piggy eyes. His grey hair had thinned to the point where he was almost bald, and yet it was long enough to be greased back to his collar and fastened there with an elastic band. Distinguishing marks included a tattoo of a gorgon’s head on the left side of his neck, and a jagged scar across the bridge of his nose.