PRAISE FOR PAUL FINCH

‘Wonderfully dark and peppered with grim humour. Finch is a born storyteller and writes with the authentic voice of the ex-copper he is.’

PETER JAMES

‘Edge-of-the-seat reading … formidable – a British Alex Cross.’

SUN

‘An ingenious and original plot. Compulsive reading.’

RACHEL ABBOTT

‘As good as I expected from Paul Finch. Relentlessly action-packed, breathless in its finale, Paul expertly weaves a trail through the North’s dark underbelly.’

NEIL WHITE

‘A deliciously twisted and fiendish set of murders and a great pairing of detectives.’

STAV SHEREZ

‘Avon’s big star … part edge-of-the-seat, part hide-behind-the-sofa!’

THE BOOKSELLER

‘An explosive thriller that will leave you completely hooked.’

WE LOVE THIS BOOK

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Paul Finch 2018

Cover design © www.blacksheep-uk.com 2018

Cover photograph © Alamy

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 ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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: 9780008243982

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008243999

Version: 2018-06-21

Dedication

For my wife, Catherine, who has always been my rock.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for Paul Finch

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

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

Chapter 39

Keep Reading…

About the Author

By the Same Author:

About the Publisher

Prologue

2014

‘OK … here’s how we do it. Now pay attention, Brian. Pay very close attention …’

The older one was speaking, the one who’d been so indescribably vicious all night.

It was a strange thing, but as recently as one day ago, if you’d asked Brian Kelso which of two desperate criminals you’d expect to be the most unrestrainedly violent – the older one, or the younger one – he’d have opted for the younger one every time.

But of course, the last nine hours had not just changed his views on that – it had changed everything.

‘Are you listening?’ the guttural voice wondered.

Again, the guy sounded as if he was from East Yorkshire. Again, Kelso made a mental note to remember this, so that he at least had something he could tell the police, though both he and Justine needed to survive this ordeal first.

‘Yes, I’m listening,’ he told the throwaway phone they’d supplied him with.

‘Drive out of the north end of town along Welton Road. You know it?’

‘Yes … I know it.’

‘You’ll see a bus stop at the junction with Horncastle Lane. Slow down when you get there, and stop. That’s when you’ll receive further instructions.’

‘OK.’

‘Before you set off … how much did you manage to get?’

‘Erm …’ Kelso’s mouth, already flavoured like mud after what seemed an age without even a sip of water, went fully dry. He glanced over his shoulder at the four heavy haversacks, now zipped and buckled tight on the rear seat of his Peugeot. ‘About two hundred … I think.’

There was a protracted silence.

‘Two hundred?’ came the eventual response. ‘I thought we’d agreed three at the very least?’

‘Look … I was on my own, OK? The staff were due within the next hour. I got as much as I could in the time available. Surely you understand that? It’s not like the Dunholme branch is crammed with cash anyway.’

‘I suppose it’ll have to do.’ The tone was deeply grudging. ‘But I’m not happy with you, Brian. I’m not happy at all.’

The line went dead.

‘Wait, please!’ Kelso shouted. ‘Is Justine all right?’

Only the dial tone purred back at him.

Just about managing to suppress the cry of emotional agony set to burst its way out of him like a piece of actual anatomy, he dropped the phone onto the passenger seat next to him, and slumped forward, his forehead striking the steering wheel.

Justine, whom he’d been married to for the last twelve years, had never hurt anyone in her life. She was good-natured, kind-hearted; she rarely nagged him or got crotchety, and God knows, there were times when he’d deserved that from her. Even though she’d been so grief-stricken to learn that she couldn’t have children, she’d refused to let it get her down, determinedly continuing with life, filling what might otherwise have been a yawning desolation for both of them with her bubbly personality and busy demeanour, looking after herself to the nth degree, looking after him, looking after their detached, four-bedroom house, ensuring that it was permanently like a new pin.

And now those bastards had … had …

Kelso shook his head, hot salt-tears coursing down his cheeks as he struggled to negotiate the icy surface of Market Rasen Road. Whatever the outcome today, he knew that he’d never forget the image now branded into his mind’s eye: of his lovely soulmate, stripped naked and bound X-shaped with pairs of her own tights to the lower banisters of their staircase, her head drooped, her chestnut hair unbound and hanging in long, ratty hanks, her slim, marble-white body mottled with bruises, streaked with blood.

‘You have to understand,’ the older one had said some time around three that morning, by which point Kelso sat stiff and sweat-soaked in the dining room chair they’d brought into the hall and tied him to with the hoover flex, so that he could watch. ‘We couldn’t do any of this to you. Because just before dawn, you’ve got to go down to that bank you manage with your best suit on and your keys in your pocket as if everything is normal. A bit earlier than usual of course, but not so much … and not in any kind of state that’ll make anyone who sees you suspicious. But even so, we had to make it absolutely clear what you’ll be facing if you try to fuck us over. You see, my young pal, here … he’s going to tail you down to the bank. And he’s going to park across the road till you’ve gone inside. Now, up until that moment I reckon it’s safe to say we’ll have full control over you. But we’re under no illusions: once you’re in there, things are different. There’ll be nothing to stop you picking the nearest phone up and calling the filth. Except the knowledge that we’ve still got your missus. And that nasty little question that’ll be niggling away in the back of your head … if that was the way they treated her when I hadn’t given them any grief, what in Christ’s name will it be like if I try to double-cross them?’

Kelso shuddered at the memory of those cold, reptilian eyes fixed on him from the two slits in the bright green balaclava. It was too easy to imagine that there was nothing human behind them.

‘So … you won’t try anything stupid, will you?’

‘I swear it,’ the captive had said. ‘Please … just don’t hurt her any more.’

‘You know … I actually think I trust you, Brian.’ This might have sounded more convincing had the older one’s pistol not been jammed so hard into Kelso’s right temple that his entire head was crooked painfully to the left. ‘Just don’t give me any fucking reason to regret that judgement, yeah? Because if you do, what happens after that will be un-fucking-imaginable.’

By the time he was on Welton Road, it was past eight, and the veils of frozen fog were thinning and clearing. The two hoodlums would like that, because, as they’d continually reminded him, they’d be watching his progress and keeping a sharp lookout for any anomalies, like so-called members of the public displaying unusual interest in his activities or maybe a helicopter hovering in the near distance. Not that there was any possibility of this, because Kelso, though he’d been tempted on entering the bank, had eventually made no phone call. What would have been the point? In the short time available before the villains became suspicious, the police wouldn’t have been able to mount any kind of response other than sending uniformed officers scrambling to the house and the bank – which would have achieved nothing, because the older villain was unlikely to still be at the former location, and though the younger one had tailed Kelso down here, he’d vanished after that, presumably secreting himself somewhere nearby, to watch. Both of them would have been able to get away relatively easily, maybe taking Justine with them, which would have been the end for her.

So, Kelso had complied.

Naturally he’d complied.

But he still had no idea what to expect next.

As he approached the junction with Horncastle Lane, he saw the bus stop in question, though nobody was waiting there. Rush hour was now upon them, as indicated by the increasingly heavy traffic, but this was a rural area, and the few commuters living in the villages round here were more likely to travel by car.

Before Kelso had set out that morning, they’d searched his vehicle for a tracker, and had even advised him that, when he got to the handover site, he’d be searched again, just in case he’d somehow managed to fit a wire and had been feeding covert info to the police all along. If that was the case, he’d never see his wife again, or anything in fact, because he’d be shot on the spot. The older one’s preferred method, or so he’d boasted, was a slug through the back of the neck.

Kelso would have laughed had the predicament not been so critical. A tracker? A hidden wire? They clearly overestimated the facilities available to modern-day bank managers, but the implicit message was clear: they weren’t taking any chances and no untoward behaviour on his part would be tolerated even for a second.

Trying not to think about that, he pulled into the layby opposite the bus stop, switched off his engine and sat waiting. As the seconds ticked by, he grew increasingly nervous.

He wasn’t on a time clock here, but he’d assumed that they wouldn’t want this thing dragged out, and that the longer it took, the twitchier and more dangerous they’d become. But what was supposed to happen? Surely someone should have shown up by now? The younger one who’d followed him to the bank, maybe – though perhaps he now had another role to play in the scheme. With the engine off, the interior of the car was cooling fast. Kelso pulled on his leather driving-gloves and zipped his anorak over his dishevelled suit. He’d tried to dress the part this morning, but it had been impossible to do a proper job.

Outside, a police traffic patrol eased past in the sluggish flow of vehicles. Kelso shrank down, only just resisting the urge to duck out of sight altogether, gabbling prayers that they wouldn’t swing around and park behind him to see what the trouble was. If one of the gang was observing and they spotted that, they’d never believe it a coincidence.

Thankfully that didn’t happen, though the mere sight of the police Range Rover with its hi-vis blue and yellow chequerboard flanks had touched Kelso with a new sense of despair. He’d been a bank manager for fifteen years, but he had no clue how his actions would be viewed when this was all over. Surely people would understand that he’d acted under duress? But the fact would remain that he’d robbed his own bank of £200,000. And if the hoodlums got clean away, how would people know that he hadn’t been in cahoots with them? The brutalising of Justine wouldn’t disprove that on its own. So, he’d be a suspect at the very least.

He sat up straight and pivoted around, to see if there was anything he ought to have responded to that he’d failed to notice.

On his left there was a stile, and beyond that a farm field, which, now that the mist had cleared, lay flat and white. Across the road, behind the bus stop shelter, stood a clutch of trees, their leafless boughs feathered with frost.

His eyes roved across the bus stop itself – and that was when he saw something.

He’d registered it on first arriving here but had barely thought about it. From across the road, it was a simple sheet of paper inserted into a ragged plastic envelope and taped to the bus stop post. He’d assumed it a reference to some proposed development in the area, a request for viewpoints from the local community, or similar. But now he clambered from his car, and crossed the road, weaving through the slow-moving vehicles. When he reached the bus stop, he saw that the paper bore a message composed from snipped-out newspaper lettering:

GO NORTH UP HORNCASTLE LANE

THAT IS OPEN COUNTRY

SO WE’LL BE WATCHING

ANY SIGN YOU HAVE COMPANY

YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS

BRING THIS NOTE AND THE PLASTIC

Kelso ripped the envelope down, and scampered back to his car, jumping in behind the wheel and, at the first opportunity, pulling into the traffic. He swerved onto Horncastle Lane and headed north. As directions went, these were vague, but he felt absurdly relieved, almost as if this whole tribulation had suddenly been resolved for him.

As he’d been advised, and already knew, this was a big agricultural area, expansive acres of farmland rolling away to every horizon under their coat of winter white. The sun was now up and sitting low in the east, a pale, ash-grey orb, while the sky itself was clear of cloud, but, in that eerie way of raw January days, was bleached of all colour. Suddenly, Kelso felt as if he was away from the hubbub; there were few, if any, fellow road-users on this quieter route.

The phone began to ring, and he slammed it to his ear.

‘This is Kelso.’

‘I know it’s you,’ that familiar, confident voice replied. ‘So far you’ve been a good boy. Looks like we’re really going to do business, doesn’t it?’

‘I hope so. Please can you tell me … where’s Justine? Is she all right?’

‘It’s good that you care about your wife, Brian. I always knew you would. That’s why this plan was foolproof from the start. You don’t need to worry, pal. You’ll see her again. Just continue to do exactly as you’re told, and we’ll be fine.’

‘All right, well … please, let’s just get this over with.’

‘Take your next left.’

That, in itself, was unnerving. It meant they really were watching him. Who knew where from – they could be standing on a barn roof, using binoculars, for all Kelso was aware. Whatever it was, they were bloody well organised.

‘And where will that bring me to?’ he asked.

‘Oh, no …’ the voice hardened. ‘Now don’t spoil it by asking stupid questions. I thought we’d already established that once we hook up again, we’ll be searching you … just to make sure that, by some miracle, you and your friendly neighbourhood PC Plod didn’t get a chance to secrete some kind of communication device on you.’

‘I haven’t done that!’ Kelso blurted. ‘Come on … I was only in the bank ten minutes. How could anything like that have been arranged? You were watching anyway, weren’t you? You’d have seen if a police officer had arrived there.’

There was a long, judgemental silence, and then: ‘Like I said … take your next left.’

The line went dead.

Kelso shuddered, briefly feeling as if he needed to vomit, but instead he slammed his foot to the floor, accelerating from forty miles an hour to fifty. As instructed, he took a left-hand turn, but at reckless speed. It was a few seconds later, when common sense kicked in and he slowed right down again. It might seem quiet along here, but the last thing he wanted was to catch the eye of some lazy copper idling around in the back-country hoping to bag some boy-racers.

He pressed on more cautiously for perhaps another three or so miles, passing a farmhouse on his right, though it was boarded up. Fleetingly, he was taut with anticipation, recognising this as a possible spot for the handover. But he’d soon bypassed the old farm, driving steadily north, and still there was no call.

‘Come on, come on,’ he said under his breath, frantic and frustrated at the same time. ‘Please … soon, good Lord in Heaven, let this be over soon.’

The phone buzzed. He snatched it up, and saw that he’d received a text:

Next right

The car was warming up again, but the sweat on his brow owed nothing to the temperature.

When a right-hand turn approached, he swung around it, paying almost no heed to the conditions. The Peugeot slithered sideways across a road so slick with ice that it might have been double-glazed. He now found himself following a single-track lane, which hadn’t even been tarmacked, his wheels jolting amid rock-hard tractor ruts. It was a terrifying thought that he was being lured further and further from civilisation, but that had probably been the appeal of the Dunholme branch in the first place; he was nobody – just an everyday bank manager, but his bank was located on the edge of extensive countryside, from where it would be quick and simple for the robbers to vanish into the sticks. Yet more evidence of how well planned this whole thing had been. But none of that mattered right now. His overwhelming desire to feel Justine in his arms again – no doubt shivering and whimpering, teeth chattering from the cold, numb with shock, but at last safe – rendered any qualms about how isolated he was null and void.

Up ahead, he could see trees: not exactly a wood, more like a copse. The narrow lane bisected it through the middle, running on straight as a ribbon.

Maybe that would be the place? It was the first change of scenery Kelso had encountered on this drear landscape in the last few minutes. In that respect, it surely signified something. And indeed, as he passed into and among the trees, he couldn’t resist accelerating again, bouncing and rocking on the ridged, hard-frozen surface – and, as such, almost crashing head-on into the white-painted pole with the red, circular signpost at the top, which stood in a concrete base and had been planted in the dead-centre of the thoroughfare.

When the Peugeot finally halted, having slid nearly twenty yards, the signpost stood directly in front of him, only its circular red plate visible over the top of his bonnet. A single word was stencilled in black lettering in the middle of it:

STOP

Kelso climbed out and stood beside the car, his breath pluming in the frigid air.

Initially, there was no sound. He glanced left and right and saw to his surprise that he’d halted on a narrow bridge. He’d been so focused on the stop sign that he hadn’t noticed the rotted, flimsy barriers to either side of him. Not that it was much of a bridge. By the looks of it, it didn’t lead anywhere in particular; it was probably for the use of livestock.

‘Kelso!’ a harsh voice shouted.

He turned full circle.

‘Kelso!’ the voice shouted again, and, realising where it was coming from, he scrambled around the front of his Peugeot to the left-hand barrier.

Some twenty feet below, he saw what he took to be a derelict railway cutting, except that this also had been adapted into a farm track, because, almost directly underneath him, a flatbed truck was waiting. Its driver, the younger of the two hoodlums, a taller, leaner figure than the older one, but mainly identifiable because, instead of a green balaclava, he was wearing a black one, had climbed from the cab.

‘Throw the cash down!’ he called up. ‘Do it now!’

‘Where’s my wife?’ Kelso shouted back.

‘Throw it now, or you’ll never see her again.’

‘All right, for God’s sake!’

Kelso returned to his car and, one by one, humped the loaded haversacks to the barrier, dropping them over. Each one landed with a shuddering crash, bouncing the truck on its shocks. From twenty feet up, fifty grand in used banknotes made quite an impact. The younger hoodlum had clearly anticipated this, because he stood well back in case one went astray. However, when all four had landed, he hurriedly lowered the tailgate and jumped on board, opening the zips on two of them to check their contents, before climbing back down and scuttling to the driving cab.

‘Hey!’ Kelso shouted. ‘Hey … what about my wife?’

The guy never once looked back. The door slammed behind him, the vehicle juddering to life, before roaring off along the cutting, frosted leaves and clumps of frozen earth flying behind it.

‘What the …’ Kelso’s voice almost broke. ‘Good … good God almighty!’

‘Hey,’ someone behind him said.

He spun around, and almost collapsed in gratitude at the sight of the older villain, who had evidently sidled out of the trees beyond the signpost and now approached along the lane.

As before, he wore overalls, heavy gloves and a green balaclava.

Also as before, his pistol was drawn.

‘I’ve done as you asked.’ Kelso limped towards him, arms spread. ‘You saw me.’

The hoodlum pointed the gun at his chest. ‘Yeah, you’ve done as we asked.’

Kelso stumbled to a halt. ‘OK … please let’s not play this game any more. Just let me have Justine?’

‘Worried about your wife, eh?’

Despite his best efforts, Kelso’s voice took on a whining, agonised tone. ‘Please don’t do this. Just tell me where she is.’

‘Where she was before. Back at your house. Why would we bring her with us?’

‘OK … so … is that it, then?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’ But the hoodlum didn’t lower his firearm.

Kelso was confused. ‘So … I can go?’

‘Eager to see her again, eh?’

‘What do you think? Just let me go, and I’ll drive back.’

‘Nah. I can send you to her a quicker way.’

‘What …?’ After a night of extreme horrors, Kelso, who’d thought he’d be rendered immune to this sort of thing for the rest of his life, now felt a deeper, more gnawing chill than ever before. ‘What do you mean?’

The gaze of those terrible eyes intensified. He imagined the bastard grinning under his balaclava; crazily, maniacally, a living jack-o’-lantern.

‘Oh, no …’ Kelso simpered under his breath. ‘Oh no, please nooo …’

‘Oh, yes,’ the hoodlum chuckled, firing twice into the bank manager’s chest.

Chapter 1

Present day

The church of Milden St Paul’s was located in a rural haven some ten minutes’ walk outside the Suffolk village of Little Milden. It sat on the edge of a quiet B-road, which ostensibly connected the distant conurbations of Ipswich and Sudbury but in truth saw little activity and was hemmed in from all sides by belts of gentle woodland and, in late summer, an endless golden vista of sun-ripened wheat.

The atmosphere of this picturesque place was one of uninterrupted peace. Even those of no religious inclination would have struggled to find fault with it. One might even say that nothing bad could ever happen here … were it not for the events of a certain late-July evening, some forty minutes after evensong had finished.

It began when the tall, dark-haired vicar came out of the vicarage and stood by the wicket gate. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, about six-foot-three inches tall, and of impressive build: square across the shoulders, broad of chest, with solid, brown arms folded over his pink, short-sleeved shirt. His hair was a lush, curly black, his jaw firm, his nose straight, his eyes a twinkling, mischievous blue. To pass him in the street, one might think it curious that such a masculine specimen had found his calling in the cloth. There had to be at least a chance that he’d have certain of his parishioners swooning in their pews rather than heeding his sermons, though on this evening it was he who’d been distracted by something.

And here it came again.

A third or fourth heavy blow sounded from the other side of the church.

Initially, the vicar wondered if the warm summer air was carrying an echo from some distant workplace. On the church’s south side, you could see the roof of Farmer Holbrook’s barn on the far southern edge of the wheat field next door. But that was the only building in sight, and there wasn’t likely to be much work under way on a tranquil Monday evening.

When he heard what sounded like a fifth blow, it was a sharper, flatter sound, and louder, as if there was anger in it. The vicar opened the gate, stepped onto the path and walked towards the church’s northwest corner. As he reached it, he heard another blow. And another, and another.

This time there was a smashing sound too, like wood splintering.

He hurried on to the church’s southwest corner. Yet another blow followed, and with it a grunt, as of someone making a strenuous effort.

On the building’s immediate south side lay an untended part of the grounds, the weathered slabs of eighteenth-century gravestones poking up through the long summer grass. Beyond those stood the rusty metal fence cordoning off the wheat field. It might be a sobering thought that, once you were on this side of the church, you were completely screened from the road and any passing traffic, but the vicar didn’t have time to think about that. He rounded the final corner and strode several yards along the south-side path, before stopping dead.

A man with longish red hair, wearing patchwork green/brown khaki, was striking with a wood-axe at the vestry door. He grunted with each stroke, splinters flying, going at it with such gusto that he’d already chopped a hole in the middle of the door, and very likely would soon have the whole thing down.

The soles of the vicar’s black leather shoes had made barely a sound on the worn paving stones, but the man in khaki had heard him; he lowered his axe and turned.

The mask he wore had been chiselled from wood and depicted a goat’s face – but it was a demonic kind of goat, with a humanoid grin and horns that curled fantastically. The worst thing about it, though, was real: the eyes peering out through the holes notched for them were entirely human, and yet they burned with living hatred.

The man came down the step from the door and approached, axe held loosely at his side. The vicar stood his ground and spoke boldly.

‘What are you doing here? Why are you damaging church property?’

‘You know what we’re doing here, shaman!’ a voice said from his right.

He glanced sideways: three more figures had risen into view, each from behind a different headstone. They too largely wore green; he saw old ragged jumpers, ex-military combat jackets. They too were masked: a toad, a boar, a rabbit, each one decked with additional monstrous features, and each with the same hate-filled eyes glaring out.

The vicar kept his voice steady. ‘I asked what you are doing here?’

‘You know the answer, you holier-than-thou prick!’ said a voice from behind.

When the vicar spun backwards, a fifth figure had emerged around the corner of the church. This one also wore green, but with brown leather over the top. His wooden mask depicted a wolf, and as he advanced, he drew a heavy blade from a scabbard at his belt; a hunting knife honed to lethal sharpness.

The vicar looked again at the threesome in the graveyard; Toad now smacked a knotty club into his gloved left palm; Rabbit unhooked a coil of rope from his shoulder; Boar hefted a canister of petrol.

‘In the name of God,’ the vicar said, ‘don’t do this.’

‘We don’t recognise your god,’ Wolf replied.

‘Look … you don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘Oh, very good,’ Wolf sniggered, as they closed in. ‘Very fucking saintly.’

‘This is sanctified ground,’ the vicar advised them. ‘Use more blasphemies here, and I’ll be forced to chastise you.’

‘Really?’ Wolf was so surprised by that, that he almost came to a halt. ‘I can’t wait to see how you do it.’

‘I warn you, friends …’ The vicar pivoted around. ‘I’m no martyr.’

‘Funnily enough,’ Wolf sneered, ‘the ones before you didn’t go willingly to it, either.’

‘Ah, now I know who you are,’ the vicar said.

‘Always a good thing to know thine enemies.’

‘You’re on your final warning.’

‘Perhaps your god will strike us down?’ Wolf was only five or so yards away. ‘Maybe throw a thunderbolt this fine summer evening.’

The vicar nodded solemnly. ‘I fear one’s coming right now.’

A rasping chuckle sounded behind the lupine mask. ‘You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.’

‘I also have this.’

From out of his trouser pocket, the cleric drew an extendable autolock baton, which, with a single jerk of his brawny wrist, he snapped open to its full twenty-one inches.

Before Wolf could respond, the baton had struck him across the mask in a backhand thwack. The carved wood cracked as Wolf’s head jerked sideways and he tottered, dropping his knife. As the rest came to a startled halt, the vestry door burst inward and the figure of a man exploded out, launching at Goat from behind. This figure was neither as tall nor as broad as the vicar, just over six feet and of average build, with a mop of dark hair. He wore blue jeans and a blue sweatshirt with a police-issue stab vest over the top, but he also carried an extended baton, which he brought down in a furious, angled swipe at the elbow joint of Goat’s right arm.

The axe clattered to the floor as the target yelped in disbelieving pain. He grappled with his injured joint, only for a kick in the backside to send him sprawling onto his face. His assailant leapt onto him from behind, knees-first, crushing the air from his lungs.

The vicar swung to face Toad, Boar and Rabbit, holding aloft a leather wallet, displaying his warrant card. ‘Detective Inspector Reed, Serial Crimes Unit!’ he bellowed. ‘You’re all under arrest on suspicion of murdering John Strachan, Glyn Thomas and Michaela Hanson!’

Wolf fled towards the southwest corner of the church, only to slam head-on into another huge figure, this one even more massive than the vicar. He too wore jeans and chest armour, and he greeted Wolf with a forearm smash to the throat.

As Wolf went down, gagging, a deep Welsh voice asked him: ‘What time is it, Mr Wolf? Time you weren’t here? Too bloody late for that, boyo.’

The other three ran energetically towards the boundary fence, only to be stunned by the sight of more police officers, some in uniform and some in plain clothes, all armoured, rising from the wheat and spreading into a skirmish line.

‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Reed intoned, watching the fleeing trio as, one by one, they were overpowered, unmasked and clapped into handcuffs, ‘but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you may later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

‘You’re also under arrest for being a sacrilegious little fuck,’ the big Welsh cop whispered, leaning into Wolf as he fastened his hands behind his back.

‘We don’t fear your god,’ Wolf hissed in an agonised voice.

‘You shouldn’t.’ The Welsh cop yanked the fractured mask off the lean, sweaty features underneath. ‘My God’s merciful. Problem you’ve got, boyo, is … there’s a long, hard road before you get to Him.’

Beside the vestry door, the cop in blue snapped a pair of cuffs onto Goat, who, without his mask, was gaunt and pale, his carroty red hair hanging in lank strands as he cowered there.

‘Get up,’ the cop said, standing. His accent was Northwest England.

‘Shit … think you …’ Goat’s voice became whiny, frantic. ‘Think you broke my arm.’

‘No, I didn’t … just whacked you on a nerve cluster.’ The cop kicked him. ‘Get up.’

‘Can’t feel anything under my elbow.’

‘You’re facing three murder charges.’ The cop grabbed him by an armpit and hauled him to his feet. ‘A dicky elbow’s the least of your problems.’

‘Christ!’ Goat screamed. ‘My arm’s broke … God-Christ!’

‘Thought you boys didn’t believe in Christ?’

‘It’s killing me, mate … for fuck’s sake!’

‘Sucks when you’ve come to hurt someone and found it’s the other way round, eh? Who are you, anyway?’

‘Sh … Sherwin …’ the prisoner stammered.

‘First name?’

‘That’s my first name. Last name’s Lightfoot … Oh shiiit, my fucking arm!’

‘Sherwin Lightfoot? For real?’

‘Yeah … oh, sweet Jeeesus …’

‘Fair enough. You’re also getting locked up for having a stupid name.’

‘Everything all right, Heck?’ Reed called.

‘Heck?’ Lightfoot said. ‘Look who’s bloody talking …’

‘Shut up,’ the cop called Heck retorted. ‘Everything’s smashing, sir. Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘Easy, Sarge.’ Reed ran a finger round the inside of his clerical collar but made such a dog’s breakfast of loosening it that its button popped off. ‘I was only asking.’

‘I have done this before, you know.’

‘Good work, everyone,’ a female voice interrupted.

Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper was never less than impressive. Even now, in jeans, a T-shirt and body armour, and clambering over a rusty farm fence, she cut a striking figure. With her athletic physique, wild mane of white-blonde hair and fierce good looks, she radiated charisma, but also toughness. Many was the cocky male officer who’d taken her gender as a green light for slack work or insubordination, or both, and had instantly regretted it.

‘This lot been cautioned, Jack?’ Gemma asked.

‘They have indeed, ma’am,’ Reed said.

‘Responses?’

‘The only one I heard was this fella.’ Reed indicated Boar, who, having had his mask pulled off, resembled a pig anyway, and now was in the grasp of two uniforms. ‘Think it went something like “fuck off, you dick-breathed shitehawk”.’

‘Excellent. Just the thing to win the jury over.’ Gemma raised her voice. ‘All right, get them out of here. I want separate prisoner-transports for each one. Do not let them talk.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Wolf sneered, still gripped by the large Welsh cop, though he seemed to have recovered some of his attitude. ‘No one’s talking here except you. And you’ve got quite a lot to say for a slip of a tart.’

Gemma drew a can of CS spray from her back pocket and stalked towards him.

‘Ma’am!’ Reed warned.

DSU Piper was renowned, among other things, for almost never losing her cool, and so managed to bring herself to a halt before doing something she might regret. She stood a couple of feet from the prisoner, whose thin, grizzled features split into a yellow-toothed grin.

‘Don’t say nothing!’ he shouted to his compatriots. ‘Do you hear me? Don’t give these bastards the pleasure. Say nothing, and we’ve got plenty chance of beating this.’

‘You finished?’ Gemma asked him.

He shrugged. ‘For now.’

‘Good. Take a long look at your friends. This is likely the last time you’ll see them till you’re all on trial. And very possibly on that day, one, or maybe two of them, could be looking back at you from the witness stand. How much chance will you have then?’

Wolf hawked and spat at her feet.

‘Let’s move it!’ Gemma shouted. ‘Someone get the CSIs in. Tell them the scene’s clear for examination – I want this ground going over inch by inch.’

Chapter 2

It wasn’t always the case that suspects arrested by the Serial Crimes Unit were brought back to London for processing. As part of the National Crime Group, SCU’s remit was to cover all the police force areas of England and Wales, and as such they most commonly liaised with local forces and tended to use their facilities. But on this occasion, to Detective Sergeant Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg at least, it felt like the most sensible option. Little Milden was only fifty-eight miles from London, and only seventy-two from Finchley Road police station, where extensive adaptations had been made for the confinement and interrogation of just such highly dangerous groups as the ‘Black Chapel’.

Finchley Road was now classified as one of only two high-security police stations in London. The first one, Paddington Green, was primarily for holding suspected terrorists and as such was more like a fortress than a regular police office. Finchley Road was physically much the same, but primarily for use against organised crime. To all intents and purposes, it was a normal divisional police station in that it was nondescript and open to members of the public twenty-four/seven. But the reinforced concrete barriers around its exterior might indicate that it had other purposes too, while additional, less visible defences were also in place, such as bulletproof glass in its windows, outer doors of reinforced steel with highly complex access codes, and the presence on the premises of permanently armed personnel. It had an ordinary Custody Suite for use in day-to-day police operations, but there was also a Specialist Custody Suite on a lower level, which was completely separate from the rest of the building’s interior and hosted twenty cells and ten interview rooms, all of these viewable either through video link or two-way mirror.

It was through one such viewing port that Heck now watched as Rabbit, aka Dennis Purdham, was interviewed. Of all five suspects, he had been the most visibly distraught on arrest. Aside from their leader, Wolf, also known as Ranald Ulfskar, the others – Sherwin Lightfoot (Goat), Michael Hapwood (Toad) and Jason Renwick (Boar) – had also registered surprise and shock when the police showed up, but as with any cult, and that was what Heck felt they were dealing with here rather than a conventional criminal gang, they’d drawn strength from their leader’s stoicism, and were obediently keeping their mouths shut.

Purdham was the exception.

Like the rest of them, he’d struck Heck as an outsider: unshaved, long-haired, pockmarked. The clothing they’d seized from him mainly comprised oil-stained hunting gear and mismatched bits of army surplus wear. But, at the age of twenty-three, Purdham was much younger than his confederates, and possibly only involved in the murders as a bit player – or so his solicitor was seeking to intimate. He’d wept when they’d booked him in, and wept again when they gave him his white custody suit. As such, while the others were left to stew in their cells, it wasn’t long into Purdham’s interview before he’d begun to talk.

The interviewers were Gemma Piper and Jack Reed, who, by prior agreement, was adopting an understanding guise. It was this that Purdham had responded to, gradually regaining his confidence.

‘At the end of the day, Christians are a set of vile bastards,’ he said in broad Staffordshire. ‘Everything about them stinks. Their hypocrisy, their dishonesty … they’re a bunch of fucking control freaks too.’

‘Someone give you a hard time when you were young, Dennis?’ Reed asked. ‘A priest maybe?’

‘You mean was I kiddie-fiddled?’ Purdham shook his head. ‘Nah … never happened to me. But there are lots it did happen to, aren’t there?’

‘So, you and your friends were responding to sexual misdoings?’ Gemma said. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

Purdham hesitated, unsure how to reply.

He wasn’t as stupid as he looked, Heck thought, because to admit to this would be to admit premeditation.

‘Because in case you did,’ Gemma added, ‘I can tell you that there’s never been any suspicion about those three people. Or about the Reverend Hatherton, who is the incumbent at Milden St Paul’s.’

‘That means he’s the one I stepped in for tonight,’ Reed explained.

‘Look …’ Purdham scrubbed a hand through his lank, mouse-brown hair. ‘I don’t think anyone was specifically targeted. It’s what I said before, Christians are … just shit-arses.’

‘You mean Christians in general?’ Gemma asked.

‘Lots of people agree with me on this.’ Purdham’s eyes widened; he became animated. ‘You only need to go on social media. Everyone’s always saying it.’

There was a soft click in the viewing room, as a door opened. Heck turned and was surprised to see the squat, bull-necked shape of DCI Bob Hunter come furtively in. Hunter acknowledged Heck with a nod and signalled that he didn’t want to interrupt.

Heck turned back to the mirror, beyond which Gemma was in mid-reply.

‘It’s worth remembering, Dennis,’ she said, ‘that social media is an echo chamber.’

Purdham regarded her confusedly.

‘Every mother’s son on the planet uses it to sound off about stuff that bugs them. They may have genuine issues with religion, even with Christianity specifically … but just because they gob off about it online, most of them are not even so hyped about it that they stop celebrating Christmas. So, I’d say it’s a near certainty that what happened at St Winifred’s in the Marsh, for example, would be right off their agenda.’

The killing of the Catholic priest, Father John Strachan, on March 21 that year, had been the first murder in the Black Chapel case. The victim had answered a knock at the presbytery door just after 11 p.m., at his church, St Winifred’s in the Marsh, up in rural Cambridgeshire – only to receive an axe-blow to the face, which had killed him instantly.

‘Look … I’ve admitted I was there,’ Purdham said, tingeing red. ‘But … I told you, I didn’t participate.’

‘Neither did you do anything to prevent it.’

‘It happened in a flash. I didn’t even know Ranald was armed.’

As Heck listened, he thought again about Ranald Ulfskar. It was a cute name he’d given himself. In real life, he was Albert Jones from Scunthorpe. He was the spiritual leader of this weird group. At fifty, he was the oldest, and though also the scrawniest and most ragbag, he was, without doubt, the toughest and had led the most lived-in life. And yet it was through Ulfskar/Jones that Heck had first learned about the so-called Black Chapel. Ulfskar had spent several years as a roadie for a very successful black-metal band from Scandinavia called Varulv. One of his fellow roadies at the time, Jimmy ‘Snake’ Fletcher, someone not quite as besotted with Varulv’s dangerous Nordic vision, had later become one of Heck’s informants. And once it had become apparent to Fletcher that the East Anglia priest killings were a series, and that they were in synch with certain dates in the calendar, he’d got on the blower.

‘We also strongly suspect you were there at the murder of Reverend Glyn Thomas,’ Gemma said.

Purdham hung his head and said nothing.

The second cleric to die had been a Church of England minister, the Reverend Glyn Thomas. On the night of April 30 that year, he’d been alone at his church of St Oswald’s, out in the Norfolk back-country, when, just before midnight, intruders had forced entry to the vicarage. He was hauled out in his nightclothes and forced to watch as both the vicarage and the church were set alight. He was then bound, hand and foot, and had a wire noose tightened around his neck, which was attached to the tow bar of a vehicle. After this, the Reverend Thomas was dragged at high speeds along isolated country lanes for fifteen miles, before his body, or what was left of it, came loose of its own accord. It was found in a roadside ditch the next day, but only several hours after the blazing ruins of St Oswald’s had drawn the attention of early-morning farm workers.

‘And what about the murder of Michaela Hanson?’ Gemma wondered.

Purdham still said nothing.

In the case of the Reverend Michaela Hanson, it was mid-evening on June 21. She’d been alone in the Church of Our Lady on the outskirts of Shoeburyness in Essex. As with the incident at Little Milden, it was shortly after evensong, and the congregation and altar servers had gone home. Reverend Hanson was collecting the hymnals from the pews when intruders entered through the sacristy door. Her naked corpse was found the following morning, spread-eagled on the altar table. She’d been slashed across the throat with something like a billhook and pinned to the wood with a pitchfork.

‘There was even a sexual element in that one, wasn’t there?’ Reed said, referring to the fact that the Reverend Hanson’s lower body had also shown signs of being violently attacked.

‘Which at least is in keeping with this Odinist fantasy,’ Gemma said.

Purdham looked up sharply, as if to mouth a protest, but managed to restrain himself.

‘Why don’t we talk about that Odinist angle, Dennis?’ Reed said.

Still, Purdham held back on a response.

‘Those Vikings had a pretty violent attitude to life, didn’t they? Rape, pillage …’

‘They get misrepresented by films.’ Purdham hung his head again; he almost seemed embarrassed to be mounting a defence.

‘Maybe, but blood rites are a part of Odinism, aren’t they? I’ve been reading up on it. Normally, it was animals that got sacrificed. But certain Viking leaders, to really curry favour with the gods, used to offer humans too, didn’t they?’

Again, Purdham said nothing.

‘You have to talk to us about this bit, Dennis,’ Gemma said. ‘We’re not really interested in the mythology, or how Ranald Ulfskar managed to tie it in with some modern-day Aryan master-race gibberish. What we really want to know is what you saw happen on these awful nights, and what part you played in it.’

Still, nothing.

‘What about the dates?’ Reed said. ‘If you’re genuinely interested in the Viking religion, you must’ve known about the dates …’

‘March 21,’ Gemma reminded him. ‘April 30, June 21 … how about today, July 31?’

He glanced up weakly. ‘Look … I knew they were relevant, yes. But I didn’t know we were going to kill people.’

‘OK, let’s go with that?’ she said. ‘Let’s assume that was true the first time. But what about the second, third and fourth?’

‘Surely, you didn’t think you were just going to rough these guys up?’ Reed said. ‘Or scare them? How would that have gone down with Odin and Thor?’

‘That’s the point,’ Purdham moaned, seemingly deeply troubled. ‘It’s cruel … I know, but you can’t deny the deities. Once you’ve promised something, you’ve gotta deliver …’

Heck shook his head as he watched.

‘Deities?’ said a disbelieving voice. Bob Hunter had come forward to the mirror. ‘Odin and Thor? These twats ripping the piss, or what?’

‘Not totally,’ Heck replied. ‘Odinism was a real thing.’

‘Wouldn’t have thought there was much call for it in the twenty-first century.’

‘Where’ve you been, sir? This is the age of the hate crime.’

‘Yeah, but when it comes to white-power nutters, I thought Muslims were the hate figures of the moment.’

‘Me too,’ Heck agreed. ‘But I suppose some clowns just can’t get over that slap Sister Mary gave them when they were being cheeky to her all those years ago in Junior School. How are you anyway?’

‘I’m good.’

‘Congratulations on the promotion.’

‘Cheers.’

DCI Bob Hunter had once been DI Bob Hunter of the Serial Crimes Unit, in which capacity he and Heck had worked together on several enquiries. Ultimately though, Hunter, who had moved to SCU from the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad, had adopted a cowboy approach to law enforcement, which its overall commander, Gemma Piper, had never been comfortable with. In due course, after one dispute too many, Hunter had returned to the Met and his beloved FS – or ‘Sweeney’, as it was known among London’s armed robbery community, whom it exclusively tackled – where he had now, much to Heck’s surprise, been promoted.

‘Listen, Heck … do you need to be in here?’ Hunter asked, seemingly conscious that several other SCU officers were also present, no doubt earwigging. ‘Or can we step outside for a minute?’

Heck threw a grudging glance through the mirror at Reed, who again was making headway with the suspect, before shrugging. ‘I don’t think they’ll miss me.’

‘Who’s Prince Charming, anyway?’ Hunter asked, noticing the object of his annoyance.

‘DI Jack Reed.’ Heck opened the door and moved out into the Custody corridor. ‘Transferred in from Hampshire about three months ago.’

Hunter followed him out. ‘What did he do down there?’

‘I don’t know. Some crap job … probably undeserving of praise.’

Hunter looked curious. ‘You’re not a fan, then?’

‘It’s nothing, I’m just being cynical.’ Heck walked through the Charge Office and tapped out a code on the door connecting to the Custody team’s Refs Room.

‘If he’s that bad how did he finish up in SCU?’

‘He used to work for Joe Wullerton in the Critical Incident Cadre.’

Hunter chuckled. ‘Bit of nepotism in the National Crime Group? Never.’

‘Nah …’ Heck shook his head glumly. ‘He’s good. I mean, he’s so clean he squeaks when he walks, but I can’t pretend he doesn’t know his job.’

‘Well … this is all very interesting, but how about that chat?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

They went into the Refs Room, which currently was empty, and got themselves a coffee from the vending machine in the corner.

‘Sounds like everything’s peachy in the Flying Squad,’ Heck said.

‘To be honest,’ Hunter replied, ‘when I rejoined, I didn’t think I had much of a future.’

‘I always thought it was your natural home.’

‘Yeah, but sometimes it isn’t a plan to go back where you started, is it? Not that Gemma bloody Piper left me much choice. No offence, by the way.’

‘None taken,’ Heck said.

It had been well over a decade since he and Gemma had been an item, and had even, briefly, set up home together; they’d been young detective constables at the time, working divisional CID at Bethnal Green. But much fire and water had gone under the bridge since then, not to mention Gemma’s meteoric rise through the ranks. On first arrival at the Serial Crimes Unit, Heck had never expected to find himself subservient to his former girlfriend. They’d worked together ever since, almost eleven years now, but not always cosily.

‘The Squad’s been good to me, though, as it’s turned out,’ Hunter added. ‘It always has. I mean, it’s not fucking perfect …’

‘Give over, Bob.’ Heck sipped his coffee. ‘What’re you moaning about? There are lads all over the Met who’d kill to get into the Sweeney.’

‘How about you, Heck? Are you one of them?’

Heck snorted. ‘Not in the Met any more, am I?’

‘Jesus, so what? You’ve swapped forces at least three times already to my knowledge. And it’s not like NCG’s got a great future.’

Heck couldn’t deny that. In this age of austerity, the police services of the UK were taking a real hammering. It would only be a matter of time before specialist squads started to feel the pinch as well, and rumours were now rife at Scotland Yard, where the National Crime Group’s HQ was located.

‘And the Flying Squad has?’ Heck wondered.

Hunter barked a laugh. ‘Come off it. We’ve survived everything from machine-gun attacks to corruption charges. A few cutbacks aren’t gonna do for us.’

‘Bob …?’ For the first time, Heck wondered where this conversation was leading. ‘Are you offering me a job, or something?’

‘You’ve surely heard that we’ve got a vacancy for a new DI?’

‘And it’s down to you to find someone to fill it?’

‘I’m running Squad North-East now. There have to be some perks.’

‘There’s one problem with this. You’re looking for a DI … I’m a DS.’

‘Come on, Heck … I think we can make that happen.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Yeah, just like that.’ Hunter laughed again. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, pal. With your record, you’ve got credit in the bank. Or have you still got this daft, self-defeating ideal about not wanting to join the brass because you’d rather be a soldier?’

Heck had been offered promotions in the past but had rarely given them a second thought, always insisting that he preferred the front line, and that he’d rather be an investigator than an administrator – though, deep down, and Gemma had once mentioned this to him, he couldn’t help wondering, being the ‘rogue angel’ he was (again, Gemma’s phrase, not his), if it was more a case that he simply didn’t fancy the extra responsibility of DI.

Times changed, of course. And so did attitudes and ambitions.

As he sipped more coffee, he thought again about how comfy the handsome, debonair Jack Reed was in his new role as DI at SCU, which in effect made him Gemma’s deputy. And how comfy Gemma apparently was to have him there.

And it wasn’t as if the Flying Squad itself wasn’t appealing. Heck had worked Tower Hamlets Robbery once, though that had been a smaller role – mainly he’d found himself going after muggers and other street bandits. The Sweeney pursued the big boys. For that reason, there’d always been a certain glamour about it – they were regularly in the press and on TV. Their reputation for being wideboys, just a bit too close in spirit to the East End villains they often investigated, had always put him off in the past.

But again, things changed.

‘Not that Squad DIs don’t do a bit of soldiering themselves from time to time,’ Hunter added. ‘Just think, you can make your ultimate fantasy real … you’ll be Regan Mark II, a displaced Manchester lad working over the blaggers of London.’

‘Who’d I be replacing?’ Heck asked him.

‘Ray Marciano.’

‘Come again …?’

Hunter shrugged. ‘He’s left us, Heck.’

Heck was astounded. ‘Ray Marciano’s left the Flying Squad?’

‘Not just the Squad, pal. The job.’

The term ‘living legend’ was often overused in police circles, but Ray Marciano, the Flying Squad’s quietly spoken detective inspector from Sevenoaks, Kent, had proved to be the exception to that rule. For the last nineteen years, he’d led one successful campaign after another against the capital’s legion of bank robbers, taking down more firms than anyone else before him, securing hundreds of years’ worth of convictions for major-league faces. He wasn’t just considered a brilliant detective, he was also better connected and therefore better informed than almost anyone else in the Met, which was all the more remarkable given that he wasn’t a London boy by origin. There was scarcely a snout in the city he didn’t have a working relationship with, barely a villain who didn’t know him well. In fact, it was gang leader, Don Parry, whom Marciano had arrested in connection with the Millennium Dome raid and sent down for twenty years, who had christened him, with a degree of grudging respect, ‘Thief-Taker No. 1’.

‘Would you believe he’s gone working for a defence solicitor?’ Hunter said.

Heck was vaguely aware that his jaw had dropped. ‘You’re telling me Ray Marciano hasn’t just chucked it in, he’s chucked it in to go and be a case worker for a brief?’

‘Not just any brief. It’s Morgan Robbins.’

‘Robbins …’ Heck tried to recall; the name sounded familiar.

‘He’s the one who got Milena Misanyan off,’ Hunter said.

Heck did remember it. Last year, the City of London Police had charged some female oligarch from Turkey or somewhere, who was newly settled in the UK, with various highfalutin white-collar offences: embezzlement, fraud, tax evasion, that kind of thing. Apparently, they’d done months of work on her before striking, only to see her defence, organised by Morgan Robbins, take them on at every turn and defeat them. It had been all over the papers for several months.

Heck seemed to recollect a photo of Misanyan on the cover of Time magazine: it was a portrait of an archetypical eastern beauty, complete with dark eyes, thick lashes and ruby lips, a fetching silk scarf woven around her head, her expression a bland but enigmatic smile. That item had come well before the recent court battles; he thought it had been in celebration of her joining the ranks of the world’s female billionaires – the headline had been something like From Hell to Heaven – but he hadn’t bothered reading the story.

‘Thanks to the Misanyan case, Robbins is no ordinary lawyer these days,’ Hunter said. ‘He’s a big fish, a real whopper.’

‘Even so …’ Heck shook his head. ‘Hearing that Ray Marciano would rather be a case worker than a cop is like hearing Kim Jong-un’s up for Man of the Year. It doesn’t compute.’

‘He’s not really a case worker, is he? More like their lead investigator. Look … don’t be surprised, Heck. Ray’s still doing what he loves, only now there’ll be no more pissing around with Met politics, no having to cover his back all day, no having to mind his Ps and Qs or watch what he says in case he upsets some fucking snowflake back in the office. On top of that, he’ll be on massive money. Way more than we can afford to pay.’

Heck arched an eyebrow. ‘You’re not exactly selling the Squad to me, Bob.’

‘Look, Heck … we’re all pig-sick of the changes in the job. Everyone’s pissed off about their pensions. We’ve had lads slogging their guts out for twenty years, waiting for promotion, only to see chinless wonders brought in from Civvy Street as direct-entry superintendents. It’s not just us, it’s you lot in NCG too … I know you’re feeling it. But there are still some oases of common sense here and there, even in London.’

They were alone in the Refs Room, but Hunter lowered his voice conspiratorially.

‘Heck, you know that with me as your guv’nor, you’d get a lot more leeway than you do under Her Ladyship. And I’m only answerable to Al Easterbrook, which basically means I’m answerable to no one.’

Alan Easterbrook was Senior Commander of the Flying Squad, a man once famed but now with a reputation for being a distant, remote figure, whose main ambition in life was to get through each day without any underlings bothering him with details.

‘Until Easterbrook retires,’ Heck said.

‘Why would he retire?’ Hunter replied. ‘They want us all to stay on. And he’s got the cushiest number ever. It’s me who does the donkey work. He just gets the credit for it.’

‘Look, Bob …’ Heck threw his half-empty cup into a bin. ‘I don’t know if I’m even qualified to replace Ray Marciano.’

‘You must be joking, pal. Ray never did anything you don’t. You’re bang on for it.’

Before Heck could argue further, the door swung open and Gemma came in, followed by Jack Reed. They headed to the vending machine, deep in conversation about how to pitch the next interview, though Gemma was visibly distracted by the sight of Heck and Bob Hunter, particularly Hunter.

‘You don’t have to decide now, pal,’ Hunter said quietly, when the other two had resumed their discussion. ‘But I’ll have to make a decision in the next few weeks. Can’t leave a vacant DI desk for too long. Not with all the bloody nutters we’ve got lining up to do jobs.’

Heck pondered. The offer had come from left-field and, even if other things hadn’t been preoccupying him, would have left him a little dazed, not to say doubtful. It wasn’t just the personal ties he had at SCU, he’d been with the unit eleven years now. In some ways, he’d almost become institutionalised. It was difficult to imagine being anywhere else.

‘I’ll get back to you, Bob,’ he said.

‘Give it some serious thought.’ Hunter leaned again into his personal space. ‘SCU’s a good gig, but anyone who stays in the same place for too long gets stale. Plus, I’ll say it again … National Crime Group’s on rocky ground. You don’t believe me … wait around and see.’

He glided away, leaving the Refs Room without a backward glance.

‘What’s Bob Hunter doing here?’ Gemma wondered, coming over.

‘Dunno,’ Heck replied. ‘Suppose he’s got some case in.’

‘Thought his new patch was the East End?’

‘Flying Squad, ma’am. If anyone makes good use of this nick, it’s them.’

By the look on her face, she didn’t believe this for one second, but decided to let it pass.

‘Purdham given us a full confession yet?’ he asked.

‘In the end,’ she said. ‘I actually believe him … somehow or other, they railroaded him into participating in these crimes. It’s amazing what you’ll do to become part of a club. But yeah, to answer your question … if Ulfskar and his cronies don’t get thirty years apiece, no one ever will. Once we get the forensics in play, it’s over for them.’

She walked from the room with coffee in hand.

‘OK, Heck?’ Reed asked, edging after her.

‘Fine, sir,’ Heck replied stiffly. ‘You?’

‘Never better. You can call me Jack, you know.’

‘That’s all right, sir. I always think we’ve got to earn the right to use first names.’

Reed smiled as he left. ‘No one’s earned that right more than you.’

‘Who’s talking about me?’ Heck said under his breath.

Chapter 3

The impending threat to the National Crime Group felt as if it might be real. Heck was in no position to judge, or even voice opinions on the matter – but there was rarely smoke without fire, and there was an awful lot of smoke at present.

Almost certainly, there’d be pay and recruitment freezes, people would be expected to work longer hours for less, resources would likely be slashed, and maybe staff too. If the worst came to the worst – and certain folk were saying that the crisis was actually this bad – entire departments could be disbanded, and all personnel reassigned. On the face of it, the latter would seem unlikely, but it would be a sure way to make an awful lot of savings in one fell swoop. And in that regard, the National Crime Group, thus far untouched by the cutbacks, had to be a prime target.

It comprised three specialist branches: the Kidnap Squad, the Organised Crime Division and the Serial Crimes Unit. In the eyes of many, these were all luxuries the British police could ill afford, as they monopolised manpower and funds for relatively small gain. Even Heck had to admit that it didn’t look good in the stats when an SCU detective made maybe only four or five arrests per year. What matter that these were nearly always repeat serious offenders – serial murderers, rapists and the like – who may already have ruined countless lives and had the potential to continue doing exactly that? It was still only four or five villains off the street each year, compared to the forty or fifty that a divisional detective might account for, never mind the hundred or so claimed by the average uniform.

He tried to put it from his mind as he worked his Megane through the heavy mid-morning traffic in Dagenham, but it frustrated him no end. Several days had passed since the Black Chapel sting and yet the ominous stories about the unit’s potential fate continued, seemingly unaffected by these recent positive results. In the words of DS Eric Fisher, SCU’s main intel man, ‘Why should we expect preferential treatment just because we do our job?’ Heck supposed that Fisher had a point, but it was a job that few others could do.

Again though, he tried to dismiss it all. He’d always sought to ignore the internal politics of the police, especially high-end politics like this, mainly because it was hardly the sort of thing you’d expect of a ‘rogue angel’.

This unusual status referred to the roving commission Heck was often accorded during SCU enquiries. Another name for it, again of Gemma Piper’s invention, was ‘Minister Without Portfolio’. In a nutshell, this meant that he was rarely attached to any specific part of the investigation but instead was authorised to develop and chase down his own leads. This was a privilege he’d earned over many years, on the basis of having felt numerous quality collars on the back of his own analysis and intuition. But whether it would have happened under any other supervisor than Gemma was questionable.

Not that Gemma was his best friend at present, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason why. It was certain that the menacing sounds from the top floor had put her on edge. She’d been brusque and indifferent with him recently, if not downright vexed. Neutral observers might argue that this was their normal relationship – there’d been many times in the past when it felt like they were at daggers drawn, but this was usually because of procedural disputes, not as a matter of course. Lately, she’d been actively and protractedly cold with him, much more than was normal, and much, much more than she was with anyone else.

Heck puzzled over it as he left the A13 and joined the Heathway.

He hadn’t done anything especially wrong, as far as he knew. Quite the opposite, in fact. His own intel had laid the Black Chapel on a plate for them, for which he’d received minimal gratitude. He wondered if it could be down to his lack of enthusiasm for the recently appointed DI Reed, though on that front Gemma was more than making up for it herself.

He shook that thought from his head, aggravated in ways he couldn’t explain.

He was now on the edge of the Rimmington Hall estate and, inevitably, his mind moved to other things. St Agatha’s Roman Catholic Church was easy enough to find. It faced onto Rimmington Avenue from behind a tall wire-mesh fence. There’d be a car park behind it somewhere, but as this was August and the junior school next door was closed, there was nothing to stop him parking on the main road at the front.

St Agatha’s was an industrial-age structure, stark and functional, its brickwork ingrained with the smoke and soot of generations. After recent investigations, especially the pursuit of the Black Chapel, Heck felt as if he’d been spending a lot of time in and around churches. But the lichen-clad tombstones and ivy-hung chancels of rural Suffolk were a world away from this place. Not that St Agatha’s grim appearance made it seem any less incongruous that Jimmy ‘Snake’ Fletcher now hung out here, though it wouldn’t have been the first time in Heck’s experience that a half-hearted soul had only needed to be exposed once to the full viciousness of his chosen team before he went scuttling off to join the opposition.

That said, Fletcher was still lucky that the local parish priest had been sympathetic.

Heck didn’t bother trying the front door but walked down a side passage into a small yard at the back. On one side here stood the entrance to the presbytery; on the other stood St Agatha’s Church Hall.

The latter was a free-standing building, a single-storey with a prefab roof, and walls coated in white stucco. It was in regular use, and in fact its main entrance stood open now, so Heck ventured inside. Here, a door on the right led into the hall itself, an open space of bare floorboards and scattered school chairs. A door on the left revealed a short corridor with signposts for toilets. A whitewashed brick arch stood directly in front and, beyond that, a stairwell dropped out of view.

Heck descended. At the first turn in the stair, he saw a startling piece of graffiti on the facing wall. Some vandal had used venom-green paint to daub the words:

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here …

And underneath it:

… if you had any in the fucking first place

Heck understood the meaning of this when he looked right, to where the final flight of steps descended three or four feet, before connecting with a corridor built from bare brick and smelling strongly of mildew. Exposed piping, unlagged but dangling with cobwebs, ran the full length of it. Heck could just about see this thanks to the illumination provided by a series of grimy light bulbs mounted every ten yards in wire-mesh cages crusted with limescale. Some forty yards ahead, a pair of doorways led off opposite each other, and a little way beyond those, at the corridor’s far end, stood a closed door made of what looked like solid steel.

Heck walked forward, footsteps clicking on damp cement.

On reaching the facing doorways, he glanced into two squat brick rooms, in which massive cisterns churned quietly. He strode on towards the steel door. It was heavy, full of rivets and had no visible handle.

Just as he reached it, it slid open on its greased runner.

Snake Fletcher stood there, the eyes inscrutable behind the bottle-thick lenses of his heavy-framed glasses.

‘Welcome,’ he said.

‘Some welcome,’ Heck replied. ‘What’s wrong with the pub, or a park bench?’

‘I told you, Heck … I’m not going topside at the mo.’

‘Never had you down as the sort who scares easily.’

‘Then you don’t know me as well as you think, eh?’

That was most likely true, Heck conceded, as Snake withdrew into the dank chamber beyond the heavy door.

Some informants were interested in one thing only: the money they earned off the scalps of those fellow criminals they sent to their doom. Others were trying to pay off scores or remove rivals. But Snake didn’t seem to tick any of those boxes. And that had always troubled Heck about this case. If you couldn’t work someone out from the word ‘go’, if you’d never been able to fathom their purpose … how could you really trust them?

He’d first encountered the guy while working in Tower Hamlets Robbery. He’d pulled in a desperate youngster, Billy Fletcher, Snake’s little brother, for participating in a string of corner-shop stick-ups. There wasn’t much down for Billy at the time, but Heck had managed to persuade his colleagues that the young idiot had been drawn into the crimes through his heroin addiction. He’d also persuaded Billy to turn evidence, thus saving himself both from prison and underworld retribution. Snake hadn’t seen his brother for fifteen years now, as he was safely inside a witness protection scheme, but that didn’t matter to him. At least, the kid was still alive. And after that, Snake had always felt that Heck, of all the coppers in London, was someone he could trust.

But still … you could never afford to be totally sure of an informant’s motives.

It wasn’t as if Snake Fletcher was the most prepossessing-looking bloke.

The first time Heck had seen him, he’d made him for an over-the-hill metalhead: early forties, bespectacled, ratty hair and beard, faded tats on his gangling arms, ragged, oily denims. Now, fifteen years later, his image hadn’t changed much, except that he was thinner and greyer and had ditched the proto-biker gear for a set of dingy caretaker’s overalls. For all that, he still smelled strongly of cig smoke and sweat.

‘You having a cuppa, or what?’ he asked.

A bare bulb showed that his room was built from brick and crammed with unidentifiable clutter. If Snake himself had been pungent, the reek of dirty underclothes and soiled sheets, which spilled out of the subterranean hovel, was eye-watering.

‘I’ll come in,’ Heck said. ‘I’m not so bothered about the cuppa though. Nice welcome for all the God-fearing church folk, by the way.’

Snake chuckled. ‘You mean the “abandon all hope” thing? Yeah, some skank broke in about three weeks ago. Father Wilkin, he’s the parish priest … he asked me to clean it off, but I need to get some paint. It’s not a priority. He never comes down here, never mind any of the parishioners.’

Which was undoubtedly a good thing, Heck decided.

From its various mops, buckets, brushes, bottles of bleach and boxes of random junk, the room was clearly a caretaker’s lock-up. But Snake had also adapted it into a living space, even though it was small and windowless. He’d dragged in a truckle bed from somewhere (its sheets in a rumpled, filthy state), a few bits of second-hand furniture, and even a chemical toilet, though by its stench, this was sorely in need of emptying.

Snake sidled to a rickety sideboard on which streaky tea-making things sat among crumbs and puddles of spilled milk. ‘So, tell me … did you get them all?’

‘We’ve charged five men with various offences relating to the priest murders,’ Heck said. ‘They’re all been remanded in custody.’

Snake nodded, as he plugged his kettle in. ‘Names?’

‘Sherwin Lightfoot – still can’t get over that one – Michael Hapwood, Dennis Purdham, Jason Renwick and Ranald Ulfskar, aka Albert Jones. That’s all of them, yeah?’

‘Far as I’m aware.’

‘Well … they won’t be darkening any church doors in the near future.’

Snake spooned coffee granules into a mug. ‘I’ll be laying low for a while, all the same.’

‘No one knows you gave us the tip, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

‘They’ll be watching, though. Wondering.’ Snake shook his grizzled head. ‘If I’m not dutifully despondent about what’s happened to our worshipful leaders, they’ll ask themselves why.’

‘Who’s they?’ Heck asked. ‘You just said we’d got them all.’

‘You’ve got the hardcore. The fanatics. But there’re others.’

‘You mean other activists?’

‘Nah, there are no more priest killers. The rest are just gobshites. But … if Ulf and his nutters get off for any reason, someone’ll tell them what I’ve been up to.’

He continued to make his coffee. Heck watched him, curious.

‘Snake … you certain there’s no one else we should be looking at?’

‘No one who scares me as much as Ulf and his cronies. Sure you don’t want one?’

Heck shook his head and checked his phone, noting that he’d received a text from Gemma.

ETA office?

That had been nearly five minutes ago now, which meant she’d shortly be ringing him. He turned the device off and pulled up a chair. There was a crumpled magazine on top of it. It was a five-year-old edition of the extreme metal mag, HellzReign, now suitably dog-eared and stained with motorbike oil.

On the cover, father and son black-metallers, Karl and Eric Hellstrom, aka Varulv, posed in full concert regalia. The older looked particularly demonic, his craggy features eerily pale, a complexion offset by his flowing black hair and dense black beard and moustache, not to mention his sunken, green-tinged eyes. Only his head and upper body was visible, but he was clad in dark leather armour with roaring bear faces sculpted onto its shoulder pads, and in his left hand, he clutched a blood-spattered human skull. It was pure hokum, a Hollywood costume designer’s idea of how a Viking should have looked. The younger Hellstrom stood behind him. His hair and beard were blond, but he too wore black, sculpted leathers, and held his clenched fists crossed over his chest, a leather bracelet dangling with Gothic adornments – skulls, inverted crucifixes and wolf heads – encircling each brawny wrist. Behind the pair rose a curtain of flames, and over the top of that, in jagged, frozen letters, arched the headline: Real songs of ice and fire.

Ordinarily, you could write this off as typical rock band posturing, a bad-boy outfit doing their best to look mean and moody, with a bit of mysticism woven in to underline their high-fantasy credentials. The very name ‘Varulv’ was Old Norse for Werewolf. But there’d been nothing fantastical about the violence their malevolent influence had allegedly unleashed.

Heck glanced up. ‘How long were you involved with these guys?’

Snake lowered his mug. ‘Couple of years. I told you before … to me it was just music.’

Even now, with Snake’s intel having paid off, it occurred to Heck that he’d never really understood how it had taken the guy as long as it had to learn that the rock band he’d once idolised and, in fact, had road-crewed for, were so swept up in their Nordic-Aryan anger that they or their followers might actually have posed a genuine threat. Song titles like ‘Make More Martyrs’ and ‘Berserk, I Rule’ hadn’t hinted at a sweet and inclusive nature.

Heck flicked his way through the mag, finally coming to a full-page advert for Varulv’s first and apparently seminal album, Asatru. He wasn’t averse to listening to a bit of hard rock, himself, though his own preference was for the older-school style, not the consciously dark-hearted material of more recent times. Almost from first hearing about these guys, Heck had disliked Karl Hellstrom and his son as a pair of professional rabble-rousers who probably didn’t even believe the bigoted nonsense they preached. On the sleeve of Asatru, the artwork depicted a Catholic nun, naked, save for her wimple and cowl, nailed to a cross upside-down, while, behind her, horn-helmeted silhouettes raised axes against a backdrop of forked lightning strikes. If Heck remembered rightly, the album had been withdrawn from a number of British and American chain stores because of concerns about that cover, but this had only enhanced the record’s notoriety, and it had reached a huge audience via the underground circuit, cementing the band’s reputation as a major black-metal act.

He put the mag down. ‘You sure we shouldn’t be going after Varulv too?’

‘Be my guest,’ Snake said. ‘But you’d be wasting your time. You heard what happened up in Norway?’

Heck had, of course. In 2014, two Norwegian teenagers, and avowed Varulv loyalists, had set fire to an eleventh-century timber church near Tromsø, beating to death the site’s elderly custodian with a bat. Pinned to his body was a note calling for a war against ‘Christ-lovers and Semites’ in the form of direct quotes lifted from Varulv’s lyrics, putting the band deep in the spotlight.

‘They might have inspired that crime, but they weren’t physically connected to it,’ Snake said. ‘That was just headcases reacting badly to their message. And it took all sorts. Look at Ulfskar … he wasn’t some extremist metalhead. If anything, he came from a punk background. Varulv chucked their net widely. Some hard-line metallers, sure, some bikers, but skinheads too, white supremacists, all kinds of hyper-masculine malcontents. That Black Chapel business … that’s more Satanic than Odinist. Look at those four clowns who got locked up with Ulf. They weren’t roadies, like us … they weren’t even followers of the band. They were Ulf’s followers. I told you … coked-out dickheads lost in some dark fantasy. That shows how mixed up it’s all got.’

Heck didn’t take issue with this. It was true that Varulv had never been officially accused of involvement in the Tromsø outrage, not even as instigators. They were put under pressure by the Norwegian press, but they weren’t investigated to any serious degree.

‘If I recall,’ he said, ‘the band haven’t accepted any responsibility for the Tromsø incident, and they certainly didn’t offer an apology.’

Snake looked troubled by these notions, as if he too had been wondering about it and had not yet found a satisfactory explanation.

‘Maybe they didn’t lower themselves to respond,’ he finally said. ‘I mean, it happened in the States, didn’t it? Metal bands of an earlier era getting unfairly blamed for sending bad vibes, causing suicides and the like. It’s just bloodsucking lawyers trying to cash in on tragedy.’

‘And yet Varulv were forced to leave Norway.’

Snake shook his head. ‘That’s a myth. They still own property over there. They just settled here in the UK when they retired. Seems Karl Hellstrom always wanted a hunting estate up in Scotland, and now he’s got one. And it was after they settled up there when all this bad stuff really kicked off. I mean, that was in 2015. We’d all gone our separate ways by then, and it was three years later when I heard about these priest murders. It never entered my head that the band might actually be involved.’

‘But you had no hesitation in suspecting Ulfskar?’

Snake pondered. ‘He was always the most extreme of us … plus these killings were down in East Anglia, and that was his home patch. He’d gone back there, as far as I knew. The first priest, the one who got axed … I thought, nah, that won’t be Ulf. Probably just a robbery that’s gone wrong or something. But the second one … that was a bit nastier, wasn’t it? And then the third one, the woman … fuck me! After that, I felt certain Ulf was involved. He’d said stuff in the past, you see … about drugs, sex and rock and roll just being hedonistic crap. About talk being cheap. About no one believing we really hated these bastards until we took action against them. Back then, I thought it was just more talk …’

Heck had heard this story before, of course.

After the gruesome death of the third victim, Michaela Hanson, Snake, rather bravely, had made an effort to reacquaint with Ulfskar. He’d still had a contact number for him and had called, saying how empty his life was after the band. Ulfskar had replied that he would soon be down in London on business and was happy to hook up.

An uproarious drunken night had followed, much of which Snake captured on a concealed Dictaphone. There would always be questions about whether such non-approved evidence of private conversation would be admissible in court, but the tape, when Snake finally took it to Heck and Gemma, had been more than sufficient to catch their interest.

The conversation the cops listened to was very telling.

Initially, the twosome reminisced about the good old days on the road with the band, feasting on babes and booze, wild times when they’d got high and did crazy things. But they also recalled the firelit meetings they’d attended in woodland groves, and the ancient sites where they’d venerated long-forgotten northern gods. Then they expressed their enthusiasm for the right-wing forces marching in Europe and the US, and expressed hope that the white races of the world were finally getting their act together. It was around this point when Ulfskar first hinted at the existence of the Black Chapel, explaining that he and a few other like-minded guys were now taking direct action. He and Snake had once dreamed the dream, he said. But now he was making it real, following the creed to the letter – and if it didn’t kick off a revolution on its own, that wouldn’t matter. At least, it made them feel better.

‘Hey, I want in!’ Snake blurted on the tape.

‘You want in, Snakey … just like that?’

‘You were right. We dreamed it … but we never actually did it.’

‘I can’t take you on the next job, Snake. Not yet. I need you to sober up and think it through. Just steer well clear of Little Milden in Suffolk, on July 31.’

That had been all Snake had needed to know. After playing the tape to Heck and SCU, he’d told them about Ostara, an ancient Viking festival which fell on March 21. That was the night the first cleric had died. The other two murders had coincided with other pagan Nordic celebrations, Valpurgis on April 30 and Midsumarblot on June 21. They now had the date of the fourth one as well: Freysblot, which was July 31. And the location, Little Milden, where there was only one church: Milden St Paul’s.

Heck glanced again at the lurid cover to HellzReign.

‘But nah,’ Snake said again. ‘The Hellstroms aren’t involved. Why would they be? Much better to be the gurus who sit on the mountain and get the kudos without taking any of the risk. Anyway, when do I get paid?’

Heck tossed the magazine aside. ‘Soon as the Black Chapel get convicted.’

‘Look, Heck … don’t fuck this up, all right?’ The ex-roadie looked vaguely troubled. ‘We don’t want those five nutters walking free again. Let ’em rot in jail, so any other rootless, confused idiot toying with the same idea might realise that murder isn’t some bloody joke.’

‘Good luck with that,’ Heck said, standing. ‘We might have cleared the new Vikings off our streets, Snake, but I’ll tell you … there are people out there even as we speak, who, in their own minds at least, will have perfectly sound reasons for the total bloody mayhem they’re about to unleash.’

Chapter 4

Heck got back to SCU at Staples Corner, in Brent, early that afternoon. The first thing that struck him were how many more vehicles there were than was usual on a Monday. He prowled the crowded bays before managing to locate a parking space. It was just his luck, of course, after he’d manoeuvred his Megane into it, to realise that the car on his left was Gemma’s aquamarine Mercedes E-class, and not only that, that the detective super was currently on her way across the car park towards it, with one of the civvy secretaries.

As he watched them through his rear-view mirror, they opened the boot of Gemma’s Merc and humped out a couple of sealed boxes of paperwork. The secretary set off back across the car park, carting one of these. But Gemma waited with her arms folded.

Sighing, Heck climbed out.

‘And where’ve you been?’ she asked. ‘I’ve only been trying to contact you since lunchtime.’

‘Thought it might pay some dividends if I went to see a grass,’ he replied.

‘I gauged that from the scruffs.’

Heck hadn’t yet had time to change out of the paint-stained jeans, sweatshirt and work boots that he’d worn for the meeting with Snake.

‘Unofficially?’ she asked. ‘As in … on your own?’

He shrugged. ‘I was out and about, but I just had a thought to go and see him.’

She considered this, before nodding at the box by her feet, turning and heading back towards the personnel door.

Heck picked the box up and tagged along after her.

‘Who are we talking about?’ she said. ‘Wait, let me guess … Snake Fletcher?’

‘Of course.’

‘For crying out loud, Heck …’

‘Partly it was to reassure him. He was very happy that we’ve made his intel count.’

‘So would a lot of lowlifes be if all they had to do to get paid was drop dimes on their mates.’

‘Thing is …’ Heck knew he had to choose his next words carefully. ‘I don’t know … I thought it went too well, to be honest.’

She glanced at him quizzically. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The takedown at Little Milden,’ he said. ‘The Odinists turned up when Snake said they would. All five of them. We nabbed them. Each one banged to rights … we had enough evidence to charge them almost straight away. By the time we get to trial, we’ll have even more. They haven’t got a chance.’

They reached the personnel door, and Gemma tapped the combination into the keypad. ‘Murder cases aren’t always complex, you know.’

‘I understand that. I just can’t help feeling that we might have missed something.’

‘Is this your natural pessimism talking?’ she asked, as they went inside and she summoned the lift. ‘Or did Snake say something?’

‘No, he thinks we’ve got everyone.’

‘So you have no actual grounds for this concern?’

He shrugged.

‘I thought so.’ She folded her arms as they waited in the small lobby. ‘Heck, as always, your determination to bottom out every single job does you credit. But sometimes you make too much work for yourself. And for everyone else, including me. Which, as you can imagine, is not always appreciated. Now, it may be that something else comes up in due course regarding the Black Chapel, and if it does, we’ll follow it to the end of the line. But in the meantime, we’ve got another, equally big job on our desk. Heard about Operation Sledgehammer yet?’

‘Erm … Sledgehammer?’

‘I had a meeting at the Yard over the weekend, and another one this morning. We’re going to be doing some work with the Met’s Cold Case team.’

‘Oh …?’ Heck wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that.

‘Gwen Straker’s coming in on it.’

‘Oh … right.’ This was better news.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Heck and Gemma were at Bethnal Green, Straker was their DI, and an able and affable boss she’d been. He hadn’t seen much of her in recent years, but from gossip she was still one of the most popular supervisors in the Met. Heck was sure that the next question Gemma expected him to ask would be about this mysterious Operation Sledgehammer, but the good news about Gwen Straker notwithstanding, he wasn’t yet ready to dismiss the case they’d only recently closed.

‘I keep thinking about this black-metal band, Varulv,’ he said.

She regarded him carefully. There were lots of things about Heck’s reckless style of policing that worried Gemma immensely, but she’d learned through hard experience that his instincts could often be trusted.

‘Former black-metal band,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they in retirement?’

‘Yeah. Apparently, they live as country gents in the Highlands of Scotland.’

‘You are aware they were fully investigated by Kripos?’ she said. ‘I mean for that church-burning incident in Norway and the murder of the caretaker?’

‘I understand they were interviewed,’ Heck replied. ‘Not necessarily investigated.’

‘Either way, they were cleared of suspicion.’

‘I agree that, as far as we know, they didn’t commit any crime,’ he said. ‘But have you seen some of their song titles … some of their lyrics? It wouldn’t take a religious zealot to consider them a fairly malign influence.’

‘Heck … you’re a malign influence. Young detectives see the corners you cut, and they think “wow, this job’s a doddle”. And then they pull the same stunts, and because they don’t enjoy the luck of the devil, like you do, they end up wearing tall hats again. But ultimately, you never get hauled over the coals for it. You know why? Because you never told them to behave that way. It’s one hundred per cent their own fault. And it’s exactly the same with devil-worshipping idiots like the Black Chapel. Now, the cult leaders have all been charged, and like I say, if something else comes up … if one of them wants to do a deal, drop a few more names our way, we’ll be all ears. Until then, we’ve got other business, OK?’

‘Yeah, but I’m just wondering if I should do some follow-up work on this one.’

She regarded him blankly, unused to a lower rank – even Heck – completely ignoring her expressed viewpoint.

‘On the basis of what … a hunch, a wing and a prayer?’

‘Just let me run with it for a couple of weeks. See if I can dig anything up.’

‘Heck, you can’t touch Varulv anyway. They live in Scotland, they’re outside our jurisdiction.’

‘They may be outside our jurisdiction, but I can still touch them.’

‘No, no.’ She shook her head adamantly. ‘None of that. As it stands, the case against Lightfoot, Hapwood, Purdham, Renwick and Ulfskar is watertight. I’m not having you mucking things up by chucking your weight about in a foreign land.’

‘If nothing else, Varulv have encouraged all this. Ulfskar was one of their roadies. Should they just be allowed to go on as if …’

‘Heck, what don’t you understand about “no”? I need you here. In fact, I needed you here a couple of hours ago!’

The lift doors slid open. They stepped inside, and Gemma hit the button for the third floor, where SCU’s command suite and her personal office were located.

Heck stood alongside her and said nothing, but as they ascended, he pondered again the dark, black-metal entity that was Varulv. Powerful music could be a potent force, especially among the disenfranchised. But he’d never quite known anything like this, where a message of anger had been taken to such extremes. It was difficult to imagine its originators, who appeared to have spent their entire adult lives hatching this creed of hatred, simply sitting to one side while their minions were defeated, and taking no further action. After all, they’d first spread their deadly message in Norway, and having got away with it there, had moved to the UK, where the same thing had happened again, only worse.

‘You still with us?’ Gemma wondered.

‘Sorry,’ he responded. ‘I just don’t think this’ll be the last we hear from these guys.’

She visibly tried to keep a lid on her vexation.

‘And when we do hear from them again,’ he said, ‘I think it’s going to be seriously nasty.’

‘Unfortunately, Heck, serious nastiness is not in short supply at present. Which is what Operation Sledgehammer is all about … and as we’re reduced to having to do it in twos, that’s all the more reason why you can’t be spared.’

‘Sledgehammer?’ Heck was finally distracted from his ruminations. ‘We’re … we’re doing it in twos?’

‘Yes. That’s how few people we’ve got available. And you, meanwhile, want to waltz off into some distant Scottish sunset to collar someone purely on sus?’

‘Sorry, ma’am … what do you mean, we’re doing it in twos?’

‘That’s why I wanted you back here. Your new partner’s been waiting in my office for the last two hours or so.’

‘Partner?’ Heck tried not to sound too appalled by this.

‘Yeah. Now there’s a shocking concept, eh?’

The lift doors opened again, and Gemma strode onto the top floor, where many more bodies than usual were flowing back and forth, a lot of them tooled-up techies wandering in and out of the conference room.

‘That’s going to be the MIR,’ she said, as they walked past it.

‘Sledgehammer’s a major enquiry then?’

‘It’s pretty major for us, yes.’

Still carrying the box, Heck followed Gemma down the corridor to her office.

‘And I’ve got a new partner?’ he said. ‘As in someone from outside SCU?’

Gemma glanced back. ‘She’s just joined SCU, as it happens. She’s been trying to come to us for ages. She dropped your name half a dozen times during her last application. Don’t look so worried. You’re not being asked to puppy-walk someone. DC Honeyford’s been a fully operational detective for several years now. She’s clocked up some excellent arrests.’

‘DC Honeyford,’ Heck said slowly.

‘You ought to remember her. That time you were assigned to work down in Surrey, she was your right-hand man.’

‘Yeah, she was.’

‘She also has a rep for not taking any bullshit. Which also makes her the ideal choice to be paired up with you.’

‘Ma’am, she’s spiky as hell.’

‘Like I say, ideal.’ Gemma halted by her office door. ‘Yet, funnily enough … when I interviewed her, she said that you were the main reason she wanted to leave Surrey and come to the National Crime Group. She said that when she worked with you on the Laurel and Hardy murders, she learned more than she has from all the rest of the detectives she’s met put together.’ Gemma registered the disbelieving expression on his face. ‘I know, I kind of doubt that too. But we are where we are.’ She pushed the door open. ‘Come and say hello to her. Let’s hope she’s not died of old age waiting for you.’

Chapter 5

‘DC Honeyford,’ Gemma said, ‘DS Heckenburg apologises for his tardiness. The fact that he doesn’t look very apologetic is to be ignored. He doesn’t do apologies often or convincingly. However, on this occasion, despite all appearances to the contrary, he means it.’

Gail Honeyford looked much the way Heck remembered when he’d last seen her, which was just over two years ago: she was still slim and attractive; a cool brunette, with hair down to her shoulders, dark hazel eyes and a pale, ‘peaches and cream’ complexion. She wore a powder-blue trouser suit and blue heeled boots and was sitting in the chair facing Gemma’s desk. A raincoat was folded alongside her, and an empty coffee cup sat on the desktop.

‘Yeah,’ Heck said. ‘Sorry I’m late, DC Honeyford.’

She replied with a polite nod.

Gemma indicated that Heck could dump the box of paperwork in a corner, and slid behind her desk, which was a complex operation in itself, given how little room there was in here. Unlike some senior officers, Gemma had never been given to displays of power. Though she was commander here at Staples Corner, head of the Serial Crimes Unit and second in authority at the National Crime Group only to the director, Joe Wullerton, himself, her office was a cramped, closet-like space, half of it filled with filing cabinets, the rest overhung with shelves groaning beneath the weight of packed files and dog-eared legal manuals.

‘Right …’ She selected a beige folder from her wire basket in-tray. ‘Seeing as Operation Sledgehammer goes live at eight tomorrow morning, there isn’t a great deal of time for us to discuss the niceties of what’ll be expected of you as a Serial Crimes Unit detective.’

DC Honeyford, having realised that she was the one being addressed, sat up straight.

Gemma glanced at her. ‘Except to say that if you needed to learn anything, you wouldn’t be here. So, you’re not on probation. You understand that?’

‘Of course, ma’am,’ the new recruit replied.

‘There’s a serious job needs doing, and in SCU we do it to the best of our abilities,’ Gemma said. ‘If any one of us fouls up, and that includes me, we’re out. But it may even be worse than that.’ She sat back, watching her new charge carefully, probing her with that penetrating blue-eyed gaze. ‘In this department, we deal exclusively with violent psychopaths … that means we can’t afford any errors. Lives, including our own, DC Honeyford, may depend on it.’ She paused again. ‘And … that’s it. That’s the whole of the introductory pep talk. Sorry if it wasn’t what you were expecting, but we’re all a bit short of time at present. You’ve got exactly half a day to get settled in. Because after tomorrow morning’s briefing you’ll all be expected to hit the road straight away in pursuit of the various actions that will have been allocated to you as part of Operation Sledgehammer.‘

‘I’m ready to go now, ma’am,’ DC Honeyford said.

‘Good. That means you can spend the rest of the day familiarising yourself with this.’ Gemma pushed the beige folder across the desk. ‘Consider that a welcome-to-your-new-job present. It’s a perk of sorts … no one else will know what case they’re being allocated until tomorrow morning.’

At last, Heck understood why they were being deployed in twos.

There were clearly several investigations that needed working on at the same time, most likely of historical significance rather than dating to the here and now. So that was Operation Sledgehammer: it sounded dramatic, as if it was something right up SCU’s street, but in actual fact one of the most experienced and productive special investigations units in the British police service was being used to adjust the clean-up rates.

‘And, Heck,’ Gemma said, interrupting his thoughts, ‘let’s make this thing work.’

He nodded, trying not to look as half-hearted about it as he felt.

‘OK … off you go.’ She waggled them away with her fingers.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ DC Honeyford said, standing and tucking the file under her arm.

Heck dawdled after she’d left the room, edging the door closed behind her.

When he spoke, it was quietly. ‘Ma’am, I—’

She halted him with a raised palm. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘Look, there’s something you may not know …’

‘I said I don’t want to hear it.’

She’d already opened her emails, her manicured fingers rattling on the keyboard.

‘Gemma … come on!’

Two things you never did with Gemma Piper was raise your voice or lose your temper. Even though Heck felt that, on occasion, he might have earned the right, he hadn’t intended it to slip out quite so abrasively. But rather to his surprise, her reaction was mild.

‘Don’t get too cocky, Sergeant.’ Her voice remained level; she didn’t even look up. ‘You may find this thing more of a challenge than you think.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he muttered, leaving the room and half-blundering into Jack Reed outside.

‘Sorry, Heck,’ Reed said. ‘My fault. Don’t worry, I wasn’t eavesdropping.’

Heck had never known such politeness in the police environment as he routinely heard from Reed, especially not from a supervisor to an underling. It surely had its origins in the Officers’ Mess, though Heck had never enquired about the DI’s background, and never would – as that would imply that he was interested in getting to know the guy.

‘It’s OK, sir,’ Heck grunted. ‘Nothing to hear anyway.’

‘I’ve told you, mate … it’s “Jack”. I don’t do formalities.’

‘Yeah, no probs.’

Gail Honeyford was waiting a few yards along the corridor, picking through the folder’s contents. He stumped towards her. Behind him, he heard Reed tap on Gemma’s door.

‘Busy!’ she called out. ‘Unless it’s exceedingly important.’

‘It’s me, ma’am,’ Reed replied. ‘Can I come in?’

Heck was now too far away to hear her muffled response, but whatever it was, Reed went in.

‘You don’t look very pleased to see me,’ Gail said, as they walked side by side down to the detectives’ office.

‘I’m not displeased.’ Heck tried not to sound tetchy, though it was a struggle. The truth was that he rated Gail as a police officer. How could he not when he owed his life to her? But there were other issues here, which, frankly, he didn’t think he could deal with at this moment. ‘I’m just … surprised.’

‘I gave you a heads-up that I was going to try and join SCU,’ she said. ‘Roughly around the same time you said you’d try to give me a leg-up. Just because I didn’t hear anything else from you, that doesn’t mean I didn’t stick with my ambition.’

‘In a way, I did give you a leg-up,’ he said. ‘You name-dropped me during your interview.’

‘Yeah, funny that. When I reminded DSU Piper that I’d worked with you before and that we got on well together, she said something to the effect of: “Ordinarily, that would be a reason for me not to appoint you.” What do you think she meant by that?’

‘She plays games,’ he grunted. ‘Likes to keep us on our toes.’

‘I hear they call her “the Lioness”.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Why?’

‘Muck up this enquiry, and you’ll find out.’

Gail nodded as she pondered this.

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Why did she?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She told you that “ordinarily” she wouldn’t have appointed you. What changed her mind?’

‘Oh … she also noted that aside from that one case you and me worked together, my career’s been pretty straight-laced and that I’ve had some good results, all of them by the book. She added that she was certain the experience of this, plus the passage of time, would probably ensure that I’ve got over any bad habits I might have picked up from you.’

‘Might have picked up from you, Sergeant,’ he corrected her.

‘Sorry, yes … Sergeant,’ she agreed primly.

That was one bad habit she’d dispensed with, he noted. The previous incarnation of Gail had bridled at the merest hint that she was under someone else’s control, especially a male’s. This was explainable by the tough time she’d had with some of the idiot men in her life, but it hadn’t been likely to do her any good in the long run. At the end of the day, rank was rank.

They went into the detectives’ office – or ‘DO’ as it was known – to find the place reorganised in terms of its furniture. Heck’s own desk had been moved several feet from its south-facing window and turned around ninety degrees. Another desk, previously empty, had been drawn up to face it. It wasn’t hugely inconvenient. All Heck’s electricals were still plugged in and he could still reach his shelves and filing cabinet. But the fact that everything had been shifted around, without his even being consulted, was the last thing he needed on a day like today.

The bloke responsible was still in the middle of it.

Approaching his late fifties, DS Eric Fisher had outlived his usefulness to SCU as an outdoors man, and if his age hadn’t been against him, his colossal girth could have done the job on its own. But as an analyst, intelligence officer and now the unit’s official account manager for HOLMES 2 – the latest IT system used by UK police forces for the investigation of serious crime – Fisher was second to none. In case that wasn’t quite enough in this new age of extreme cost-efficiency, Gemma also had him double-hatting as a kind of unofficial office manager – a role he was currently occupying comfortably, as he issued orders to DCs Quinnell, Rawlins, Cunliffe and Finnegan, who, with much clattering of tables and scraping of chair legs, were trying to pair up their own furniture.

‘What’s all this?’ Heck demanded.

Fisher scratched his beard. ‘We’re working Sledgehammer in pairs. Haven’t you heard?’

‘Yeah, I heard.’ Heck toed irritably at his desk. ‘But, given the option, I might have wanted to do things slightly differently.’

‘Fair enough.’ Fisher pushed his glasses back up his sweat-greased nose. ‘How many permutations of two desks do you want me to go through before you settle on one you like?’

‘I’m sure this’ll be all right,’ Gail said, throwing her coat, bag and the Sledgehammer file onto the empty desk facing Heck’s.

Fisher turned to Heck and arched his caterpillar-thick eyebrows.

‘It’ll do for the moment,’ Heck grumbled. He cleared his throat and raised his voice. ‘Everyone … listen up. Meet our newest recruit, DC Gail Honeyford.’

The rest of the men – and they were exclusively men at present – gathered, grinning, catching as much of an eyeful as they dared in the twenty-first century. A lot had changed in British policing, even during Gail’s relatively short service, but boys would always be boys.

‘DS Eric Fisher,’ Heck said, sticking a thumb towards the big man.

‘Please to meet you, love,’ Fisher nodded genially, which belied his barbaric appearance.

‘DC Gary Quinnell,’ Heck said. ‘He’s our conscience.’

Quinnell nodded too. Gail nodded back.

Heck then went through the rest of them: Andy Rawlins, who was short, tubby, balding on top and possessed of a beard as scraggy as Eric Fisher’s – he smiled shyly; Burt Cunliffe, who was squat and solid, with a grey buzz cut and a tan that indicated he’d recently been abroad for his holidays; and Charlie Finnegan, who was lean, with black, slicked hair and an odd foxy look about him.

‘There are a few more of us, of course,’ Heck said. ‘Out on the job, scattered around the building. We have actually got a few other women on the plot. You’ve met Gemma. DI Ronni James is on leave. Up to last year, we had DC Shawna McCluskey …’

‘Big shoes to fill there, girl,’ Quinnell interrupted; he’d been a particularly close friend of Shawna’s, even more so than Heck.

‘Promoted?’ Gail wondered.

‘Shot,’ Charlie Finnegan said matter-of-factly. ‘And savagely beaten.’

Gail glanced at Heck. ‘Fatality? Only I didn’t hear anything …’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But she went on a full medical. She’s OK. The Federation looked after her.’

‘Yep,’ Finnegan said. ‘There’s always that consolation. If you catch a few bullets … the Federation will look after you.’

‘There but for the grace of God go all of us,’ Gail said, pointedly unfazed by his sneery smile.

‘Sounding like my kind of girl already,’ Quinnell guffawed, slapping her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, though … I’m already spoken for.’

The others laughed and continued to straighten the new-look office. But when Gail went into the adjoining room to find the locker Eric Fisher had allocated her, Finnegan slid over.

‘Lucky bastard,’ he said to Heck. ‘Don’t know how you fucking do it.’

‘You wouldn’t want to work with Gail, Charlie,’ Heck replied. ‘She’d be too much of a distraction. You know how hard you have to focus just to get the basics right.’

‘Aha,’ Fisher interrupted, leafing through the Sledgehammer file Gail had left on her desk. ‘So, you two are going after Creeley.’

‘Don’t know,’ Heck replied. ‘Haven’t looked at it yet.’

‘Eddie Creeley. He’s a rough customer, I’ll tell you.’

Heck seemed to remember hearing something about him. If recollection served, Eddie Creeley was an offender from the North-East suspected of armed robbery and murder.

‘I don’t know much about Sledgehammer yet,’ he admitted.

‘A new initiative,’ Fisher explained. ‘We’ve received a list of bad guys who’ve so far eluded arrest and, thanks to info provided by Interpol, are still believed to be in the UK. We’re the ones who are charged with rounding them up.’

‘Us and Cold Case?’

‘Well … they’re mostly older cases, so the Coldies are providing intel and back-up.’

Heck took the file and glanced through it himself. Immediately, he was struck by a mugshot of Eddie Creeley, who’d probably been somewhere in his early thirties when the pic was taken. He was an archetype: not a bruiser as such, but cold, cruel, with a lean, aquiline face, greased-back black hair, black sideburns and small, dark eyes. Just flicking through a few more documents, the huge extent and heinous nature of the crimes he was suspected of became clear. He was perhaps most well-known in connection with a violent £7 million armed robbery at a security company in Newark-on-Trent, during which he’d taken two employees hostage, handcuffed them and injected them with drain cleaner to disable them – one later dying and the other suffering permanent brain damage. But more recently for a home invasion, wherein he took two civilian hostages; the female occupant died after she too was injected with a toxic substance, while her husband, though he survived, was shot twice.

‘Everyone’s drawn cards of a similarly nasty ilk,’ Fisher commented. ‘There are no small-time offenders on the Sledgehammer list.’

‘Two of us for each one,’ Heck mused. ‘How much actual support are we going to get?’

Fisher shrugged. ‘As many PSOs as you can scrounge out of whichever force area you end up working in. But that’ll be down to you.’

Heck glanced at him. ‘For real?’

‘Yeah. Times are hard all over, pal. The word is the UK can’t afford coppers any more.’

They turned and saw that Gail had reappeared and had been listening to the conversation.

‘No pressure then,’ she said.

Chapter 6

It always struck Nan as odd that August, which so many folk thought of as the height of summer, was actually more like its end. OK, the schools were closed and people went away, and it was generally the warmest, driest month in the calendar, but the hours of daylight were noticeably shorter than they were in June, when the official midsummer fell.

It particularly took her by surprise that evening, when she opted to walk home from the Spar, having just worked the back shift, and pick up a fish-and-chip tea on the way. It was only half past eight when she left the building by the side door, but already it was going dark. Unnerved, she followed the side passage to the shop’s small forecourt, where she encountered another problem: that irritating bunch of school-age hooligans who always hung out here in the evenings. Yes, they were only kids, and Nan was forty-eight, but she wasn’t a particularly tall or powerfully built woman, and the age gap counted for so little these days. During her own childhood, adults had ruled the roost, way more than was even remotely reasonable. But it still felt wrong that she should be frightened of these youngsters, even if it was inevitable given their rat-like faces and their habit of using obscene words every other sentence with no fear of consequence.

The profanity didn’t bother her, if she was honest. Not after the youthful home life she’d led. And anyway, you couldn’t really blame them for that when it was so routine. Every new movie was full of it; comedians on TV used it to get laughs instead of actually being funny. No, it wasn’t the bad language that she hated; it was the name-calling.

‘Oy, Toothless Mary!’ one of them shouted as she walked away, huddled inside her anorak, clutching her handbag tightly.

Cackles of heartless laughter sounded from the rest of them.

She’d hoped that with it being dusk, they wouldn’t have noticed her. No such luck.

‘Oy, Toothless!’ one of them called again, as she crossed the road towards the chippie.

Nan was determined not to cry, reminding herself that this was entirely her own fault. Last February, it had been. It was wet, miserable, bitterly cold – and she’d had the sniffles. How ridiculous of her, though, to hit a sneezing fit just after she’d finished work. How even more ridiculous that she hadn’t fixed her dentures properly, four of them shooting out of her mouth and scattering across the pavement the very second she’d entered the forecourt.

They would never let her forget it.

No, she wasn’t going to cry. But she wasn’t sticking around either. Through the smeary rectangle of the chip shop window, she saw there was nobody waiting at the counter. On one hand, that might mean that Nan would get served quickly, but on the other it might mean that, at this time of evening, nearly everything had gone. If that was the case, they might have to fry her a new piece of cod, and that could take ten minutes. There’d be nothing to stop one of those callous young brutes traipsing across the road to amuse himself even more at her expense. It was better just to vacate the district, she decided. She’d have some bread and butter when she got home.

As it was now mid-evening, and full darkness was falling, she wouldn’t normally have taken the wooded footpath known locally as the Strode, which led between the small shopping centre where she worked and her home housing estate. In truth, it sounded a bit melodramatic to call it a ‘wooded footpath’. That gave the impression of a track in a forest, but it was nothing like that really; more like two hundred yards of beaten grit with a narrow belt of trees separating it from the council playing fields on the right and a wall of shrubbery on the left, with privately owned houses beyond that. Not that this made much difference in the dark, because the Strode was only served by two streetlamps, one at either end, which didn’t do much to light it. As such, Nan wasn’t always keen to use it even during the day. But on this occasion, she didn’t think twice. She just wanted to get home, and this was the quickest route.

She pressed hurriedly on down the path. The tree trunks on her right were stanchions in deep shadow, the playing fields already invisible. The dull glow of house lamps filtering from behind drawn curtains only minimally penetrated the bulwark of vegetation on her left.

Though the end of the Strode was still a good hundred yards distant, Nan told herself that there was nothing to be frightened of. But she was undeniably alone – all she could hear was her own breathing and the steady crunch of her feet on the grit. Nervously, she peeked backward over her shoulder.

There was a figure about sixty yards to her rear.

Silhouetted against the distant glow of the streetlight, it was no more than a black, hunched outline, walking not running.

She had to look again, just to be sure.

Yes, it was only walking – though at faster-than-average speed.

Nan increased her own pace. Her breath came short and quick.

It occurred to her, somewhat belatedly, that it might be a police officer. There’d been a few of them around recently. But she couldn’t see any reason why this would be a copper. Coppers usually did one of two things: they watched from a place of concealment, or they came and knocked on your door.

They didn’t do this: follow you round at night, trying to frighten you.

She glanced over her shoulder again, walking even faster, wishing she had longer legs. Even without running, this guy might catch up before she reached the main road. However, he wasn’t significantly closer. She faced forward again and saw that she only had another fifty yards to go. Unless he started running at the last minute, she ought to make it – and he surely wasn’t going to do that, otherwise he’d already have done it. As she approached the end of the pathway, she looked back one more time. He was still forty yards off and still no more than a silhouette.

With a sense of relief, she emerged onto the pavement, into the yellow radiance of the streetlights. She made a sharp right and continued on her way.

Just ahead, on the other side of Orchard Park Road, there was another cut-through, ‘the Ginnel’ as they knew this one, which passed between the rear fences of houses before opening onto her estate. In daylight hours, it was an easy and safe shortcut home. But she certainly wasn’t chancing it now; she would stay on the main road.

There wasn’t a great deal of traffic about. But it didn’t matter. Nothing would happen to her while there were occasional cars flitting by. She felt certain of that. You heard some bad stories, of course. If she was honest, this wasn’t the best part of town to live in. But it was only at the godforsaken times of night when people Nan knew had been mugged.

Assuming that was what this was.

She’d almost given up on the idea that it could be one of those stupid kids from the Spar. If it was, he’d come an awful long way simply to laugh at her again.

She glanced back, now seeing no one on either side of the road. A break occurred in the intermittent traffic, so she crossed over. The entrance to the Ginnel was about ten or twenty yards behind her, but thirty yards beyond that, the mouth to the Strode stood in the shadow of several sycamore trees. The man could be waiting there, watching her, and she wouldn’t know it. It was difficult to see where else he could have gone. Even if he hadn’t been following her, shouldn’t he be out here on the main road somewhere? She put the question from her mind. There was no point puzzling over something when you didn’t have all the facts. He could live close by and have already gone indoors for all Nan knew.

She continued on, her breathing coming easier as she turned down a side street and entered the estate. She was almost home now. Circling a block of council maisonettes, she cut across an open green space, beyond which lay the subway – another poor choice at night, but there was no real option. After that, she’d be at Hellington Court, the horseshoe-shaped apartment house on whose first floor she lived. But then she caught movement in her peripheral vision, at the bottom end of the Ginnel in fact.

Nan hadn’t taken the shortcut. But he had.

Undoubtedly, it was the same figure, though now much closer; hands tucked into his front pockets, a hood pulled down over a lowered head as though he was walking through driving rain – or trying to keep his face concealed from CCTV cameras.

‘My God,’ she whimpered, her heart hammering her stick-thin ribs as she broke into a run.

It was a perilous course. The green was strewn with bricks and bottles, any one of which could turn her ankle, but she stumbled on blindly, risking another glance backward. He too was on the green, head still bowed. Not running, but walking much faster, as if he couldn’t allow her to get too far ahead.

‘Oh my … my God,’ Nan gibbered.

Fear applied wings to her heels. She sped on, tripping only once, but though she tottered and stumbled, she managed to right herself before falling.

Just ahead, the steps led down into the subway. She took them without hesitation.

Another quick glance showed that he was about twenty yards to her rear.

At the bottom of the steps, she dashed up the concrete passage. Of the thirty-odd lights installed along its damp ceiling, only a few worked, filling the tunnel with gloom.

With a series of echoing thumps, feet descended the steps behind her. Gasping with terror, Nan staggered on. The end of the passage was clearly visible thanks to the streetlights beyond it, but it was still some forty yards ahead. Before that stood the long-abandoned relic of a pram, nothing now but corroded framework and shreds of upholstery. She thought about grabbing it and flinging it behind her to create an obstacle. But a voice told her to act her age, because that only worked in films.

She looked back again. Incredibly, he was still walking, not running; even more incredibly, he was much closer. She could make out the details of his clothing: grey tracksuit pants; a black hoodie top with some faded insignia on the front.

With a shriek, she ran into the pram.

How ridiculous, she thought, as she seesawed over the top of it, landing hard on the wet, grimy floor. She’d dismissed the idea of using the object against her enemy because it probably wouldn’t have worked and then had fallen foul of it herself.

A fastener snapped open and the contents of her handbag skittered out, but Nan didn’t wait to regather them. She jumped to her feet, which was some achievement considering that she’d winded herself, grazed both her hands and hurt her left hip – the latter stung abominably where a piece of jagged metal had torn through her clothes and punctured the flesh – and lurched on, aware that he was less than ten yards behind her. When she got to the steps, she hammered up them, expecting to hear an explosion of footfalls as he finally started running.

But that didn’t happen.

Was it possible, was it even vaguely conceivable, that he was innocent, just an ordinary guy on his way home after a couple of pints in the pub?

No. How bloody ludicrous are you, woman!

An ordinary man would most likely have shouted after her when she fell over the pram, to enquire if she was OK.

She reached the top of the steps, throat raw with panting. The edifice of Hellington Court loomed on her right, and she scuttled towards it. The first entrance, the one directly facing her, was no longer used by residents; it led into a series of ground-floor utility rooms which were now seen as places to dump rubbish in. Nan took that route anyway, because just entering her own building felt as if it would offer some modicum of protection. As an occupant, she ought to know her way around in there better than he did.

But, of course, it wasn’t that easy.

In the first room, she tripped on a pile of rusty old bicycles, and when she fell on top of them, sharp prongs snagged and cut her again. In the next room, which she entered via an arched brick tunnel that was so dark she had to feel her way, she bounced between abandoned fridges and stacks of mouldy furniture. There was no point looking back to check on his progress now, because he could be right behind her and she wouldn’t even see him.

In the third room, Nan glimpsed what looked like a row of upright bars with light shining down behind them from above. The bars were accessible through another brick passage, but when she got there, they ran floor to ceiling and left to right, seemingly closing off this entire section of the building. The light spilled down an interior set of fire-escape stairs, but there was no way through to them.

From behind – in either the first or second room – there was a clunk of metal.

Frantic, she worked her way along the bars, spying a gate, a steel frame filled with mesh and fitted with what looked like a garden latch – but when she got to it, it was fastened with a padlock. Nan whined aloud, her torn, sweaty hands smearing blood as she yanked futilely on it. From some non-too-distant place, she heard a breaking and splintering of wood.

That mouldy old furniture.

With vision glazed by tears of horror, she fumbled on along the bars. There had to be another way out of here; there simply had to. But this faint hope collapsed as the narrow passage she was following terminated at a bare brick wall.

Nan gazed at it, rocking on aching feet. She went dizzy. The world tilted, and she had to grapple with the bars to support herself. And by a miracle, the one she grabbed dislodged. It wasn’t broken but had come loose from its concrete base. Breathless, she bent and twisted it until she’d created enough space to get past.

Unsure whether it was her imagination that a dark-clad figure advanced along the row of bars towards her – she never even looked to check – she slid her thin body through and ran to the foot of the metal staircase, almost slipping on a tiled floor covered by green scum, before haring up it. At the top, there was a concrete landing she didn’t recognise. Wheezing, drenched with sweat under her ragged, bloodstained clothes, she pivoted in a bewildered circle. A single bulb shed light up here, showing a couple of metal doors leading off in different directions. Nan was perplexed as to which way she should go. But when she heard a heavy tread ascending the stairway, it jolted her forward, propelling her to the nearest door.

On the other side of that, she ran down a corridor with entrances to flats on either side. At the end, she entered another similar corridor, but now she knew where she was.

A few seconds later, she was out on the balcony overlooking the central court.

Her own door, No. 26, was only four along from here.

As she tottered towards it, she fumbled in her handbag for her keys.

Only to find that the bag was empty.

The reality of this only washed over Nan as she came to a halt in front of her flat door, which stood huge and solid and impenetrable.

‘No,’ she moaned. ‘Nooo … ’

She’d been so frightened down in the subway that when she’d fallen over the pram, she’d assumed all she’d dropped was loose change, lipstick, reading glasses – not her house key!

A figure rounded the corner onto the balcony and proceeded towards her.

Nan would never know where it came from: a memory, dredged from nowhere, that before she’d left the Spar that evening, she’d dropped her key from her handbag, and had only spotted it at the last minute, bending down, scooping it up – and putting it in her anorak pocket. With robotic speed and smoothness, all the time aware of that dark shape encroaching from the left, she delved into the pocket, pulled out the key, and jammed it into the lock.

She turned it, and the mechanism disengaged.

Nan tottered inside, banged the door closed behind her, and rammed the bolts home.

Twenty minutes later, when Nan found the courage to unlock the bathroom and re-emerge into her narrow hall, she heard nothing.

But then she wasn’t sure what she’d expected to hear.

Someone trying the front door, or someone simply idling there, muttering to themselves?

Even if this person – whoever it was – had been following her, none of that seemed likely. One thing you had to say about these old run-down blocks of flats, they were fairly secure. The units weren’t easy to force entry to, and with everyone living so close to each other, if someone tried, they’d cause such a racket that the police would inevitably be called.

Even so, it took Nan another five minutes, still damp under her clothes, to actually approach that front door. And she only did so armed with a carving knife she’d brought from the kitchen. Even then, she was tentative. Half a foot short, she waited, listening hard – but still there was no sound.

Neck and shoulders tense, breath tightening in her narrow bird-chest, she considered leaning forward to the spyhole. She’d seen so many horror films where this happened and immediately an ice pick was driven through it from the other side, or a bullet fired into the eye of the person peeking. She didn’t think that was actually possible – how would the madman know when you were looking, and when you weren’t? But it was still a horrific prospect. When she finally steeled herself to do it, the fisheye lens gave its usual restricted, distorted view of the balcony, but showed nobody standing near the door. Despite this, it was another whole minute before she could sum up the extra courage to withdraw bolts and turn the main lock.

She kept the safety chain on, of course, the door opening to four inches maximum.

Now she could see much more of the balcony, and still no one was there. Night sounds reached her: the hum of distant traffic, someone laughing in one of the flats above. Encouraged, Nan loosened the chain, opened the door properly, and with knife levelled like a bayonet, ventured one step outside – just enough so that she could look both right and left.

The balcony trailed harmlessly away in both directions. There was no one there, the only movement a scrap of wastepaper drifting on the summer breeze.

Chapter 7

The life of Eddie Creeley was pretty much a blueprint for the development of a violent criminal. Born into poverty in the Hessle Road district of Hull in 1979, his mother died from a stroke when he was three years old, leaving him in the care of his older sister by ten years and his unemployed ex-trawlerman father, who sought to fill the void in his life with alcohol, and periodically took time off from this to beat his children black and blue.

On one occasion, or so the stories told, young Eddie was battered so savagely by his raging parent that he ‘didn’t know where he was’ for nearly two days.

By the early 1990s, perhaps inevitably, the youngster had become a regular juvenile offender, with form for shoplifting, car theft, burglary and assault. In 1993, he finally dealt with his father, retaliating to yet another unprovoked backhander by breaking a bottle over the old man’s head and dumping his unconscious body in the litter-strewn alley out back, where a freezing rainstorm was almost the death of him. After this incident, there were no further reports of the Creeleys’ father attacking either of his children, though it was noted that he himself often sported black eyes, split lips and missing teeth.

Throughout this period, Eddie Creeley served regular time in juvenile detention, where he became well-known for his violent and troublesome behaviour. One thing he didn’t like were authority figures, though he could extend his brutality to any person at any time. In 1997, for example, he beat his pregnant girlfriend, Gillian, so severely that he caused her to miscarry. On this occasion, he was sent to adult prison, where he was involved in frequent altercations with staff and fellow inmates. Only five months into his four-year stretch, in response to a sexual advance, he ambushed a much older fellow prisoner and smashed his legs with an iron bar. This brought him to the attention of Newcastle gangster, Denny Capstick. Impressed by Creeley’s viciousness, Capstick took him on as muscle, and he spent the next few years, both inside jail and out, attacking and terrorising the rivals of Capstick’s firm and even, or so the rumours held, carrying out several murders on their behalf.

Capstick cut him loose in 2001, when he robbed a mini-market in Sunderland and unnecessarily brutalised a female cashier. Sentenced to ten years, it looked as if Creeley was finally out of circulation, but in the end he only served seven, coming out in 2008 and returning to his native Humberside, where he cheerfully recommenced his criminal career. Using his extensive underworld contacts, he put together a ruthless team, and over the next few years they carried out several raids on banks and post offices, all of which were eye-catching for their levels of violence, with shots fired, and bats and pickaxe handles used on staff, customers and security personnel alike.

In 2010, he hit the big time when, with high-level underworld backing, he pulled off a massive score. In the middle of the night, he and six associates infiltrated a private security firm’s cash-handling depot at Newark-on-Trent in the East Midlands by taking hostage the depot manager and his wife and children. On successfully entering the depot, four guards and three more members of staff were handcuffed and locked into one of the vault’s cages while the actual blag, which lasted forty minutes, took place. Some £7 million in banknotes was stolen, and the thieves got clean away. It would perhaps have gone down as one of Britain’s most audacious and cleverly planned robberies, had Creeley’s mistreatment of two security guards not left a very sour taste even in the mouths of his underworld backers. The two guards, both ex-military, proved difficult captives, and so to punish and further incapacitate them, Creeley injected them with drain cleaner; one died as a result, while the other was subject to fits and blackouts for the rest of his life.

Disowned by many associates after this, Creeley went to ground for four years, only to re-emerge in 2014, when he and a young accomplice broke into the suburban home of a Lincolnshire bank manager called Brian Kelso. The bank manager was tied up and subjected to hours of fearsome threats, while his wife, Justine, was beaten and repeatedly indecently assaulted. The following morning, the haggard and terrified manager went to work early, and stole £200,000 in cash. He handed it over to Creeley at an agreed rendezvous point and was then shot twice in the chest. He survived by a miracle, recovering later in hospital, but his wife, still at the family home, hadn’t been so lucky. Police officers found her dead; she had been injected with battery acid.

The horrifying and sensational nature of these crimes galvanised the various police forces in the East Midlands into throwing all their resources at the case, and in due course, several men were arrested and charged for the depot robbery, though Creeley wasn’t among them. Yet again, he’d gone on the run, but it wasn’t easy for him. Increasingly seen as a dangerous psychopath, fewer and fewer of his former compatriots wanted to work with him.

It was probably no surprise that sometime in 2015, he dropped out of sight – as in quite literally vanished, never to be seen again even by those who were close to him.

Gail Honeyford breathed out long and slow as she laid the case papers down on the pub table.

‘Well … that’s a life well lived.’

Heck, at the other side of the table, wiped froth from his lip. The Duke of Albion affected the look of an old-fashioned gin palace, but much of that was window-dressing. In truth, it was another large and typically impersonal inner-London pub, but it was close to Staples Corner, so it served. This being a Monday night and now after ten o’clock, it wasn’t especially busy, though there were a few punters dotted about its spacious interior.

‘I wonder where you actually get off causing so much damage to everyone around you,’ Gail said. ‘No wonder even his fellow hoodlums hate him.’

‘He’s obviously got some buddies left … to have disappeared so effectively,’ Heck said.

‘Are we sure he’s even in the country?’ she wondered.

He shrugged. ‘If Interpol have had no leads on him, and Europol have had nothing …’

‘I suppose we should expect a maniac like this to leave some kind of ripple. Unless he’s died, of course.’

‘No death of anyone even closely resembling Eddie Creeley has been reported, but that’s something we may need to look into. Need to cover all bases, as they say.’

‘Looks like we’ve got a lot of legwork ahead of us.’

‘You wanted to be where the action was.’ He half-smiled. ‘You couldn’t have arrived at a better time.’

She nodded thoughtfully.

‘I’m sorry if I wasn’t very welcoming earlier on,’ he said.

She waved it away. ‘I did come at you a bit out of the blue.’

He watched her, genuinely puzzled by the change in her personality since they’d last met. ‘Gail, I don’t know what it is, but you seem more …’

‘Grown-up?’

‘Not necessarily the words I’d have used.’

‘When we worked together in Surrey, Heck, I took issue with the fact that I had a murder enquiry, my very first, which I thought I was on top of … and then you came in, kind of from nowhere, and were given seniority over me.’

‘It’s understandable you were peeved about that.’

‘But I was wrong.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d been listening too much to people like Ron Pavey. Who, as you know, was a dickhead of the first order. Surrey’s own version of Charlie Finnegan.’

Heck sniggered. ‘Good … you’ve already got Charlie’s number.’

‘Ron always said that special squads like SCU, and even National Crime Group itself, were a complete waste of space. A bunch of flash gits hogging all the resources and getting all the headlines but doing police work in name only. But that was typical of him. Total crap from a total gobshite.’

Heck nodded. He’d known Pavey as a divisional DS down in Surrey, and as Gail’s ex-boyfriend, which status he’d only reluctantly relinquished after giving her hell for several years. Of course, being a total gobshite was only one of Pavey’s lesser vices. The more Heck had got to know the guy, the more irritated he’d been by his swaggering style and casual, brutal bullying – so much so that he’d stood and applauded when Gail herself had arrested Pavey and charged him with several career-ending offences. It had been an enormously brave move by the young policewoman, one which, now that Heck recollected it, filled him with a surprising amount of affection for her. There were lots of ingredients in the make-up of an effective police officer, and though it wasn’t fashionable to discuss it in the modern era, raw courage was still one of the most important (and one of the rarest).

‘Course, I didn’t know any of that at the time,’ she said. ‘When you first arrived, I was rude and prickly, and probably came over as very arrogant.’

‘Well … it’s big of you to admit that.’ Heck was so unused to people apologising to him that it made him feel awkward. ‘But we should remember that my style is not to everyone’s taste, either. You heard what Gemma had to say about me. On occasion, I like to cut corners.’

‘Yeah, but it works.’

‘Not always.’ He felt a pang of unease. It was amazing how pertinent Gemma’s warning words of earlier that day now seemed. ‘Perhaps, while we’re working on Sledgehammer together, it should be more a case of do as I say, not do as I do.’

Gail laughed. ‘If only I’d got that on tape. I could have you over a barrel for the rest of your career.’

‘Do you think anyone’d be surprised to hear it?’

‘Possibly not.’ She finished her drink. ‘But it’s something I’m still going to hold you to over the next few weeks. Anyway …’ She checked inside her handbag. ‘We’re in at the crack tomorrow, so I’m off back to Cricklewood for an early night.’

‘Cricklewood?’ Heck was surprised. ‘You’ve got digs up here?’

‘Course. What else was I supposed to do … commute from Guildford every day? You know what the Orbital’s like. It’d be four hours here, four hours back. Anyway, Cricklewood’s not so bad.’

‘You’ve bought a flat, or something?’ he asked.

‘Rented one. I haven’t sold up in Surrey just yet.’

Heck nodded, relieved. That decision had shown prudence and suggested that this wasn’t totally a knee-jerk thing.

‘Anyway, I’ve got to go.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be in tomorrow morning.’

‘Briefing starts at eight.’

‘I know, don’t worry.’ She slung her bag over her shoulder, tucked the Eddie Creeley paperwork under her arm and pushed her chair backward.

‘Shall I take that?’ Heck said. ‘Line manager, and all that.’

‘Oh, sorry … yeah.’ She smiled and handed the file back.

Only when she’d left did Heck allow himself a smile, though it was tinged with concern.

Gail was clearly still Gail; she’d evidently got on top of her inferiority complex, but a hint of the old single-mindedness remained. She’d been in SCU less than a day and was already trying to make the running on their first case. On one hand that was good – she would need to be feisty in this world; Gemma was the perfect example of that. But a couple of questions still nagged at him. Firstly, how comfortably could she make the switch? Working CID in Surrey’s green and pleasant land was likely to be a very different experience from the Serial Crimes Unit, where they dealt exclusively with the worst of the worst. And secondly, did he really want to be the man in charge if it started proving problematic?

Heck was looking forward to going after Eddie Creeley. He was in no doubt that he would find and collar the murderous bastard, but only by doing it his way rather than the approved way. Gemma would tolerate that to a degree; if she didn’t, she’d never have accorded him his roving commission. Having Gail Honeyford along for that ride would be interesting. He just hoped that she was up to handling life at the sharp end.

If she had trouble coping when they were chasing this baddest of bad boys, that would be a level of complexity he really didn’t need.

Chapter 8

Nan’s eyes sprang open in a face rigid as wax and beaded with sweat.

She didn’t think she’d ever seen her bedroom as dark as it was at this moment. Normally, yellowish streetlighting suffused through the curtain on the single small window, dappling the bare wall opposite with curious shapes. But tonight, there was nothing. Utter blackness. A void. And why was the room so deathly cold? Wasn’t this supposed to be summer?

She was unable to move as she lay there, rucked in damp, tangled sheets. Couldn’t budge so much as a muscle. Good God, was she paralysed? Had she become ill during the night, had a stroke or something? Dear Lord …

And then she heard it.

The voice. From the darkness alongside her.

‘Sorry, missus,’ it whispered. ‘I don’t like to wake you when you’re having your beauty sleep and all. But you know how things are. Sometimes a man can’t wait.’

Nan couldn’t answer because she couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even utter a whimper.

‘That’s why I followed you home,’ he explained. ‘Had no choice.’

She tried to roll her eyes sideways, to visualise him. His voice was so close to her ear, his breath so rank – a mixture of onions and ketchup and something else too, a faint odour of rot – that he had to be kneeling right alongside her.

‘No choice at all,’ he said again. ‘When the mood’s on me, like. When the rest of the lads told me … well, that you’ve got a soft mouth.’ He sniggered, a snorting pig-like sound. ‘No teeth, they said. Nothing to chomp or chew me … you getting my drift?’

To her abject horror, Nan still couldn’t react.

‘I’ll be honest,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t think of anything more exciting. Getting a blowjob off Toothless Mary. I’d have asked you nicely, like … if you’d let me catch up with you. But you kept running and squawking … you know, like some typical fucking idiot lass who doesn’t know what side her bread’s buttered on. But it’s all right … I know you’re not like that really. I know you’ll co-operate …’

She sensed rather than saw him rise to full height next to her, and then felt the weight of him across her chest as he straddled her and knelt there. With a slow, metallic slither, his zipper was drawn down.

‘Won’t you?’ he chuckled.

Nan screeched as she leapt from the bed, arcing though the air, landing knees-first, then slamming the thickly plastered palms of her hands on the carpet.

She didn’t know which was the more painful, the smarting of recent flesh wounds, or the agonising thumping of her heart. She looked up, eyes goggling, mouth drooling, sweat dabbling her brow. What seemed like an age passed before her tear-glazed eyes were able to focus on the neon numerals of the clock on the dresser. It read: 5:28 a.m.

It was still early. In winter, it would feel like the middle of the night. But this was summer, and dawn light penetrated the curtains, revealing the bedroom’s meagre furnishings: Nan’s mirror, her wardrobe, the chair with her anorak draped over the back, two library books on an otherwise empty shelf.

But nothing else.

No hooded figure skulking in a corner or crouching to keep low.

A dream, then. Nothing but a dream. But good Lord … a dream from Hell, if ever there was such a thing!

She rose shakily to her feet, hands still smarting. A tugging at her side revealed that part of her nightie had adhered to her left hip, probably where it had caught on the Elastoplast she’d applied to the gouge wound from the old pram.

Nan had taken a long shower before coming to bed. She’d paid particular attention to that gash on her hip, because of the dirt and germs. But now she felt as if she needed another one. She brushed rat-tails of hair from her eyes as she turned to look at her bed. It was a foul nest, the sheets stained and messy. The last thing she wanted to do was climb back in there. Not, in truth, that sleep was a viable option. Not now.

It might only be half-past five, but she switched the bedroom light on and inserted her feet into her slippers. She really had to do something about her ‘coming home from work’ arrangements, she thought, as she opened the bedroom door. She couldn’t afford a taxi home every day, though even if she could, she’d still have to go out to the front of the shop to get it, which would defeat the object. Alternatively, perhaps she could arrange to work ordinary day shifts from now on. Though that wouldn’t be easy, because all the other ladies employed at the Spar were the same: they didn’t like walking home late either.

Nan crossed the hall to the kitchen, to make herself a cup of tea, when she spotted something lying at the foot of the front door. Something had been pushed through the letter box.

Her breath shortened again, her chest began to tighten. She took a couple of steps forward.

The dull light from her bedroom showed a relatively small object, two or three inches long, narrow, bright green. From this distance, it resembled a cigarette lighter.

‘Good … good God!’ she stammered.

Had someone put petrol through, and then had they tried to light it? It was beyond belief, but you heard about horrific things like that happening.

She blundered forward, heart trip-hammering. But as she approached, she realised that it wasn’t a cigarette lighter. Nothing so sinister, in fact. She ventured all the way up to it, and there was no mistake.

A pen drive lay on her welcome mat.

Nan wasn’t the kind of person one might automatically expect to be electronically proficient. ‘Dim’ was one term she’d heard people using for her. She’d been regarded as a ‘dunce’ at school. But in fact, in adult life, Nan had become familiar with computers, the internet and such because she’d needed to while she was working at the Spar. She’d even bought herself a second-hand laptop in order to practise at home. And though she wasn’t an expert yet, she certainly knew what she was doing.

She’d been so momentarily petrified by the thought of petrol that now she mainly felt relief, but she was mystified too. Why would someone stick something like this through your letter box in the middle of the night? If it was someone well-intentioned, wouldn’t they have attached a note? Perhaps not if it was a friend playing some elaborate but harmless joke – but Nan wasn’t friendly enough with anyone for that to be a possibility.

As she took her laptop from the shelf in the living room, it occurred to her that the pen drive might contain a virus. But she had nothing on her computer that she would miss if it was lost. She sat on the couch, set the laptop on her knees, opened it and switched it on. When it came to life, she inserted the pen drive, which immediately appeared as a smiley face icon on her desktop. When she touched it with her cursor, it opened, and she saw that it contained a single file: an MPEG, which someone had entitled: Greetings – from the Devil’s Messenger.

Even more mystified, she clicked on it.

A window opened, and a black-and-white video commenced playing. Nan watched it for twenty seconds or so, slack-jawed.

Before she began to scream.

Chapter 9

Setting off at around six from his Fulham flat, Heck made it to Staples Corner before seven, hoping to get some breakfast in the canteen, only to find even at this ungodly hour that it was busier than usual.

Lots of people appeared to have set off early to avoid being late for the briefing. Not just from SCU, but from the Cold Case team as well, while Gemma and her joint SIO, Gwen Straker, had secured the attachment of extra personnel, both police and admin, to do the legwork and provide office back-up. This meant that the queue to the service counter stretched halfway around the room.

Disgruntled, Heck went to the vending machine instead, to get himself a coffee-to-go. While he waited for his Styrofoam cup to fill, he glanced left – and saw Gemma in the far corner, facing Jack Reed across a tabletop, conversing with him in intent but friendly fashion. The body language alone was fascinating. The twosome cradled a cuppa each and leaned towards one another – not exactly the way lovers do, though it would be easy to picture Reed reaching out an affectionate hand and brushing aside a stray lock of Gemma’s flaxen hair.

Heck was more than surprised. Behaviour like this, not just in full view of her own team but of the Cold Case officers too, who’d be arriving here under the impression that their new joint boss was a hard-ass of legendary proportions, underlined the sea change in Gemma since Reed had come on board. She would never normally have been this lax in her manner. Quite clearly, other things were now on her mind.

Other things that were making her smile.

‘You’ll not win her favour by glaring at her in public,’ a voice behind him said.

Heck spun around and found Detective Chief Superintendent Gwen Straker waiting her turn at the vending machine.

‘Oh, ma’am …’ he stuttered. ‘Sorry … I’m done here.’

He stepped aside, and she moved forward.

‘I wasn’t glaring,’ he said. ‘I’m, erm … I’m actually waiting for the new DC I’m working with. Wanted a quick chat before the briefing.’

‘Why don’t you go and find us a table, Mark,’ she said.

‘Thing is, ma’am … I was going back to the office. Wanted to get some stuff sorted.’

‘Couple of minutes won’t hurt. Go and find us a table.’

This was easier said than done, so the first time a couple of seats facing each other became free, Heck pounced on them. When Gwen arrived, she sat down in neat, non-fussy fashion. Not atypically, she’d got herself a herbal tea rather than the milky, sugary coffee that Heck preferred.

One of the first black female detectives in the Met to actually make rank, Gwen was now in her mid-fifties. She wasn’t especially tall, around five-seven, and the little weight she’d put on over the years gave her a buxom-to-heavy build. But otherwise, age had been kind to her; she still possessed thick, shoulder-length hair, and, unmarked by wrinkles, boasted soft, pretty features. Back during her days as Heck and Gemma’s divisional DI at Bethnal Green, Gwen had favoured street casuals: denims, sweatshirts, leather jackets and the like, earning her the soubriquet ‘Foxy Brown’, after the gorgeous, hard-hitting heroine of the 1970s blaxploitation movie. But today, in reflection of her new, high-powered status, she wore a charcoal-black skirt suit, which fitted her snugly, though such a severe look didn’t quite match her personality, which was famously warm, at times almost maternal.

Gwen sipped her brew, before grimacing.

‘Ma’am, like I said, I have some stuff—’

‘So, you’ve been getting reacquainted with Gail Honeyford?’

Heck was surprised. ‘You know her?’

Gwen sipped her tea again, slowly but surely finding it tolerable. ‘You worked with her once, I believe?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it went well?’

‘We got a result.’

Gwen pursed her lips and nodded. ‘Sounds ideal … you and her, I mean.’

‘It’s hardly ideal.’ He’d blurted that out without thinking; immediately regretting it. He ought to have learned from experience that Gwen Straker never missed anything.

She arched an eyebrow, intrigued.

Heck chewed his bottom lip. His and Gwen’s previous relationship had been a difficult one to gauge, even at the time. While she was his DI, Gwen had rebuked him whenever necessary – sometimes spectacularly – but she was an old-stager herself. So long in the tooth that when she’d first entered the police, rules and regulations were mainly regarded as guidelines. For that reason alone, while she hadn’t always approved of some of Heck’s antics, she’d tacitly tolerated them if there was no serious fallout. Stranger than that, though, had been her attitude to his relatively short-lived romance with Gemma. Whereas most gaffers would have wanted the two officers concerned to work in different outfits so that they couldn’t distract each other, Gwen had seemed to enjoy it; like a fond parent pleased to finally see two of her wayward children get fixed up.

Heck and Gemma had been her protégés, of course. Bethnal Green had been both their debut CID postings, and Gwen their first ever plain-clothes supervisor. Perhaps it was no surprise that, way back then, Heck had come to trust her to the point where he’d seek advice from her, even on personal matters, and would feel particularly lousy if he ever did anything that seriously disappointed her. It was probably as much the presence of Gwen Straker, right here in the canteen, as it was the sight of Gemma fawning over that square-jawed, blue-eyed Henry Cavill lookalike, Reed, that reminded him why a working partnership with Gail Honeyford might prove to be more awkward than he’d prefer.

‘Look, ma’am,’ he said, ‘Gail’s a great girl, and an even better detective. Spirited, tenacious. Not perfect, of course. When I first met her, she was all attitude and not enough nous. But that seems to have changed. I’m strongly hopeful she’s not going to go at this case like a bull at a gate …’

‘Well, no,’ Gwen agreed. ‘Two of you taking that approach would never work.’

‘Listen … if you must know,’ he lowered his voice, ‘last time, we … as in me and Gail … I’ve unfortunately neglected to mention this to anyone, but we had a thing.’

‘I see.’ Gwen looked thoughtful. ‘As in a real thing? Or as in you just ended up in bed together.’

‘Well, the latter.’ He reddened. ‘We’d had a tough day. Got into a real scrape, in fact. We were stressed, wired, whatever you want to call it.’ He shrugged. ‘Guess we just needed to hit a release valve. I mean, Gail wasn’t spoken for at the time. But it was still an error … and we both realised that afterwards.’

‘You don’t need to offer a defence, Mark.’

‘Just filling you in on the circs.’

‘You don’t need to do that, either …’ she sipped more tea, ‘because I know all about it.’

Heck was astonished. ‘How’d you know?’

‘Gemma told me.’

‘Gemma told you!’ he almost shouted. A couple of faces turned from nearby tables. He lowered his voice again, throwing a quick nervous glance to the farthest corner of the room, but Gemma was still engrossed with Reed. ‘How does she know?’

‘Don’t be daft. You can’t keep anything secret in this job.’

‘No, seriously … I didn’t blab about it, and I’m damn sure Gail wouldn’t have.’

Gwen waved that away. ‘No secret’s one hundred per cent, Mark. Think about it. No matter how sensitive the info, everyone trusts someone, and quite often it’s someone they shouldn’t. Hell, does it matter?… We’re all adults.’

‘Yeah, but …’ This wasn’t panning out the way he’d expected it to. ‘Look, if … if Gemma actually does know, and she’s still partnered me and Gail together, that’s a bit of an error, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps she just wants everyone to be happy?’

It was several seconds before Heck could process the meaning of that.

‘Hell,’ he said slowly. ‘She wants to sweeten the pill … is that it? So that when she finally hooks up with Reed, I won’t be too upset?’ It was a shocking thought, but it made a horrible sort of sense. Heck was so thrown by it that suddenly he was thinking aloud rather than making conversation. ‘Who’d have known she’d ever be so manipulative? The bloody little schemer. Well, it won’t sodding work. There’s nothing between me and Gail now …’

‘Hey, Mark,’ Gwen said, ‘got room for some advice?’

‘Sure,’ he said distractedly.

‘You’re being a bit ridiculous.’ She gave him a frank stare. ‘Gemma is doing the best she can with limited resources. One of those resources is a relatively inexperienced detective … who, quite rightly, she’s put in company with an experienced detective. And as those two detectives know each other already and have worked together previously, so much the better.’

‘Yeah …’ When Heck thought about it that way, it did make sense.

‘I honestly don’t know why you still have this hankering after Gemma’s affection,’ Gwen said. ‘Assuming that’s what it is. The way I hear it, you and she fight like cat and dog.’

‘We’ve been through hell and high water together.’

‘Tough experiences usually bring people closer.’

‘Personally, I’ve always felt it’s the job that’s got in the way.’

‘The job?’

‘Most of our fallouts are over procedure.’

‘Ah. You mean you want to use the Ways and Means Act, and Gemma wants to do things the proper way?’

He didn’t bother answering that, because there was no answer he could give.

‘Let me tell you something, Mark.’ Gwen sat back. ‘I once thought you two were right for each other. But, for whatever reason, it hasn’t happened. So, for both your sakes – and for the sake of Operation Sledgehammer, I might add – this can’t go on much longer.’

‘Ma’am … we’re fine. It’s business as usual.’

‘It isn’t, Mark. That’s the problem. We’re under the microscope like never before.’

‘It won’t interfere with anything.’

‘Just make sure it doesn’t, hmm? And think about growing up a little. You both have separate lives … time you started living them.’

Heck was about to respond, when he spotted the object of their conversation approaching.

Gemma and Reed had been en route to the exit, but having seen them together, Gemma now veered towards their table.

‘Don’t you two look cosy?’ she said.

‘Just reminiscing about the good old days,’ Heck replied.

Reed offered his hand to Gwen. ‘DI Reed, ma’am. Jack.’

She shook hands with him. ‘Pleased to meet you, Inspector.’

‘Heard some amazing things about you, ma’am.’

‘And I you. Well done on the Black Chapel arrests.’

‘Well … it was a team effort.’ Reed indicated Heck. ‘I particularly couldn’t have done it without this fella’s groundwork.’

Heck said nothing, but inwardly seethed. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Reed had been a pompous idiot, or a boring fart. But instead he was basically a good egg. The guy wasn’t just tall and handsome, with a natural aristocratic bearing, he was pleasant, clever, witty, and he always gave credit where it was due. It was no small challenge when you’d set your stall out to loathe someone like that.

‘Let’s hope we can call on the same level of effective teamwork when Sledgehammer gets under way,’ Gwen said.

Reed nodded. ‘We’ll all be pursuing different targets, of course. But ultimately, we’re the same outfit. We can always call on each other’s expertise or assistance. I was thinking we should video conference twice a day, just so we can keep each other informed.’

‘We’ll be doing that, anyway,’ she replied. ‘It’s part of the strategy.’

‘I don’t just mean with Silver Command, ma’am. I mean all of us. Filing our updates together, keeping each other appraised of where we’re at. If nothing else, it’ll be good for morale.’

‘I agree,’ Gwen said. ‘It might even boost progress. For example, Heck, if you felt that one of the other teams – I’m not thinking of anyone specifically, of course – was making real headway on their case, and you were still on first base …’

‘I’m not sure that turning this thing into a competition between the investigation teams is necessarily the way we want to go,’ Gemma said.

‘Nevertheless, that’s what’ll happen,’ Gwen replied.

Gemma clamped her mouth shut, biting down on a riposte. Heck eyed her with interest; it was rare to see Gemma voice a concern and have it so airily brushed aside. He’d been wondering how he was going to cope having Gail Honeyford along, but now he wondered how Gemma would do playing second fiddle to Gwen Straker.

‘I don’t think it’ll be a case of competition,’ Reed said, ‘as much as mutual encouragement.’

‘So long as it gets the best out of everyone,’ Gwen replied, standing up. She turned to Gemma. ‘You ready? We’ve got a long session ahead.’

Gemma nodded. ‘I’ll not be a sec.’ As Gwen left the canteen, Reed sauntering after her, Gemma turned to Heck. ‘How are things going with DC Honeyford?’

‘Sweet,’ he said. ‘We went for a drink last night, and it’s just like we’ve never been apart. I think she and me are going to get on very well.’

Gemma nodded as if satisfied to hear this. Otherwise, there wasn’t a flicker of emotion.

Chapter 10

‘Right … there’s no way to sugar-coat this,’ Gemma said to the assembled staff of Operation Sledgehammer. ‘You all know the crisis we’re facing in the police service at this present time. And you know that it’s a very serious crisis indeed.’

There were over seventy of them crammed into the conference chamber, and on a hot August morning like this, it was an uncomfortable crush. Fans whirred overhead, but it was stuffy and stale. Many jackets and ties had been removed; foreheads gleamed with sweat.

Gemma Piper, not atypically, seemed oblivious to this, looking cool and unruffled as she pirouetted back and forth in her slacks and heels, her only concessions to the temperature that her blouse’s sleeves were rolled to the elbows and her collar button unfastened.

In contrast, Gwen Straker was seated on a stool to one side, next to the conference room’s large VDU, fingering her collar uncomfortably. Alongside her, sat Director of the National Crime Group, Joe Wullerton. In his late fifties now, burly in shape with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a thick if droopy moustache, he normally preferred cardigans and open-neck shirts to the grey suit he affected currently. It was smart enough, but it wasn’t ideal for these conditions and made him look awkward and restless.

‘In short,’ Gemma said, ‘money is tighter than a duck’s you-know-what. There are cutbacks everywhere. Many forces haven’t recruited since what feels like the Stone Age. People are having to work longer and longer just to get their pensions. And, inevitably, sections like ours are under ever greater pressure to produce, and I quote, “impressive results”.’

She paused. There was silence, the entire room, the brass included, paying rapt attention.

‘Now, you people here may consider that pretty unfair … I certainly do. Only a couple of days ago, the Serial Crimes Unit concluded the first part of its investigation into the Black Chapel. Not too long ago, we helped to halt a string of brutal underworld slayings and apprehended a notorious hitman.’

Heck listened alongside everyone else. He still felt the bruises from that last one.

‘I would certainly call those results impressive,’ Gemma said. ‘And you Coldies have an equal track record. In case any SCU officers are uninformed about this, in the last twelve months, Cold Case, under the command of Detective Chief Superintendent Straker here, have brought charges against eight individuals believed to be connected to historic homicides. But it seems, ladies and gentlemen, that none of this is quite enough.’ She paused to tuck ringlets of blonde hair behind her ears. ‘I recently attended a meeting at the Yard, wherein representatives of the National Police Chiefs’ Council put it bluntly to me that the Serial Crimes Unit either had to find some clear and visible way to reduce its overheads, or it had to increase its arrest and conviction rate dramatically, or, preferably, both. One other alternative was laid out for me – we discontinue operations.’

Mumbles of anger sounded, even though they’d all known this was coming.

‘What’s more, the whole of National Crime Group is under similar pressure.’ She glanced at Wullerton. ‘You want to say something about that, Joe?’

Wullerton sat stiffly upright, arms folded. ‘No, it’s fine, Gemma … you carry on.’

‘Director Wullerton is too self-effacing to mention it,’ she said, ‘but he’s been putting up a hell of a fight on our behalf. He recently put a forceful case to NPCC that if we lose the Kidnap Squad, the Organised Crime Division and the Serial Crimes Unit … all at the same time, then in one go we’ll have left our society significantly weakened in its battle against some of the most serious threats currently posed by the criminal underworld …’

There was silence again. Clearly, no one disagreed.

‘Unfortunately, it cut no ice,’ Gemma said. ‘However, two days after my meeting at Scotland Yard, I received a phone call from Detective Chief Superintendent Straker here, who advised me that she and her Cold Case team at the Met were facing an identical crisis. Do you want to take it from here, Gwen?’

‘Thanks, Gemma,’ Gwen said, standing up.

She peeled off her suit jacket and hung it from a hook on a shelf.

‘I won’t elaborate on any of this,’ she said. ‘We all know we’re under the microscope. However, our two units are in a more invidious position than most because we can’t just send staff out onto the streets to bump our stats the easy way. At least …’ she paused, ‘that was what I thought. But then it occurred to me that maybe there actually are some offenders out there, still at large, whose pursuit and apprehension would comfortably fall within the remit of the people gathered in this room.’

There was a stir of interest.

Gwen nodded to one of her Cold Case detectives, who hit some keys on his laptop. The VDU came to life, initially depicting a gallery of twenty thumbnail mugshots.

‘Unlike the FBI, in the UK we don’t keep an official list of the Most Wanted,’ Gwen said. ‘But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of fugitives from British justice wanted in connection with some very serious crimes who may still be living here – either in hiding, or under false names and identities.’

She turned to the screen.

‘My proposal, which I first made to DSU Piper and then to NPCC, was that SCU and Cold Case pooled their resources and drew up a list of the twenty Most Wanted fugitives from UK justice who were still believed to be in the country. And once we’d established that list, that we rekindled and pursued those particular enquiries. In short, that we made it our very next job to go after the twenty worst of the worst.’

Heck eyed the rows of faces on-screen. On their way in, everyone present had been handed a bundle of paperwork relevant to their own particular part of the enquiry, but also providing overarching information about Sledgehammer as a whole. No doubt, all of these mugshots, and the rap-sheets attached to each one of them, would be included in said packages, but it was interesting to see the faces all on-screen together.

‘You won’t need me to tell you,’ Gwen said, ‘that if, within a reasonable timeframe, we can arrest and convict even half of the names on this list – because each one of these is an open sore which NPCC is both angry and embarrassed about – we will massively boost our value for money in the eyes of the people who matter.’

She paused again, to let it sink in.

‘So, people … welcome to Operation Sledgehammer. DSU Piper picked the name, because we’re going to bring the full weight of the police service of England and Wales down on these scattered nuts, who are likely to be much more fragile than they realise.’

There were several satisfied snickers.

‘In the first instance, as some of you are already aware, we’re assigning two detectives to each individual. I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s only for the initial phase of the enquiry. Once you’ve made substantial ground on your case, Silver Command – that’s myself and DSU Piper, we will joint-SIO this investigation from the Command Centre here at Staples Corner – will provide all the technical, financial and personnel back-up you require to see it through to the end. We’ve already made preliminary contact with the various force areas in which your enquiries are to be focused, and in most cases, you’ll find that local CID have already done some groundwork on your behalf.

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