by Paul Finch
Heck smiled, and went back to his rooting and digging. She saw that he’d already retrieved one item; what looked like an old scrapbook. Its cover was badly charred, but the edges of the pages inside looked to be intact. She’d never seen his photo-record of all those murder victims he’d gained results for, and she’d never wanted to – but it seemed a reasonable guess that this was it.
‘How did you find the Race?’ she asked.
‘Wet.’
‘Me too. So did everyone else. Burt Fillingham had a heart attack going through Switchback Canyon.’
Heck glanced up. ‘I heard that. How is he?’
‘He’ll recover. Something to tell his grandkids … a red badge of courage from the battle of Cragwood Vale.’
Heck brushed his hands again, surveying the scorched rubble. ‘Sure looks like a battlefield.’
‘And yet you’re still here, Mark … right in the middle of it.’
‘Just salvaging what I can.’
She nodded at his scrapbook. ‘Looks like the important thing survived.’
He picked it up, flicked its pages. Many had browned in the heat and smoke, but the images they contained were just about identifiable. ‘None of these poor people survived the attacks that really mattered, I’m afraid.’
‘You know, Mark … you have to draw a line somewhere. You can’t live this job like you seem to.’
‘That’s been said,’ he agreed.
‘It’s going to send you to an early grave.’
‘That’s been said too.’
‘By Gemma, no doubt. But if you won’t listen to it from her, what’re the chances you’ll listen to it from me?’
He didn’t reply, just regarded her guiltily.
‘You know I can’t go with you, don’t you?’ she said.
‘And that means …?’
‘When you return to the world.’
‘I’m not returning to …’
‘Don’t lie to me, please. We’ve been through an awful lot together this last day and night. I’m just about still on my feet. But I don’t think I could take it if you started lying to me.’
‘Okay … I won’t.’
‘That world you yearn to be part of is not mine, I’m afraid. And don’t tell me you need to be part of it, because that isn’t true. If you need anything, Mark Heckenburg, it’s a clip around the ear from time to time, from a woman who loves you. But you’re a grown-up. You have to make this decision for yourself.’
‘You know, Hazel …’ Heck kicked the last few bricks he’d been searching back into place. ‘You’ve been the only nice thing that’s happened to me in an awfully long time.’
‘But not nice enough, is that it?’
‘In some ways you’ve been too nice. I’d say you’re too good for me, but that would be a cliché. What I actually mean is … you’d make it very difficult for me to do the job the way I do it.’
‘You mean you wouldn’t be able to risk your life every day?’
‘I don’t risk my … well, not every day.’
‘Just now and then?’
‘Yeah, now and then.’ He shrugged. ‘Most of the time I’m buried in routine stuff. Hours and hours of it.’
‘You’re telling me you’d never come home?’
‘I would come home because I’d have to, but that’d be the problem … it would reduce my effectiveness as an operator.’
She shook her head. ‘So not only are you not prepared to stay here, in this place, you’re not prepared to be with me? Not in the long term anyway.’
‘Look, I’ve always known I have this problem with commitment …’
She pointed at his scrapbook. ‘But you’re committed to those people, who are actually dead. They can’t be hurt anymore than they already are, can they?’
‘Hazel, come on …’
‘But maybe that’s what you like about them.’
‘That’s a low blow.’
‘Sometimes low blows are deserved. And required.’ She turned and headed back up the slope. ‘I’m reopening the pub in half an hour, if you fancy a drink. A few of your colleagues have been commenting about what thirsty work all this is.’
‘Hazel … for what it’s worth, I’m really sorry.’
She glanced down from the top. ‘You’ll get over it, I’m sure. Life goes on, the future beckons and all that. Who knows what it holds, Mark. For either of us.’
Are you #HOOKEDONHECK? Tell us all about it @CrimeFix and @paulfinchauthor.
And if you can’t wait for your next Heck fix, read on for a sneak peek of Paul’s next book, Hunted, which hits the shelves in May 2015.
Chapter 1
Dazzer and Deggsy didn’t give a shit about anyone. At least, that was the sort of thing they said if they were bragging to mates in the pub, or if the coppers caught them and tried to lay a guilt-trip on them.
‘We do what we do, innit? We don’t go out looking to hurt people, but if they get in the way, tough fucking shit. We pinch motors and have a laugh in ’em. And we’re gonna keep doing it, because it’s the best laugh ever. No one’s gonna stop us, and if they get, like, really pissed off because we’ve just wrecked their pride and joy, so what. We don’t give a shit.’
Tonight was a particularly good night for it.
Alright, it wasn’t perishing cold, which was a shame. Incredible though it seemed to Dazzer and Deggsy, some numbskulls actually came outside, saw a bit of ice and snow and left their motors running for five minutes with the key in the ignition, while they went back indoors for a cuppa; all you had to do was jump in the saddle and ride away, whooping. But if nothing else, it was dank and misty, and with it being the tail-end of January, it got dark early – so there weren’t too many people around to interfere.
Not that folk tended to interfere with Dazzer and Deggsy.
The former was tall for his age; just under six feet, with a broad build and a neatly layered patch of straw-blonde hair in the middle of his scalp, the rest of which was shaved to the bristles. If it hadn’t been for the acne covering his brutish features, you’d have thought him eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty – instead of sixteen, which was his true age, though of course even a sixteen-year-old might clobber you these days if you had the nerve to give some indication that his behaviour affronted you. As was often the way with juvenile duos, the second member of the tag-team, Deggsy, though he wasn’t by any means the lesser in terms of villainy, looked more his age. He was shorter and thinner, weasel-faced and the proud owner of an unimpressively wispy moustache. His oily black thatch was usually covered by a grimy old baseball cap, the frontal logo of which had long been erased by time and had been replaced with letters written in dayglo orange highlighter, which read: Fuck off.
There wasn’t thirty years of experience between them, yet they both affected the arrogant swagger and truculent sneer of guys who believed they knew what was what, and were absolutely confident they did what they did because the world had been a bastard with them and fully deserved whatever they gave it back.
It was just around nine o’clock that night when they spied their first and most obvious target: a Volkswagen estate hatchback. A-reg and in poor shape generally: grubby, rusted around the arches, occasional dents in the bodywork; but it ticked all the boxes.
Posh motors were almost impossible to steal these days. All that top-of-the-range stuff was the sole province of professionals who would make a fortune from ringing it and selling it on. No, if you were simply looking for a fun time, you had to settle for this lower quality merchandise – but that could also be an advantage, because you went and smacked a bit of rubbish around on the streets, the coppers would tow it away afterwards but would rarely investigate; so, if they didn’t catch you in the act, you were home free. In addition, this one’s location was good. Leatherhead boasted several sprawling industrial estates with lots of service and retail parking, not to mention numerous supermarkets, pubs, clubs and restaurants in the town centre, which also had ‘own risk’ parking lo
ts attached. Most of these were covered by cameras, which made the punters feel it was relatively safe to leave their motors overnight, and in many cases that was true – it was certainly safer in Leatherhead than it had been in the pre-CCTV era – but there were black spots as well, all of which Dazzer and Deggsy were intimately informed about, and the old Volkswagen estate was sitting right in the middle of one.
They watched it from a corner, eyes peeled for any sign of movement, but the dim sodium glow of the sparsely located streetlamps illuminated only a rolling beer can and a few scraps of wastepaper flapping in the halfhearted breeze.
Still, they waited. They’d been successful several times on this patch – it was a one-lane access way running between the back doors of a row of old shops and a high brick wall, and ending at three concrete bollards. No one was ever around here at night; there were no tenants in the flats above the shops, and even without the January miasma this was a dark, dingy place – but all such apparent ease of opportunity did was make Dazzer and Deggsy more suspicious than usual. The very fact that motors had been lifted from around here before made the presence of this one seem curious. Did people never learn? Maybe they didn’t. Though maybe there were other factors as well. The row of shops was a bit of an eyesore. Only one or two were occupied during the day, most of the others ‘to let’, a couple even boarded up as if they’d just been abandoned. God bless the Recession. When folk were at their wits’ end, they stopped caring – and that was always the best time to hit them.
The lads ventured forth, walking boldly but stealthily, alert to the slightest unnatural sound – but no one called out, no one stepped from a darkened doorway.
The Volkswagen was locked of course, but Deggsy had his screwdriver with him, and in less than five seconds they’d forced the driver’s door open. No alarm sounded, which was just what they’d expected given the ramshackle state of the thing; another advantage of pillaging the less well-off. With rasping titters, they jumped inside, to find that the steering column had been attacked in the past – it was held together by wads of silvery duct-tape. A few slashes of Dazzer’s Stanley knife and they were through it. Even in the pitch darkness, their gloved but nimble fingers found the necessary wiring, and the contact was made.
The car rumbled to life. Laughing loudly, they hit the gas.
It was Dazzer’s turn to drive today, and Deggsy’s to ride, though it didn’t make much difference – they were both as crazy as each other when they got behind the wheel. They blistered recklessly along, swerving around bends with tyres screeching, racing through red lights and stop signs. There was no initial response from the other road-using public. Opposing traffic was scant – another good thing about January; most folk, having spent up over Christmas, would prefer to slump in front of the telly rather than go out on the town. They pulled a handbrake turn, pivoting sideways through what would ordinarily be a busy junction, a stink of burnt rubber engulfing them, hitting the gas again as they tore out of town along the A246. They had over half a tank of petrol and a very straight road in front of them. Maybe they’d make it all the way to Guildford, where they could pinch another motor to come home in. For the moment, though, it was fun fun fun. They’d probably veer off en route, and cause chaos on a few housing estates they knew, flaying the paint from any expensive jobs that unwise owners had left in plain view.
Some roadworks surged into sight just ahead. Dazzer howled as he gunned the Volkswagen through them, cones catapulting every which way – one struck the bay window of a roadside house, and demolished it. They mowed down a ‘keep left’ sign, and took out a set of temporary lights, which hit the deck with a detonation of sparks.
The blacktop continued to roll out ahead; they were doing eighty, ninety, almost a hundred, and briefly were mesmerised by their own fearlessness, their attention completely focused down the borehole of their headlights. When you were in that frame of mind – and Dazzer and Deggsy nearly always were, it was part of their legend – there were almost no limits. It would have taken something quite startling to distract them from their death-defying reverie – and that came approximately seven minutes into this, their last ever journey in a stolen vehicle.
They clipped a kerbstone at eighty-five. That in itself wasn’t a problem, but Deggsy, who’d just filched his mobile from his jacket pocket to film this latest escapade, was jolted so hard that he dropped it into the foot-well.
‘Fuck!’ he squawked, scrabbling around for it. At first he couldn’t seem to locate it; there was quite a bit of junk down there – so he ripped his glove off with his teeth and went groping bare-handed. This time he found the mobile, but when he pulled his hand back he saw that he’d found something else as well.
It was clamped to his exposed wrist. Initially he thought he must have brushed his arm against an old pair of boots, which had smeared him with oil or paint. But no, now he could feel the weight of it and the multiple pinprick sensation where it had apparently gripped him. He still didn’t realise what the thing actually was, not even when he held it close to his face – but then Deggsy had only ever seen scorpions on the telly, so perhaps this was unsurprising. Mind you, even on the telly he’d never seen a scorpion with as pale and shiny a carapace as this one had – it glinted like polished leather in the flickering streetlights; or as big – it was at least eight inches from nose to tail, that tail now curled to strike; or with as menacing a pair of pincers – they were the size of crab claws, and extended upward in the classic defensive pattern.
It couldn’t be real, he told himself distantly.
Was it a toy? It had to be a toy.
It stung him.
At first it shocked rather than hurt; as though a red hot drawing pin had been driven full length into his flesh, and into the bone underneath. But that minor pain quickly expanded, filling his suddenly frozen arm with a white fire, which in itself intensified – until Deggsy was screaming hysterically. By the time he’d knocked the eight-legged horror back into the foot-well, he was writhing and thrashing in his seat, frothing at the mouth as he struggled to release his suddenly restrictive belt. At first, Dazzer thought his mate was play-acting, though he shouted warnings when Deggsy’s convulsions threatened to interfere with his driving.
And then something alighted on Dazzer’s shoulder.
Despite the wild swerving of the car, it had descended slowly, patiently – on a single silken thread, and when he turned his head to look at it, it tensed, clamping him like a hand. In the flickering hallucinogenic light, he caught brief glimpses of vivid, tiger-stripe colours and clustered demonic eyes peering at him from point-blank range.
The bite it planted on his neck was like a punch from a fist.
Dazzer’s foot jammed the accelerator to the floor as his entire body went into spasms. The actual wound quickly turned numb, but searing pain shot through the rest of his body in repeated lightning strokes.
Neither lad noticed as the car mounted an embankment, engine yowling, smoke and tattered grass pouring from its tyres. It smashed through the wooden palings at the top, and then crashed downward through shrubs and undergrowth, turning over and over in the process, and landing upside down in a deep-cut country lane.
For quite a few seconds there was almost no sound: the odd groan of twisted metal, steam hissing in spirals from numerous rents in mangled bodywork.
The two concussed shapes inside, while still breathing, were barely alive in any conventional sense: torn, bloodied and battered, locked in contorted paralysis. They were still aware of their surroundings, but unable to resist as various miniature forms, having ridden out the collision in niches and crevices, now re-emerged to scurry over their warm, tortured flesh. Deggsy’s jaw was fixed rigid; he could voice no complaint – neither as a mumble nor a scream – when the pale-shelled scorpion re-acquainted itself with him, creeping slowly up his body on its jointed stick-legs and finally settling on his face, where, with great deliberation it seemed, it snared his nose and his left ear in its pincers, then ar
ched its tail again – and embedded its stinger deep into his goggling eyeball.
Chapter 2
Heck raced out of the kebab shop with a half-eaten Doner in one hand and a carton of Coke in the other. There was a blaring of horns as Dave Strickland swung his distinctive maroon Astra out of the far carriageway, pulled a U-turn right through the middle of the bustling evening traffic, and ground to a halt at the kerb. Heck crammed another handful of lamb and bread into his mouth, took a last slurp of Coke and tossed his rubbish into a nearby bin, before leaping into the Astra’s front passenger seat.
‘Grinton putting an arrest-team together?’ he asked.
‘As we speak,’ Strickland said, shoving a load of documentation into Heck’s grasp, and hitting the gas. More horns tooted despite the spinning blue beacon on the Astra’s roof. ‘We’re hooking up with them at St Ann’s Central.’
Heck nodded, leafing through the official Nottinghamshire Police paperwork. The text he’d just received from Strickland had consisted of thirteen words, but they’d been the most important thirteen words anyone had communicated to him in several months:
Hucknall murder a fit for Lady Killer
Chief suspect – Jimmy Hood
Whereabouts KNOWN
Heck, or Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg, as was his official title at Scotland Yard, felt a tremor of excitement as he flipped the light on and perused the documents. Even now, after seventeen years of investigations, during so many of which shocking twists and turns had been commonplace, it seemed incredible that a case that had defied all analysis, dragging on doggedly through eight months of mind-numbing frustration, could suddenly have blown itself wide open.
‘Who’s Jimmy Hood?’ he asked.
‘A nightmare on two legs,’ Strickland replied.
Heck had only known Strickland for the duration of this enquiry, but they’d made a good connection on first meeting and had maintained it ever since. A local lad by birth, Dave Strickland was a slick, clean-cut, improbably handsome black guy; at thirty, a tad young for DI, but what he may have lacked in experience he more than made up for with his quick wits and sharp eye. After the stress of the last few months, even Strickland had started to fray around the edges; ‘frazzled’ would have been one way to describe him, but tonight he was back on form, collar unbuttoned and tie loose, but careering through the chaotic traffic with skill and speed.
