Stalkers

by Paul Finch

  ‘That should give you an idea how serious I am.’

  ‘You do not fuck around with the Nice Guys Club.’

  ‘So you do know them?’

  ‘I’ve heard of them. But only like I’ve heard of Jack and the Beanstalk or Jason and the Argonauts. It’s legend, a myth.’

  ‘Why are you frightened of them then?’

  ‘I’m not frightened, it’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  McCulkin laced his tattooed, nicotine-stained fingers in a tight, tense ball. ‘There are red flags all over this, Mr Heckenburg. Any time it comes up in conversation, it’s like “you don’t talk about this”, or “do not even go there”.’

  ‘That’s Halloween stuff, Pat. It’s designed to stop people asking questions.’

  ‘Look, these people are bad news.’

  ‘And I’m not?’ Heck leaned forward. ‘These bastards are going to find out different. Now you tell me every single thing you know.’

  ‘You really going to spread it that I’m a snitch?’

  ‘Just watch me.’

  McCulkin clawed at his brow, which was suddenly glazed with sweat. He looked tortured by indecision, which impressed Heck no end. Among other tough outfits, McCulkin had once grassed on a team of blaggers who’d been doing banks and post offices across southern England and had killed at least twice, and on a car-ringing operation that had involved the import into London of high-end motors stolen from all over the UK. If he wasn’t frightened of firms like these, just what level of threat did the Nice Guys pose?

  ‘What do you think is going to happen?’ Heck asked him. ‘Nothing will come back to you. It never does.’

  McCulkin shook his head. ‘You’d better keep Finnegan out of this, because he’s got a gob on him when he’s pissed.’

  ‘At present there are only two people on earth know about it — me and you. And that’s the way I’d like to keep it.’

  McCulkin took his cap off, ran a hand through his greasy hair. ‘Look, I don’t know ’em, myself. But I know someone who might.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘No names. Not at this stage. But I can set up a meet with him.’

  ‘Okay. The sooner the better.’

  ‘This afternoon?’

  Heck nodded. He indicated the red phone that McCulkin had found in the waste bin. It was one of the pair that Ballamara had provided the previous night. ‘Use this phone to call. Don’t call me on any number except the one I rang you from earlier.’

  McCulkin nodded worriedly. Before he left the tearoom, he glanced back. ‘You’ve started playing dirty, Mr Heckenburg. That isn’t like you.’

  ‘We all reach our breaking point, Pat.’

  ‘Well I’m glad you’ve reached yours when you have. From what I’ve heard about the Nice — about these people, you’re going to have to play it even dirtier.’

  Chapter 29

  Des Palliser had been at his desk half an hour, and was checking and signing off on a pile of reports, when the phone rang.

  ‘Serial Crimes Unit,’ he said, picking up and cradling the receiver under his jaw.

  ‘Detective Inspector Palliser?’

  ‘That’s right. Can I help?’

  ‘It’s Paula Clark again, at Deptford Green.’

  Palliser straightened up. ‘Yes, Paula. What can I do for you?’

  ‘DS Heckenburg’s still on leave, I understand?’

  ‘Erm … one second.’ He jumped up and closed his door on the bustle of activity in the main detectives’ office. Retrieving the phone, he sat down again. ‘That’s correct. He’s on leave until December.’

  ‘Maybe you could leave a note on his desk, or something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Or maybe you might want to do something with it, yourself, I’m not sure.’

  ‘I’ll do whatever I can, Paula.’

  Her tone was perfectly normal — there was nothing nervous or conspiratorial about it. Whether she’d got wind that something was going on because of the brief contact they’d had with her the other day, enquiring about Heck, he was unsure.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘have you heard anything about a mis-per called Louise Jennings?’

  ‘That name doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘I see. Well, she’s a secretary in the City. Seems she’s been missing since last Friday night. As I understand it, Thames Valley are dealing. I only read about it on force bulletins this morning. But it strikes me that her circumstances are very similar to a number of those missing women that DS Heckenburg was investigating.’

  Palliser grabbed a spare piece of paper and picked his pen up again. ‘Can you elaborate on that, Paula?’

  ‘I only glanced at it, but well … she’s not the type, if you know what I mean. Apparently, she’s nothing to run away from. She’s got no lover that anyone knows about, she hasn’t fallen out with her husband or her family. She hasn’t got drugs, drink or mental health problems. She’s got a wide circle of friends and relatives, and none of them have the first idea where she could be.’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘It’s probably nothing, but I just thought it seemed very similar to the other cases.’

  ‘That’s great, Paula. Thanks very much for drawing this to our attention.’

  ‘No problem. Always glad to help, as you know. Is Mark alright?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s fine. Having a right old time of it, I understand.’

  ‘Mmm.’ She probably knew Heck too well to believe that. ‘Okay, well, you know where I am if you need me. Bye.’

  She hung up, and Palliser sat there for several moments, pondering. Paula was right; it was probably nothing at all to do with the case, but then again …? He wondered if he should go down the corridor and speak to Gemma, but finally, deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, he picked the phone up and spoke to Janice, one of his unit’s own secretaries.

  ‘Hello love,’ he said, checking the brief details he’d just scribbled down. ‘Get me Thames Valley, please.’

  Chapter 30

  The Nice Guys Club.

  They were a club?

  That was what McCulkin had said.

  From Mudchute, Heck had taken the DLR to Canary Wharf, then the Jubilee to London Bridge, where he switched to the Northern Line. He was now riding south back towards Elephant amp; Castle, and puzzling through this latest revelation.

  A club obviously meant more than one or two, which he’d already figured. But it could also mean several more than one or two, maybe many more. In a way, that made sense. Given the complexity that had to be involved in these abductions — ordinary, everyday women snatched from view while doing ordinary, everyday things, and not a trace left behind — it was certainly more than a couple of offenders could manage. And then there was the hit-man factor. This whole thing was getting the whiff of organised crime, yet how did a load of disappeared women who weren’t whores or drug addicts fit into that picture?

  Heck was now working on the basis — though he hadn’t told Lauren this yet — that Deke was onto them because, whoever the Nice Guys were, they’d been following the progress of the enquiry, and had ordered the hit-man to intercept as it was getting too close for comfort.

  Did that mean there was a leak inside the National Crime Group?

  Heck didn’t even like to consider that possibility, though it was difficult to see how it could be otherwise — who else would have known that he’d been pulling files on Shane Klim?

  All of this was supposition of course, that police sixth sense that finely tunes itself over the course of hundreds of investigations.

  The missing link in all this was the motive. Why would an organised gang abduct ordinary women without making ransom demands? It didn’t compute. Heck remembered rumours he’d heard back in the 1980s about Satanists, and how they were responsible for thousands of disappearances all over Europe and America, the victims having been sacrificed in unspeakable rites. Few detectives at the time ha
d believed it mainly because there was so little physical evidence; for the same reason, he was ready to dismiss similar ideas now. There’d been no hint in recent times that dangerous cultists might be at work in the UK — and yet perhaps the real answer wasn’t a million miles away from that. He thought again about McCulkin’s reaction to the mere mention of the Nice Guys. ‘Unadulterated fear’ was the only way to describe it. It wasn’t as if he’d been asked to grass on gangsters or hoodlums — and Lord knows, they could be dangerous enough — but on something much darker, much more evil. This wasn’t a pleasant line of thought when Heck considered the missing women, many of whom he felt he’d come to know personally thanks to his in-depth analysis of their lives and relationships. One thing seemed certain: the answer — when he found it — was going to be extremely unpalatable.

  He returned to Ballamara’s private club before ten o’clock, but found the gangster, Lauren and several ape-like henchmen in a pub just across the road. Aside from these, there were no other patrons. Ballamara himself was standing behind the bar and looking unusually less than dapper, without a tie or jacket and with his shirt open at the collar. The others were around a table, where two or three heavies were mopping up egg and beans with hunks of bread. Lauren, who was crammed into a corner from which there was no easy escape, sat stiffly with her back against the wall. She glared at Heck as he sauntered in, but no more so than Ballamara did.

  As always, the gangster’s eyes were flat, grey metal.

  ‘You little shit,’ he said. ‘We had a deal.’

  Heck nodded. ‘We still do. I promised I’d deliver, and I will. But I need a couple of days.’

  ‘Pity. You haven’t got ’em.’

  Ballamara signalled to two of his men who were seated near the door. They closed and locked it, then began to draw blinds on the windows.

  ‘Neither have you,’ Heck replied.

  There was something in the way he said this — something bold, unafraid, which meant it wasn’t just bluff or bravado. The pub fell silent.

  ‘I’ve been busy this morning,’ Heck said. ‘Among other things, I’ve written and posted a letter to my solicitor, which is only to be opened in the event of me being found dead, or not being found at all within a certain time period. In it, I name you and your firm as my abductors and murderers.’

  Ballamara snorted scornfully. ‘Being sniffed at by the filth is not exactly a new experience for us.’

  ‘They’ll do more than sniff this time. Because guess what, I was busy last night too. And when they come and turn your pad across the road inside out, they’ll find numerous personal items that I secreted, any one of which will serve as proof positive that I was being held there.’

  The silence that followed was ear-pummelling. Ballamara’s gaze was so intense that even Lauren, who’d seen the maniacal faces of Taliban killers up close, found she couldn’t look at him.

  Heck remained undaunted. ‘Course, you can go over the place with a fine-tooth comb if you want. But you know you’ll have your work cut out. And even if you find some stuff, you’ll never know if you’ve found it all.’

  Ballamara’s knuckles turned white as he clenched them on the bar top.

  ‘That’s called being owned, Mr Ballamara,’ Heck added. ‘And in front of your own team. However, I’m not one to gloat. I’m going to stick to our deal, but the terms have changed. I’ll give you the info I promised as soon as I’ve got it to hand — and hopefully that won’t be long off. But in the meantime, me and Lauren are going to walk out of here unmolested. Not only that, we’re going to walk out with twenty grand of your money in our pocket.’

  This was too much for certain members of Ballamara’s crew. Loxton leaped up, his chair flying. ‘You fucking what?’

  Heck ignored him, and continued to address Ballamara directly. ‘I’m a fugitive, wanted for murder. That means they’ll be watching my bank accounts. I start making withdrawals around London, and it won’t take them long to join the dots. But I can’t live on air, can I? Don’t worry, you’ll get your cash back — it’s a loan, not a gift. You can even charge me interest.’

  ‘Can you believe this bastard?’ Loxton shouted.

  ‘Dale,’ Ballamara said tightly, ‘shut — your — sodding — trap!’

  ‘I’m not ripping you off, Mr Ballamara,’ Heck added. ‘I guarantee it. I’ve done a lot of spadework on this enquiry, but now at last we’re getting somewhere. This afternoon I’m seeing someone who can finally put me on the right track.’

  ‘In which case we’re going with you,’ Ballamara replied.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No! Look … the guy I’m seeing is a grass. One of my best. You lot show up, and not only is that relationship fucked, but word’ll get out that I can’t be trusted, and my relationship with every other grass in London will be equally fucked.’

  Ballamara did not like to be wrong-footed, but it was plain to him that Heck had covered every corner. He pondered this darkly, his brow furrowed.

  ‘You won’t be kept out of it,’ Heck assured him. ‘You’ve got my word.’

  ‘Your word? That’s supposed to make me feel better?’

  ‘Think about it — I may actually need you. You already know that whoever took your Noreen might have taken a number of other women. I don’t know why, or where. But you’d better prepare yourself for the worst.’

  Ballamara’s anger seemed to ebb a little. ‘I’ve already done that some time ago.’

  ‘Good. But the point is … whoever did it, they’re not going to come without a fight.’

  Again Ballamara pondered this.

  Heck produced the blue phone. ‘You’ve even got a number you can get me on any time you need an update.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Lauren still couldn’t believe that Heck had pulled it off, even as they sat facing each other on a Northern Line train headed north. She watched in bemused admiration as he filched a bundle of crisp new twenty-pound notes from a brown envelope, and began to count them.

  ‘I just don’t know how you did it,’ she said.

  He winked. ‘Seventy per cent of being a good bobby is the ability to bullshit.’

  ‘So none of that stuff was true?’

  ‘Not all of it.’

  ‘I should’ve realised … and I’m totally stunned that Ballamara didn’t.’

  ‘He probably did. But why take the chance?’ The twenty grand was all there, so Heck pocketed the envelope again. ‘What’s he really got to lose? The only way he’s going to get to whoever nabbed his daughter is if I lead him to them. Now …’ and he checked his watch. ‘You’ve already had breakfast, haven’t you?’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘What were you doing earlier on in the pub?’

  ‘Sitting watching those lunatics stuff their faces, while my stomach was turning inside out.’

  He shook his head. ‘Ballamara’s own boozer, and he didn’t even treat you?’

  ‘Actually he offered to. But I hardly felt like eating, did I?’ Her voice hardened. ‘Not knowing what was going to happen to me and all that! You are going to keep me a bit more informed from now on, yeah?’

  ‘Sorry to leave you sleeping, but you had to stay behind as a kind of insurance — to convince them I’d come back.’

  ‘I wasn’t convinced you’d come back, never mind them.’

  ‘Then you don’t know me very well, do you?’

  ‘Anyway, the answers are “no” and “yes”,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘No, I haven’t had any breakfast yet, and yes, I do want some.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They dismounted the train at Bank, and rode into the West End via the Central Line, where they found a small diner. Heck ordered scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. Lauren had pancakes with syrup.

  ‘The team we’re looking for call themselves the “Nice Guys”,’ he said while they ate. ‘But I don’t know too much more about them.’

  Lauren gla
nced up, her mouth full and cheeks bulging. ‘They’re the kidnappers?’

  ‘It’s possible. They were mentioned in Deke’s ledger. Whoever they are, it looks like they paid for the job he did on O’Hoorigan. Not to mention a few others.’

  ‘What did you do with the ledger?’ she asked, suddenly noticing its absence.

  ‘Parcelled it and posted it.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘My home address — safest place I could think of.’

  ‘I thought you said your lot would be sitting on that address?’

  ‘They’re only looking out for me. I doubt they’ve got a warrant to check the mail yet.’

  Before she could ask him anything else, the blue phone rang. Heck glanced at the number on its tiny screen.

  ‘Ballamara already?’ she wondered.

  He shook his head, before answering. The following conversation was mumbled and inaudible to Lauren, even though she was only on the other side of the table. When Heck eventually hung up, he was frowning — partly with concern, but also with puzzlement.

  ‘It’s a bloody good job we’ve got twenty grand to spend,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a hell of a taxi drive coming up.’

  Chapter 31

  Heck didn’t want the taxi dropping them off in the exact spot in case ‘things turned nasty’. So instead they jumped out in Allhallows-on-Sea, which was little more than a rural hamlet with a few holiday homes dotted around it, but busy enough in August for them to arrive unnoticed. Once the cab had set off back, they walked, leaving the village and heading along a coastal road that led into what seemed like an infinite distance.

  ‘What do you mean “in case things turn nasty”?’ Lauren asked.

  ‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m getting less and less sure about this as the day goes on.’

  It wasn’t just the stiff sea breeze that was making him uncomfortable. A good thirty miles from London, they’d alighted on the northern edge of the Hoo peninsula, and were now surrounded on four sides by salt marsh and mud flats. When they finally stopped at the lone payphone that McCulkin had specified to Heck, the only buildings in sight were a few weather-boarded boathouses down at the edge of a narrow creek. Gulls and other seabirds swooped noisily, unaccustomed to the arrival of strangers in this remote place.