The Burning Man

by Paul Finch

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’ He put the Fiat in gear.

  She finally allowed herself a sigh of relief, only to sense a flicker of movement beyond the window. She glanced around. The driver looked too, but not before there was an impact that shook the whole car. The sound of the window smashing inward was louder than Shelley could ever have imagined. Fragmented glass showered over them, and all they could do was shield their eyes. They didn’t get a chance to shout or scream. Neither even saw the black-steel muzzle come jutting in at them, the thickly gloved finger depressing the trigger behind it, or the blinding glare as blazing fuel burst over them, filling the entire taxi with roaring, searing flame.

  Chapter 14

  A few years earlier, Heck’s sister Dana had reached out to him in a determined effort to rekindle their relationship. Heck had initially responded doubtfully, feeling that as the bad blood between them could never be put right, why bother trying? But Dana had persevered, and gradually she’d broken down his resistance. It had particularly bothered him that otherwise he might never have had any participation in the life of his niece Sarah, Dana’s sole child from her unsuccessful marriage. They’d slowly but surely reconstructed the bridge between them, though it was more by Dana’s effort than Heck’s. She now, at least as he saw it, overcompensated for what had happened by demanding that he visit them at every opportunity, that he stay with them every time he was up in the Northwest, and that he interact with them far more than he considered necessary.

  ‘It’s nice to get text messages from you on our birthdays,’ she’d once said. ‘And to get cards at Christmas. But talking to you on the phone at least once a week would be nicer.’

  This was a warmth of spirit that Heck still found it difficult to return in full – and that wasn’t just down to Dana. She was six years his senior, and when they were children she had bossed him and Tom around as mercilessly as only older sisters could. But she’d also been beautiful and vivacious and clever, which had made him proud of her among his mates, and of course, because she was a sibling rather than a parent, he’d also been able to confide in her, trust her and seek her advice on personal matters. Inevitably, he’d come to adore her – so much so that years later, when she’d sided with his father during that terrible fall-out, it had hurt him all the more. Even now, the sense of betrayal was raw in his memory. Ultimately, though, the reason he disliked coming back to 23 Cranby Street, which Dana had inherited after their mother’s death, was less to do with his sister and more with that chapter of his life in which the Heckenburg family home was the epicentre.

  As he regarded the house from his stationary car, it was an uninviting prospect, even without the historical baggage. Not that he had much choice at present. He climbed from the car, grab-bag in hand, and crossed the pavement. He’d half hoped the key his uncle had given him wouldn’t work, but it fitted snugly and the lock turned. The door clicked open and he stepped inside.

  As he’d expected, it was chilly in there, his breath vaguely visible as he walked around downstairs switching lights on. It was the archetypical terraced house: a small living room at the front, a kitchen/diner at the back, a narrow hall connecting them and a stairway in between. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a tiny boxroom. His parents had once occupied the main bedroom, while his and Tom’s beds had been crammed into the second one and Dana had used the third. These days, Dana had the main room, Sarah had the second, and the boxroom was a spare. Heck had slept here once before since the big fall-out, and it had proved perfectly adequate, but he had no inclination to go upstairs and find himself a bed at present. The downstairs was spick and span, carpets vacuumed, corners dusted, everything put away or neatly in its place – Dana was almost obsessively house-proud – and despite Heck’s lifelong antipathy to sleeping on couches, he only needed to enter the lounge, switch on the real-flame gas fire and feel the blast of warmth from it, to decide that he was camping out in there. The couch was large enough, a cushion would suffice for a pillow and he could get a fresh blanket from the airing cupboard at the top of the stairs. It would create minimum mess anyway, which only seemed fair to the house-owner who had no clue that he was here.

  There was one possible drawback to lodging in the lounge: the photographs.

  Several of these were arrayed on the mantel over the fire. The first that caught his eye was an updated image of Sarah, now well on her way to growing up, appearing smart and sensible in her school uniform, and, with her long dark hair, finally turning into the sort of looker her mother had been. Secondly, there was a more familiar shot of his parents; if he remembered rightly, it had been taken at a distant relative’s wedding, and his father in particular had hated the whole event, as was evident from his unsmiling visage. In reality, they’d been an odd couple: George Heckenburg of burly, foursquare physique, with a tough look about him and slicked black hair, Mary Heckenburg small by comparison, almost petite, with refined, elfin features. Yet they had, on the whole – until that incident – been as good a mum and dad as anyone could reasonably hope for. The third photo depicted Heck and Tom as young children, Tom slightly bigger at that stage, both in pyjamas and grinning excitedly as they knelt amid a chaos of torn-up Christmas wrappings. Their father had always been a stern watcher of the family accounts, but they’d never lacked for anything. Christmas in particular had been a fun time back in those days. Briefly, Heck wondered why his sister had opted to frame and display such an old picture – this one must date from 1980 at the latest – though, he realised, it was probably the only one she had showing her two younger brothers together.

  He decided to turn that last one to face the wall – at least while Dana wasn’t here.

  But then, just as quickly, he relented.

  These images were uncomfortable reminders of times past, but they weren’t something Heck was unused to. Even now, he kept a scruffy old scrapbook, its charred cover mainly sticky-tape, in which he’d collected photographs of all those murder victims he’d ever got justice for during his career. They were mugshots mostly, from parties or holidays or family albums, the faces they portrayed invariably laughing or smiling, betraying no knowledge of the dreadful event creeping up on them. It never made for cosy reading. Having convicted their killers wouldn’t bring them back from the dead, nor negate the pain they’d suffered – but Heck still found it instructive, a forceful reminder of why he did what he did. In comparison, all that these Heckenburg snapshots were good for was showing how great things had once been for him as opposed to how they were now. That also hit where it hurt, but alongside the scrapbook they were easily tolerable. If nothing else, Heck’s photo-gallery of the doomed was a daily reminder that the past was done – no amount of tearful regret would change things there – so why stress about it?

  But of course, that was a simple thing to say.

  That night, he tossed and turned for hours underneath his single blanket. The walls of the small living room closed in on him, liquid red-gold patterns from the gas fire swarming up them and across the ceiling. The heat became intense, the air stuffy, and for a brief time the atmosphere in there was almost hellish. As he drifted in and out of tortured sleep, it was impossible to resist the flood of distorted memories with which this place was impregnated, let alone rationalise them.

  And of course Tom was embroiled in all of them.

  Tom – one of the most significant figures in Heck’s life, and yet someone who’d only graced the stage for a very brief part of it, someone who’d been gone so long now that Heck only had the vaguest recollection of how he’d actually felt about him. He’d loved him, certainly – they were brothers after all – but he’d hated him too, at times, during those harrowing end-days when Tom was no longer the person he’d grown up with but someone completely unrecognisable.

  There was no doubt that Tom himself was responsible for many of the problems that in due course tore the Heckenburg family apart. It wasn’t entirely his fault that he’d become an addict. It was just that drugs were b
y that time everywhere, penetrating deep into the traditional working class whose domestic problems had previously owed more to alcohol abuse. Tom had initially smoked weed, but one thing led to another. By the time he was studying for his A-levels at Bradburn Tech, he was taking heroin. He dropped out without even sitting his exams, and settled down to a life of seeming inertia on what were then scanty benefits, most of which his angry father took from him anyway. They clashed relentlessly, George Heckenburg, who believed in punishment and discipline rather than rehab and counselling, resorting to ever more heavy-handed tactics, transforming the once happy home into a place of misery and conflict.

  In many ways, George Heckenburg had been a good man and a stolid example to his children: a hard worker, a churchgoer, and a staunch opponent of anything anti-establishment, anything ‘loutish’. But he wasn’t good under pressure.

  Heck would never forget the awfulness of that moment when the phone-call disturbed them just after two in the morning, everyone in the house knowing instinctively that it would involve Tom, who by then was long in the habit of staying out all night. At first it was a relief to learn that he’d merely been arrested. It could have been something much worse. But then a secondary piece of news was delivered that was infinitely more terrible: Tom wasn’t just under arrest for burglary, he was also being held on suspicion of carrying out the Granny Basher crimes.

  The anger and rage in the house that night, the shouting and bawling, the kicking of furniture – it had had to be heard to be believed, and it probably had been heard. By the neighbours at least. But losing their dignity in the eyes of those they’d known and been respected by all their lives was only the beginning of the Heckenburg’s problems. Because after the anger had come the fear.

  Tom’s future had looked bleak before, but now suddenly it barely looked tenable.

  These days, Heck knew from personal experience how much hard work and diligence it took to bring a successful prosecution against any suspect in a series of crimes as sensational as the Granny Basher attacks. And if the suspect was innocent it would be so much the harder. Back in those days, behavioural science hadn’t been that big a deal. Motives were either obvious – he’s a druggie who needs to score – or they were dismissed as irrelevant. Even so, it wouldn’t have been easy to frame someone for a string of offences he hadn’t committed. But from the start of this process Tom Heckenburg was at a big disadvantage.

  He’d been out of the house on every occasion when one of those crimes had occurred, without once being able to adequately account for his movements. In most cases he hadn’t been able to remember; in others there were no witnesses to corroborate his near-incoherent explanations. To make things worse, by this time he’d developed a reputation in his neighbourhood for slyness and dishonesty, and of course it was known that he was an addict, which was another reason for people to take against him – nobody rushed forward to give him a character reference.

  Of course, the family solicitor had been confident; Tom was innocent, so he’d be OK – it was only one year since the Birmingham Six had been exonerated on appeal, and the public had no taste for another colossal miscarriage of justice. Even then, after he was charged and remanded in custody, his distraught family were reasonably hopeful he’d be cleared. Aside from the confession, what evidence was there that wasn’t circumstantial? And it was clear that his confession had only been given under duress. But, by the time they got to trial, the prosecution had remedied this shortfall. They made a very big deal of the fact that, since Tom Heckenburg had been arrested, the Granny Basher crimes had ceased. In addition, witnesses had now been found who’d seen Tom in the areas where the attacks had occurred, often in the correct timeframe. It was a sad fact that witnesses could always be found – for good or ill. Heck knew that from bitter experience. There were all kinds of reasons why people were willing to offer false testimony. But in this case they might have been telling the truth. Tom’s endless nocturnal wandering in search of drugs, or the money to score drugs, was strange and worrying to those householders who happened to glance out of their bedroom window at three in the morning and see him tottering down their street. A well-used burglary kit was then produced which had been found in an allotment shed that Tom and some of his drug-addled mates had used as a shooting gallery.

  After that, even Heck had briefly wondered if Tom was the real culprit, but in later years he came to realise that, even if the kit hadn’t been planted by the investigation team, which he now suspected it had, there was a viable reason for it being there – Tom was a burglar by his own admission. But the court only had his word for it that he’d never raided actual houses, focusing instead on pubs, shops, cafeterias and the like. Who in that frenzied atmosphere, with the black and blue faces of little old ladies adorning newspaper covers for weeks on end, would believe such a preposterous defence?

  And that was a big part of the problem.

  The fevered press coverage, while not overtly prejudiced against Tom, had created a furore about oddballs wandering the streets at night, about creatures on the margins of society, creatures who were worthless, creatures who for whatever reason were a menace to civilisation. On that basis, the public had eagerly bought it that this thieving, druggie outcast was the guy they wanted. On reflection, Tom hadn’t stood a chance.

  With the fragile state he was in when he commenced his life sentence, he was never going to last very long in captivity. In fact he didn’t last a month, let alone thirty years. The inquest jury was later told that Tom was raped ‘about fifty times’ during that short period, though in truth it was anyone’s guess how much abuse he’d suffered. In reality, it was probably unquantifiable.

  Little wonder he’d chosen to end it.

  Even now, sweating and delirious with fatigue, Heck didn’t cry. He had no tears left for this particular memory. But it was agonising to recall the arrival of that terrible news.

  They’d received it here, in this very room.

  The wails of anguish from his mother, his father ranting and railing at God, literally shaking his fist at the ceiling, Dana calling foul-mouthed curses on the police officers responsible, whom they were all increasingly certain had framed their loved one – a certainty that would really explode three weeks later on the arrest of Luke Gaskell …

  Frustrated by the futility of this reminiscence, Heck struggled to his feet and padded out of the room. He was only wearing shorts and was running with sweat, so the chill in the kitchen gripped him immediately. But he ignored it as he went to the sink to get a glass of water.

  Why did you do it? he berated himself. I mean, really – why would you go and do something so crass? And why did you do it the way you did … to announce on the occasion of your eighteenth birthday, only three years after Tom’s death but in front of all your family and friends, that you’d applied to join the cops?

  It wasn’t as if the law had covered itself in glory even after Tom had been posthumously acquitted. The family’s disbelief knew no bounds when they were informed that the police internal enquiry was being wrapped up, having uncovered no culpability on the part of its own staff. Tom had been wrongly convicted but it was entirely accidental. It was tragic for sure, and everyone was heartily sorry about it, but circumstances had conspired against the lad, along with his own cravings and weaknesses, rather than corrupt police officers.

  And once you’d done it, regret it as you might, there was no going back. Was there?

  He suddenly wished Dana was here instead of overseas somewhere, enjoying a holiday. Even more so, he wished Gemma was here. He could do more than lay his head on a soft, understanding shoulder then. But after he’d washed his glass and stood it upside down on the draining board, he rubbed at his left eye with the heel of his palm, and realised that it was moist, wet even – and he was glad that neither of them was present.

  Chapter 15

  Bradburn Central Police Station, located on the town’s Market Street, was an architectural throwback: red-brick Victorian G
othic, complete with tall, arched casements, narrow towers and steep gable roofs. It looked more like an old primary school than a police station. A horde of press vehicles, including several vans with TV aerials on top, were double-parked along the station’s front. A tight access road led around the side of the building to a pound overflowing with rusting hulks, and a staff car park without an inch of space available on it.

  Heck was forced to drive the adjacent streets for ten minutes, and when he got back to the station, hot under the collar and with a bright gleam of sweat on his brow, he was half an hour later than he’d wanted to be. He then had to wait a further fifteen minutes at the front counter before he was dealt with, sharing it with another bunch of unruly reporters jostling and shouting for attention. But it was while he was here that Heck heard about the double slaying the previous night.

  ‘That’s right, two more,’ a female journalist was shouting into her mobile. ‘A taxi driver and his fare were burned to death inside his cab. Bold as you like, this flamethrower killer. Walked up and did for them both while they sat outside a town centre pub.’

  Heck hadn’t yet heard about this. He’d had too many other things on his mind the previous night to bother watching any news programmes. The desk clerk, a large-boned, blonde girl in the smart pale-blue uniform of the Greater Manchester Police civilian staff, finally turned to him. He straightened his tie, smiled, showed his warrant card and explained who he was.

  She regarded him with something like deep scepticism before hitting a buzzer and drawling: ‘First floor on the right, the old Comms Suite.’

  Beyond the double-glazed personnel door, there was a forced atmosphere of business-as-usual. Phones were being answered as briskly and efficiently as ever. But now that he was actually in the heart of the building, Heck could detect a heaviness in the air. Almost certainly this was partly because of the army of pressmen outside, whose crammed-together vans and cars and noisy personnel could be glimpsed through every window, but mainly he suspected it was the nature of the crimes suddenly confronting this relatively small divisional police station. Every face he saw – officers and civvies alike – looked pale and stern.