The Burning Man

by Paul Finch

‘Correct. And get this, Shelley Harper’s was her home-town – Bradburn.’

  There was a long silence, during which Heck could barely say anything.

  ‘This help in any way?’ Fisher asked.

  ‘Yeah, mate, it does,’ Heck replied. ‘Thanks a bundle.’

  ‘Can I assume you’ll pass this on to the rest of the team, seeing as Gemma was the first person at Wandering Wolf to enquire about Shelley Harper?’

  ‘That you can, mate,’ Heck said, but he was still lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘Good. See you later, pal.’

  ‘Yeah, mate.’

  Heck sat there for several minutes.

  How quickly and easily the fly had been extricated from the ointment.

  Shelley Harper had been the sole reason he’d hesitated to call it in that Kayla Green should be regarded as a suspect in the Incinerator murders. Kayla and her doomed sister had been local lasses, Bradburners through and through. They were never likely to have encountered Shelley Harper in their normal lives, at least not Shelley Harper in her capacity as Vic Ship’s girlfriend. But in her capacity as Vic Ship’s talent scout – that was a different matter.

  Shelley Harper recruited Jess Green, Heck thought, the final pieces falling into place. A lively and attractive young girl … a bit wild after the recent loss of her father, a bit wayward, a bit reckless, clubbing eight till late in the town’s nightspots, hitting the party circuit afterwards, taking all sorts just to keep going, sleeping around maybe – targets didn’t get much easier.

  Heck shoved the Makarov into the glovebox, then climbed from the car, closed and locked it, and walked slowly down the rain-drenched backstreet.

  ‘Jess finally told you about Shelley Harper too, didn’t she, Kayla?’ he mumbled to himself. ‘Probably spotted her in the newspaper. She’ll have said, “That’s her, sis … that’s the one who first got me into it.” And so Shelley’s name got added to the list as well, didn’t it?’

  The backstreet became an alley, which wound away between tall buildings, most now silent and empty. Perhaps 150 yards away, down at the alley’s far end, it terminated at a high-wall, but first passed underneath the canopy of the old Lyceum, formerly Bradburn’s only cinema but now, like so much else here, abandoned – a lowering, decrepit structure, the neon-bulb letters that had once adorned its frontage either broken or missing.

  But Heck didn’t walk down that far. Closer, on his left, a nine-foot brick wall marked the outer perimeter of the yard attached to what had once been Kayla’s father’s body-shop and now was hers. A few yards further down, Heck came to the entrance, which comprised two seven-foot-tall gates made from corrugated metal. Fastened closed by a single chain on the inside, they provided flimsy security, the two sections of corrugated metal hanging lopsided and covered in rust. Over the top, the wooden sign that had once read Greenways Autofix was now indecipherable with damp and rot.

  Heck glanced over his shoulder. No one appeared to be headed in this direction. He pushed against the lefthand gate with his shoulder. It yielded inward, creating a gap of about twelve inches, before the chain pulled taut. He crouched and tried to slide through. Thankfully there was plenty of give in the old metal and, with a groan of corroded hinges, he forced his way to the other side.

  It was difficult to work out exactly what now lay in the yard beyond; it was only early evening, but, thanks to the storm, the sky overhead was almost black. A few crates and barrels occupied distant corners, with tarpaulins draped over them, but it mostly appeared to contain rubbish – bits of car parts: wheels, bumper bars, exhaust pipes, broken-off doors, even an entire vehicle shell sitting on breezeblocks and either burned or stripped down to its bare metal – it was difficult to tell in the violent downpour.

  In no way did this place resemble functioning business premises.

  It almost looked abandoned.

  In the centre stood the main workshop: a single-storey brick garage with a flexible, fold-down steel door at the front. Alongside that, a cluster of boxy prefabricated offices. All the doors and windows were closed, and no light shone out. Heck started walking, circling the ramshackle building – but warily, guiltily. He’d entered these premises unlawfully; there weren’t even grounds for a warrant at this stage, his suspicions based entirely on circumstantial evidence and, most likely, imagination. When he actually stopped and tried to think it through, it still seemed ridiculous. Kayla had clearly gone through some kind of breakdown. By the looks of this place, her entire life had turned to crap. But he’d known her so well at one time, and there hadn’t been a murderous bone in her body. OK … she’d trained as a mechanic. She had tools and equipment to hand. But it took more than the physical capability to make a murderer.

  ‘I’m an absolute killer with a blowtorch.’

  Again, those words echoed through his head.

  Rain swept over Heck in sheets as he prowled.

  That comment could easily have been a coincidence. She might have meant nothing by it. If she actually was the Incinerator, would she have risked saying anything along those lines? It seemed ever more unlikely that Kayla could be involved, and yet it would explain so much.

  Whoever the Incinerator was, he was almost solely responsible for kicking off this gangland war. And he was clearly not part of Lee Shaughnessy’s outfit. Heck’s initial theory that this had been a deliberate attempt by a third party to stir things up now looked a real possibility. But Kayla wouldn’t have known how to do that. She might, at a push, have been able to build herself a flamethrower, but she wouldn’t have possessed the knowhow to engineer an underworld conflict on this scale. She didn’t know enough of the main players.

  At least, she hadn’t known them before her sister started working for them, and no doubt had picked up various names and gossip from other wretched souls trapped in the same hellish life.

  No, it wasn’t too fantastical, he decided, continuing to circle the structure. Kayla had plenty of reasons to seek revenge.

  He’d now reached the back of the premises. There was a narrow gap here, perhaps no more than five feet across, running between the rear wall of the garage and the rearmost boundary wall of the compound. It was jammed with rubbish, a vast jumble of large, shapeless, jagged-edged items. But he was still able to see an egress point about halfway along it: some six feet from the ground, a row of three letterbox-shaped windows, each about one foot by three. Even with his vision obscured by the dying light, he saw that the middle window was open, if only by a couple of inches.

  He made his way down there, clambering through tangles of dripping wet steel, broken frames, springs, rotted rubber tyres. But he reached the window without difficulty, fitted his fingers underneath it and lifted. It wasn’t on a catch, and rose all the way, easily affording him entry, though he paused again to think.

  He’d hammered Shaughnessy and his henchman earlier, but that was pretty routine stuff when it came to cop and gangster relations. In comparison, this was a lot more serious – if he entered this building now it would be a clear-cut illegal entry.

  But there was patently no one here. It was now – he checked his watch – just after half-five. If for any reason Kayla was engaged in actual work on this semi-derelict site, which didn’t look to be the case at all, she was unlikely to turn up at this hour and in these conditions.

  But still he hesitated. It wasn’t so much his conscience that bothered him – he wasn’t going to damage anything when he got in there, he wasn’t going to steal or assault someone; this would not be a burglary. But if he got caught, even Gemma would struggle to keep him in the job. And on top of that, a very good suspect would be lost to them.

  I’m having a mooch about, he told himself. That was all; he was just being a good copper. He had a gut feeling and he had to follow it. Whatever he found in here, he couldn’t even use it as grounds to secure a search warrant, let alone seize it as evidence, but at least he would know what he was dealing with.

  He braced his elbow on the sill and sw
ung his body up, slid in through the gap and fell full-length down into the dim interior, landing heavily on a work-bench, which clattered as tools spilled onto a concrete floor.

  He jumped to his feet, listening intently. No sound of movement came back to him. He squinted around, trying to work out exactly where he was, though it was so gloomy in there and so filled with indefinable shadows that he couldn’t at first distinguish anything. That said, it felt like a typical workshop environment, the air reeking of dampness and oil; as he walked, his feet kicked through drifts of rustling paperwork. When he took his phone out and activated the light, its hard, cold glow showed clutter everywhere, on worktops, on shelves, on the floor: old and rusted tools, loose wiring, tatty boxes with yet more desiccated paperwork overflowing out of them. A nearby bench was thick with dust; when Heck ran his finger along the surface, its tip came away black as coal. A few more neglected documents were scattered on top. He picked a couple up. They were final demands for unpaid bills. The most recent was dated almost a year ago.

  Light in hand, he rotated, scanning every other corner of the junk-filled room, finally coming about-face – at which point he realised that someone had walked stealthily up and now was standing directly behind him. Heck choked in surprise, dropping quickly to his knees – as a huge, two-handed spanner swept sideways at his head.

  Chapter 36

  ‘So there’s nothing you can give me at all?’ Gemma said in a tone of deep exasperation.

  At the other end of the phone, Dr Anna Sarkovsy, GMP’s senior CSI, remained infuriatingly calm and matter-of-fact. ‘Not from that underground passage, Ms Piper, no. We’ve got the threads from the old iron gate, probably originating from a pair of gloves … but unless someone provides a pair of gloves for us to cross-compare them with, we’re no further on.’

  ‘There are no boot-prints or anything?’

  ‘The air-raid shelter ceiling has partially collapsed, so the floor of that tunnel was mainly compacted rubble. We’re still looking. There’s nothing so far, but the best we were ever going to get was a fragment of a boot-print.’

  Gemma leaned back. ‘How about tyre-marks from the car? For Christ’s sake, Anna – my officer chased the suspect clear across Anderson Brow.’

  ‘All of which has now been washed repeatedly by heavy rain, I might remind you.’

  ‘It wasn’t raining this hard when you and your team first went out there.’

  ‘Ms Piper, Anderson Brow comprises about six square miles of open spoil-land, most of which is made of compacted slag, which is pretty resistant to even shallow impressions. In the short time available, we discovered nothing we could use. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

  ‘Right … OK. Thanks for that, Anna. Obviously let me know when something does arise.’ Gemma cut the call and sat back, thumbing at her aching brow. As she did, Gary Quinnell barged in without knocking. She glanced up at him. ‘I sincerely hope this is good news, Gary.’

  ‘Depends how you look at it, ma’am.’ He grinned broadly. ‘It’s Sagan. I think we’ve got him.’

  *

  Heck ducked all the lower, dropping his phone in the process. It hit the concrete floor with such an impact that its light was extinguished, plunging them back into murk. There was a swish of air, as the spanner narrowly missed him. Even so, the towering shape standing over him, whose face he hadn’t yet seen, would know exactly where he was, and even now would be aiming a second bone-crushing blow at his head. Heck sprang forward from his knees, catching his assailant in the waist with his shoulder. It was a full-on, battering-ram blow, and a female yelp split the air.

  The figure doubled over and staggered sideways, before rebounding from the dusty workbench. Normally, Heck would have caught him with an uppercut as he tottered back into range, but now he knew that it wasn’t a ‘him’. Instead, he went for the spanner, which again loomed towards him, caught it with his left hand, twisted it from his injured opponent’s grasp and hurled it away into a corner. After that, he grabbed the figure by the belt and flung her forcefully away from him. There was an echoing thud as she slammed into a wall of shelves, debris cascading around her as the entire structure collapsed.

  Back on his feet, Heck blundered to the nearest corner. In those brief moments when his phone-light had worked, he’d seen a switch over here. He fumbled and caught it with his thumb.

  With a dull hum, a faltering yellow strip-light activated overhead.

  Heck spun around, resuming the combat position.

  As he’d expected, the figure rising painfully to her feet on the other side of the room was female. She wore a jumper and jeans and held her left hand clamped to the side of her back. Though her dark hair hung messily over her face, it was quite plain who he was dealing with: Kayla Green.

  He walked forward warily. As far as he could see, she had no other weapon.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  She looked startled rather than angry, straightening up and brushing her locks out of the way.

  ‘Mark? What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I could ask you the same thing. You almost brained me with that bloody thing.’

  ‘I thought someone had broken in …’ Her words tailed off as she eyed him curiously, and then glanced at the still open window. ‘You did break in, didn’t you?’

  Heck could have made up some off-the-cuff lie like ‘I just happened to be passing and thought I heard someone sneaking around’, but in terms of childishness that would have been off the scale. If you wanted to avoid severe embarrassment, there was rarely a better option than coming clean.

  ‘I forced entry, yes,’ he admitted. ‘As part of my investigation into the Incinerator murders.’

  She regarded him with bemusement. ‘And … why would you do that?’

  ‘Why do you think, Kayla?’

  Her confused features slowly lengthened. Her mouth slackened open. ‘You … Mark, you think I’ve been committing these crimes?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kayla. Have you?’

  ‘Why on earth would I?’ She half-laughed. ‘Mark … why would I be murdering people?’

  ‘I think you already know the answer to that.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Mark … I’m trying to be a better person now. I go to church every day.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean very much, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. I’ve not even got a reason to.’

  ‘And that bit definitely isn’t true, is it?’

  She still seemed perplexed by the accusation.

  ‘What about Jess?’ he prompted.

  Slowly, her expression changed from one of bewilderment to one of near-complete disbelief. ‘You mean … you’re saying I’m murdering the gangsters who poisoned my sister? Is that it?’

  ‘You’re not exactly a bundle of forgiveness when it comes to the drugs problem in this town, Kayla.’

  She grew progressively more irate as the truth of the situation dawned on her. ‘And that’s a crime? Whereas the maniacs supplying the stuff walk around scot-free!’

  ‘Did you know a woman called Shelley Harper?’ he asked.

  Kayla didn’t so much as flinch. ‘Wasn’t she murdered by this flamethrower man?’

  ‘Yes, but did you know who she was? I mean, what she did for a living?’

  ‘She was some kind of Page Three girl, wasn’t she?’

  ‘But you don’t know anything else about her?’

  ‘Excuse me, Mark!’ Kayla shook her head. ‘I seem to remember we were having a conversation about why you’ve broken into my home.’

  ‘Your home?’

  ‘Yes, I live here. Is that a crime too?’

  Heck now noticed the open door through which she’d slid unnoticed into his presence. The room beyond it was dark, its walls made of bare brick, but now that his eyes were adjusting he could make out an iron-framed bunkbed, a side-table with books and a bottle of water on it, a portable electric fire.

  ‘Kayla … y
ou live here?’

  She shrugged. ‘I haven’t got anywhere else. And while we’re on the subject, I haven’t got a flamethrower either. Why don’t you look around … this time with my permission?’

  Heck knew there’d be no point in that. Even if he turned this dump upside down, there’d be nothing here – otherwise she’d never have allowed him to look.

  ‘Last Sunday night,’ she said, her tone altering, turning contemptuous, ‘when you lowered yourself to go on that date with me … you know, the one which unsurprisingly led nowhere … were you feeling sorry for me, Mark? Is that why you agreed to it? Or did you already have me down as a suspect? Were you there purely in a professional capacity?’

  ‘Kayla, don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to fix those bastards who did that thing to Jess?’

  ‘Of course I damn well did.’ She looked amazed he could even ask the question. ‘But we all have different ways of dealing with crises, don’t we?’

  ‘And what was yours? Start a war? Make them kill each other?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what it wasn’t – it wasn’t going and joining the enemy. It wasn’t betraying my family, becoming a part of the very organisation that destroyed their lives.’

  Heck felt his cheeks colouring.

  ‘I told you, Mark.’ She lowered her voice again. ‘I got involved with the Church after Jess’s death because I wanted to change my life.’

  ‘And you do that by sweeping footpaths?’

  She shook her head. ‘I thought I’d drifted a long way from what I once was. But you take the biscuit. I want to find myself again, I want something spiritual …’

  ‘Kayla …’

  ‘I was a wild child once. A drinker, a slut – you know that, Mark, you took full advantage of it.’

  That stung him. ‘You were up for it as much as I was!’

  ‘Yes, but it was all a bit naughty, wasn’t it? A bit sordid? A tent in the park, and all that. But it doesn’t end there with me. Later on, I got a husband I never paid any attention to –’

  ‘I thought he was a pillock who chased other women?’