The Chase

by Paul Finch

  Three hours into his interview, he was still as full of his own foul-mouthed righteousness as he had been on first getting his collar felt. ‘It’s not my problem if someone thinks they’ve had it up to here with these neo-Nazi pigs!’ he said in a cultured accent far removed from the distinctive Mackem normally found in these parts. ‘The only thing that actually doesn’t surprise me about this is that another bunch of Nazi pigs, i.e. you people, are in a mad rush to find out who’s responsible.’

  ‘The question stands, Mr Matthews,’ DI Jane Higginson replied. She was a smooth, very cool customer. Her dark hair was cut short but neatly styled; her accent was much more local than Matthews’s, betraying solid blue-collar origins. ‘Why aren’t you able to tell us what you were doing on the night of August 15?’

  ‘Because it was five fucking weeks ago! And unlike you and your little wind-up clockwork toy friends, I don’t have to keep a careful account of everything I get up to in an officious little pocket-book. Not that I think you do, by the way. We could look through your notes now, and I doubt we’ll find any reference to harassment of ethnic or sexual minorities, intimidation of protest groups, illegal searches of private premises, brutality against ordinary working-class people, or general, casual misuse of authority in any of the other ways you no doubt indulge in on a daily basis …’

  Matthews was articulate, Heck had to concede that, which was probably par for the course. He was leader of a self-styled ‘action group’ loosely affiliated to various militant student societies. He and his cronies were political firebrands, anarchists by their own admission … but did that make them killers?

  ‘What about August 15?’ Higginson persisted. ‘Let me jog your memory … it was a Saturday. That must help a bit.’

  ‘I do lots of different things on Saturdays.’

  ‘You don’t keep a record or diary? An industrious man like you.’

  That was a sensible question, Heck thought. He’d been present when Matthews was arrested that morning inside his so-called HQ, which was basically a bike-shed, though it had been packed with leaflets and pamphlets, and its walls were covered with posters and action-planners. Two state-of-the-art computers had also been seized. Matthews didn’t just talk the talk.

  ‘The only reason you can be refusing to cooperate on this, Mr Matthews, is because you’ve got something to hide,’ the DC acting as Higginson’s bagman said.

  ‘Or because you’re so deluded that you’re more concerned about your street-cred than your personal liberty,’ Higginson suggested.

  Matthews bared his teeth. ‘You really are a prissy, smarty-pants bitch, aren’t you?’

  ‘Moderate your language and tone, Mr Matthews,’ the DC warned him.

  ‘Or what? You’ll beat me up?’ Matthews laughed. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t already. Go on. There’s nothing to stop you. I think you’ll find I can take it.’

  That depressed Heck, at least with regard to any chance these arrests might lead to a conviction. The guy didn’t even realise the films and tapes made of interviews in custody were carefully audited; they couldn’t just disappear. Along with Matthews’s refusal to ask for legal advice, not to mention the ‘no result’ search they’d placed on him and his group with Special Branch, it all combined to suggest they were dealing with a pretender rather than an actual player.

  ‘If only beating was where you lot drew the line,’ the DC said. ‘When did you decide you were actually going to murder Nathan Crabtree?’

  ‘This is such bollocks.’

  ‘Before or after the twentieth time you threatened to kill him online?’ Higginson asked.

  Matthews feigned amusement. ‘If that’s the best you’ve got, I pity you.’

  Online, Matthews had regularly visited a number of rough and ready social-networking sites, usually hosted overseas, which catered for extremist ideologies. Their stock-in-trade were bitter, rancour-filled exchanges between anonymous individuals with ridiculous monikers. In normal times, any political forum would have been a strange place for an uncouth bunch like Nathan Crabtree and the other two victims, John Selleck and Simon Dean – quasi-political boot-boys with scarcely an educated brain-cell between them – to finish up, but from what Heck could see, the internet was increasingly allowing crazy activists to find an audible voice.

  He turned from the video monitor, and ambled across the ‘Operation Bulldog’ Incident Room to the display boards bearing images of the crime scenes. There were three in total, and each one was located in a different corner of Hendon, Sunderland’s old dockland.

  The first, where Selleck had died, was inside a derelict garage, the second, the site of Dean’s death, on a canal bank, and the third – the death-scene of Nathan Crabtree himself – under a railway arch. From the close-up glossies, it ought to have been easy to distinguish the victims as white males in their mid/late twenties, but it wasn’t. So much blood had streamed down the faces and upper bodies from the multiple contusions to their crania, and had virtually exploded from the yawning, crimson chasms where their throats had once been, that no facial features were visible. Even distinguishing marks like tattoos, scars and piercings had been obliterated – at least until such time as the medical examiners had been able to move the bodies and wash them down.

  The murders had happened over a three-week period the previous August, and though they’d raised a few eyebrows among the police, that had been more through surprise than dismay – because Crabtree and his crew had been well-known scumbags. Members of a semi-organised group called the National Socialist Elite, they were basically skinheads without the haircuts, but also football hooligans and small-time drugs dealers. They’d spent most of the last few years menacing local householders, drinking, brawling and alternately bullying or trying to indoctrinate younger residents with their unique brand of hard-line British ‘patriotism’. They’d been against Muslims, queers, lefties and – taking a break from the political stuff, just to win some brownie points with the common man – nonces. They were believed responsible for the brutal beating of an OAP in his own home after the rumour had got around that he was listed on the Sex Offender’s Register. The rumour had later turned out to be incorrect, but either way, the case against them was unproved.

  ‘No, he was a paedo, for sure … and the lads knew it,’ Crabtree was reported to have said, after the revelation the victim was innocent. ‘Someone needed to sort him.’

  The problem was, someone had now sorted the lads.

  And in spectacular fashion.

  The first victim had simply been dragged into a garage, and there beaten unconscious before having his throat cut with a sharp, heavy blade. At the time it could have been anything from a mugging gone wrong to a personal score. But then the other two had been nabbed over the following two weeks, and it became apparent that something more sinister was going on. The second victim, after being hammered with a blunt instrument, had been bound to a fence on the side of a canal, and had his throat cut with the same blade as before. In Nathan Crabtree’s case, the perpetrators had gone even further. Though his body had been found under a railway bridge, it had first been bound upright to a brick pillar with barbed wire, before his throat was slashed.

  Heck appraised this scene the longest.

  The wire was a nasty touch. Not just a sadistic measure designed to inflict maximum pain and distress, but indicative of enjoyment on the part of the killer. Whoever the perpetrator was – Heck wasn’t convinced they were dealing with more than one, but then he wasn’t in charge here – he’d displayed an aggressive loathing of his three targets, particularly Crabtree. Okay, that put Greg Matthews back into the picture – he’d clashed online with these right-wing apes more times than Heck could count, but there was still nothing in his past to suggest he was capable of such violence.

  And then there was that damned barbed wire.

  Heck couldn’t help thinking the use of such material was trying to spark a dim and distant memory – but it was proving elusive.


  ‘You’re not convinced we’ve got the right people, are you?’ someone said.

  Heck turned. Detective Sergeant Barry Grant stood to his left, wearing his usual sardonic smile. Often, when Heck was posted out to Counties in his capacity as SCU consultant – or rather, a specialist investigator from the Serial Crimes Unit – he encountered a degree of resistance, though not in the case of DS Grant, the task-force’s File Preparation Officer, and a chap who had so far proved very amenable.

  Grant was a shortish, older guy but rather dapper, given to matching blazers and ties, buttoned collars and pressed slacks. He had a well-groomed mop of chalk-grey hair and horn-rimmed glasses, the net effect of which was to make him look a little old to be a serving copper – not an inaccurate impression, as he was well into his fifties. But as Heck had already discovered, Grant was here for his brain, not his brawn.

  Heck shrugged. ‘I’m not saying there wasn’t enough for us to pull Matthews in … but whoever carved these ignoramuses up was seriously driven. I mean they were on a mission … which they planned and executed to the letter.’

  They assessed the gruesome imagery together. Alongside Grant, Heck looked even taller than his six feet. He had a lean but solid build, rugged ‘lived-in’ features and unruly dark hair, which never seemed neat even when he combed it. As usual, his suit already appeared worn and crumpled, even though it was clean on that day.

  ‘I hear you think we should be looking for a single suspect?’ Grant said. ‘Rather than a group like Matthews and his people.’

  Heck pursed his lips. He’d made the comment a couple of times during the post-arrest debrief, but had thought no one was listening.

  ‘I know it doesn’t look likely on the face of it,’ he said. ‘But here’s my thinking. Crabtree and his gang lived and breathed urban violence, and they were usually team-handed. There’s at least five or six of them still at large. They’re also connected with various football factories, which means they can call an army into the field if they need one. On top of that, they have local credentials. They know every alley and subway. The whole East End of Sunderland is their turf.’

  ‘All of which makes it less likely that one bod could do this on his own,’ Grant said.

  ‘Not if he knows the ground too,’ Heck argued. ‘In all three cases, the vics were skilfully entrapped. Witnesses say Crabtree chased someone half a mile before he was killed – in other words he was lured. Course, they didn’t say who by. They didn’t get a proper look.’

  ‘They never do, do they.’

  ‘And apparently he was led a merry dance … all over the housing estates.’

  A different display board featured a large, very detailed street-map of the Hendon district. Trails of red felt pen, constructed from the fleeting glimpses witnesses had admitted to, indicated the zigzagging routes taken by the three victims, each one of whom – for reasons not yet known – had suddenly taken off in pursuit of someone in the midst of their everyday activities, the subsequent footrace leading each man directly to the spot where he was murdered. All three had been on their own at the time, which suggested they’d been observed beforehand, and stalked like prey.

  ‘We’re talking careful preplanning here and good local knowledge,’ Heck said. ‘Greg Matthews and his mates aren’t urban guerrillas … they’re student gobshites. On top of that, none of them are Sunderland natives.’

  ‘I’m not sold on Matthews either,’ Grant said, ‘but another crew could easily be responsible. I don’t see why it needs to be one man.’

  ‘Call it a hunch, but I keep thinking … Rambo.’

  ‘Rambo?’

  Heck shrugged. ‘First of all, we’ve canvassed all the main gangs on the east side of town. None of them are a fit. Secondly, none of your team’s grasses are talking, which more or less rules out the rest of the local underworld. That knocks it back into the political court – Matthews and his like. Except that no … they may say they’re fighting a war, they may dress like commandos, but whatever else they are, they aren’t that. Not for real.” Heck rubbed his chin. ‘We’re looking for someone below the radar. Someone who knows every nook and cranny, but who’s a loner, a misfit …’

  ‘Could it be you’ve forgotten we’re in the Northeast?’ Grant chuckled. ‘A violent misfit? Won’t be a piece of piss singling him out.’

  Heck pondered the question in the station canteen.

  It was lunchtime so the place was crowded: uniforms and plain clothes, as well as traffic wardens and civvi admin staff. Heck had only been up here in the Northeast five weeks thus far, and aside from Grant, hadn’t made friends with anyone locally, so he sat alone in a corner, sipping tea and hoping the DSU in charge of the enquiry would eventually bail the suspect downstairs. It didn’t help that there were no alternative faces in the frame, but even if there had been Heck hadn’t made enough of a mark on the enquiry yet to expect his opinion to carry any weight. His SCU status, while politely acknowledged, didn’t cut much ice on its own – which in some ways he understood. The Serial Crimes Unit might be good at what they did, but they were based in London, which as far as many northern coppers were concerned was a different world. It didn’t matter that SCU had a remit to cover all the police force areas of England and Wales, and subsequently could send out ‘consultant officers’, like Heck, who had experience of investigating various types of serial cases in numerous different environments – there were still plenty of local lads who’d view it as interference rather than assistance.

  ‘Mind my whips and fucking stottie!’ a voice boomed in his ear.

  A chair grated as it was pulled back from the table alongside Heck.

  ‘Oh … sorry,’ the uniform responsible said, noticing he’d nudged Heck’s arm and slopped his tea – though he didn’t particularly look sorry.

  Heck nodded, implying it didn’t matter.

  The uniform in question was one of a group of three, all loaded down with trays of food. The other two were younger, somewhere in their mid-to-late twenties, but this one was older, paunchier and of a vaguely brutish aspect: sloped forehead, flat nose, a wide mouth filled with yellowing, misaligned teeth. When he took off his high-viz waterproof and hung it over the back of his chair, he was barrel-shaped with flabby, hairy arms protruding from his stab-vest; when he removed his hat, he revealed a balding cranium with a thin, greasy comb-over. He ignored Heck further, exchanging more quips with his mates as they too sat down to eat.

  Uniform refs wouldn’t normally coincide with lunchtime, which on Division was reserved for the nine-’til-five crowd, so this presumably meant the noisy trio had been seconded off-relief for some reason, most likely to assist with Operation Bulldog. Heck relapsed into thought, though at shoulder-to-shoulder proximity it was difficult for their gabbled conversation not to intrude on him, despite the strength of their accents. Heck was a northerner himself. He’d initially served in Manchester before transferring to the Metropolitan Police in London. Even though he’d now been based in the capital for the last decade and a half, there were many ways in which the north still felt more familiar than the south, though the north was hardly small – and Sunderland was a long way from Manchester.

  The PC who’d nudged his arm was still holding the floor. Heck could just about work out what he was saying. ‘Aye t’was. Weirdest lad I’ve ever seen, this one.’

  ‘Ernie Cooper, you say?’ a younger colleague with a straight blonde fringe replied.

  ‘Aye. Bit of an oddball.’

  ‘You were H2H off Wear Street?’ asked the other colleague, who was Asian.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Bet you didn’t get much change there?’

  ‘Wouldn’t think you’d find Ernie Cooper there,’ the older PC added. ‘Two-up-two-down. Bit of a shithole outside. Aren’t they fucking all, but that’s by the by. He answers the door – suit, tie, cardy. Like he’s ready to go to church or something.’

  ‘I know what you’re gonna say,’ the blonde said. ‘It’s inside his house, isn
’t it?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Was in there last year. Reporting damage to his windows. Bairns chucking stones.’

  ‘Thought he was off to work, or something,’ the older PC explained, ‘so I says “Caught you at a bad time?” He says “no, come in.” What a fucking place.’

  ‘Shrine to World War Two, isn’t it?’ the blonde agreed.

  Heck’s ears pricked up.

  ‘Everywhere,’ the older PC said. ‘Never seen as much wartime stuff. And it’s neat as a new pin, you know. It’s orderly. Like it matters to him.’

  The blonde mused. ‘Bit of an obsessive, I think. His dad, Bert, was a commando or something. Got decorated for bravery.’

  It was a simple association of ideas, but Heck had been brooding on his own comments from earlier and the thought processes behind them – “they may dress like commandos, but whatever else they are, they aren’t that!”

  ‘And then there’s that bloody big knife on his living room wall,’ the older PC added. ‘Enough to scare the crap out of you.’

  Heck turned on his chair. ‘Say that again?’

  At first the three PCs didn’t realise he was talking to them. When they did, they gazed at him blankly.

  ‘Sorry … DS Heckenburg. I’m on Bulldog too.’

  ‘Aye?’ the older PC said, none-the-wiser.

  ‘I’ve been attached from the Serial Crimes Unit in London.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ This was Blondie. He sounded less than impressed.

  ‘It’s what you were saying about this bloke … Something Cooper?’

  ‘Ernie Cooper.’

  ‘His father was a veteran, yeah?’ Heck asked.

  ‘Was, aye,’ Blondie said. ‘Been dead five years.’

  ‘How old is the younger Cooper?’

  The older PC, who wasn’t bothering to conceal how irked he felt that his meal had been interrupted, shrugged. ‘Late fifties … more.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘Has he got form?’

  The older PC frowned. ‘Bit. From way back.’