by Paul Finch
He surveyed the house again, wondering how many targets were still on the premises. Their skipper had closed the front door firmly, ensuring it was locked.
Crazy thoughts played through Heck’s mind. The house itself was pretty standard for these parts: gabled and built from plain grey stone. It consisted of a central block, but like so many old farmhouses that had been added to over countless ages, various wings and annexes jutted out, each with a different levelled roof. As a sop to the holidaymakers who’d normally rent this place, there was a lawn on the right side, while the drive and the forecourt were covered with fine gravel. Now the present occupants had left, there wasn’t a hint of life there; not a flicker of movement beyond its small windows. But Heck’s concerns still carried weight. There’d likely be a treasure trove of evidence behind that closed door, which he could expect to go up in smoke if Northumbria Firearms – how had Ben Kane phrased it? – threw a ring around the place. Warnings would go out to other Nice Guys units not on site.
Quite simply, the investigators stood to lose too much if Heck just remained on the perimeter, watching. He glanced at the Aussie sentry. The guy’s back was turned. He’d closed the gate and was taking a long leak against its left-hand post.
Though every molecule in Heck’s body told him this was a bad idea, he stood upright and swung his legs over the wall. Scalp tingling, he walked quickly towards the house. It was tempting to break into a run, but he maintained a leisurely pace. When you ran you made ridiculous mistakes – like kicking over unseen bottles, or tripping and falling. The front door was directly ahead by about twenty yards. It was made of solid oak, with a narrow frosted glass panel in the centre – and of course it was locked. He risked another glance towards the sentry, whose back was still turned. Thanking God for cans of takeaway Cola, Heck veered left towards the northwest corner, sliding thankfully around it so that he was out of sight of the main gate.
He pressed on down the side of the house, a clutch of stone and timber outbuildings coming up on his left. Most looked closed and locked, but it meant there were plenty of places for Nice Guys to be lurking. He also had to pass several ground-floor windows, through any one of which he’d be visible from the inside, though in all cases he saw only empty, wood-panelled rooms, one containing a table heaped with rubbish. Away from the front of the house, the windows were more functional than ornate – sheets of glass in basic PVC frames. He tried each one, but found them locked. He was fully prepared to break and enter if necessary – whatever the legal consequences might be, they were far outweighed by the larger gain of taking the Nice Guys off the street. He’d find some way around the irregularity – he always did; though it would help if he didn’t have to smash something.
Heck rounded another corner. A potting shed stood to the left, alongside a disused garage. Beyond those, the encircling trees encroached closely – he’d be able to nip to cover quickly in the event he heard someone coming. But this didn’t resolve his problem of how to gain entry.
He rounded another corner, entering the farmyard proper. This was a paved open space, rectangular in shape and partially covered with straw. It extended about sixty yards by forty to a wire fence, beyond which lay empty paddocks. More farm outbuildings stood down either side of it. Several hung open, exposing rank darkness inside. Heck halted and listened. Only after several seconds did he venture forward, proceeding along the back of the house – where he halted again.
The rear door stood ajar.
This gave him real pause for thought.
An open door likely meant someone was on the premises. In fact, as Heck’s ears strained, he fancied he could hear something beyond the farm buildings. Music, very faint and tinny. Someone was working over there but wearing earphones. He stood rigid by the wall as he processed this information. A guard at the front, and someone out here at the back. It felt like madness to continue. But an open door was a big invitation. It also offered the advantage of a silent entry.
He’d come this far, he decided, proceeding. He peeked through another window before passing it, scanning a traditional farmhouse kitchen: stone worktops, a cast-iron range, a brick floor, crockery and ironmongery on walls and shelves. It looked improbably neat. They clearly hadn’t been preparing their own food; another measure against the risk of leaving DNA. No doubt their heap of takeaway refuse would be incinerated before they departed. In fact, giant-size plastic bottles of bleach and white spirit were visible in one corner, suggesting the entire place would be cleansed after use. An enclave of professional killers, he reminded himself – who had come here unnoticed, wreaking indescribable carnage, and then would simply vanish again. An amazing notion. Even more so, given that he was about to walk into their centre of operations and sign their communal death warrant.
Steeling himself with that thought, he slipped past the window and pushed at the kitchen door, which eased open. The Glock was still tucked into his waistband, but he kept his right hand on its grip. He wasn’t even authorised to be carrying it at present; he didn’t want to use it if he didn’t have to – but he wasn’t going to become the centrepiece of the Nice Guys’ next bonfire.
Again, he listened long and hard. The only sound from the interior was the steady tick of a grandfather clock. Heck glanced again over his shoulder – no one was in sight – then wiped his feet on the mat and stepped across the threshold.
The interior of the farmhouse was rougher and readier than the safehouse in the Cotswolds. It hadn’t been modernised, but it was handsomely finished in the Jacobean style, with plenty of beams and panelling, original stone features, and numerous rural ornaments on show, from horse brasses to hunting bugles. Aside from the kitchen and hall, there were four spacious reception rooms, though none seemed to have any specific or individual purpose. The grandfather clock stood by the front door, at the foot of an awkwardly twisting staircase. Thanks to the small windows, the place was dim, almost gloomy, and as Heck prowled from one chamber to the next, this heightened his awareness that he was on dangerous ground. But still he heard nothing: no creak from overhead; no sounds of movement aside from his own.
There was evidence everywhere that the house was in use by a number of occupants. The dining table was heaped with the rubbish he had spied from outside, mostly cartons and wrappers adorned with the Whips n Stottie logo. Much clothing was on view, mainly cagoules and anoraks, but also flak-jackets and windbreakers. Some of it hung in the hallway, either from pegs, or over the stair banister, but plenty was littered around the reception rooms as well, strewed across the furniture, on the various camp beds that had been set up, or over the haversacks and Bergen kit bags dumped alongside them. This was no more than a crash pad, Heck decided; a camp they could break at a second’s notice.
But the find of the day came in the room adjoining the lounge.
All four of its wainscoted walls were hung with documentation: maps, both local and national, covered in scrawled biro; printed lists and itineraries; sketched diagrams; masses of surveillance photographs – so many that they hung in untidy wads – with every kind of location on view, from town to country.
This was so reminiscent of the original Nice Guys operation that Heck was almost physically sick as he assessed it, but now his thoughts were racing. He wanted to seize it all, every scrap, but that wasn’t practical. He could fill twelve bin-liners and there’d still be materials left over. Instead, he should go for quality rather than quantity – remove something vital, something undeniable, something that would totally incriminate these bastards. Because there was no question in his mind that as soon as the Northumbria lads closed in, whichever Nice Guys were present, they’d put a match to this pile of kindling.
And then he saw it.
Pinned to the doorframe connecting with the hall.
It was a list – another list. The Nice Guys so liked their lists; they were meticulous, methodical. They’d almost certainly created this one on the basis they were already loaded down enough without having to carry a half-t
on of ‘client files’ around. The list was very neat, carefully typed, arranged in alphabetical order. It consisted entirely of names and addresses. Four pages of them in total, stapled together.
Heck snatched it down, sweat stippling his brow, but it was only when he flipped a couple of pages that he noticed how some of the names – well over twenty, in fact – had been scribbled out with red marker. A few of those rang a bell straight away. Ronald Po and Anton Trevelyan – the two university pals shot to death in Oxford. Austin Ledburn; wasn’t he the haulier doused with petrol and burned in the woods near Andover? It shouldn’t have surprised him the Nice Guys were working to a fast timetable – they wanted to get the job done and get home again. But it was a shock that they’d already clocked up so many victims, many of whom were presumably still waiting to be found. Even given the murderers’ high level of improvisational skill, it was amazing they’d been able to put together so many missions so quickly when they’d only got hold of the client info from Laycock five days ago.
Despite that mystery, Heck wanted to shout in triumph – but his excitement was tempered by the overall number of names on the list. At least eighty.
Eighty.
SCU had established that the Nice Guys’ tally of victims in the UK was thirty-eight at least. They’d estimated that another ten or so might still be unknown. But another forty-two! Raped and murdered, still lying in undiscovered graves!
And that was assuming each of these men had been content with one victim each.
Heck folded the list and crammed it into his back pocket. It would be tricky presenting this as evidence, but he didn’t care. They had the all-important names.
He backed into the centre of the room, pivoting around. An inner sense advised him that time was running out. But there had to be something else here he could use.
He went back into the hall and began searching coats and jackets, rifling their pockets, finding a train ticket stub, a pen or two – and a phone.
A rather smart one. An expensive-looking iPhone.
The coat he’d taken it from was a khaki overcoat; no different to many of the others there. He pocketed the phone and was about to search some more when a shadow flickered past. He whipped around, staring along the hall towards the front door. No one was visible on the other side of its glass panel, but he knew someone had just walked past. He backtracked a few yards, flattening himself against a wainscoted wall to peer into the dining room. Half a second later, someone trudged past its window, headed towards the rear of the property.
It was the Australian sentry.
Heck ran hell-for-leather back along the hall, but when he reached the front door, it was locked. He jerked around as booted feet clumped on the kitchen’s brick floor. From this position, he could see clear through to the cast-iron range, a shadow swelling across it as the feet clumped louder. He had no choice but to dart up the stairs, hoping the dull, repeating thud of the grandfather clock would mask the sound of his own footfalls. When he arrived on the landing, he crouched to listen. The heavy feet plodded around downstairs, in and out of various rooms. At the same time, there came the gravelly growl of an engine from outside. Heck stood up and ventured to an arched window, beyond which he saw a Mondeo estate and a Peugeot 207 re-entering through the main gate. The Mondeo came straight on, but the Peugeot halted, and one of the Nice Guys climbed out, taking up the sentry post.
Downstairs meanwhile, those feet were crossing the hall towards the foot of the stairs. Heck snatched again at his Glock. Did he just go for it? Try and arrest them all now? That was a crazy idea. This Aussie shithead alone was armed with an assault rifle, and would easily outgun him.
Heck entered the first bedroom he came to, where there surely had to be a hiding place. The room was neatly if sparsely furnished – a real holiday let if ever he’d seen one, but the sheets and coverlet on the bed were unruffled. None of the Nice Guys were sleeping up here; another defence against leaving DNA, and yet a door led into an en-suite bathroom, in which a Bergen kit bag was dumped against the radiator. There was something else in there too – a tall, arched window. At the sound of boots on the stair, Heck skedaddled into the en-suite. If the window was locked he’d have no option but to kick it through, jump out and run for it.
Jump … yeah. And how was he going to run with two broken ankles?
But the window wasn’t locked. It was merely on the latch. As quietly as possible, he opened it. The boots had now reached the landing, and came thudding in this direction. In addition, now the window was open, he could hear the slamming of car doors. But the cars were parked at the front of the house, and this window looked down on the north side, on the footpath running past the potting shed and the old garage. The window was also part of a gable-fronted dormer, set into the slope of the roof. It would be risky underfoot, but at least he’d have a parapet to balance on. Heck sidled out, more grateful than he could say for the rubber grips of his trainers. Clinging with fingertips to the rugged slates composing the dormer roof, he pushed the window closed with his left foot, before clambering around the side of the structure, out of sight from within and hopefully from below.
Then he could do nothing except wait, pressing himself into the join between the dormer and the roof, arms and feet outspread, sweat beading his face. He heard movement inside the bathroom. There was a dull thumping. He pictured the Australian rooting through his kit bag. A second later, those sounds fell silent.
Had the Aussie withdrawn, or had he spotted the window open a crack?
With a clunk, a slate under Heck’s backside broke and he felt himself sliding downward. He struggled desperately to brace himself and at the same time catch hold of the errant slate – both of which he achieved, though with no little scuffling. He held his breath again, listening. The silence inside persisted. Very cautiously, he adjusted his position – at which point something else detached from his person.
Heck watched in disbelief as the list of Nice Guys’ clients slipped down the roof, unfolding as it did and fluttering out of sight.
He hung on there for several more heart-stopping moments, listening intently but hearing no commotion, either from inside the bathroom or down on the footpath. Then, slowly and clumsily, he straightened himself up, took a grip on the dormer corner, and leaned forward, peering first into the bathroom, which was indeed empty, and then down into the passage below – just as one of the Nice Guys came trudging along it. The stapled list lay in plain view, just left of the path.
But face-down, presenting nothing more than a blank sheet of paper.
Heck sucked air through tight-locked teeth as he watched. The Nice Guy strode past, never giving it a glance, vanishing around the back of the house.
Heck swallowed bitter saliva. They were all over the premises now. He could hear their voices. Even if he didn’t get spotted up here, the list would be found, and sooner rather than later. In addition – he glanced at his watch – he had only twenty minutes before his RV with the Northumbria firearms team.
It was two or three metres down to the edge of the roof, and Heck had to cover that distance on his heels and backside, constantly aware that slates were cracking and slithering. When he reached the guttering, it was made of aged, scabrous iron, clogged with old nests. About six yards along that, a drainpipe descended. Whether it would hold his weight, he didn’t know, but he balanced his way towards it on all fours, and lowered himself over the edge.
The pipe shifted and creaked, and he clambered down it quickly. When he hit the bottom, he dropped to a crouch, snatching up the list and glancing in both directions. Voices were encroaching from all sides. He heard the Aussie twang again, the broken-nosed maniac conversing with someone who replied in a Scandinavian accent. That exchange was at the rear of the house, but drawing closer. Heck bolted down the narrow gap between the potting shed and garage. He scrambled over the perimeter wall, and sprinted away into the trees, ears pinned back for any sounds of pursuit – and hearing nothing of the sort.
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nbsp; Only as the property fell behind him, did he shove the client list back into his pocket, and fish out the iPhone. He prodded at its keyboard, managing to open its directory. There was no time to search it properly, but he immediately saw reams of telephone numbers, many of which looked as if they were located overseas. When he scrolled down the directory of contacts, it went on and on. He ran faster, perhaps no longer exercising the necessary caution, but eager to put as much distance between himself and the farmhouse as he could. He glanced at his watch. It was twenty-five past three. He was due at the RV point in five minutes, so he had no option but to sprint. It wouldn’t matter; the vanguard of the Northumbrian firearms response should already be in position. Help was close at hand.
However, when he burst out of the bushes onto the road leading to the junction, it was suspiciously quiet. It was possible they’d had the common sense to find a covert lying-up point, but Heck was suddenly uneasy. He stepped back into the undergrowth before heading on towards the crossroads. When he reached it, there was a single vehicle parked there: a purple Land Rover Discovery. It was parked by the phone booth, at the end of the road approaching from the southeast. No one was inside it.
Bewildered, Heck walked across the road. It was possible this vehicle had nothing to do with him. Maybe Northumbria had yet to turn up. But why had this car been left here unattended? And why did it seem vaguely familiar? When a foot scuffed the road surface behind him, he attempted to turn – only for a sharp, stinging blow to impact on the back of his neck.
Chapter 31
Gemma Piper felt as if she was midway through a whistle-stop tour of the entire British Isles. She’d spent the previous night in the Highlands, while most of today had seen her on the move – over yet another empty, desolate landscape.