by Paul Finch
The clerk smirked again and wandered out to his desk.
Gail gazed sullenly at Heck. ‘We should do him for managing a brothel.’
‘Good luck with that. In the trade, this is called a private hotel.’
She averted her eyes, cheeks flushed. ‘Taking us to some sweet places, this investigation.’
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘We’re almost done.’
‘Yeah … God knows what kind of weirdos we’re gonna be meeting in a few minutes.’
‘They might not be as weird as all that, actually.’
It took a second for the import of this to sink in. She glanced up at him. ‘Do you want to run that by me again?’
Heck frowned as if he wasn’t sure about this himself, which in truth he wasn’t. When he spoke now, it was quietly, confidentially. ‘While we were digging out those Snake Eye goons, I got to thinking … and this is only a theory …’
‘Which is all we ever seem to have.’
‘Most crims who do well have a kind of animal cunning. We know the ones we’re after are a step ahead of that. But suppose this lot are several steps ahead?’
‘I don’t get you.’
He looked thoughtful. ‘Julius Manko and his crew were happy to stay low-profile – small-time dealers, committing street-punk crimes like blagging boozers. But in reality they were building a distribution network with the ’Ndrangheta.’
‘So?’
‘Suppose our killers are bluffing too? Suppose, just suppose this crazy game they’re playing is actually a smokescreen?’
‘But I thought they were getting off on it, really enjoying themselves?’
‘Okay, suppose it’s a partial smokescreen?’
Before she could respond, there came a hissed warning from the front desk.
Heck flattened himself against the wall on the right. Gail moved to the wall on the left. They couldn’t see who was there, but now heard the desk clerk speaking.
‘Everything all right, mate?’
There was a grunted reply, and the rattle of a key as it was handed over. A pair of feet thudded away up the staircase.
‘That our Mr Smith and his mate?’ Heck asked, appearing at the clerk’s shoulder.
‘One of ’em,’ the clerk said. ‘The one who does all the talking.’
‘Where’s the other?’ Gail asked.
‘Dunno. Haven’t seen him yet.’
Heck pondered, and then lifted the hatch and sidled out.
‘Hey mate, listen.’ The clerk suddenly looked twitchy. ‘If there’s any damage up there, you’re gonna have to pay.’
‘What, you mean like if we wreck the place? You sure you’ll be able to tell?’
‘Ha ha, very funny. But it’s not coming out of my wages, okay?’
Heck was now at the bottom of the stairs, listening, but he also kept one eye on the front door, acutely aware that at any moment the second of the two suspects could come sauntering in. Common sense bade him wait until the second target was on the plot, but another voice advised that it would be easier to tackle one than two, and that this was a chance he couldn’t miss.
There was only dimness at the top of the stairs, but he fancied he could hear noises: the squeaking of age-old bedframes, occasional cries of pleasure – whether real or simulated, it was difficult to tell.
Gail had now emerged from behind the counter as well, but he rounded on her quickly. ‘Best if you stay down here.’
‘What – why?’
‘To cover my back. It’ll be just my luck if the second one turns up while I’m in mid-arrest.’
She looked uncertain. ‘What if the first one’s a handful?’
Heck turned to the clerk. ‘Big fella, is he?’
The clerk shrugged. ‘Five-six. Out of shape.’
‘I’ll take five-six and out of shape.’
‘Heck, wait!’ Gail protested. ‘What if he’s armed?’
‘I’ll think of something. I always do.’
While Gail moved reluctantly back behind the counter, Heck headed upstairs.
The treads creaked; the walls on either side were damp and scabby; the air was rank with odious smells: smoke, sweat, rotten cabbage. When he reached the first floor a single passage ran from one side of the building to the other, laid with mouldering carpet and littered here and there with crack phials and used condoms. Occasional dust-enshrouded bulbs created the dullest illumination. For some reason, unless it had all been his imagination, the squeaking beds and ecstatic voices had fallen silent.
Heck ventured forward, following the numbers on the doors – five, six, seven, eight, but glancing over his shoulder as the top of the stairs diminished behind him, acutely conscious of the space beyond it, which was an unlit recess. It was too easy to imagine someone concealed there, watching him. Turning a corner, he entered another dingy passage, now conscious of a curious sound – a low rumble, like distant thunder except that it was ongoing.
A figure crossed the passage ahead of him; flickering through his vision from left to right, and then was gone.
Heck froze. For a crazy second it had been like one of those ghost stories, where some hapless investigator is confronted by a phantom shape walking out of one wall and disappearing through another; until he shuffled forward a few feet and realised that two doors were open and facing each other. A faint pall of daylight lay between them, and he now recognised the dull thunder as the sound of water pouring into a metal tub.
The figure crossed back, now in the opposite direction. It was too dim to make out any detail, but Heck saw a stocky, bullish shape with a paunch, dressed only in underwear.
He ventured forward again, and was about five feet away when he spotted that the door on the right was number fourteen. As he did, the figure re-emerged, now naked except for several neck chains and a towel round its waist. It was halfway across the corridor when it suddenly halted and turned.
It was a toss-up which one of them was the most astonished.
Mark Heckenburg or Alan Devlin.
Both their mouths dropped open. Both stammered an incoherent exclamation.
Devlin even had to fit his partially steamed-up glasses onto his nose, as if he didn’t trust the evidence of his own faltering vision. ‘You fucker …’ he stuttered, before swivelling and fleeing along the corridor.
Heck charged in pursuit. Devlin glanced once over his shoulder as he ran, bare feet slapping the aged carpet, his glasses flying off in the process. At first Heck wondered if there might be another room Devlin had access to, but now he saw a fire-escape door at the far end. Devlin went straight for it, buffeting its panel of grimy frosted glass with his shoulder. With a shattering crack, it sagged outwards, but it was clearly filled with safety wiring and so remained in place. Frantic, Devlin dropped his towel, standing naked and hairy as he wrestled with the push-bar, which, from his inability to budge it, was jammed. He struggled desperately before spinning round and dropping to a half-crouch, his eyes narrowed. Several feet away, Heck slowed to a wary prowl.
‘You stupid bastard,’ he said. ‘How many years have you avoided jail for? And now you’re going to make up for it in one go.’
Devlin darted forward, going first to the left – Heck jumped to block his path – and then dodging right. Heck stuck his foot out, catching him across the shins.
Devlin fell full length, barking his knees and elbows on the floor, shouting in pain. As he tried to get up Heck grappled with him from behind, having to bend him forward to draw both wrists behind his back and cuff them together.
A nearby door opened. The housewife-whore with the styled blonde hair, which now looked distinctly tousled, stuck her head out. ‘Oooh,’ she said in a tone reminiscent of umpteen Carry On movies. The door opened wider, and her bearded, bespectacled husband also stepped out, his tracksuit pants round his knees.
‘What’s going on here?’ he asked with interest.
‘Police,’ Heck replied. ‘Get back in there and shut the door. Lock it if you can.’
Devlin gargled with pain as Heck levered him upright by his chained wrists, contorting them into an X-shape in the small of his back.
‘Is this for real?’ the husband asked, his interest bordering on fascination.
‘I said get out of my fucking sight!’ Heck roared at him.
The beard and his wife disappeared, the door banging shut, a bolt thudding home.
‘At one time they’d have cleared out of this place like a swarm of rats at the first sign of cops,’ Heck said into Devlin’s ear as he frog-marched him back along the corridor, stopping only to scoop up his glasses. A couple of other doors opened as they passed, but immediately closed again when Heck glared at them. ‘Shows how much moral authority we have these days, eh?’
‘What do you fucking expect?’ Devlin retorted, grimacing with pain. ‘Fitting people up, brutalising prisoners.’
‘On which subject …’ Heck said, reaching the door to number fourteen, which still stood ajar, and kicking it wide open. ‘Me and you are going to have a little chat.’
They entered the room, which unsurprisingly was a hovel: more stained carpet, two iron-framed beds covered by dingy sheets, a window along whose ledge lay several years’ worth of dead, desiccated flies. He’d no sooner shoved Devlin onto the nearest bed than the phone bleeped in his pocket.
‘Heck,’ he said.
‘The second one’s here,’ came Gail’s urgent voice. ‘He’s on his way up now.’
Heck just had time to cut the call and jump back as the door to the bedroom swung open. Devlin tried to shout a warning, but Heck pitched forward at full velocity, hitting the door with both hands. It slammed backwards, hitting whoever was in the process of entering with incredible force. Wayne Devlin was flung sideways against the jamb – the door had clearly struck his head, because his eyes were rolling like pinballs. He rebounded, only to catch a stinger from Heck right in his teeth, which dropped him senseless and gory-mouthed to his knees.
Gail appeared, panting. She drew her cuffs and assisted Heck as he threw the second hoodlum over onto his front and twisted his arms behind his back. Meanwhile, the older Devlin lay naked on the bed like some fantasy film orc; his leathery brown body with its flabby gut, cheap jewellery and tattoos, unashamedly displayed, his penis a crinkle-cup stub in a nest of grey, thinning pubes. When Gail glanced up at him, he fixed her with a lewd, wet-mouthed grin.
‘I presume someone’s going to tell me what’s going on here?’ she said.
Heck beat the grime from his hands as he stood up. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He regarded the older prisoner with a colder, harder expression than Gail had seen from him at any time in the enquiry so far. ‘Seems we’ve been led down another blind alley – and we’ve picked up two dog turds en route.’
Chapter 29
‘Right, Alan,’ Gail said, ‘here’s the way things are. Thanks to information received from a member of the Snake Eye Crew, we’ve now identified you as the same person who, on 22 July this year, acquired a stolen vehicle from the Snake Eyes. The vehicle in question was a grey Bedford van, registration GD14 FED.’
Devlin said nothing, merely glowered across the interview-room table. At least he was now dressed, albeit in the obligatory paper suit, while a duty solicitor was perched alongside him, scribbling notes. The only personal item Devlin was still in possession of was his pair of bottle-lensed glasses; the rest was bagged and stored away in one of the Brixton Custody Suite’s numerous property lockers.
‘At the time,’ Gail added, ‘you were masquerading under the alias Jack Smith. Later that day, you used this same alias to check into a south London hotel, the Lambeth Royal, where you rented room number fourteen – which is where you and your son, Wayne, were arrested earlier today. Outside the hotel was the same grey Bedford van, which we’ve now impounded for forensic analysis, though it didn’t take an FSI to identify the stockpile of offensive weapons we found in there.’
‘Not looking too good so far, is it, pal?’ Heck remarked.
‘Depends where it’s headed, doesn’t it?’ Devlin said.
‘We’re getting to that,’ Gail continued. ‘Thanks to CCTV footage taken at the south entrance to Thornton Farm, Woldingham, Surrey, on 24 July, we saw the same Bedford van, which by this time had been in your possession for two days. We also saw the driver of the van and an accomplice in possession of a warning sign, which they were in the process of deliberately moving, thus allowing the free passage of traffic over a bridge so dangerous that it had officially been condemned. As a direct result, a couple of hours later that day, Detective Sergeant Heckenburg crashed his car into the River Tat and very nearly drowned.’ She paused. ‘Do you deny any of this?’
Devlin smirked. ‘You’re saying that because that van was at the hotel where I happened to be staying, that means I’m responsible for an attempted murder in a place I’ve never been to, God knows how many miles away from where I was stopping?’
‘Answering questions with other questions won’t help you, Alan,’ she replied. ‘Unless you’re denying that this person we saw was you.’
‘I don’t have to deny anything. You prove it was me, or we’re all wasting our time.’
‘There were two men on the CCTV footage, Alan. One of them was short and thickset, like you. The other one was tall and rangy, like your son, Wayne.’
‘So what?’
‘Alan – you should be aware that attempting to murder a police officer is an extraordinarily serious offence.’
Devlin chuckled. ‘What are you talking about, attempting to murder? Unless you’ve got our faces on film, you’re pissing in the wind.’
‘You know that’s bollocks,’ Heck interjected.
Devlin jabbed a finger at him. ‘You’ve had it in for me ever since the trial up in Nottingham. You tried to kill Jimmy Hood instead of arresting him. And after he got sent down, you threatened all sorts.’
‘Is this the reason you set your trap for DS Heckenburg?’ Gail asked.
‘I didn’t set any trap.’
Heck sighed. ‘Alan … why bother with this charade? We’ve got statements, we’ve got video evidence. We can put you in front of an ID parade if we need to. The forensics lads are going through the van as we speak. You know we’ve got more than enough to charge you already.’
‘Do it then.’ Devlin sounded scornful, but his cheeks had coloured. ‘You won’t, will you? Because you don’t know it was us. Not for sure. You haven’t got any faces, you haven’t got nothing.’
‘How do you know we haven’t got any faces?’ Heck asked him.
Devlin stuttered before replying. ‘You … you told me.’
Heck frowned. ‘All we told you was that we’d got two guys on film. So how do you know that we either have or haven’t got their faces?’
Gail leaned forward. ‘Look, Alan – no one actually died. So you’re not going to go away forever. You can make it even easier for yourself if you come clean.’
Devlin sat back, unconsciously putting distance between himself and his interrogators. ‘I assumed you haven’t got their faces. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking these dumb questions.’ He tried to sound confident, but it was obvious bravado. ‘I know how this stuff works.’
‘Do you also know that on the day in question I was present at Thornton Farm investigating a series of other similar murders?’ Heck asked. ‘Which were all committed after first being disguised as unlikely accidents?’
‘Eh?’ This time Devlin looked genuinely baffled.
‘Believe it or not, you aren’t the first bloke to have this idea,’ Heck said. ‘Oh … unless you’re the same bloke?’
‘What are you wittering on about?’
‘We know you live in Nottingham, Alan,’ Gail said. ‘But we’ve no idea why you’re down in Brixton. It’s not the sort of place people would normally pick for a holiday. How about Leatherhead? You ever been there? Say around 29 January this year?’
‘I don’t even know where Leatherhead is.’
‘Okay, what about Dorking? We’re looking into an unexplained death there too.’
Devlin’s cheeks had now turned beetroot-red. ‘You’re not fitting me up, if that’s what you think the game is. I’ve kept my nose clean all these years …’
‘Until 16 July this year,’ Heck said. ‘When your old mate, Jimmy Hood, was sent to prison for the rest of his life, with the judge expressing regret that he couldn’t actually hang the bastard.’
Devlin pointed again, finger quivering. ‘That judge was out of fucking order!’
‘And with the kind of irrational thinking that is always your sort’s undoing, you decided to get even; isn’t that right, Alan?’
‘This is garbage.’ Devlin turned to his solicitor. ‘They haven’t got anything on me. Tell them we’ve had enough.’
The solicitor made no verbal reply, but his sceptical expression implied that he held a different view.
‘Let’s cut to the chase, Alan,’ Heck said. ‘You tried to kill me on the bridge at Thornton Farm. We know that for a fact. All that matters now is why. You removed that safety chain and warning notice, either because you’ve been setting up bizarre fatal accidents all over Surrey or because you knew I was shortly to arrive and you wanted to get even with me for putting Jimmy Hood away.’
‘I’ve never even been to Surrey until four days ago,’ Devlin snapped.
‘So you at least admit you were in Surrey at the time of the bridge incident?’ Gail said.
Devlin glanced from one to the other, breathing hard. Spittle slathered his lips; the hue was visibly draining from his cheeks. ‘Jimbo was sick,’ he finally said. ‘You have to understand that. Sick in the head.’
‘And you’re not?’ Heck replied.
Devlin shot him a look, but now it was devoid of malice. Suddenly, he seemed tired. ‘I felt it was unjust what had happened to him. Really unjust.’
‘If you’re expecting to find sympathy for a rapist and murderer of old ladies, you’re in the wrong place,’ Heck said.
‘So it’s okay he now has to spend the rest of his life in a hole, like a rat – supposedly for his own protection? Even that doesn’t stop the screws giving him hell.’