by Paul Finch
An ambulance waited on the drive in front of the main house. Heck sat on its rear step, a foil blanket draped across his shoulders, his leg propped up while a pretty young paramedic bandaged his left foot, which had swollen to about twice its normal size. She patiently explained for the third or fourth time that she didn’t think a bandage would be sufficient.
‘If this is just bruising, it’s very extensive,’ she advised him. ‘You really should get along to A&E and have it X-rayed.’
‘And then have to hobble around with a pot on my leg for the next six weeks,’ he replied. ‘No thanks. Even if it’s broken, I can still put my weight on it. I’ve just chased a tractor half way from here to Sevenoaks. I’ll be fine.’
She tut-tutted as she pinned the wrappings in place, and moved away. Heck pulled a sock back over it, only to groan when he realised that he wouldn’t be able to fit it into his training shoe. He stood up tentatively. Now she mentioned it, the foot wasn’t half hurting. It was possible the adrenalin of battle had subdued his earlier awareness of it. Gingerly, he took a step. It’s just about tolerable, he thought. He took another step and grimaced with agony.
‘You all right?’ came a voice.
Gemma strolled along the drive towards him, hands in her overcoat pockets.
‘Think I’ll be limping for a couple of days,’ he murmured.
She eyed him warily. ‘I still find it amazing that all this carnage was acted out as cover for murder-for-money.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think it exactly came difficult to them. I mean, they turned Harold Lansing into a cheese toastie because Tilly Thornton missed a holiday. In all probability, they’d have kept adding people to the list who they had grievances against, real or imagined. More and more innocent bystanders would have got swept up. On which subject, Gordon Meredith is still in jail for something he didn’t do.’
‘I know,’ Gemma said. ‘I’ve been onto Joe Wullerton, and he’s contacting the Home Office first thing. Should be grounds for a quick appeal, which most likely won’t be opposed. Should be.’ She sighed. ‘I just hope you’ve got your paperwork straight, Heck, because CPS will have trouble believing this one – even from you.’
He took another careful step. ‘You know me, ma’am. I always have my paper straight.’
‘Yeah … eventually. After I’ve knocked it back about six times.’ She glanced around at the house, its whitewashed walls tinged with gold in the rising sun. Bird twitters filled its shaggy eaves. ‘Isn’t the sort of place that routinely produces psychopaths, is it?’
‘Takes all sorts.’
‘Dunno – well-bred family. Moneyed. Educated. No history of abuse …’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘Is a strict father an abusive father these days?’
Heck shrugged again. ‘You want my take on this: goblins.’
Gemma arched an eyebrow. ‘Excuse me?’
‘You’ve never read Tolkien, or watched the Peter Jackson movies?’
‘Yeah. What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Goblins.’ He gave it a little more thought. ‘It’s like humans are descended from earlier races. The good guys are descended from elves, the bad guys are descended from goblins.’
‘I don’t remember that in the movies.’
‘It’s something like that anyway.’
‘You’re trying to say that some people are just born bad?’
Heck nodded. ‘It’s particularly appropriate in this case. I mean, they got their kicks creating fatal accidents. That’s kind of a goblin thing to do, isn’t it? Or is that gremlins?’
‘Heck, I thought you said you were okay?’
‘I am okay.’
‘When we get back to the Yard, I’m having you looked at.’
‘Your prerogative, ma’am.’
‘How’s DC Honeyford anyway?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’
‘I’m asking you. I hear you and she worked pretty well together?’
‘Nah … she doesn’t like me much.’
‘Well, that’s easily explained. Will Royton tells me she’s an excellent detective with great instincts and an admirable work ethic. But that she’s also hot-headed, lacks discipline, goes at cases like a bull at a gate, is overly confident and has a dog’s breakfast for a private life.’
Heck frowned as he sat himself back on the ambulance’s rear step. ‘I knew she reminded me of someone.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Excuse me, Gemma!’ Will Royton called from the farmhouse doorway. ‘Got my Chief Con on the phone. Any chance you can have a word?’
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Gemma told Heck, as she walked up the path. ‘I’m driving you to hospital myself later on. Gonna make sure you get that foot X-rayed.’
‘Ma’am, I don’t—’
‘And don’t bloody argue. It’s happening.’
As she vanished into the house, Gail came round the other side of the ambulance. She too was wrapped in a foil blanket. ‘So you and me are alike, eh?’ She sipped tea from a paper cup. ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help overhearing.’
‘Eavesdrop away,’ Heck replied. ‘We’re going to have to live in each other’s pockets for the next few days to make sense of all this.’
‘The spider’s dead, by the way.’
‘My heart bleeds.’
‘Thornton squished it in his death throes.’
‘He bought it surprisingly quickly.’
‘Apparently it bit him sixteen times. It’s a miracle he didn’t go sooner.’
Heck pondered on that, and shuddered. ‘Thanks for getting here when you did.’
She sat down on the step alongside him. ‘I was only following your lead.’
‘You’re the one who called for an inventory of rifle owners.’
‘Basic detective work.’
‘Was it basic detective work that got you to the Blackwall Tunnel ahead of Julius Manko?’
‘You mentioned the Tunnel first. I’d never have thought of it.’
‘Yeah, but you got there.’
She stood up. ‘Heck – stop this, will you!’
‘Stop what?’
She turned her back on him. ‘I don’t need all this. Everything’s scatty enough in my mind as it is.’
‘Ahhh … what you mean is you don’t need any help?’
She threw the cup aside. ‘I don’t need help I don’t deserve.’
‘You know, Gail.’ Heck got painfully back to his feet. ‘Your trouble is you’re so busy telling people you can do this job on your own that you don’t actually know you can. After all this, you’ll have nothing to prove to anyone. So why don’t you just chill out and enjoy the moment?’
She glanced at him, pale faced but with bright dots of pink on either cheek. ‘You think I’m too inexperienced to apply for the Serial Crimes Unit?’
‘Well, Gemma’s impressed by you, I can sense that. But the answer’s probably yes. I also think it’ll look like you’re running away. You’ve got some business you need to sort out down here first.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you top and tail that bastard, Pavey, and you show his mates that you don’t give a crap what they think; that you’re a Surrey Police detective and you’re going to keep on doing that job to the best of your ability regardless of any shit they try and pull behind your back – and you do all that to your own satisfaction. No one else’s. Yours. You do all that, then you give me a call and I’ll give you a heads-up the first vacancy we get. But I’ll tell you now, SCU is no easy ride. There’ll be zero chance of promotion and when Gemma’s on the warpath there isn’t a beating you won’t take.’
‘If you can hack it, so can I,’ Gail said.
Heck smiled. A few days ago he’d have scoffed at that, but she didn’t need to say it twice now. The spell broke as Gemma came briskly back out of the farmhouse, car keys in hand. ‘You ready?’ she asked.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Heck said.
Gemma deigned to notice Gail. ‘Well done, DC Honeyford.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’
‘Seems you both had a couple of close shaves this morning.’
‘All in a day’s work, ma’am.’
Gemma eyed her dubiously. ‘Really? Well, there’s no rest for the wicked. Your DCI would like a chat inside.’
Gail nodded and headed into the farmhouse. Gemma strode to her Mercedes, Heck limping after her. She offered to help him climb in, but he declined.
When they were seated alongside each other, she said: ‘I’ve just had it explained to me in no uncertain terms that two respected members of the country set have died today. So when this story breaks, they’re going to come at us from every angle.’
Heck shrugged. This was only to have been expected.
She glanced at him. ‘So regardless of whether or not you’ve got a pot on your leg, I want to know for sure that your head’s in the right place?’
‘You’ve got it, ma’am.’
‘You and me had a big fall-out last year, Heck, for which we were both partly at fault. I don’t want that again. If you’re staying in SCU, I want us all on the same side, I want no one harbouring any grudges; I want you to be a good little soldier.’
He nodded.
‘And no more talk about goblins or gremlins?’
‘Promise.’
She arched an eyebrow again.
‘I promise,’ he said.
‘Okay.’ She put the Merc in gear. ‘Let’s do it.’
Can’t wait for the next Heck instalment?
Read on for an exclusive glimpse of the next book in the series,
The Burning Man
Chapter 1
Barrie and Les saw customer care as an essential part of their role as porno merchants.
Some might laugh at that notion, given pornography’s normal place in the world. It was all very well people pretending it was near enough respectable now, but the reality was that even if you used porn, you tended not to talk about it; that you weren’t generally interested in building a rapport with the providers – you just wanted to acquire your goods and go (said goods then to reside in a secret compartment in your home where hopefully no one would ever find them). No, one wouldn’t normally have thought this a business where the friendly touch would pay dividends, but Barrie and Les, who’d jointly and successfully managed their street-corner sex shop for twelve years, didn’t see it that way at all.
Certainly Barrie didn’t, and he was the thinker of the twosome.
In Barrie’s opinion, it was all about improving the customer’s experience so that he would happily return. Happily … that was the key. Yes, it was about providing quality material, but at the same time doing it with a smile and a quip or two, and being helpful with it – if someone requested information or advice, you actually tried to assist, you didn’t just stand there with that bored, bovine expression so common among service industry staff throughout the UK.
This way they’d more likely buy from Sadie’s Dungeon again – it wasn’t difficult to understand. And it worked.
Even in 2015, there was something apparently disquieting about the act of buying smut. Barrie and Les had seen every kind of person in here, from scruffy, drunken louts to well-dressed businessmen, and yet all had ventured through the front door in similar fashion: rigid around the shoulders, licks of sweat gleaming on their brows, eyes darting left and right as though fearful they were about to encounter their father-in-law – and always apparently eager to engage in an ice-breaking natter with the unexpectedly palsy guys behind the counter, though this was usually while their merchandise was being bagged; it was almost as if they were so relieved the experience was over that they suddenly felt free to gabble, to let all that pent-up tension pour out of them.
It was probably also a relief to them that Sadie’s Dungeon was so neat and tidy. The old cliché about sex shops being seedy backstreet establishments with grubby windows and broken neon signs, populated by the dirty raincoat brigade and trading solely in well-thumbed mags and second-hand video tapes covered in suspiciously sticky fingerprints, was a thing of the past. Sadie’s Dungeon was a clean, modern boutique. Okay, its main window was blacked-out and it still announced its presence at the end of Buckeye Lane with garish, luminous lettering, but behind the dangling ribbons in the doorway, it was spacious, clean and very well-lit. There was no tacky carpet here to make you feel physically sick, no thumping rock music or lurid light show to create an air of intimidation. Perhaps more to the point, Barrie and Les were local lads, born and raised right here in Bradburn. It wasn’t a small borough as Lancashire towns went – more a sprawling post-industrial wasteland – but even for those punters who didn’t know them, at least their native accents, along with their friendly demeanour, evoked an air of familiarity. Alright, it was possible to overegg that pudding. It didn’t exactly instil what you’d call a family atmosphere in Sadie’s Dungeon, but it meant there was something a little more welcoming about it, a little more wholesome.
‘Fucking shit!’ Les snarled from his stool behind the till. ‘Bastard!’
‘What’s up?’ Barrie said, only half hearing.
‘Fucking takings are crap again.’
‘Yeah …?’ Barrie was distracted by the adjustments he was making to the Christmas display.
It was early December, and though it might seem incongruous for a sex shop to stick holly over its autographed porn-star wall-posters, and even stand a large Christmas tree in one of its corners (hung with miniature sex toys instead of ornaments), Barrie held a different view. As far as he could see, hardly anyone believed in God anymore, but that didn’t stop the entire population of the town getting embarrassingly pissed on Christmas Eve, unwrapping a pile of prezzies on Christmas morning, and stuffing themselves to the gills with turkey and plum duff at Christmas teatime. How was this any more hypocritical? Besides, Barrie thought this particular display one of the better ones he’d constructed. It was located right at the front of the shop, at the top end of the central aisle so that it would strike the punters as soon as they walked in. It consisted of a life-size cardboard cut-out muscle man, laughing and naked, with a fake white beard glued on, and a metal peg pushed through at his groin, over the top of which a Santa hat had been draped to create the impression it was concealing an upright member. At his feet, a large red bag trimmed with white fur spilled out a heap of newly-imported American DVDs, all at special holiday prices. Above the muscle man’s head hung a bunch of mistletoe, and over the top of that a row of flashing fairy-light letters read:
CHECK OUT SANTA’S SACK
Of course, Les had a point. Even the rapid approach of Christmas was no real consolation when the shop’s takings were consistently poorer than they’d used to be. When Sadie’s Dungeon had first opened, sales had initially been great, but ever since then – thanks mainly to the internet, and despite the lads’ conscientious customer care routine – business had declined.
‘We’re not beaten yet,’ Barrie replied, determinedly relaxed about it. ‘The new rules will level the playing-field a little. Let’s just see how it all pans out.’
He was referring to recent legislation aimed at internet porn producers, which abolished the depiction online of certain ‘extreme’ sexual activities, and thus pulled them into line with those BBFC prohibitions already in force where DVDs were concerned, so though porn fans the country over were outraged that their private recreation was yet again being meddled with by government, it was actually a positive where the shop-counter trade was concerned.
Or so Barrie said. And though Les wasn’t entirely sure the benefits from this would feed through any time soon, he tended to listen to Barrie, who was undoubtedly the brains behind Sadie’s Dungeon, and in Les’s eyes a very smart cookie. He was also a grafter, getting stuck in wherever needed. Even now, though it was past seven o’clock, Barrie wasn’t finished. All across the shop, the product was marked and racked in easy-to-find sections: Bangin’
Babes, Horny Housewives, Glamour Grans, Tearaway Teens – Barrie sidled from one to the next, fastidiously checking that everything was as it should be after the usual day’s fingering and fondling by the customers, and swiftly rearranging stuff where it wasn’t.
‘Sonja, we’re almost done!’ Les shouted down the corridor behind the counter.
‘’Kay … getting dressed,’ came a female voice.
Which was when the bell rang as the shop’s outer door was opened. The icy December breeze set the ribbons fluttering as a bulky shape backed in, lugging something heavy behind him.
‘Sorry, sir … we’re closing,’ Les called.
The customer halted but didn’t turn around; he bent down slightly as if what he was dragging was cumbersome as well as heavy. They now noticed that under his massive, silvery coat, he wore steel-shod boots and baggy, shapeless trousers made from some thick, dark material.
‘Sir, we’re closed,’ Barrie said, approaching along the right-hand aisle.
Where Les was short, stocky and shaven-headed, Barrie was six-three and, though rangy of build with a mop of dark hair and good looks, his background was not the best – he knew how to use his height, how to impose himself. ‘Hey, excuse me … hey mate!’
The figure continued to back into the shop, the door jammed open behind him, letting in a steady waft of wintry air. When he straightened up, they saw that he was wearing a motorcycle helmet.
‘Shit!’ Les yanked open a drawer and snatched out a homemade cosh, a chunk of iron cable with cloth wrapped around it.
Barrie might have reacted violently too, except that as the figure pivoted around, the sight froze him where he stood. He wasn’t sure what fixated him more, the extended, gold-tinted welder’s visor riveted to the front of the intruder’s helmet, completely concealing the features beneath, or the charred-black steel muzzle now pointing at him, the rubber pipe attachment to which snaked back around the guy’s body to a wheeled tank at his rear.