Stalkers

by Paul Finch

  ‘If there’re any of them fit to walk,’ he said.

  But she’d made a good point — even if the men from the pub weren’t here, Deke had mentioned that O’Hoorigan had used this place to buy drugs, which could mean there’d be junkies around, and though junkies, as a rule, weren’t tough opposition, they might be carrying syringes. He fished about before picking up a heavy piece of wood; a ceiling lathe with cement caked around one end of it.

  They continued. At the midway point where each flight of stairs switched back on itself, a tall, narrow aperture in the outer wall gave a restricted view into the courtyard below. Each time, more by instinct than logic, they peered down — as if to check that hostile forces weren’t gathering at their rear. They never saw anyone down there, though when they reached the stair between the fourth floor and the fifth, they thought they heard a harsh male voice shouting something.

  They stood and listened for a while, but heard nothing else.

  Again Heck wondered about this guy, Deke — what did he stand to gain by telling them where O’Hoorigan was hiding? If that was what he’d done. It didn’t compute that Deke was in cahoots with O’Hoorigan and trying to send them the wrong way, not after he’d just beaten the hell out of the burglar’s friends. But to have casually given them the location of O’Hoorigan’s hide-out, when others were prepared to lose teeth to protect it, suggested that his motives amounted to more than personal dislike. Deke, whoever he was, clearly wasn’t a Salford lad — that much was evident from his accent. But the role he was playing in this affair was still a mystery, and the more Heck thought about it, an increasingly ominous one.

  When they reached the top floor, extensive weather damage was visible. The ceilings were decayed and, in many cases, dripping water. They moved through a fire door onto an outer gantry. It was good to get back into the fresh air — the fetid stench of the stairwell had been cloying — but again they now felt exposed to prying eyes. The courtyard, which looked a long way down, still lay empty.

  They advanced, Heck checking off the door numbers as they passed, which wasn’t easy as most of the doors had either been kicked down or burned. The interiors beyond them were opaque with shadow. Halfway along, a metal plate hung over an entrance to their left; it bore the numbers: 60–70. They passed beneath it, entering another internal passage, though this one turned out to be a cul-de-sac and was about two inches deep in water. A grime-coated window occupied its far end. No doubt this looked down on the motorway, but the light it admitted was pitiful, seeming to dwindle as they advanced.

  ‘You smell something bad?’ Lauren whispered, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘You mean worse than everything else we’re smelling in here?’

  She sniffed at the air, shaking her head. ‘I thought … it doesn’t matter.’

  The next few doors were intact, though covered in paint. But then they came to number sixty-eight, which was missing entirely, and in the entrance to which three supermarket trolleys had been jammed together, creating a near-immovable obstruction that jutted out and half blocked the passage. The light was now so poor that they had to grope their way past this, though both were acutely aware that the next apartment was the one they wanted, and they moved with extreme stealth.

  When they got to it, they saw that this door too had been removed — there was no sign of it, either in the doorway itself or amid the soaked trash that littered the passage. Like all the others, this flat was pitch dark inside.

  Initially they flattened themselves against the wall and waited. But they heard nothing. Heck glanced into Lauren’s face. In the dim light, her brow shone with sweat, but her lips were set in a defiant frown. There was no denying it; he was glad to have her with him at this moment.

  ‘You ready?’ he mouthed.

  She nodded.

  He counted down in his head — three — two — one. Then he hefted the cudgel, and spun around, going straight through the entrance. Lauren followed.

  If it ever had been a proper squat, it didn’t appear to be being used for that purpose now. The central corridor was cluttered with masses of shattered crockery and clumps of soggy plaster, which had dropped from the ceiling. Two doors opened immediately to rooms on the left and right. The one on the left had once been a kitchen but was now a gutted shell, black with filth and reeking of damp. The room on the right might have been a bedroom: a slashed, stained mattress lay in the middle, swamped on all sides by chip wrappers and food cartons — which suggested that someone had been staying here in the recent past. But in neither case was anyone present now.

  ‘He’d have to be absolutely desperate to lie low in here,’ Lauren said, revolted.

  ‘Or absolutely terrified,’ Heck replied.

  They moved towards the room at the end. By now, Heck would normally have raised his voice to let the occupants know this was a raid and that police officers were on the premises. But of course none of that was possible.

  When they reached the end room, he hesitated before going in. Lauren had been right, there was a smell — and it was vile. He glanced round at her. Her eyes were wide, almost rabbit-like. He pushed on in — but then stopped again, so abruptly that she blundered into the back of him. Neither was really sure what they’d been expecting to find in there. Perhaps they’d only been half-expecting to find Ron O’Hoorigan.

  But they certainly hadn’t been expecting to find him like this.

  They could tell it was O’Hoorigan because of his green canvas trousers, but that was the only way. He’d been suspended upside down from the central light fitting, his ankles tied with a coaxial cord, which had then been drawn behind his back and used to bind his wrists as well. He hadn’t been dead too long: the blood spattered all over the walls looked relatively fresh. And his intestines, which had been yanked out from his stomach in oily red and purple ravels and left to hang over his chest and face, were still glistening with moisture.

  This latter detail explained the nauseating smell.

  It wasn’t decay — it was offal, ordure, human bowels ripped brutally open, their fecal contents allowed to drain onto the floor.

  A cloud of bluebottles exploded from O’Hoorigan’s belly cavity, and from the pool of filth underneath him. Heck and Lauren fell back choking as the droning horrors swept around them, getting into their faces and hair, even into their mouths.

  They staggered out of the flat together, gagging. Heck, despite having attended countless murders before, had to lean on the facing wall to fight down queasiness. Lauren, though she’d fought on the real battlefield, wasn’t in a much better state — she crouched alongside him. Both were gasping for air.

  ‘Christ,’ Heck said. ‘Jesus Christ …’

  ‘Heck, I …’ She hawked and spat. ‘I …’

  ‘That guy was clearly an arsehole, but he never deserved …’

  ‘Heck, I’ve seen this before. I mean the MO.’

  He glanced round at her. ‘What … where?’

  She stood up, mopping her mouth with her sleeve. ‘Iraq.’

  She glanced back into the flat and down its central corridor. Now that their eyes had adjusted to the murk, the ghastly shape could still be seen hanging beyond the open door at the far end.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Heck said.

  ‘It can’t be relevant to this …’

  ‘I’ll decide whether it’s relevant or not.’

  ‘Okay.’ She still looked sickly. ‘It had been done to three Arab men, insurgents who were believed to have been planting roadside bombs. Their killers were never apprehended.’

  Heck pondered this — but his thoughts were interrupted by the screech of a vehicle skidding to a halt.

  It was difficult in the dank passage to judge which direction the sound had come from. The motorway lay just beyond the end window, but there was an ongoing rumble of traffic from that direction, and it was muffled. What they’d just heard had been loud and clear. Heck lurched back towards the gantry overlooking the courtyard. As he did, he heard anot
her car screeching to a halt. He reached the balustrade and looked down. Two police cars were parked below. An officer had got out of each. As Heck watched, a third police vehicle — this one looked like a dog unit — came thundering through the courtyard entrance.

  Lauren joined him. ‘Timely arrival,’ she said, relieved.

  ‘Timely arrival — nothing!’ Heck retorted.

  He glanced down at his training shoes; they were bloodied. Lauren’s were the same. Two trails of reddish footprints were visible on the gantry walk behind them. He glanced at his sweatshirt; perhaps inevitably, blood was also smeared there — along its left sleeve.

  ‘We’ve been set up,’ he said slowly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  A fourth police vehicle hurtled into view. It was another dog-van. Seconds later, the two dog-handlers, their animals straining at the leash, were picking their way through the rubbish towards the entrance Heck and Lauren had used to get up here.

  ‘We’re going to carry the can for this,’ Heck said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  He stared at her, amazed that she could be so naive. ‘We’ve been looking for Ron O’Hoorigan, haven’t we? Asking anyone who’d listen. Not only that, we’ve beaten the crap out of some guys who didn’t want to help us. Now we’re at his murder scene and we’ve got his blood all over us!’

  It still took several moments for the import of this to dawn on Lauren, as though she was dazed by the speed of events. Heck took her arm and dragged her back from the balustrade. Only one copper was now visible in the courtyard, talking animatedly into his radio. Already a yelping of dogs could be heard from inside the building.

  ‘We obviously can’t go out the way we came in,’ Heck said.

  ‘We’re running?’

  ‘Of course we’re bloody running! There must be a fire exit.’

  He raced back down the internal passage. Previously, they hadn’t gone right to the far end. Now they did, and found, as Heck had hoped, a fire escape, though its metal door was badly corroded. When he tried to push the bar down, it wouldn’t budge.

  He threw his whole weight against it, but it still didn’t move.

  Lauren joined in — they hit the metal together, and there was a clunk as the bar finally shifted. The door opened, but only about an inch before it grated to a halt. Lauren stepped back and aimed a flying kick. The door didn’t so much open now, as break from its hinges and go crashing and banging down the spiral stairway on the other side.

  Wind and traffic noise assailed them as they peered down. The stair descended to earth via a straight concrete shaft, which was open to the air on the motorway side. Whether or not the coppers in the building heard this racket was unclear, but the dogs sounded a lot nearer — they were barking excitedly.

  ‘Come on,’ Heck said.

  But the spiral stair was as rusty as the door had been. As they started down, it shuddered alarmingly. In some places, the bolts holding it to the building wall had visibly rotted through. From this terrible height, it was easy to imagine that, should the thing collapse, they’d fall clear down to the M602. The foot of the stair rested on a small paved area, only about ten yards by ten; a low wooden fence separated that from the dirt embankment plunging steeply to the motorway, along which an endless procession of cars and lorries was roaring in both directions.

  ‘This is suicide,’ Lauren said, a dizzying sense of vertigo causing her to sit and try to go down on her backside.

  ‘So’s the alternative.’ He pulled her to her feet.

  They reached the level of the fifth floor, clinging to the hand rails, but now the stair wasn’t just shuddering, it was groaning and creaking. In fact it was swaying, as though it had come loose at the top and was only anchored at the bottom.

  ‘Heck, we’re going to be killed,’ Lauren wailed, grabbing at his arm with a hand that was almost a talon.

  ‘Just keep going.’

  ‘This is crazy. We’ve found a crime scene. We should preserve it.’

  ‘We’ll get locked up, and that will bollocks everything.’

  They were now about halfway down, the decayed steel groaning ever more loudly. Of course, with each level they passed there was another exit-door connecting to the building. At any moment, an officer could burst out from one and intercept them, though most likely the cops would be following the dogs, which were on a different trail.

  By the time they got to the second floor, the drop wasn’t quite so perilous. They were now close enough to the ground to see that the door they’d knocked loose above had flattened a section of fencing. But Lauren’s fear had been replaced by anger.

  ‘This is lunacy,’ she said. ‘Even if we get away, we’re going to become fugitives.’

  ‘If that’s what’s necessary.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! Heck, for Christ’s sake, what are we doing?’

  They were still twenty feet from the ground, a sufficient distance to break them both in half if they fell, but Heck stopped and turned so sharply that she almost crashed into him and sent them both tumbling.

  ‘This is not just about the investigation anymore, Lauren … this is about our lives!’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘Someone has set us up. We’ve been green-lit. And when you’ve been green-lit, the last place you want to be is in prison or a detention centre!’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re a cop, we’ll be protected.’

  ‘I don’t want to be protected! I want to catch the bastard who’s doing this!’

  He continued down almost recklessly fast. She followed, more carefully.

  They at last reached the bottom, and exited Gallows Hill via the hole the escape door had made in the fence. They scrambled down the embankment until they were on the motorway hard-shoulder. It was narrow, and juggernauts rocketed past them with only two or three feet’s clearance. The noise of this, exacerbated by the cutting’s canyon-like geometry, was deafening.

  ‘Alright!’ Lauren shouted. ‘But if my life’s on the line as well, that means you’ve got to take me along. Right to the end.’

  ‘I’ve no bloody choice now.’ Heck beat the dirt from his hands as they headed east.

  Several hundred yards along, when they were well away from the derelict estate, they cut back uphill, climbed under some barbed wire and found themselves amid sheds and allotments. Beyond these, now watching out for police cars, they threaded their way back through the dismal streets to the alley where they’d left Heck’s Fiat.

  ‘Who’s supposed to have set us up, anyway?’ Lauren asked. ‘You think this guy Deke?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I don’t get it. If Deke doesn’t want us around, why didn’t he just let those dickheads in the pub beat us up?’

  Heck didn’t reply until he’d climbed behind the wheel, where he stopped to regain his breath. ‘Because getting us beaten up wasn’t enough. Whoever Deke is, he saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: O’Hoorigan — who for some reason we don’t know about yet, may have been in his sights all along. And us.’

  ‘But he didn’t try to kill us.’

  ‘No,’ Heck agreed, ‘but like you say, I’m a copper. Killing me would have caused a big stink. This way was better. It would have covered his back, and put us out of the game permanently.’

  ‘But who the hell is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Heck switched the engine on. ‘But one thing’s sure … he knows who we are.’

  Chapter 19

  He’d thought it was called a ‘beta site’. Blenkinsop had no technical understanding of that term, if it was a real term. As far as he was aware, ‘beta site’ referred to a website without a name, just a string of randomly chosen numbers and letters — mainly because it wanted to remain beneath most people’s notice. There could be any number of reasons for this, but none of the ones Blenkinsop could think of were particularly edifying.

  He scrubbed a hand through his uncombed hair.

  This was the second day running that
he’d come to work so untidy that fellow employees had commented. Sally had asked him if he was feeling no better and if he wanted a paracetamol. He’d grunted a curt reply before closing himself in his office.

  Beyond the window, radiant mid-morning sunshine bathed the dome of St Paul’s. Directly below, Cornhill and Threadneedle Street were packed with cars, the pavements thronging with City types. It was the throb of business, the pulse of commerce, the arterial flow of the world famous Square Mile. As yesterday, however, the vibrant scene did little to uplift his spirits. In fact now it was even worse, because now he wasn’t just riddled with guilt, now he was touched by fear.

  A ‘beta site’.

  That was what he believed it was called. There were probably hundreds of them, thousands, millions. Yet he doubted any could be as abhorrent as the one that had so quickly come to occupy his every waking thought.

  What a two-edged sword the internet could be.

  On its first arrival back in the 1990s, he’d considered it a porn explorer’s godsend. Online, you could get anything you wanted — literally anything. Talk about a refreshing change after the days of his youth, when in straight-laced, buttoned-up Britain you’d had to content yourselves with girlie mags containing nothing more than tits, bums and snatch. It didn’t matter what your kink, the net could cater for it. Nothing was too extreme or bizarre, and of course it was all completely clean and non-judgmental. There was no stern-faced shop lady to stare after you as you scuttled out of the newsagents, your new purchase stowed in your briefcase; no visit was required to a dingy back alley and seedy shop, where the odious old men in raincoats and the stains on the video tape covers made you feel soiled simply for being there.

  But in recent years, after some of his trips abroad and with his developing interest in getting ‘hands-on’ in such matters, these frolics in cyberspace had come to seem tame. The worst thing about this blasted summer had not been that his wife, Yvonne, and his daughter, Carly’s annual two-month pilgrimage to the Med would leave him on his own, but that his scheduled trip to the Gulf in early September had been cancelled. The next one was only due in February — six months away. Until then he’d have to make do with the sanitised fantasies of the internet.