The Burning Man

by Paul Finch

  He coughed harshly. It hurt, the air rasping in his sunken chest. His head ached too – he always seemed to have a headache these days. And a cold. Snot spooled out from his sore-encrusted left nostril, and he wiped it with his skinny wrist.

  An engine rumbled somewhere close by.

  Danny stepped back into the recess, crooking his head right and left. There was no sign of anyone on the towpath, but the other way he saw that a vehicle had pulled up on the cobbled space beyond the entry. By instinct, his left hand burrowed more deeply into his pocket, fingers caressing the folded switchblade he kept down there.

  The vehicle at the end of the alley had turned its lights off, but remained motionless. Danny watched it irritably. This happened on occasion. Middle-class kids looking to score would come down here nervously. Not wanting to get jumped on these mean streets, they’d get as close as they could in the car and then, ignorant of the protocol, would sit there waiting, engine chugging. With every passing minute, it was more likely they’d draw attention to themselves. The narrow backstreet they were parked on might feel like it was in the middle of nowhere, but actually it wasn’t. A couple of hundred yards further up, another old warehouse had been changed into a nightclub. OK, it was only open on Fridays and Saturdays; there was no one there on weekday nights, but there was a small car park in front of it, and on the other side of that a grotty little pool bar which sometimes entertained midweek custom.

  The fact the car was grey, or looked grey in the dimness, would reduce this risk a little. But even so, its occupants were clearly not for venturing down the alley.

  Danny swore under his breath. He could picture them. A twenty-something couple. Probably both doing jobs they loved and at the same time earning good money. They’d have put street-gear on to come down here. Stonewashed jeans or Army Surplus, maybe hoodie tops, perhaps a baseball cap for the guy. But everything would be crisp and clean, with designer branding.

  Danny loathed middle-class phoneys, but he could never allow himself to show it. Whatever their pretensions in life, they were still dopers, and dopers were his lifeblood.

  But still the car sat at the end of the alley, swimming in a smog of its own exhaust.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  These really would be silly little rich kids. They might not intend it, they possibly didn’t even realise it, but it clearly came natural to them to get served. Well, this once – just this once, to get rid of the dickless fool and his bint before they attracted the entire town – Danny would wander down there. But once business was concluded, he’d give them some advice, spiced with a few choice swear-words of his own.

  He ambled along the passage, hands in his coat pockets. Even when he reached the end, he couldn’t tell for sure what kind of motor it was. It surprised him actually – it was an estate car, but it looked a bit grubby and beaten-up; not what he’d expected. Though perhaps this was the family spare; something they felt safer in down on the Blackhall ward, a bit more incognito. As he approached, its front passenger window scrolled down. Most likely this would be the guy. The girl would be behind the wheel, because he wouldn’t want her dealing face to face with a criminal. Obviously not.

  But then it all turned a bit unreal.

  The window had reached the bottom of the frame, and yet no bearded or handsomely chiselled face appeared there. Instead, Danny saw a circular steel muzzle – a broad one, at least three inches in diameter. His mouth dropped open.

  A bulky figure was visible behind the muzzle, hunched over from the driving seat. There was no one else in there, quite clearly. To operate this mechanism, one man was enough.

  A fountain of white-hot flame spewed out.

  One minute Danny’s tall, thin body was uncomfortably cold, the next every part of him was ablaze with agony. He stumbled backward with such force that he bounced from the warehouse wall. At first, he was so agonised that he was unable to make a sound. But as his clothes fell away in charring tatters, taking much of the flaming, adhesive fuel with them, he found his voice – in long, braying screeches. Only for a second jet to engulf him, lighting him head to foot, eating immediately into his scorched and vitreous flesh.

  Danny tottered around like a burning mannequin. He blundered back into the dark alleyway, thrusting his way headlong, the dancing firelight shooting ahead of him and up the brick walls, his arms weaving glittering patterns. He didn’t just feel the heat all over him, but inside him – inside his head even. Along with a pain he’d never known, a pain that clawed through his muscles and nerves and bones, shredding his very sanity it was so unbearable, and yet somehow he kept going, one unsteady foot following another, until he’d passed his normal pitch and was out at the other end, on the cinder towpath.

  And now, in the reeling, tortured inferno of his mind, he realised why he had done this.

  His brain was malfunctioning, but his body had made the decision for him.

  He sensed the canal in front.

  Staggering another few yards, he pitched down face-first into the water, a hissing cloud erupting behind him.

  At first it was so frigid that it was like passing out of reality, and yet as well as quenching the flames, it served to numb him – to an extreme degree, to a point where he was able to flounder across the channel like a crazed fish. The semi-liquid flesh unravelled from his twisted limbs, but he threw himself forward until he reached the far side, where, with eyeballs seared beyond use, he thudded into a wall of bricks hung with tufts of rank vegetation. His blistered hands groped left and found an upright ladder, rusted and rotted in its moorings, but just about capable of holding his weight as he hauled his agonised form to the top of it, and there flopped wheezing onto another cinder path.

  Danny’s tongue had melted to a molten stub in the scalded cave of his mouth, so he couldn’t even sob let alone scream. His nose had gone, along with his eardrums and eyelids. He had minimal senses left with which to detect the armoured, helmeted figure that had clumped steadily after him down the warehouse alley, petrol tank sloshing in the harness on its back, and now came over the canal as well, footfalls louder on the metal footbridge some twenty yards to the left.

  Even when the hulking, pitiless form came and stood right over him, the shuddering, mewling wreck that had once been Danny Hollister didn’t know it was there. Thus it met no opposition, not even a protest, as it trained its weapon down, and from point-blank range blasted him with flame again, and again, and again.

  Chapter 9

  Heck didn’t hang around at court to celebrate the conviction of three-times-rapist Charlie Wheeler, despite the bastard receiving the severe but appropriate penalty of three life sentences including a judge’s recommendation that he serve no less than 45 years. While DI Dave Brunwick, who’d officially headed the Wimbledon enquiry, spoke to a bank of microphones and news cameras outside the front of the Old Bailey, Heck left via a rear door and hurried off back to Staples Corner, arriving there just around lunchtime, where he grabbed a quick sandwich before hitting the motorway.

  Three days had now passed since Gemma had taken several other SCU detectives north to liaise with the Greater Manchester Police in Bradburn, but plenty more had happened since. To start with, there’d been another fatal fire-attack in the town. This time it was a drugs dealer called Daniel Hollister, another goon believed to have been on Vic Ship’s payroll, and the modus operandi had been near enough exactly the same as that used in the sex-shop attack: the victim sprayed with some combustible accelerant, most likely petrol, while the delivery mechanism – quite literally a flamethrower – had been clearly identified on this occasion because the armoured and helmeted killer had got caught in the act on CCTV, though the footage wasn’t of the best quality. Only yesterday, Gemma, in company with DI Katie Hayes of the Greater Manchester Serious Crimes Division, had held a joint press conference at Bradburn Central police station to announce that a pre-existing investigative SCU taskforce, Operation Wandering Wolf, had now been expanded to tackle in full the escalating u
nderworld war in the town.

  Already feeling left behind by these events, Heck initially sped along the M1, not that he was looking forward to reaching his destination. As Gemma had intimated, there was no love lost between Heck and Bradburn, though in some ways it was quite illogical. Back in his youth, a major domestic crisis – not unconnected to his embarking on a career in the police – had put a deep rift between himself and his immediate family, which hadn’t been easily bridged.

  In truth, it hadn’t properly been bridged even now, though Heck and his sole surviving close relative, his older sister Dana, were in regular contact and the tone was friendly enough. Dana’s only daughter, Sarah, knew Heck simply as ‘Uncle Mark’ and though she hadn’t been around in the bad old days and with luck had never been informed about them, she hadn’t seen him often enough to forge any kind of real emotional bond with him.

  So … no, Heck didn’t particularly enjoy going back to Bradburn, but this would never stop him. It was true what he’d told Gemma: the past was the past as far as he was concerned; it was time to let bygones be bygones. In any case, he’d now lived almost as long in London as he had in Lancashire, having voluntarily transferred from the Greater Manchester Police to the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty, shortly after joining the force. He didn’t consider himself a Bradburn native any more. So why should it matter? More important than any of that was finding John Sagan, though it already sounded as if Gemma had succumbed to the inevitable and, to avoid putting out any GMP noses, had made her team available to launch a full-scale assault against all the mobsters who were making life such a misery up there.

  By mid-afternoon, the traffic flow had increased, worsening noticeably when Heck hit the M6, forcing him to divert onto the toll-road at Coleshill. From there, the driving was easier so he was able to take a guilt-free break at Norton Canes Services.

  Over a coffee, he perused the latest batch of paperwork emailed down that morning by the admin staff on Wandering Wolf.

  This latest intelligence finally confirmed that the Bradburn feud was being waged between Vic Ship’s Manchester-based firm and a breakaway crew who had once run Bradburn on Ship’s behalf but now were looking to go independent. There was no evidence as yet, at least nothing firm, that John Sagan had hooked up with Ship, but if there was a retaliatory strike for the fire-attack on Daniel Hollister, which the taskforce was now nervously anticipating, and it involved torture and the use of chloroform to overpower the subject, it would be as good as a signature.

  In the meantime, purely in terms of numbers and expertise, the contrasts between the two factions could not be more extreme.

  As Heck had already seen, Ship headed a traditional inner-city crime family whose main areas of influence were tough districts like Whalley Range, Fallowfield, Rusholme and Longsight. According to the intel, Ship’s crew dabbled in all the usual activities – pimping, loansharking, protection, drugs – and had a much-feared reputation. They could and would use serious violence if they deemed it necessary, and in the long term, even before this latest shooting war, were suspected of involvement in the murders of at least four rival gangsters. That said, on the whole it was believed that Ship’s mob observed the old-fashioned laws of gangland etiquette in that mainly they messed with their own kind while the general public didn’t even know they existed. This didn’t make them Robin Hood and his Merry Men – they were high-level criminals, whose numbers and activities were on the rise thanks to a new infusion of Russian boeviks, which literally translated into English as ‘warriors’. It seemed that Vic Ship, in his capacity as self-appointed Manchester godfather, had recently made contact with the Tatarstan Brigade in St Petersburg, a deadly cartel who had apparently been looking for an alliance in Britain to open new markets for their narcotics. If nothing else, the expectation of this hook-up was that Ship’s crew would start to display a greater degree of viciousness. The Russian mob weren’t slow to stomp on their opponents, and that would include policemen, judges, politicians, ordinary citizens, anyone. More to the point, with these Russian torpedoes in harness, alongside a merciless enforcer like Sagan, Ship’s outfit ought to be more than a match for anyone if it came to a genuine gangster war.

  As a result, Lee Shaughnessy – alleged head of the breakaway group in Bradburn, and Ship’s main rival in the town – could not have looked more out of his depth.

  In contrast to Ship’s brutish mugshot, Shaughnessy’s official photo depicted a much younger guy, thirty at the most and remarkably unblemished by his chosen lifestyle. There wasn’t a shaving nick to be seen, let alone a full-blown scar. In fact, with his neatly combed white-blond hair, grey eyes and refined, almost pleasant features, he was a boy next door, the guy you’d be totally happy with if your daughter brought him home. And yet his criminal record was ghastly. He was a Bradburn local, but he’d been in trouble all his life, with multiple convictions for burglary, robbery, car theft and assault. At the tender age of twelve, he’d raped and beaten the female warden in charge of the secure care-home where he was installed. All the credentials you needed, Heck supposed, to eventually work for someone like Vic Ship, though Shaughnessy had only come to the gang boss’s notice in his mid-twenties while serving four years for attacking a police observation post opposite his house at a time when he was suspected of planning a post office raid – two undercover officers were battered unconscious and fifty grand’s worth of surveillance kit was smashed up.

  But it was under Ship’s tutelage that Shaughnessy had really blossomed. Acting as the Manchester mob’s chief lieutenant in Bradburn, his brief had been to take charge of the local drugs trade, and lean on the pub and club owners for protection money – all of which he’d pulled off with aplomb. So much aplomb that he’d soon flooded the town’s estates with heroin and crack, while there was scarcely a nightspot where he didn’t have at least some interest. The readies had rolled in, but, perhaps inevitably, Shaughnessy had soon got tired of taking only a small cut when he could (and, in his mind, should) have been taking everything. So he’d recently broken away, taking many of Ship’s Bradburn business interests with him.

  GMP were fairly sure the recent war had commenced with the murders, on Shaughnessy’s orders, of the sex-shop managers and Ship loyalists Les Harris and Barrie Briggs, though there was some surprise that Shaughnessy had laid so open and violent a challenge at the door of the larger syndicate, especially as burning two men alive was an extreme punishment even by gangland standards – unless there’d been some provocation by Ship first which had not yet come to the police’s attention. One theory was that this use of fire was intended to be exemplary – in other words a message for any other Ship soldiers still remaining in Bradburn. GMP intelligence officers also felt that such savagery would not be completely atypical of Shaughnessy’s outfit, who were said to be wilder than the norm. Shaughnessy had achieved this by bringing together the worst of the worst in Bradburn’s previously disorganised criminal underworld, recruiting only the most dangerous and unstable individuals: alienated, disenfranchised young punks who were more than willing to rip the world a new one to get what they believed they were owed, and now, under his guidance, would have the knowhow and the means.

  As a footnote, Shaughnessy’s mob were also well armed. Ship’s crew produced firearms when it suited them, but only in certain circumstances. By contrast, Shaughnessy’s crew carried guns as a mark of their manhood, a status symbol by which they would demand respect.

  Heck shook his head as he perused this material.

  Bradburn, his home and a former colliery and mill-town – turned into Dodge City.

  It meant more drugs, more vice, more corruption, more opportunities for underachievers to break out of the poverty trap by embracing violence. On top of that, Shaughnessy’s crew in particular were leaning towards public displays of aggression. In their eyes, profit and discretion didn’t necessarily go together. To them, it was as much about status and bling and swaggering down streets that lived in terror of them.
And looking further down the page, it became apparent where this attitude, and the guns, had come from. Because Shaughnessy’s number two was another Vic Ship defector, a certain Marvin Langton. Heck had heard that name even in London.

  Before joining Ship, Langton, a one-time pro boxer, had been a member of the so-called Wild Bunch, a mixed-race Moss Side posse. They’d almost exclusively been drugs traffickers, but they’d believed strongly in firepower and turf wars, and had become notorious in Manchester’s poorest quarter for such American-style innovations as drive-by shootings, kerb-crunching – where the unlucky victim’s open mouth was slammed down on the edge of a kerbstone – and gang initiation rites involving the random murders of everyday citizens.

  Shaughnessy and his crew hadn’t quite resorted to that just yet, but with Langton on the team how far off could it actually be?

  The Wild Bunch had finally been taken down by GMP’s Serious Crimes Division, but somehow Langton, who even now was suspected of having been a senior killer in their ranks, had slipped through the prosecution net. He’d signed on for a brief time with Vic Ship, but then he too had got greedy and had relocated to Bradburn to serve as Lee Shaughnessy’s deputy. How long he’d be happy in that secondary role was anyone’s guess, but for the moment at least he made a set of very nasty opponents even nastier still.

  Heck was already wondering if Langton could be the lunatic behind the flamethrower. His mugshot depicted a tough-looking black dude in his early thirties. He was broad as an ox across the shoulders, and now in his post-sportsman days was inclined towards heaviness, though there was still something solid and virile about him. He had broad, even features, but wore his hair in a mop of dreads and his eyes burned with an odd metallic-grey lustre. His sneering half-smile revealed a single golden tooth.