The Burning Man

by Paul Finch

  ‘You actually thought that monster was me, Mark?’ Kayla asked in a feeble voice. She gave a chesty cough. ‘For real?’

  ‘I know … I’m sorry.’ Heck didn’t look at her. He could have kicked himself. What they’d faced inside the Lyceum had indeed been a monster. There was no arguing with the assertion. And that ought to have been the giveaway from the start. Because Heck had met guys like this before, and it was only then, when you were nose to nose with them, that you realised how much more than human they actually were. Whereas Kayla Green was … what? A miserable, lonely, disturbed girl.

  ‘Listen, Kayla – I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work in a few minutes.’

  ‘You certainly have!’ she said with unexpected passion. When she turned to look at him, her smoke-reddened eyes sparkled with tears. ‘You’ve got to catch that thing! You understand me, Mark? If it didn’t get burned up in there, you’ve got to catch it before it hurts anyone else!’

  He nodded dumbly. As he did, a muffled voice hailed him.

  ‘Detective!’

  The Fire Brigade station officer had removed his breathing mask and was advancing up the road. Heck climbed out and walked down towards him. They met on the outer cordon.

  ‘How we doing?’ Heck said.

  ‘All the fires are extinguished, but the place has been gutted.’ The officer, an older man with chubby, lined features, raised the dripping brim of his helmet and brushed sweat from his forehead.

  He lifted the tape so that Heck could climb underneath it. They walked back down the backstreet together, trying not to slip in deep pools of water. The grey Peugeot still sat outside the front of the cinema, which, ironically, remained untouched by the flames, though all its boarded doors had been jemmied open and were still belching smoke and steam, creating an otherworldly fog, in the midst of which the spectral forms of firefighters coiled their hoses and repacked equipment.

  They halted there.

  ‘The structure looks pretty solid,’ the station officer added. ‘Its bones are mainly concrete and steel. Can’t be sure how stable it is, though – at least until we get an engineer’s report. So no one can go inside it yet.’

  ‘Any trace of a body?’ Heck asked.

  ‘Not yet, but there’s something you may want to look at. Oh, what do you want us to do about this vehicle?’

  Heck eyed the Peugeot. With its gashed and crumpled bodywork, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘It’s now a crime scene,’ he said. ‘If you can get some kind of tent over it, that’d be excellent. And perhaps draw up a list of all your lads who’ve had physical contact with it.’

  The station officer nodded and signalled a fireman nearby to take care of it. Then he plodded on around the exterior of the burned-out cinema, Heck following. They took a narrow passage and, at the rear, entered what looked as if it had once been a loading yard, though it was now covered in a jungle of desiccated weeds. More smoke and steam surged across this from an aperture at the back of the main building, where a fire-door hung open on mangled hinges. Bits of shattered plank and chain lay scattered around it.

  ‘This was smashed open from the inside,’ the station officer said. He indicated the shiny edges of exposed metal. ‘Relatively recently.’ Again, the phantom forms of firefighters shuffled around inside. ‘Course, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen a few days ago.’

  ‘It didn’t,’ Heck said, recognising this as the cement-floored exit passage where he and Kayla had briefly been trapped. ‘I was in there earlier. It was closed and locked. You’re sure none of your lads broke this open?’

  ‘They’re the ones who reported it.’

  ‘What would it take to do this?’

  ‘Tools, I’d say. Someone’s gone at these hinges with a hammer and chisel.’

  ‘He had a hammer and chisel,’ Heck confirmed, remembering the Incinerator’s utility belt.

  It seemed as if the target had escaped after all.

  As Heck had pictured in his mind’s eye, the armour-clad maniac had simply walked back down through the blazing structure, trekking right across the white-hot heart of the giant furnace he had created, and calmly hacked his way out into the open air.

  It defied belief. It defied belief even more that Heck had ever considered Kayla Green a viable candidate for this role. As he pondered his error, he scoured the edges of the loading yard. The guy’s vehicle was out of bounds, which meant that he was now on foot. Not only that, he was still kitted out in his flameproof armour; he surely wouldn’t have wasted time hanging around here in order to strip it all off and bag it, so as he tried to flee the scene he’d have made a very clumsy and conspicuous figure. As Heck told himself this, his eyes fell on a lone set of tracks ploughing off through a mass of dripping bracken. He stooped down to it, immediately noting freshly snapped stalks and, underneath these, new green shoots that had been squashed into the mud.

  Some cumbersome person had passed this way very recently.

  ‘There’s a Detective Inspector Hayes en route here,’ he told the station officer as he straightened up again. ‘Other coppers too. But DI Hayes is the one I’d like you to liaise with. Can you direct her to that Peugeot? Tell her it’s Priority One.’

  The station officer looked surprised. ‘You not stopping?’

  ‘There’s something I need to do.’ Heck set off along the trampled pathway. ‘But I’ll be back ASAP.’

  It was all very well Gemma saying he needed to stand guard on the felon’s car, but this trail was fresh. A tracker dog would be perfect in this situ, but Heck didn’t have one, and if he hung around and waited for one, the heavy rain would progressively weaken the spoor.

  As he followed it, the trail wound through the bracken and joined a lower yard, probably an overspill car park, where he naturally lost sight of it, though from here he could see clear across the concrete and down an access ramp, which had long ago been fenced off at its lower end; this fence was a flimsy barricade made of ancient planking with a few coils of barbed wire along the top, and, by the looks of it, someone had kicked a man-sized hole in the middle.

  Heck quickly descended the ramp and stooped through the hole.

  On the other side, he found himself on a narrow road – if memory served, it was Norcliffe Avenue; beyond that lay a patch of wasteland covered in thorns and other deep scrub. From here, the fugitive could easily have been picked up by an accomplice in another vehicle. Just because Heck had suspected for some time that the Incinerator was a lone-wolf attacker, that didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t have back-up. If that was the case, he was now long gone. Even if it wasn’t, he could have run from here in almost any direction. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the steadily intensifying rainstorm was again reducing visibility to the minimum. In the last half-hour, the sky had changed from slate-grey to purple and finally to the near-darkness of late evening. Shafts of sodium-yellow streetlighting only half-pierced the downpour, which got even worse the further out into the open he blundered.

  Heck swore aloud. He was now completely saturated, hair plastered to his skull, clothing wet through to the skin. He stumbled across Norcliffe and onto the wasteland, blindly trusting that if the Incinerator was still on foot, he could not have got far – especially as at some point soon he would have had to stop in order to remove his armour. This patch of disused ground, with its straggling foliage standing in some cases almost to shoulder-height, would not have been a bad place for that. And in fact, no sooner had Heck begun looking around than he noticed a thread of stringy, blackish material snagged on a twisting clump of thorns.

  When he rolled it between his fingers, the black – which was char – smeared his fingertips. The fabric beneath possessed a curious texture and was silvery in colour.

  Almost immediately, he then spotted something else: a ground-level light glinting through the rain, some distance away but almost directly ahead of him. He knew what that was – the minicab office on the corner of Riverside Way. He hurried across the was
teland towards it, plunging knee-deep through more sodden vegetation. The rain still came down murderously, the wind whipping the greenery around his legs, so that he couldn’t easily tell if a fresh trail had been kicked through it, but the flamethrowing bastard had to have made a beeline for that minicab place. He hadn’t been picked up, so he needed wheels and he needed them quickly, and where else was he going to get some?

  As Heck slogged on, the phone jarred to life in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered.

  ‘Heck?’ It was a short, sharp bark, recognisable immediately as the voice of DI Katie Hayes.

  ‘Ma’am?’ he shouted.

  ‘You’re supposed to be meeting me at the Lyceum. What are you doing now?’

  ‘Pursuing a suspect across the open land to the northeast.’

  Her tone changed. ‘You got eyes on him?’

  ‘Not quite. I’m tracking him.’

  ‘You’re tracking … who are you, Davy bloody Crockett?’

  ‘Ma’am, the longer I chat to you, the further away he gets.’

  ‘Give me your exact location and I’ll catch up with you.’

  ‘Negative, ma’am, if you don’t mind. Someone’s got to take charge of that Peugeot. It’s the Incinerator’s car.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s something you were supposed to have done!’ she snapped back.

  ‘Ma’am, I had to do this while there was still a chance. Take care of the car for me, will you – please? It’s vital.’

  She hesitated before replying: ‘All right … I’ve got the car. But as soon as some support staff arrive here, I’m coming to find you, OK? That means you stay in bloody touch, Heck! Don’t you dare ignore my calls again! I know that’s what you were doing earlier.’

  ‘Look, it’s been a busy day –’

  ‘Don’t give me any bullshit either.’ And she cut the call.

  Past the wasteland, Heck took a footbridge over the River Pennington. The Pennington was now a boiling flood, surging along just a few feet beneath him, but he made it to the far bank without trouble, and there joined Riverside Way, on the other side of which stood a clutch of indistinguishable buildings. The minicab office sat in the middle of them, the light he’d seen penetrating dimly through its fogged-up glass door.

  Bells jangled as Heck barged unceremoniously inside. Here, there was a small waiting area, comprising a damp, stained carpet and a bare wooden bench. On one side of the room stood a counter with a sheet of security glass on top, behind which an elderly, bespectacled woman sat next to a battered radio console.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she immediately said, her voice crunchy through a static-ridden intercom in the middle of the screen. ‘We’ve no more cars for the foreseeable. They’re all out, and a couple have even got stuck. There’s flooding in some parts of town.’

  ‘Someone’s just been in here, haven’t they?’ Heck said, breathless.

  ‘That’s right,’ she replied patiently. ‘He took the last car available. The driver was Tim. But Tim’s knocking off after this fare. So like I say, there’s nothing I can do to help you.’

  Heck approached the counter. ‘I need to know what this last passenger was like?’

  She eyed him warily, for the first time seeming to notice his dirty, bedraggled state. ‘I’m not obliged to give information like that out. I’m sorry.’

  Heck pressed his warrant card against the glass. ‘Detective Sergeant Heckenburg. If you want Tim to be safe, you’d better tell me everything you know right now.’

  The woman looked more than a little perturbed. ‘What is this, please?’

  ‘We don’t have time for Q&As, love. You need to answer my questions.’

  She worked her lips together, still uncertain. ‘He was a foreigner – I could tell that much.’

  ‘Foreigner how?’

  ‘He had an accent.’

  ‘What kind of accent?’

  ‘I don’t know … Eastern European maybe.’

  ‘Eastern European?’ Heck’s scalp began to prickle. ‘Russian perhaps?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Nothing special about his face … apart from it was red. From rushing to get out of the rain, I presumed. Normal height and shape, but short, bristly hair. Like a buzz-cut. He was wearing light clothes. I remember thinking that was a bit weird in this weather. He was soaked, of course.’

  ‘What do you mean, “light clothes”?’

  ‘Lightweight running top,’ she said. ‘Joggers, that sort of thing. No coat or anorak.’

  Heck was bewildered. Surely the maniac hadn’t ditched his whole kit. ‘Was he carrying anything?’

  She nodded. ‘A big, grey-coloured sports bag. Looked really heavy, like it was full of stuff. Clanked too … you know, as if there were tools in it.’

  Heck’s thoughts raced as he tried to fit what few facts he possessed together. ‘Tattoos by any chance?’

  Another nod. ‘Lots. Like I say, he was wearing light clothing. I mean, he had this running top on, but it was sleeveless.’ Now seeming to have decided that she could trust Heck, she was starting to prove garrulous. ‘He wasn’t just wet from the rain either; he was all sweaty. I suppose, he could’ve been out running …’

  ‘What about the tattoos?’ Heck persisted.

  ‘They were all down his arms and around his neck.’

  ‘Would you remember any of them?’

  ‘That’d be easy,’ she said. ‘They were spider webs. That’s all they were. All over him.’

  Heck gazed at her through the smeary glass. He’d been expecting this revelation for the last few seconds. But even so, it sent another chill through him.

  ‘You’re sure spider webs?’ he finally said. ‘There’s no doubt in your mind?’

  ‘I know spider webs when I see them, love. And like I say, he was covered. I mean, one time I wouldn’t have given him a car, looking like that, but these days you see all sorts, don’t you?’

  ‘Where was Tim taking him to?’

  ‘He just said to take him up the Old Town. Said he’d give him the exact directions when they got there. Listen …’ She looked concerned again, probably because she could see the anxiety in Heck’s face. ‘You said Tim might be in danger? I hope not, because he’s a lovely young fella and he’s got a young family too …’

  She left the point hanging, seeking reassurance. But Heck could provide none.

  How did you tell someone face to face that there was no possible way their friend was going to make it? The Incinerator was Grigori Kalylyn, aka Nayka. The sort of brutal enforcer whom even the underworld walked in fear of; a certified crazy; a homicidal maniac who knew no limits, in fact who, as a brodyaga, would be expressly permitted by his paymasters, if not encouraged, to push the boundaries of violence to achieve his ends. That enough was reason to write Tim off. But there were other more valid reasons too: Tim would now know where Nayka was headed for. Tim would be able to identify Nayka. This latter applied to the woman behind the counter too; in fact, it was a miracle she was still alive, though in all probability the reinforced glass was responsible for that. Nayka had known the cops would be close behind. Taking time to silence this particular witness would have been a luxury he probably couldn’t afford, though of course if he managed to elude his pursuers tonight, she might still be dead by this time tomorrow.

  ‘Excuse me … Sergeant?’ She interrupted Heck’s thoughts. ‘You said Tim might be in danger. Shall I call him on the radio, and tell him to come back?’

  Heck still couldn’t answer. He could picture the Russian assassin seated silently behind the innocent taxi driver, his terrible weapon and bundle of protective clothing all wrapped up in his sports bag; essential tools of his game, but a damning indictment if found in his possession.

  No … there was no chance that poor Tim would live through this.

  And no way for him to wriggle out of it, even if he was given a heads-up. Nayka would take no chances. Any curious behaviour from his d
river, such as an unexpected change of direction, and that was the end of him.

  ‘Does Tim have an earpiece?’ Heck said. ‘So you can speak to him privately? Or will the whole cab hear it?’

  ‘The passengers hear our transmissions,’ the woman said, increasingly looking and sounding alarmed. ‘But what could we ever have done about that? We’ve never had this problem …’

  It was the ultimate dilemma.

  ‘Give me the registration of Tim’s car,’ Heck said. ‘And its description.’

  The woman did, and he moved across the office before phoning Bradburn Comms and passing the info on, at the same time supplying Nayka’s name and description as a suspect in the Incinerator murders.

  ‘I want you to call Tim,’ he then said, turning back to the frightened woman. ‘Just ask him how he’s coping with the weather, where he’s up to. We need to know where he is at this moment. But make it sound chatty, casual … you understand?’

  She nodded, twisting the microphone up to her mouth.

  ‘Casual, yeah!’ Heck reminded her, one palm flat on the glass.

  She nodded again, licked her lips, and hit the transmission button, enquiring about Tim’s location and his ETA. The response that came back was broken because of a weak signal, but it sounded chirpy enough.

  ‘Yeah, Glad … I’m on Maldon Hill. Slow going in this bloody rain. I’ve never seen anything like it, over.’

  ‘You’re having no other problems though?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ the driver replied. ‘We’re on high ground here, so no real trouble.’

  ‘All right, take care,’ the woman said. ‘Keep me updated, over.’

  ‘Wilco.’

  She glanced hopefully at Heck. ‘Everything sounds like it’s all right …’

  ‘Everything’s all right because Tim’s passenger needs to get somewhere. That’s the only reason Tim is still alive.’

  ‘Oh, my God … look, I feel awful not warning him, not giving him some kind of –’

  ‘You warn him and it’s his death warrant. You understand?’ Heck met her gaze through the grubby glass with his best interrogation-room stare. ‘What’s your name?’