by Paul Finch
She pondered this, tapping her desk with a pen.
‘The way I see it,’ he added, ‘if they really wanted to get rid of him – if the whole object of the exercise was to eliminate Harold Lansing – surely they’d opt for a method with a more certain outcome?’
‘But if the greater priority was making it look like an accident?’
‘How much of a priority can that be? You want him dead. You don’t want him injured, or shaken up, or worse still, driving off to work without a worry in the world because no dickhead in a sports car happened to come along at the right time.’
‘Suppose they locked him in the car, waited till the right moment, and pushed it out?’
‘The accident report said the car was being driven at the time of impact. The key was still in the ignition.’
‘Okay, but there are several improbables where your theory’s concerned.’
‘Such as?’
‘You’re suggesting someone did this for a lark,’ she said. ‘That they covered his mirror, hoping he’d drive out in front of a car – any passing car – and they got lucky. But how does that fit in with the toy aeroplane? They missed him the first time, so they clearly tried again. However you try and package it, Heck, your crazy jokers aren’t just picking people at random. They clearly had it in for Harold Lansing.’
‘That’s a good point.’
‘Thank you.’
Not that Heck felt much better having acknowledged this. Mainly because there seemed to be even less logic to it. They had two guys who dressed like Laurel and Hardy to carry out a joke-type murder. And yet because they’d missed him the first time, they went back for a second bite. Perhaps they’d have gone back for a third if the road accident thing hadn’t worked – either because the desire to kill Lansing was of overriding importance to them (even though that didn’t seem to fit in with the ‘comedic’ style of the attack) or maybe, simply, because they didn’t like to be thwarted; because they’d derived so much pleasure and satisfaction from the planning and execution of such an atrocity that failure to complete it was never going to be an option. Then again, maybe it was both – and how far beyond the bounds of normality would that put them?
‘Gail?’ A woman wearing a trouser suit had appeared at their desk; she was fortyish, tall and raw-boned, her fluffy mat of mouse-brown hair held in place by several messily arranged clips. ‘A DS Hart rang you from the Financial Intelligence Unit.’
‘Bloody great!’ Gail exclaimed. ‘So I’ve missed him?’
The woman handed her a note. ‘Here’s his direct line if you want to call him back. He’s in till five.’
Gail took it. ‘Thanks Sally.’
‘DS Hart?’ Heck mused as the woman walked away. ‘Never met him.’
‘Are you going to hang around there all day?’ Gail asked tersely.
‘Aren’t we supposed to be working together?’
‘If you’ve got a lead on these practical jokers, why don’t you go and follow it?’ She grabbed her landline and tapped in the number. ‘I mean, no offence, but I never really knew why we needed Scotland Yard’s help in the first place. And as I see it, there’s even less reason for you to be here now. This is not part of a series, it’s not a terrorist plot, we’re not dealing with some maniac rapist or kidnapper. It’s a straight-up murder-one, and I’m all over it – oh yeah, DS Hart?’ Her tone promptly thawed. ‘DC Honeyford here, at Reigate Hall Police Station.’ She sat forward, grabbed a pen and smiled – an attractive smile, Heck thought enviously, not yet having been treated to one himself. ‘Yeah, fine, how are you?’
Heck glanced at his watch, and seeing that it was almost one o’clock decided to head upstairs to the canteen for a bite of lunch. On the way he passed the tall woman referred to as Sally, who was leafing through the contents of a filing cabinet. She offered her hand. ‘Hi – Sally Bullock.’
‘Oh, hi.’ He shook hands. ‘DS Heckenburg.’
‘I know.’
‘DC …?’
‘No.’ She chuckled. ‘Strictly a civvie, Sarge. CID admin, but anything I can help you with, just give me a shout.’
‘Thanks.’ Heck felt immediately warm towards her. Aside from Will Royton, who’d been polite enough about Heck’s presence here, the rest of the staff at Reigate Hall had been studiedly indifferent to him – except for Gail Honeyford of course, who still seemed to be shifting between relaxed tolerance and surly hostility.
‘So, how’s it going?’ she asked.
‘Well …’ He glanced back to the corner where Gail was chatting animatedly on the phone. ‘I thought we were starting to get somewhere. Suddenly I’m not so sure.’
Sally Bullock smiled. ‘Don’t take it to heart. You’ve caught her during a bad week … maybe a bad month, maybe even a bad year.’
‘Sorry, I don’t get you?’
Sally indicated the swing doors at the entrance to the office, and led him through them into the adjoining corridor. ‘Gail’s a great young detective,’ she said confidentially. ‘She’s sharp and she works hard, but she’s going through a bad patch. Her recent ex is a guy called Ron Pavey.’
‘Yeah, I’ve met him.’
‘If you’ve met him, you won’t need me to tell you what an arse he is. “Control freak” doesn’t cover it. He has this idea that he helped Gail with her career – and who knows, maybe he did; she was in uniform when they were first going out together. But they’ve been history for six months now, and he still behaves as if she owes him. They’re forever having spats.’
‘Well, that’s a sad story,’ Heck replied, wondering why he was being told all this, and deducing that Sally Bullock was a friend of Gail’s and had taken it on herself to unofficially apologise. ‘But we’re investigating a murder here, and it would be a pity if she was to let personal issues interfere with that.’
Sally shook her head adamantly. ‘She won’t, don’t worry. Look, I’ve known Gail since she was a young PC. She’s dead keen on this job, and ambitious to go places. She’ll get her priorities right, trust me.’
‘Good to know.’ Heck moved to the foot of the stairs. ‘The sooner the better, mind you.’
Sally nodded again. Heck smiled and headed upstairs. As he did, his mobile bleeped in his pocket. He put it to his ear. ‘DS Heckenburg?’
‘Heck, it’s me.’ It was Gemma Piper.
‘Ma’am?’
‘Where we up to?’
‘Well … I’m pretty sure Lansing’s death’s a homicide.’ He reached the top of the stairs and paused. ‘That said, I’m not one hundred per cent there’s anything it for us, and neither are Reigate CID.’
‘They’re on board?’
‘Sort of. They’ve already got someone investigating it as a murder.’
‘Oh?’ Gemma sounded nonplussed. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I’m guessing that as soon as you expressed interest, they got interested too.’
‘So are you saying you want to come home?’
He hesitated. ‘Not yet … if you leave me with it a couple more days I’ll have a better idea.’
‘What’s your gut feeling?’
He walked through the station rec room, where various uniforms lounged about, shooting pool or munching sandwiches while watching television. The canteen doors were located on the far side.
‘For the first time in a while, I don’t have one,’ he said.
‘That bothers me, Heck.’
‘Bothers me too. I can’t say this one falls within our normal remit, ma’am. But there’s nothing routine about it, I can tell you that much.’ He entered the canteen, at which point further words briefly failed him.
‘You still there?’ Gemma asked.
‘Yeah – erm, can I call you back.’
‘No problem. Just keep me informed, yeah?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Heck said, still distracted by the sight of the newspaper cuttings plastered all over the canteen noticeboard.
Arresting officer abuses family and friends
/> Beneath that headline was a grainy image depicting Heck and Alan Devlin head-to-head in the lobby at Nottingham Crown Court. Various officials were holding the two men apart, and Heck was in the midst of shouting and pointing an accusatory finger.
Heck didn’t need to scan through the text underneath to know that it would give a one-sided account of the confrontation. Several times now, Devlin had given press interviews to the effect that Heck had blamed Jimmy Hood’s loved ones for his Nottingham crime spree rather than the mental health authorities who had ignored his deteriorating condition for so many years.
Cops tried to kill my mate
This was the header on an even larger clipping, and it featured two further photographs, the first portraying Heck – again as he left the court, his face written with an angry snarl – the second portraying Devlin, posing some time later and looking suitably mournful; with his thick-lensed glasses, he’d even managed to adopt a bookish air.
Heck had seen this particular item on its day of publication. It elaborated on Devlin’s accusation that Heck had contrived a motorcycle accident to capture Jimmy Hood, even though at the time Hood was deemed to be innocent. Again, Devlin went on at boring length about society being to blame for Hood’s crimes. Heck felt much about the article now as he’d felt then – that there were two sides to every story, but that it still set his blood boiling when certain sections of the press so quickly changed allegiances just to secure a headline. Not that it served any purpose getting angry now.
He glanced around. There were several other people in the canteen: a few more off-duty uniforms grouped around tables, eating their lunch; a couple of traffic wardens doing the same; even one or two plain clothes. No one would look at him. The same applied to the two ladies behind the serving hatch. One was engrossed in mopping down the aluminium counter while the other had her back turned as she made slow, careful adjustments to a chalkboard menu. In the far corner of the room, DS Ron Pavey sat alone, cupping a mug of coffee. He gazed at nothing, a vague smile playing around his thick, smug lips.
Heck smiled too and strode to the hatch, where he placed an order and made idle pleasantries with the two ladies. There were occasions when he hated this job and some of the people in it almost as much as the scum they pursued. But there was a time and place for showing that. And this wasn’t one of them.
Chapter 12
Sally Bullock looked puzzled. ‘Any strange or bizarre accidental deaths?’
Heck stood in the entrance to her small, cramped office. ‘Force-wide if possible.’
‘Force-wide?’ She sounded dropped-on.
‘Going back twelve months.’
‘Oh my goodness.’ She sat back from her computer.
The CID Admin office was an annexe to the main CID office, but it only had a small window overlooking the local green, and this was half concealed by potted plants. The room was lined floor to ceiling by shelves loaded with binders and folders, all bulging with paperwork. One window panel was open, but it was a warm day outside, so this didn’t afford much relief from the close, stuffy atmosphere.
Sally gave it some thought. ‘Well, unless there are suspicious circumstances, they won’t be logged on our database. But I can cross-ref with the Coroner’s Office files, and see what they’ve got.’
‘That’d be good,’ Heck said gratefully.
‘We’re not just talking RTAs?’
‘No. Anything … so long as it’s weird.’
‘Perhaps you can define “weird”?’
Heck realised that he couldn’t, under which circumstance he was asking far too much of the admin officer. It was self-evident that she was trying to be helpful, but she also looked bewildered. This really was ‘wing and prayer’ stuff. Going through a list of fatal accidents in as highly populated a police force area as Surrey would likely take hours, but add to that the problem of not knowing exactly what you were looking for; well, it was plain selfishness to ask someone else to do it for him.
‘Perhaps it’s better if I just set my laptop up in here, and do it myself, eh?’
She smiled, relieved. ‘Might be easier.’
Heck took up residence at a small side table, on a bum-numbingly uncomfortable stool, and once he’d linked through successfully and had refined his search to ‘Accidents’ spent the next two and a half hours perusing the Surrey Coroner’s Officer’s files, assessing a wide variety of unfortunate deaths. The vast majority were connectable only by the tragedy of their circumstances, and in many cases by their sheer banality. The ordinariness of the events surrounding incidents that had proved so devastating to families and loved ones was depressing: a middle-aged man who fell off the roof of his house while trying to adjust his television aerial; a fairground attendant who attempted to make repairs to a generator in pouring rain; a secretary in an office car park, smoking at the same time as emptying a container of petrol into her Ford Fiesta’s fuel tank; children cycling through traffic intersections without looking; children playing unsupervised close to deep water; an old couple who went to bed one night without realising they had a gas leak; a young couple who went to bed without remembering to blow out their Christmas candles …
For all that, however, there were three that did catch Heck’s eye – mainly because, like the two attempts on Harold Lansing’s life, there was something unlikely, not to say sinister, about them. Heck wasn’t the only person to feel this, because when he mentioned them to Sally she remembered two of them straight away, pointing out that on both occasions the coroner had not been convinced of their accidental status and had returned open verdicts. In both those cases crime reports had been filed, and one had eventually led to a man being imprisoned.
‘The victim in that case was a guy called Freddie Upton,’ Heck said, reading from his laptop screen. ‘A sales rep from Wales. He died last September near Dorking, when he was impaled through the back after the lorry behind him braked hard and its cargo of loose scaffolding catapulted forward. The lorry driver claimed he had to brake because an unknown cyclist deliberately swerved in front of him.’
‘That was a shocker,’ Sally said as she printed off the relevant documentation. ‘The lorry driver got two years for causing death by dangerous driving.’ She consulted the paper as it scrolled from the printer. ‘His name was Gordon Meredith. Says here that he couldn’t explain how his load had become unsafe, but insisted that it was secured properly when he set out that morning.’
‘And the mystery cyclist was never traced,’ Heck added.
‘That’s correct. Meredith was never able to produce any witness who even remembered seeing a cyclist there.’
Heck read on. ‘I see Meredith is now in Wayland …’
‘Category C. Shouldn’t get into too much trouble there. Ruined his reputation, of course. I mean, if it wasn’t his fault, he’s paid a terrible price.’
‘Not as terrible as Freddie Upton.’
Sally handed him the second printout. This one dated to the previous January and concerned a Leatherhead pet shop owner named Larry Briggs, who had initially been arrested on suspicion of murder, though after some investigation was released without charge. In his case, two local thieves – their names Richard Dasby and Darrel Degton – were bitten to death by poisonous spiders after they stole Briggs’s car. Briggs was first arrested as it was suspected that he might have deliberately left several dangerous specimens from his private collection – all of whose highly toxic venom was found riddling the two corpses – in unsecured containers inside the vehicle in an effort to ambush thieves, though Briggs maintained throughout that he had lost this valuable stock during a burglary at his shop several months earlier.
‘Briggs was held in custody for two days because it was felt he had motive,’ Sally remarked. ‘Apparently thieves had been terrorising that neighbourhood for months. As I say, his own premises had been burgled, and he’d had his car pinched before.’
‘Perfect fall guy,’ Heck said. ‘I see Briggs still lost his dangerous animals’
licence.’
‘Well … there were doubts about him even after he was released without charge. People wondered if it had been an accident because his stock was inadequately stored. You know, he’d been transporting the creatures somewhere and they’d escaped.’ She handed him the third printout. This was a single sheet, which she’d run off direct from the Coroner’s Officer’s record. ‘Can’t help you with this one, I’m afraid. First time I’ve seen it; which is no surprise if there was no criminal investigation.’
Heck reread the document, hair prickling as he pondered its sheer implausibility.
A farmer named Mervin Thornton, who owned extensive land near Woldingham, North Surrey, had failed to come in for his tea one evening. His son searched for him, and when he found his dead body almost had a heart attack at the condition it was in. It seemed that Mervin Thornton had been attempting to reinflate one of the tyres on his tractor. The police were duly called, but by the state and position of Thornton’s body they concluded that he’d slipped in fresh-churned mud and had fallen heavily on the gas cylinder, tearing the air hose loose and at the same time penetrating his abdomen with its steel nozzle. Compressed gas had thus flowed into his body, swelling it grotesquely and crushing his internal organs. Thornton’s failure to extricate himself from the nozzle was never fully explained, though an assumption was made that he’d knocked himself senseless when he’d fallen over. Heck couldn’t help wondering about that. How senseless did you have to be not to respond when a stream of inrushing gas was pumping you up like a football?
Though perhaps the bigger question – if all this stuff actually was connected to Harold Lansing – was just how warped did you have to be to perpetrate it?
Heck had encountered all kinds of creepy killers in his time, but as a rule the creepiest were those who prized the chase more than the catch. These were the slow hunters, the patient planners, the ones who set themselves complex tasks and gradually brought them to completion, revelling in their own genius as they did. Unless he was way off in his assessment, this was very possibly what they had here – though in some ways it could be even worse. The pet shop thing, not to mention the hideousness of the actual attacks – death by inflation, by slow burning, by poisonous spider – all that was bad enough, but apparently other buttons were being pushed as well. Finding pleasure in horrific suffering? Finding comedy value in it? There was abnormal, and then there was super-abnormal.