The Burning Man Page 4

  Sagan remained rigid. From this distance, his face was unreadable. Dots of yellow street-light glinting from the lenses of his glasses gave him a non-human aura. His right hand opened and the shotgun clattered to the floor.

  ‘Keep those mitts where I can see ’em!’ Shawna shouted, approaching from behind. ‘You all right, Heck?’

  ‘Never better,’ he called, dusting himself down.

  ‘Kick the weapon back towards me,’ Shawna said, addressing Sagan again. ‘Backheel it … don’t turn around. And keep your hands spread where I can see them … in case you didn’t realise it, you lowlife shithead, you’re under arrest!’

  Sagan did exactly as she instructed, the shotgun bouncing past her and vanishing beneath the van. Now Heck could see him more clearly: his black overcoat, a black roll-neck sweater, black leather gloves, black trousers and shoes, his pale face, the thinning fair hair on top, and those gold-rimmed glasses. Yet still the killer was inscrutable, his features a waxen, sweat-soaked mask.

  ‘DC McCluskey on a lorry park off Camberwell Grove,’ Shawna said into her radio. ‘One in custody. Repeat, one in custody.’

  But only now, as she angled around her captive, did Heck spy the possible danger.

  Her Glock was trained squarely on Sagan’s body, but side-on, the target’s width had reduced and Sagan’s left hand was suddenly only inches from the muzzle of her weapon – and it was with this hand that he lunged, slapping the pistol aside, and in the same motion, spinning and slamming his other hand, now balled into a fist and yet glittering as if encased in steel – a knuckleduster, Heck realised with horror – straight into Shawna’s face.

  Her head hinged backward and she dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

  ‘Shawna!’ Heck bellowed.

  But he was still forty yards away. He raised his pistol, but again had to hesitate – Sagan had dropped to a crouch alongside the policewoman’s crumpled form, merging them both into one. Heck dashed forward as the killer flipped off Shawna’s hat and smashed his reinforced fist several times more into her head and face. Then he snatched up her Glock and fired it once into her chest, before leaping to his feet and bolting towards the parked van.

  Heck slid to a halt and fired. The van’s nearside front window imploded as Sagan scarpered around it, returning fire over his shoulder, and proving uncannily accurate. Nine-millimetre shells ricocheted from the ground just in front of Heck. He fired back, but Sagan was already on the other side of the vehicle and shielded from view. A door slammed closed somewhere along the front of the building. Heck scrambled forward, but kept low. The killer was now indoors; he might have any number of concealed vantage points from which to aim.

  ‘DC McCluskey down with head injuries and a possible gunshot wound,’ Heck shouted into his radio, skidding to one knee alongside her, still scanning the grimy windows overhead.

  In the partial protection of the van, Shawna lay limp. Heck tore open her jacket and gasped with relief when he saw the slug flattened on her Kevlar vest – it hadn’t penetrated. However, her face was a mass of bloodied pulp, her splayed hair glutinous with gore. He probed for the carotid artery. Her throat was slick with blood, but at last he found a pulse.

  An engine now growled to life somewhere inside. Fresh sweat pinpricked Heck’s brow.

  As he leaped to his feet, a pair of double doors some twenty yards to the left exploded outward in a shower of splinters and rusted hinges, and a powerful SUV came barrelling through. Heck backed away from Shawna’s body to get a clear shot. But Sagan was already firing through the open passenger window, wildly, blindly. Heck let off one round before diving for cover, aiming at the SUV’s front tyre but missing by centimetres. In the process he caught a fleeting glimpse of the vehicle’s make and model. A Jeep Cherokee, dark-blue in colour with bull bars across the front, but with its headlights switched off it was impossible to make out the registration number. It was towing a gleaming white caravan, which tilted onto one wheel as the car swerved away across the wasteland, finally righting itself again as it accelerated into the darkness. Heck gave chase for several yards. He even got off one final shot, hitting the caravan’s rear door, which judging by the lack of visible damage, was armoured. And then the target was gone, vanishing around the corner of a warehouse, the roar of its engine rapidly diminishing.

  Heck got urgently onto the radio, relaying as much info as he could while rushing back to Shawna. As before, she lay perfectly still, and now the blood had congealed in her hair.

  When he felt her carotid a second time, there was no pulse.

  Chapter 3

  Calum and Dean walked along King’s Parade as if they owned it, which, to some degree, they did. There were bouncers on all the doors to the numerous bars and nightclubs; surly, brutish types in monkey suits, with gap-toothed grins and dented noses. But if Calum and Dean wanted admission, there was only a small handful who’d say ‘no’. Most of the doormen, if they weren’t involved with them professionally, knew about them by reputation, sufficiently enough to know that serious trouble was easy enough to come by in Bradburn without inviting it.

  Not that, in a normal time and place, Calum and Dean were even close to being adequately attired to gain entry to any nightspot which held itself in reasonable regard.

  The former, who was heavyset – more than was good for a guy in his early/mid-twenties – wore only a pair of grey shell-pants and grey and orange Nike training shoes. He’d removed his ragged pink sweater and now wore it draped across his shoulders, exposing acres of flabby, pallid flesh, particularly around the midriff, not to mention the usual plethora of tasteless tattoos. Whether he felt the evening chill was unclear. In all probability, thanks to his system being overloaded with drugs and drink, he probably didn’t think that he did, though if his body-odour permitted you to get close enough to appraise him in detail, you’d note that the small, pink nipples on his sagging man-boobs stood stiffly to attention.

  Dean was no less dressed-down for the occasion. In his case it was blue and blood-red Nikes and emerald green tracksuit pants with white piping down the sides, a stained string-vest and thick gold neck-chains. Such bling was Dean’s most outstanding feature, cheap and nasty though it all looked, especially the sovereign rings on his fingers and diamond studs in his ears.

  The irony was that, despite all this, neither of the two lads looked especially menacing.

  Calum’s features were rounded and pudgy, with a small nose, a tiny mouth and button-like Teddy Bear eyes. If it hadn’t been for the shaven ginger thatch on his cranium and his various nicks and scars, you could almost have said that he looked soft. Dean, on the other hand, was thin and weasel-like, but closer inspection would reveal that he was wiry rather than bony; he was certainly no weakling. Under his greasy mat of blond locks and between a pair of jug-handle ears, his face was also scarred, his features oddly lopsided, the mouth forever twisted into a weird, lupine grin. Dean didn’t look soft; more like strange.

  And yet they swaggered side-by-side through the Saturday night revellers thronging the pavements – the high-heeled, mini-skirted girls, the boys and men in polo-shirts and jeans – and if an alleyway didn’t clear for them, they cleared one for themselves. This only involved pushing and shoving, but it was still early, not yet midnight.

  It finally got tastier in the cellar bar at Juicy Lucy’s, where a gold and crimson lightshow filled the crammed, sweaty vault with strobe-like patterns. They knocked back several more beers each, after which Calum decided that the teenager next to him had nudged his drinking-arm once too often. The lad was in the midst of smooching a shapely platinum blonde in the tallest shoes and tiniest, most figure-hugging dress either Calum or Dean had ever seen, but even so he got socked in the side of his kisser, and a real bone-cruncher it was.

  Dean guffawed; he could have sworn that the way the blonde tart jerked her head back, he’d filled her mouth with blood and teeth.

  At The Place, the door-staff again let them in without a word. The
y pushed their way through the dizzying throng to the bar. Here, an older guy with iron grey curls, a leather waistcoat over his flowery shirt and a large earring which looked ridiculous on a codger of his age, shouted an order to the barmaid louder than Dean did. So Calum yanked the surprised guy around by his collar and head-butted him, splitting the bridge of his nose crosswise. The guy’s friends, all equally grey-haired and raddle-cheeked, crowded forward belligerently, and so Dean glassed one of them.

  This incident looked set to turn into a right old fracas, and another punch was swiftly thrown, but this had nothing whatever to do with Calum or Dean – as usual in Bradburn on a wild session-night, when things kicked off they kicked off generally. It didn’t matter for what reason.

  Their next fight, if you could call it that, occurred on the corner of Westgate Street and Audley Way. There was a taxi rank there. Few were queuing yet, most brawling revellers choosing to stay out into the early hours of the morning. That said, one young bloke had hit it too hard too early, and now leaned against the taxi rank pole, being copiously and volubly sick.

  Calum and Dean were passing at the time. They were several feet away, but Dean decided that several flecks of puke had spattered his already dingy, beer-stained trousers. So they assaulted the guy together, Dean catching him under the jaw with a roundhouse, Calum kicking his head like a football after he landed on the pavement.

  ‘Yeeeaaah, bro … goal!’ Dean hooted. ‘Great fucking goal!’

  *

  Calum and Dean did all these things because they could.

  There was no other reason. It gained them nothing except perhaps more notoriety.

  But that didn’t matter where Calum and Dean were concerned. It was a very personal thing for these two lads. It was about being who they were – exactly who they were. Expressing themselves in precisely the way they wanted to, with no one else doing anything to stop it.

  But eventually even they had to draw the line somewhere. They’d been drinking since lunchtime after all, and were completely sozzled even by their normal standards.

  They ambled away from club-land, the Saturday night hubbub fading behind them, the jaunty music gradually losing all definition, dwindling into a dull, distant, repetitive caterwaul.

  In the Parish Church yard, they took a minute out.

  This was a cut-through between shops and offices during the day, but now it lay quiet under the phosphorescent glow of a single streetlamp, which glimmered eerily on the flagstones where so many epitaphs had once been engraved and yet now were almost indiscernible through age. Bradburn Parish Church dominated the peaceful scene, its innumerable gargoyles jutting out overhead. To the right of it, the so-called Bank Chambers, a row of counting houses, brokerages and solicitors’ offices, led away down an arched passage, the entrance to which was opaque with night-mist.

  The sight of that reminded them both, even if only internally, that their bodies were rapidly cooling. Unconsciously, Calum scratched his itchy blubber before pulling his sweater back on. Together, they slumped down onto the War Memorial steps in the middle of the yard, Calum licking at the fresh but stinging notches on his knuckles. Before long, a soft snore issued from Dean’s puckered, spittle-slathered mouth. Dead to the world, he’d tilted back against the orderly lists of heroic names inscribed on brass plaques around the base of the Memorial’s obelisk.

  ‘Dean!… fuck’s sake!’ Calum nudged him with his elbow. ‘Gi’ us a fucking smoke!’

  Dean muttered in response, and slapped at his right hip pocket.

  Calum rummaged in there and found a single crooked joint. It was half-smoked already and bent at a right angle. He straightened it out, stuck it between his lips and dug deeper into his friend’s pocket, finding and discarding all kinds of crumby, sticky, manky crap, before retrieving a lighter.

  And only then did he become aware that someone was standing in front of him.

  Calum glanced up, vision blurring as his eyes tried to focus through the late-night gloom. The newcomer blotted out all light from the single lamp, casting a deep shadow over the lads. But he wasn’t completely in silhouette. Calum could distinguish dark clothing and the bland, bespectacled features of someone he thought he’d spotted a couple of times in the bars earlier.

  ‘Good evening,’ the newcomer said.

  ‘Who the fuck are you supposed to be?’ Calum sniggered. ‘Clark fucking Kent?’

  ‘I’ve got a message for your boss.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘Here are my credentials.’ The newcomer jammed a black-gloved hand into his overcoat pocket, but when he brought it out again, it held a wadded rag, which, as he leaned down, he squashed against Calum’s face, using his other hand to clamp the back of Calum’s head, allowing no room at all for manoeuvre.

  The young hoodlum tried to struggle, but what remained of his strength and awareness deserted him remarkably quickly.

  ‘Now, don’t breathe too deeply,’ the man said, lowering him to the ground. ‘I need you conscious again very soon. And you –’ He turned to Dean, who, more through some basic animal instinct than anything else, was trying to shake himself awake. The newcomer reached for something he’d laid against the steps. It was half a pool cue, the slimmer end neatly sawn off. ‘You can have a longer snooze.’

  He swung it single-handed. It clattered against the corner of Dean’s skull, sending him half spinning into oblivion, but not entirely.

  Dean dropped panting onto his hands and knees, blood spiralling down from his right temple, which suddenly felt as though it had turned to sponge.

  ‘You, you fuck …’ Dean stammered. ‘You fuck … ’

  ‘Thick-skulled, eh? Probably should’ve expected that.’

  The next blow came two-handed, down and then up, golf club style. THWACK!

  Dean twirled over onto his back, head clanging like a bell, hands hanging flipper-like at his sides – in which prone, helpless posture the newcomer kicked him a couple of good ones in the face. But still, somehow, Dean – probably because he was insulated against real pain by his own inebriation – clung to consciousness.

  ‘You not … not …’ he gurgled bloodily.

  ‘Thicker than average, eh?’ The newcomer sounded impressed. ‘OK …’

  He re-wadded the rag he’d used on Calum, took a small bottle from his coat pocket, unscrewed the cap and tilted it over.

  ‘… not know … who … we are?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ The newcomer knelt alongside him. ‘That’s the whole point.’

  He crammed the foul-smelling, chemical-soaked pad onto Dean’s broken nose and mangled mouth, and held it there for as long as he needed to.

  Chapter 4

  Heck skidded to a halt in the car park behind a line of Brixton shops, his tyres screeching so loud it sent several scrawny pigeons flapping from the surrounding rooftops. He jumped from his silver Megane and trotted up the outside steps to the concrete balcony serving a row of cheap and nasty flats on the upper floor. He hammered on the door to number 3.

  Half a minute passed before a dull, muffled voice asked, ‘Yeah … who is it?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Heckenburg. Open up.’

  ‘Erm … what do you, erm … what do you want?’

  ‘Do you want me to shout it at the top of my voice? Because I will.’

  ‘Erm … hang on.’

  ‘Never mind “hang on”,’ Heck growled. ‘Open this soddin’, piggin’ door, or I’ll kick it down.’

  A chain rattled as it was removed, and the door opened. Penny Flint’s younger brother, Tyler, stood there. He was weedy, pale and with a badly spotted face, particularly around the mouth. He had a mess of dyed-orange hair, and a single earring dangling from an infected lobe. He wore pyjama trousers, dinosaur-feet slippers and a ragged jersey that was three times too large.

  ‘Thought it’d be you,’ he said dully.

  ‘Well, obviously.’ Heck shouldered his way inside. ‘No one else knows she’s here. Yet.’
>
  The colour scheme inside the flat was grey, grey and grey, with perhaps a hint of lime-green, which had faded almost to grey. The place was a tip: bare, damp-looking walls, tatty and disordered furniture, dirty crockery and empty beer bottles on a side table. It was cold for an April morning, so the electric fire was on full blast. It was too much really, but it didn’t bother Penny Flint, who was slumped in an armchair and smoking an unfiltered cigarette, focused intently on morning TV, where Jeremy Kyle was putting a bunch of people just like her through their paces. She wore a thin dressing gown, while her long brown hair hung in ratty strands. The ashtray on her armrest was crammed with dog-ends.

  In the corner, Alfie, her six-month-old son, lay snug in a rabbit romper suit, burbling to himself in his carry-cot. The baby was the only dab of real colour in the room, aside from Tyler Flint’s ludicrous fake hair. Having checked outside that Heck hadn’t been followed, Tyler had closed and locked the door again and now hovered in the background.

  ‘Don’t stare at me like that, Heck,’ Penny said without looking round. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  ‘Nervous?’ Heck retorted. ‘You’re lucky I’m not dragging you down to Brixton cop-shop by your knicker-elastic.’

  She turned a face on him that had once been pretty but was now haggard.

  ‘I’m not wearing knickers at the moment, Heck. I can’t stand the pain they cause me. Or maybe I didn’t make that clear enough the last time we spoke.’

  If that was true, she was pretty scantily clad, her gown finishing above the knee and her toe- and fingernails painted their trademark shocking-green. There was even a slinky gold chain looped around her left ankle. Her injuries weren’t visible, but Heck had seen the photographs taken at the hospital, and they had spared no anatomical detail. If there was still any doubt, the pair of metal crutches propped against the back of her chair indicated that Penny didn’t even yet figure among the walking wounded. His sympathy for her in this regard hadn’t ebbed. But some things were unforgivable.