Stalkers (34 page)

‘What else could we have done?’ she said. ‘Your plan was to leave him here on this island. He’d have got free and come straight after us again.’

‘That’s hardly the point. He was our only lead.’

‘He was a mercenary scumbag. To think of all the squaddies I knew who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Good men and women trying to do a difficult job. And a piece of trash like that manages to make it back.’

Heck glanced round at her. ‘Nice attempt to change the subject, Lauren. But the reality is that you’ve totally fucked us. One hour ago, we were
this
close. Now we’ve got nothing. Not only could Eric Ezekial have led us to the Nice Guys, he could have led us to their grass inside the NCG. And let’s not talk about the fact that you’ve just murdered a man in cold blood …’

‘You can’t count him as a man, an animal like that!’

‘You think a court will see it that way?’

‘Heck, we shot him in self-defence.’

‘We – sorry,
you
– shot him while he was tied up. Any way you cut it, that’s not going to look good.’ Heck shook his head. ‘But I suppose it’s my fault. I should’ve known better than to involve someone like you in this.’

‘What do you mean “someone like me”?’

He jabbed a finger at her. ‘Don’t even think about playing the race card with me, darling. You know exactly what I mean. Someone who flies off the handle, someone who’s too emotional for their own good.’

‘I didn’t see any sign that he was about to help us.’

‘Yeah, well now we’ll never know.’

He went back inside. She followed. They surveyed Deke’s corpse. The sticky crimson pool around his shattered skull was already cooling.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Lauren said.

‘Sorry? That’s great, that makes it all okay.’

‘What else can I say? He was going to kill us. Emotions were high. If we hadn’t managed to secure him, and he’d been coming at us with a gun, are you saying you wouldn’t have shot him?’

‘The point is he wasn’t.’

‘But he might’ve done. Heck, there was every chance once he started hunting us that we were going to have to kill him. You surely must’ve allowed for that possibility?’

Heck shook his head. ‘I hoped we wouldn’t have to, and, as it turned out, we didn’t.’

‘And like I said earlier, what else would we have done with him? You weren’t serious about leaving him alive here?’

Heck’s expression turned solemn. ‘When we get off this fort, Lauren, we’re going our separate ways. You understand?’

‘But I want to …’

‘There’re no buts. Not anymore. You shouldn’t even be here anyway. And I certainly can’t do this with Calamity Jane in tow.’

‘You think I’m just going home, putting my feet up?’

‘Erm, no. Not before you’ve helped me sort out this bloody mess that you’ve made, however the hell we’re going to pull that off.’ He paused to think. ‘I need one of his knives. And that hand-grenade he had left.’

‘Why?’

‘Why, she says. Try to engage your brain, girl.’

‘Look, we just chuck him in the drink. It’s no big deal.’

‘Of course it’s a big deal.’ Heck finally got angry, finally began shouting. ‘He’ll be found! And if he’s been weighed down, there’ll be serious fucking questions to answer! But even if he isn’t, we can’t afford for him to just disappear! We need to account for all this! How we got here, the ledger, who killed Ron O’Hoorigan!’

‘Okay … so we leave him here and make it look like we shot him in self-defence.’

‘Forensics tell no lies, Lauren! There’ll be striation marks on his wrists, clear evidence that he was shot while he was bound and helpless! Like I said, try to engage your brain!’

She glared at him, but bit her lip and sloped away. When she returned, she had one of Deke’s knives and his remaining hand-grenade. Heck took them both, then gazed down at Deke’s face, which lay side-on. It was fascinating the way death so quickly dehumanised a human visage. The hole in the hit-man’s forehead was relatively small, no bigger than a two-pence piece, with a thin black stain around it; but his face might have been made from wax – it was white, slack, pudgy; it looked as if you could meld it with your fingers. The cavernous exit wound at the back of the skull completed the picture.

It was no big deal, she’d said. Killing someone was no big deal. Perhaps it wasn’t for an ex-soldier who’d seen heavy combat – and in that respect maybe he was being a bit hard on Lauren. But Heck was uncomfortably aware that he’d already strayed far from the traditional police path in what he was doing, and that this might be the final nail in his coffin. Okay, the son of a bitch had got exactly what he deserved, but it was still cold-blooded murder. This grim reality outweighed any elation Heck might have felt that Deke’s final words about Lauren’s sister had
proved
they were on the right trail.

He cut Deke’s bonds, tossing the rope and the knife out through the trapdoor.

‘What exactly are we doing?’ Lauren asked.

Heck arranged Deke’s hands so that they were cupped in front of his stomach.

‘The only thing I can,’ he said. ‘Shattering his hands and wrists, preferably blowing them off completely. That should remove the evidence that he was tied up. It’ll also make it look like the grenade went off while still in his possession. That way, at least no one will be able to
disprove
self-defence.’

Lauren backed towards the door. Heck took a breath, then pulled the pin, dropped the grenade into Deke’s grasp and dashed after her. They were out in the next corridor when it detonated, the entire structure of the tower shaking with the blast.

When they wafted their way back in through noxiously foul smoke, Deke’s body had been thrown halfway across the room. It had been reduced to smoking meat, its innards scattered in a glistening red pattern across the wreckage. The two offending limbs were little more than shredded flesh and gristle. Nothing remained of the hands and wrists.

‘As you can imagine, I really enjoy doing stuff like this,’ Heck said. ‘When I first joined up, the oath I swore to serve and protect doesn’t contravene anything we’ve done here at all.’

‘Like you said, it was the only thing you could do.’

‘I think the phrase you’re actually looking for is: “Thank you Sergeant Heckenburg, for making sure I don’t spend the rest of my life in prison.”’

‘How do we get away from here?’ she asked curtly.

‘I suppose his lordship here had a plan for that. Of course, now that we can’t ask him what it was, we’ll just have to look around and see what we can find.’

They began by searching through the rubbish in the other rooms, but eventually finished up on the gun platform overhead. It was a broad deck, the size of a modern-day helipad, floored with wooden planks which in their turn had been laid with a gritty tarpaper sheet. The flat surface was broken here and there with pits and rusted steel fittings where the ack-ack guns had once been located. Heck looked east to the distant sea, then west to where the sun was descending in a fiery cascade over the smoke-grey smear that was London.

‘There’s nothing else on this tower,’ Lauren said. ‘We need to check the other ones.’

Heck shifted his gaze to the south tower. ‘That was where he was perched when we got here. We’ll try that one next.’

They crossed the bridge in single file, so physically and emotionally drained that they barely noticed how rickety it felt. As the sun set, the waters below were turning purple. The stiff breeze blew steadily colder.

‘You think it’s true?’ Lauren asked from behind.

‘What?’

‘What he said about Genene?’

‘I dunno.’

‘But what do you suspect? Is she dead?’

Heck hesitated before replying. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, but you knew there was at least a chance of that.’

‘He said she was tortured.’

‘We don’t know if that bit’s true.’

‘Why else would they take her?’

Heck couldn’t answer that. They kept walking, feet clanking on the aged metalwork. The upright cylinder of concrete that was the south tower was only a few yards away. The bridge entered it through a single black aperture.

‘That’s another reason why you should call it a day,’ Heck said without looking round. ‘You’re not going to find your sister alive, Lauren. Which means you’re only in it now for revenge, and trust me, you don’t want that.’

‘You can’t ask me to leave, Heck.’

‘I can and I am doing. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you informed.’

‘And will you keep me protected?’

He was just about to enter the tower, but now he glanced back at her.

‘Like you said the other day,’ she added. ‘We’ve been green-lit.
Both
of us. You might have been guessing then, but now we know it’s true. Deke knew Genene was my sister. That means he knew who I am. That means the Nice Guys know who I am.’

‘Oh. So now, when it suits you, you can be a defenceless girl?’

‘The same applies to you, Heck. Will Deke be the last professional killer they send? At least together, we can look out for each other.’

It was an ugly thought but nonetheless true. For Lauren’s own sake, Heck couldn’t really afford to let her out of his sight now, whether he liked it or not. Of course, the stakes had been raised dramatically for
both
of them. The Nice Guys wouldn’t yet know that their enforcer was dead; but when they finally put two and two together, how would they respond? Almost certainly with overwhelming force. This had become a shooting match now and any rules, such as there’d been, would almost certainly be dispensed with.

He sighed. ‘There may still be ways we can make this disaster work for us. But first we’ve got to get ashore and back to London.’

Inside the south tower, the floor was a simple steel grille. A stair led up through a hatch onto the roof. They went up there, and found a green Bergen backpack, and alongside it a khaki bedroll and four spent bullet casings. This was clearly the point from where Deke had originally sniped at them. Heck ripped the first section of the pack open and pulled out various bits of survivalist kit: a water bottle, a flask probably containing hot soup, a mess tin, a packet of chocolate, a box of stay-light matches, a mobile phone and a bunch of keys. He examined the keys – one of them was for a Volvo four-track; the others looked as though they might be for a house.

‘Look at
this
,’ Lauren said. She’d opened another section of the pack, and taken out two further hand-grenades and a fold-out Heckler & Koch submachine gun with two full magazines taped to the side of its short, stubby barrel. ‘He wasn’t taking any chances, was he?’

‘It’s all to the good,’ Heck said. ‘Useful evidence of who and what this guy was. We leave it here, it’ll confirm our story.’

‘Don’t you think we should make use of this stuff?’

‘Lauren, we’re already up to our necks in illegal crap. We start getting involved in firefights, and we’re going down for sure.’

‘What about this?’ She held up Deke’s mobile phone. ‘Maybe we can get something out of it?’

‘Any numbers stored?’

She checked it. ‘None.’

‘Should’ve guessed. He was too much of a pro to bring anything out here that might lead us to them. We’ll hang on to it though – at some point we might be able to investigate his phone records.’

The final thing they found – to their relief – was a deflated dinghy with a paddle and a motorised propeller attachment. They carried it down to the landing platform. It was now almost completely dark. The only light was the eerie glow of the chemical plant. Lauren inflated the boat, and, once they’d both climbed into it, they pushed off with the paddle. It hadn’t been designed for two, and rode dangerously low in the water. The excess weight also put great strain on the motor, which groaned agonisingly as it slowly propelled them away from the fort. When Heck steered them round in an arc so that they were heading towards the more distant north shore, Lauren was shocked.

‘Why are we going this way?’

‘We were seen in Allhallows-on-Sea. I don’t want us to be seen there again, especially now we’re ragged and wet and beaten up. People remember that sort of thing. Besides, I’m looking for this bastard’s Volvo. It’s more likely to be on one of the Canvey Island car parks. There’ll be loads of other vehicles there, so it won’t stand out.’

‘Come on Heck, we’ll never find it.’

‘We don’t have a choice, Lauren. How else are we going to get back to London?’

‘Are we sure going back to London is a good idea?’

‘We’re not only going back to London, we’re going back to Kingston upon Thames.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘If there’s any further clue to the identity of the Nice Guys, we’ll find it in Deke’s house. He’s hardly likely to turn up and disturb us this time, is he?’

‘When were you going to tell me that Mark Heckenburg’s in the frame for murder?’ Commander Laycock demanded.

Gemma glanced round from where she was loading paperwork into the boot of her BMW. At this late hour, her vehicle was the only one present on the lower personnel car park. Laycock’s had to be around here somewhere, though he’d come upon her unawares.

She continued sorting her stuff. ‘He’s not in the frame for it, as such.’

‘Of course he’s in the frame for it.’ Laycock waved a three-sheet fax with a Greater Manchester Police logo at the top. ‘There’s more than enough evidence to arrest him right here.’

‘Well, for one thing, we don’t know where he is.’

‘Have you looked?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet strangely enough you haven’t found him.’

‘We’re not running the murder enquiry, Sir. GMP are.’

‘I know they are. I’ve had a certain Detective Superintendent Smethurst bending my ear on and off all day. Apparently this isn’t just a murder anymore. Late last night they lost a potential witness and the two uniforms who were guarding him got badly hurt.’ Laycock looked genuinely angry. His cheeks had paled until they were almost white – but then, as she already knew, he was a consummate actor. ‘What’s going on, Gemma?’

‘I don’t know, Sir.’

‘You sure of that? Only it doesn’t seem to be worrying you a great deal.’