Kiss of Death

She continued on, her breathing coming easier as she turned down a side street and entered the estate. She was almost home now. Circling a block of council maisonettes, she cut across an open green space, beyond which lay the subway – another poor choice at night, but there was no real option. After that, she’d be at Hellington Court, the horseshoe-shaped apartment house on whose first floor she lived. But then she caught movement in her peripheral vision, at the bottom end of the Ginnel in fact.

Nan hadn’t taken the shortcut. But he had.

Undoubtedly, it was the same figure, though now much closer; hands tucked into his front pockets, a hood pulled down over a lowered head as though he was walking through driving rain – or trying to keep his face concealed from CCTV cameras.

‘My God,’ she whimpered, her heart hammering her stick-thin ribs as she broke into a run.

It was a perilous course. The green was strewn with bricks and bottles, any one of which could turn her ankle, but she stumbled on blindly, risking another glance backward. He too was on the green, head still bowed. Not running, but walking much faster, as if he couldn’t allow her to get too far ahead.

‘Oh my … my God,’ Nan gibbered.

Fear applied wings to her heels. She sped on, tripping only once, but though she tottered and stumbled, she managed to right herself before falling.

Just ahead, the steps led down into the subway. She took them without hesitation.

Another quick glance showed that he was about twenty yards to her rear.

At the bottom of the steps, she dashed up the concrete passage. Of the thirty-odd lights installed along its damp ceiling, only a few worked, filling the tunnel with gloom.

With a series of echoing thumps, feet descended the steps behind her. Gasping with terror, Nan staggered on. The end of the passage was clearly visible thanks to the streetlights beyond it, but it was still some forty yards ahead. Before that stood the long-abandoned relic of a pram, nothing now but corroded framework and shreds of upholstery. She thought about grabbing it and flinging it behind her to create an obstacle. But a voice told her to act her age, because that only worked in films.

She looked back again. Incredibly, he was still walking, not running; even more incredibly, he was much closer. She could make out the details of his clothing: grey tracksuit pants; a black hoodie top with some faded insignia on the front.

With a shriek, she ran into the pram.

How ridiculous, she thought, as she seesawed over the top of it, landing hard on the wet, grimy floor. She’d dismissed the idea of using the object against her enemy because it probably wouldn’t have worked and then had fallen foul of it herself.

A fastener snapped open and the contents of her handbag skittered out, but Nan didn’t wait to regather them. She jumped to her feet, which was some achievement considering that she’d winded herself, grazed both her hands and hurt her left hip – the latter stung abominably where a piece of jagged metal had torn through her clothes and punctured the flesh – and lurched on, aware that he was less than ten yards behind her. When she got to the steps, she hammered up them, expecting to hear an explosion of footfalls as he finally started running.

But that didn’t happen.

Was it possible, was it even vaguely conceivable, that he was innocent, just an ordinary guy on his way home after a couple of pints in the pub?

No. How bloody ludicrous are you, woman!

An ordinary man would most likely have shouted after her when she fell over the pram, to enquire if she was OK.

She reached the top of the steps, throat raw with panting. The edifice of Hellington Court loomed on her right, and she scuttled towards it. The first entrance, the one directly facing her, was no longer used by residents; it led into a series of ground-floor utility rooms which were now seen as places to dump rubbish in. Nan took that route anyway, because just entering her own building felt as if it would offer some modicum of protection. As an occupant, she ought to know her way around in there better than he did.

But, of course, it wasn’t that easy.

In the first room, she tripped on a pile of rusty old bicycles, and when she fell on top of them, sharp prongs snagged and cut her again. In the next room, which she entered via an arched brick tunnel that was so dark she had to feel her way, she bounced between abandoned fridges and stacks of mouldy furniture. There was no point looking back to check on his progress now, because he could be right behind her and she wouldn’t even see him.

In the third room, Nan glimpsed what looked like a row of upright bars with light shining down behind them from above. The bars were accessible through another brick passage, but when she got there, they ran floor to ceiling and left to right, seemingly closing off this entire section of the building. The light spilled down an interior set of fire-escape stairs, but there was no way through to them.

From behind – in either the first or second room – there was a clunk of metal.

Frantic, she worked her way along the bars, spying a gate, a steel frame filled with mesh and fitted with what looked like a garden latch – but when she got to it, it was fastened with a padlock. Nan whined aloud, her torn, sweaty hands smearing blood as she yanked futilely on it. From some non-too-distant place, she heard a breaking and splintering of wood.

That mouldy old furniture.

With vision glazed by tears of horror, she fumbled on along the bars. There had to be another way out of here; there simply had to. But this faint hope collapsed as the narrow passage she was following terminated at a bare brick wall.

Nan gazed at it, rocking on aching feet. She went dizzy. The world tilted, and she had to grapple with the bars to support herself. And by a miracle, the one she grabbed dislodged. It wasn’t broken but had come loose from its concrete base. Breathless, she bent and twisted it until she’d created enough space to get past.

Unsure whether it was her imagination that a dark-clad figure advanced along the row of bars towards her – she never even looked to check – she slid her thin body through and ran to the foot of the metal staircase, almost slipping on a tiled floor covered by green scum, before haring up it. At the top, there was a concrete landing she didn’t recognise. Wheezing, drenched with sweat under her ragged, bloodstained clothes, she pivoted in a bewildered circle. A single bulb shed light up here, showing a couple of metal doors leading off in different directions. Nan was perplexed as to which way she should go. But when she heard a heavy tread ascending the stairway, it jolted her forward, propelling her to the nearest door.

On the other side of that, she ran down a corridor with entrances to flats on either side. At the end, she entered another similar corridor, but now she knew where she was.

A few seconds later, she was out on the balcony overlooking the central court.

Her own door, No. 26, was only four along from here.

As she tottered towards it, she fumbled in her handbag for her keys.

Only to find that the bag was empty.

The reality of this only washed over Nan as she came to a halt in front of her flat door, which stood huge and solid and impenetrable.

‘No,’ she moaned. ‘Nooo … ’

She’d been so frightened down in the subway that when she’d fallen over the pram, she’d assumed all she’d dropped was loose change, lipstick, reading glasses – not her house key!

A figure rounded the corner onto the balcony and proceeded towards her.

Nan would never know where it came from: a memory, dredged from nowhere, that before she’d left the Spar that evening, she’d dropped her key from her handbag, and had only spotted it at the last minute, bending down, scooping it up – and putting it in her anorak pocket. With robotic speed and smoothness, all the time aware of that dark shape encroaching from the left, she delved into the pocket, pulled out the key, and jammed it into the lock.

She turned it, and the mechanism disengaged.

Nan tottered inside, banged the door closed behind her, and rammed the bolts home.

Twenty minutes later, when Nan found the courage to unlock the bathroom and re-emerge into her narrow hall, she heard nothing.

But then she wasn’t sure what she’d expected to hear.

Someone trying the front door, or someone simply idling there, muttering to themselves?

Even if this person – whoever it was – had been following her, none of that seemed likely. One thing you had to say about these old run-down blocks of flats, they were fairly secure. The units weren’t easy to force entry to, and with everyone living so close to each other, if someone tried, they’d cause such a racket that the police would inevitably be called.

Even so, it took Nan another five minutes, still damp under her clothes, to actually approach that front door. And she only did so armed with a carving knife she’d brought from the kitchen. Even then, she was tentative. Half a foot short, she waited, listening hard – but still there was no sound.

Neck and shoulders tense, breath tightening in her narrow bird-chest, she considered leaning forward to the spyhole. She’d seen so many horror films where this happened and immediately an ice pick was driven through it from the other side, or a bullet fired into the eye of the person peeking. She didn’t think that was actually possible – how would the madman know when you were looking, and when you weren’t? But it was still a horrific prospect. When she finally steeled herself to do it, the fisheye lens gave its usual restricted, distorted view of the balcony, but showed nobody standing near the door. Despite this, it was another whole minute before she could sum up the extra courage to withdraw bolts and turn the main lock.

She kept the safety chain on, of course, the door opening to four inches maximum.

Now she could see much more of the balcony, and still no one was there. Night sounds reached her: the hum of distant traffic, someone laughing in one of the flats above. Encouraged, Nan loosened the chain, opened the door properly, and with knife levelled like a bayonet, ventured one step outside – just enough so that she could look both right and left.

The balcony trailed harmlessly away in both directions. There was no one there, the only movement a scrap of wastepaper drifting on the summer breeze.

Chapter 7

The life of Eddie Creeley was pretty much a blueprint for the development of a violent criminal. Born into poverty in the Hessle Road district of Hull in 1979, his mother died from a stroke when he was three years old, leaving him in the care of his older sister by ten years and his unemployed ex-trawlerman father, who sought to fill the void in his life with alcohol, and periodically took time off from this to beat his children black and blue.

On one occasion, or so the stories told, young Eddie was battered so savagely by his raging parent that he ‘didn’t know where he was’ for nearly two days.

By the early 1990s, perhaps inevitably, the youngster had become a regular juvenile offender, with form for shoplifting, car theft, burglary and assault. In 1993, he finally dealt with his father, retaliating to yet another unprovoked backhander by breaking a bottle over the old man’s head and dumping his unconscious body in the litter-strewn alley out back, where a freezing rainstorm was almost the death of him. After this incident, there were no further reports of the Creeleys’ father attacking either of his children, though it was noted that he himself often sported black eyes, split lips and missing teeth.

Throughout this period, Eddie Creeley served regular time in juvenile detention, where he became well-known for his violent and troublesome behaviour. One thing he didn’t like were authority figures, though he could extend his brutality to any person at any time. In 1997, for example, he beat his pregnant girlfriend, Gillian, so severely that he caused her to miscarry. On this occasion, he was sent to adult prison, where he was involved in frequent altercations with staff and fellow inmates. Only five months into his four-year stretch, in response to a sexual advance, he ambushed a much older fellow prisoner and smashed his legs with an iron bar. This brought him to the attention of Newcastle gangster, Denny Capstick. Impressed by Creeley’s viciousness, Capstick took him on as muscle, and he spent the next few years, both inside jail and out, attacking and terrorising the rivals of Capstick’s firm and even, or so the rumours held, carrying out several murders on their behalf.

Capstick cut him loose in 2001, when he robbed a mini-market in Sunderland and unnecessarily brutalised a female cashier. Sentenced to ten years, it looked as if Creeley was finally out of circulation, but in the end he only served seven, coming out in 2008 and returning to his native Humberside, where he cheerfully recommenced his criminal career. Using his extensive underworld contacts, he put together a ruthless team, and over the next few years they carried out several raids on banks and post offices, all of which were eye-catching for their levels of violence, with shots fired, and bats and pickaxe handles used on staff, customers and security personnel alike.

In 2010, he hit the big time when, with high-level underworld backing, he pulled off a massive score. In the middle of the night, he and six associates infiltrated a private security firm’s cash-handling depot at Newark-on-Trent in the East Midlands by taking hostage the depot manager and his wife and children. On successfully entering the depot, four guards and three more members of staff were handcuffed and locked into one of the vault’s cages while the actual blag, which lasted forty minutes, took place. Some £7 million in banknotes was stolen, and the thieves got clean away. It would perhaps have gone down as one of Britain’s most audacious and cleverly planned robberies, had Creeley’s mistreatment of two security guards not left a very sour taste even in the mouths of his underworld backers. The two guards, both ex-military, proved difficult captives, and so to punish and further incapacitate them, Creeley injected them with drain cleaner; one died as a result, while the other was subject to fits and blackouts for the rest of his life.

Disowned by many associates after this, Creeley went to ground for four years, only to re-emerge in 2014, when he and a young accomplice broke into the suburban home of a Lincolnshire bank manager called Brian Kelso. The bank manager was tied up and subjected to hours of fearsome threats, while his wife, Justine, was beaten and repeatedly indecently assaulted. The following morning, the haggard and terrified manager went to work early, and stole £200,000 in cash. He handed it over to Creeley at an agreed rendezvous point and was then shot twice in the chest. He survived by a miracle, recovering later in hospital, but his wife, still at the family home, hadn’t been so lucky. Police officers found her dead; she had been injected with battery acid.

The horrifying and sensational nature of these crimes galvanised the various police forces in the East Midlands into throwing all their resources at the case, and in due course, several men were arrested and charged for the depot robbery, though Creeley wasn’t among them. Yet again, he’d gone on the run, but it wasn’t easy for him. Increasingly seen as a dangerous psychopath, fewer and fewer of his former compatriots wanted to work with him.

It was probably no surprise that sometime in 2015, he dropped out of sight – as in quite literally vanished, never to be seen again even by those who were close to him.

Gail Honeyford breathed out long and slow as she laid the case papers down on the pub table.

‘Well … that’s a life well lived.’

Heck, at the other side of the table, wiped froth from his lip. The Duke of Albion affected the look of an old-fashioned gin palace, but much of that was window-dressing. In truth, it was another large and typically impersonal inner-London pub, but it was close to Staples Corner, so it served. This being a Monday night and now after ten o’clock, it wasn’t especially busy, though there were a few punters dotted about its spacious interior.

‘I wonder where you actually get off causing so much damage to everyone around you,’ Gail said. ‘No wonder even his fellow hoodlums hate him.’

‘He’s obviously got some buddies left … to have disappeared so effectively,’ Heck said.

‘Are we sure he’s even in the country?’ she wondered.

He shrugged. ‘If Interpol have had no leads on him, and Europol have had nothing …’

‘I suppose we should expect a maniac like this to leave some kind of ripple. Unless he’s died, of course.’

‘No death of anyone even closely resembling Eddie Creeley has been reported, but that’s something we may need to look into. Need to cover all bases, as they say.’

‘Looks like we’ve got a lot of legwork ahead of us.’

‘You wanted to be where the action was.’ He half-smiled. ‘You couldn’t have arrived at a better time.’

She nodded thoughtfully.

‘I’m sorry if I wasn’t very welcoming earlier on,’ he said.

She waved it away. ‘I did come at you a bit out of the blue.’

He watched her, genuinely puzzled by the change in her personality since they’d last met. ‘Gail, I don’t know what it is, but you seem more …’

‘Grown-up?’

‘Not necessarily the words I’d have used.’

‘When we worked together in Surrey, Heck, I took issue with the fact that I had a murder enquiry, my very first, which I thought I was on top of … and then you came in, kind of from nowhere, and were given seniority over me.’

‘It’s understandable you were peeved about that.’

‘But I was wrong.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d been listening too much to people like Ron Pavey. Who, as you know, was a dickhead of the first order. Surrey’s own version of Charlie Finnegan.’

Heck sniggered. ‘Good … you’ve already got Charlie’s number.’

‘Ron always said that special squads like SCU, and even National Crime Group itself, were a complete waste of space. A bunch of flash gits hogging all the resources and getting all the headlines but doing police work in name only. But that was typical of him. Total crap from a total gobshite.’

Heck nodded. He’d known Pavey as a divisional DS down in Surrey, and as Gail’s ex-boyfriend, which status he’d only reluctantly relinquished after giving her hell for several years. Of course, being a total gobshite was only one of Pavey’s lesser vices. The more Heck had got to know the guy, the more irritated he’d been by his swaggering style and casual, brutal bullying – so much so that he’d stood and applauded when Gail herself had arrested Pavey and charged him with several career-ending offences. It had been an enormously brave move by the young policewoman, one which, now that Heck recollected it, filled him with a surprising amount of affection for her. There were lots of ingredients in the make-up of an effective police officer, and though it wasn’t fashionable to discuss it in the modern era, raw courage was still one of the most important (and one of the rarest).

‘Course, I didn’t know any of that at the time,’ she said. ‘When you first arrived, I was rude and prickly, and probably came over as very arrogant.’

‘Well … it’s big of you to admit that.’ Heck was so unused to people apologising to him that it made him feel awkward. ‘But we should remember that my style is not to everyone’s taste, either. You heard what Gemma had to say about me. On occasion, I like to cut corners.’

‘Yeah, but it works.’

‘Not always.’ He felt a pang of unease. It was amazing how pertinent Gemma’s warning words of earlier that day now seemed. ‘Perhaps, while we’re working on Sledgehammer together, it should be more a case of do as I say, not do as I do.’

Gail laughed. ‘If only I’d got that on tape. I could have you over a barrel for the rest of your career.’

‘Do you think anyone’d be surprised to hear it?’

‘Possibly not.’ She finished her drink. ‘But it’s something I’m still going to hold you to over the next few weeks. Anyway …’ She checked inside her handbag. ‘We’re in at the crack tomorrow, so I’m off back to Cricklewood for an early night.’

‘Cricklewood?’ Heck was surprised. ‘You’ve got digs up here?’

‘Course. What else was I supposed to do … commute from Guildford every day? You know what the Orbital’s like. It’d be four hours here, four hours back. Anyway, Cricklewood’s not so bad.’

‘You’ve bought a flat, or something?’ he asked.

‘Rented one. I haven’t sold up in Surrey just yet.’

Heck nodded, relieved. That decision had shown prudence and suggested that this wasn’t totally a knee-jerk thing.

‘Anyway, I’ve got to go.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be in tomorrow morning.’

‘Briefing starts at eight.’

‘I know, don’t worry.’ She slung her bag over her shoulder, tucked the Eddie Creeley paperwork under her arm and pushed her chair backward.

‘Shall I take that?’ Heck said. ‘Line manager, and all that.’

‘Oh, sorry … yeah.’ She smiled and handed the file back.

Only when she’d left did Heck allow himself a smile, though it was tinged with concern.

Gail was clearly still Gail; she’d evidently got on top of her inferiority complex, but a hint of the old single-mindedness remained. She’d been in SCU less than a day and was already trying to make the running on their first case. On one hand that was good – she would need to be feisty in this world; Gemma was the perfect example of that. But a couple of questions still nagged at him. Firstly, how comfortably could she make the switch? Working CID in Surrey’s green and pleasant land was likely to be a very different experience from the Serial Crimes Unit, where they dealt exclusively with the worst of the worst. And secondly, did he really want to be the man in charge if it started proving problematic?

Heck was looking forward to going after Eddie Creeley. He was in no doubt that he would find and collar the murderous bastard, but only by doing it his way rather than the approved way. Gemma would tolerate that to a degree; if she didn’t, she’d never have accorded him his roving commission. Having Gail Honeyford along for that ride would be interesting. He just hoped that she was up to handling life at the sharp end.

If she had trouble coping when they were chasing this baddest of bad boys, that would be a level of complexity he really didn’t need.

Chapter 8

Nan’s eyes sprang open in a face rigid as wax and beaded with sweat.

She didn’t think she’d ever seen her bedroom as dark as it was at this moment. Normally, yellowish streetlighting suffused through the curtain on the single small window, dappling the bare wall opposite with curious shapes. But tonight, there was nothing. Utter blackness. A void. And why was the room so deathly cold? Wasn’t this supposed to be summer?

She was unable to move as she lay there, rucked in damp, tangled sheets. Couldn’t budge so much as a muscle. Good God, was she paralysed? Had she become ill during the night, had a stroke or something? Dear Lord …

And then she heard it.

The voice. From the darkness alongside her.

‘Sorry, missus,’ it whispered. ‘I don’t like to wake you when you’re having your beauty sleep and all. But you know how things are. Sometimes a man can’t wait.’

Nan couldn’t answer because she couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even utter a whimper.

‘That’s why I followed you home,’ he explained. ‘Had no choice.’

She tried to roll her eyes sideways, to visualise him. His voice was so close to her ear, his breath so rank – a mixture of onions and ketchup and something else too, a faint odour of rot – that he had to be kneeling right alongside her.

‘No choice at all,’ he said again. ‘When the mood’s on me, like. When the rest of the lads told me … well, that you’ve got a soft mouth.’ He sniggered, a snorting pig-like sound. ‘No teeth, they said. Nothing to chomp or chew me … you getting my drift?’