The Killing Club

‘Heck,’ Gemma said. ‘You know Commander Tasker? Serious Offender Control and Retrieval. He heads up their Special Investigations unit …’

‘I know him, yeah,’ Heck replied.

‘Sergeant Heckenburg,’ Tasker said with a curt nod.

‘Sir.’ Heck turned back to Gemma. ‘What a bloody disaster.’

She sighed. ‘By any standards. Before you ask, we’re working on the basis it’s down to a Nice Guys team who’ve come in from abroad. Somehow or other, they managed to bring an entire arsenal of high-tech weapons with them …’

‘Unless the weapons were already here,’ Heck said. ‘I know two or three underworld quartermasters we can lean on straight away …’

‘For the record!’ she interrupted. ‘We’ve lost sixteen officers, two prison personnel and two ambulance crew. There are no wounded … no survivors.’

‘A courting couple got the chop too,’ Tasker added. ‘Two civvies.’

‘How’s that?’ Heck asked.

Tasker glanced at Kane, who rummaged through his pocket-book. ‘A Jenny Barker and Ronald Withersnap,’ Kane said. ‘Looks like they were out for a late-night canoodle when the Nice Guys ran over their parked car in a JCB, killing them both in the process. They then used their bodies and the wreck of their car to stage the accident.’

‘Jesus Christ …’ Heck breathed.

‘Worst of the worst, this lot,’ Tasker said, his eyes meeting Heck’s – their gaze was cold, distinctly unfriendly. ‘Which of course you won’t need us to tell you about. Anyway, now you’re as clued-in as we are, sergeant.’

It seemed to be a morning for euphemisms. That one clearly meant ‘so fuck off back to your own office’.

Instead of taking the hint, Heck continued to ask questions. ‘What about Silver?’

‘No sign of him,’ Gemma said, with another ill-disguised sigh.

‘They just whisked him away?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Isn’t he supposed to be ill?’

‘Not “supposed to be”,’ Tasker said. ‘He is ill. The prison infirmary confirmed it.’

‘Is it serious? I mean, how far do we expect him to get?’

‘We don’t know, Heck … okay?’ Gemma replied in a patient tone. ‘It’s too early to say.’

Heck pondered. ‘Well, I suppose the next question is did he actually tell you anything useful before he disappeared? I mean during the prison interviews?’ Their expressions remained blank. ‘Surely you’re allowed to discuss that now he’s gone?’

‘We’re not going to discuss it at this stage,’ Gemma said.

‘Which means he told you nothing …’

‘Which means we’re not discussing it,’ Tasker asserted.

‘Heck,’ Gemma said. ‘You know the kind of intel we were trying to glean from those interviews. We wanted to know about other Nice Guys associates. About Nice Guys operations abroad … how many there are, where they are, who they are. Regardless of where Peter Rochester is now, there’s still a significant amount of sensitivity surrounding that information.’

Heck shook his head. ‘I don’t see why.’

‘Because if you must know, sergeant,’ Tasker interjected, ‘the various law enforcement agencies we’re in contact with overseas are well aware of the damage done to your own enquiry into the Nice Guys by a British police insider. They don’t want their investigations to suffer in the same way.’

Which, Heck had to admit, made a kind of sense.

‘Subsequently, all info related to the prison interviews with Peter Rochester is still being handled on a need-to-know basis,’ Tasker added.

Heck nodded. ‘Okay, okay … but just out of interest, what’s this?’

He indicated the photograph on Gemma’s desk, which appeared to depict a dented car door, marked here and there with bullet holes, but in the centre of which a jumble of apparently meaningless letters had been crudely inscribed in the paintwork.

BDEL

‘That was carved into the driver’s door of the SOCAR command vehicle,’ Kane said. ‘We’re not sure what it means yet … if it means anything.’

‘BDEL …?’ Heck mused.

‘We’re not going to town on that yet,’ Gemma added. ‘For all we know it could have been done before – at the prison, maybe even before then. The car was a fully marked police vehicle. If the driver had parked up somewhere, I dunno … to buy chips. Some lowlife with an attitude comes along …’

Heck looked sceptical. ‘Wouldn’t the driver have noticed? It’s on his door.’

‘We don’t know what it is yet,’ Tasker replied. ‘All options are still on the table.’

‘But in the event it turns out to be relevant,’ Gemma said, ‘and is perhaps some kind of signature, we’re keeping it in-house, yeah?’

Heck shrugged. ‘Yeah, sure. So … I suppose it’s down to practicalities. Do we know how many casualties we inflicted on the ambushers? If we bagged a few of them, we can be checking hospitals and …’

‘None,’ Ben Kane said.

‘You mean none that we know about?’ When Heck received no answer, he glanced from one to the other. ‘What’re you saying … our people didn’t even return fire?’

‘A couple of the police weapons found at the scene had been discharged, but it looks as if that was in panic,’ Tasker said.

‘Seems like they were taken totally by surprise,’ Gemma added. ‘And by overwhelming forces.’

Heck could scarcely believe what he was hearing. Hadn’t SOCAR known they were escorting one of the most dangerous criminals in Britain? Or had they been too busy taking it all in their stride, playing it cool? He wanted to ask that question aloud. Wanted to give full voice to exactly how such arrogant incompetence made him feel, but of course it would be impolitic – it was always impolitic. ‘I hear you’re forming a taskforce to go after them, ma’am?’

She appraised him carefully. ‘It’s a SOCAR taskforce, Heck. That means we’ve more than enough bodies. Every spare officer Frank’s got is now on the case.’

‘Well … you’re not SOCAR.’

‘DSU Piper has maintained a dialogue with Silver for the last few months, as you’re no doubt aware,’ Tasker said. ‘She probably knows the guy better than anyone else in the job.’ He made a point of stressing anyone else. ‘It would be impossible to leave her out.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Gemma replied. ‘Frank and his team are well-resourced and very experienced.’

But they’re not detectives, Heck wanted to say. They’re like Special Branch; knuckle-dragging ex-squaddies or pumped-up government agents playing at being CID.

‘We’ll be getting used to each other in the future, anyway,’ she added. ‘You know National Crime Group is moving from the Yard next year?’

‘Yeah …?’ Heck said, baffled as to where this might be leading.

‘It’s early days yet, but we’ll likely be sharing a building with SOCAR. We may even be on the same floor.’

Heck gave her a long, blank look. ‘That’s marvellous, ma’am. Truly. Any more good news today?’

‘Look … what’s your problem, sergeant?’ Tasker asked. ‘You’ve had an attitude since you came in here. Call me an idiot, but I can’t think there’s anything about me or my staff that might have got on your nerves.’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Heck said. ‘If we spent a couple of days together, I’m sure I could produce a catalogue.’ He turned and left the office.

For a second, Tasker looked astounded. ‘What the actual FUCK!’

‘Leave this to me, Frank,’ Gemma said, jumping to her feet. ‘HECK!’

She caught up with him twenty yards down the corridor.

‘You’ve got five seconds to tell me what that was all about!’ she said, pinning him to the wall with her index finger. ‘And make it good, because trust me, I’m not in the mood for any chip-on-the-shoulder bullshit today!’

‘I don’t like seeing fellas I don’t know treat your desk like an armchair.’

‘I’m not going to dignify that garbage with a response. Try again.’

‘Ma’am … I should be the one going after Mike Silver. Two reasons. First of all, I have unfinished business with him. Very unfinished. Secondly, I’m the one who caught him last time. No one else managed it.’

‘Oh yes?’ She folded her arms. ‘Who made the arrest?’

‘Okay, me and you should be going after him then.’

‘You know it doesn’t work like that.’

‘Says who … SOCAR? The fucking idiots who let Mike Silver go?’

‘Hey! Now just watch how you talk to me, sergeant … alright?’ She kept it low-key, but as always with Gemma when her back was up, there was intense ferocity in her tone. ‘And you might try showing a bit of respect, and remember that most of those “fucking idiots” are dead! And that they were fellow police officers! And that they died in the line of duty! And that they left young families, children …’

‘Okay …’ He already regretted that part of his outburst. ‘That was out of order …’

‘We’re all upset, Heck … but at least stop embarrassing yourself, and more importantly, stop bloody embarrassing me! And get your sodding head screwed on! You know you can’t be involved in this enquiry. I’ve explained it to you half a dozen times, so I’m not going to explain it again. Your job, as far as the Nice Guys is concerned, is done.’

‘No disrespect, ma’am … but that’s what you think.’

‘Heck …’ Gemma gave him a searching gaze. ‘Be absolutely one hundred per cent sure, I will not tolerate any monkey business from you on this. Operation Thunderclap – yes, it’s got a name and everything – Operation Thunderclap is way too serious to be jeopardised by an officer as emotionally scarred by past events as you are.’ Her tone levelled off, but she continued to nail him with those laser-blue eyes. ‘You and me have been close for a long time, but trust me on this, Mark … I will take any disciplinary measures necessary. Any at all … to protect this SOCAR enquiry from interference by outside elements, especially you.’

‘Ma’am, Mad Mike Silver will be overseas in a day or so. He’ll be gone from these shores, we’ll never see him again … we’ll never get another chance.’

‘Commander Tasker’s team is already on the move.’

‘They don’t know what they’re doing …’

‘Are you serious? Tasker is SOCAR Special Investigations …’

‘And what does that mean exactly?’

‘I’ll be there too. Maybe you don’t trust me either?’

Heck shrugged awkwardly. ‘I always trust you.’

‘Which is more than I feel about you.’ She paused. ‘When are you back on duty?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Excellent. Until such time as you’re needed in the Northeast again, we’ll have you here at base, doing everyone’s housekeeping. In fact we’ve got a dozen new case files that need our attention too. So you better get home before I send you in there right now.’

Tasker reappeared outside Gemma’s office. He stood with hands on hips as she traipsed back towards him.

‘You need to put someone on Jim Laycock, ma’am,’ Heck called after her.

She glanced back. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘If he removed all those files containing the names and addresses of clients the Nice Guys provided totty for …’

‘Heck, we’ve been over this as well!’ She was clearly trying not to look as exasperated as he was making her feel. ‘There’s no evidence it was Laycock. You were being paranoid to the nth degree.’

Heck had never been able to shake the suspicion from his mind that former National Crime Group commander Jim Laycock had been a client of the Nice Guys. All through the original investigation, the murdering bastards had benefited from having a police insider; it was the only way they could have continually stayed one step ahead. And then, to top it all, right at the death, the files containing extensive details of all the Nice Guys’ clients in the UK – a full list of names and addresses – had simply disappeared, even though their existence was only known about inside the National Crime Group. Which had meant the insider was very close to home.

Heck had come to suspect Laycock, firstly because the bloke had done his level best to reduce the manpower available to the original enquiry, finally closing it down entirely before it managed to gain any real results – and for what Heck considered to be spurious reasons. And secondly, because Laycock, with his background in the military police, was better-placed than most officers in NCG to have known some of the Nice Guys from an earlier career. Of course, Gemma never felt there was any proof of this, and had many times expressed concern that Heck was letting his personal dislike for Laycock cloud his professional judgement. However, after the dust had all settled, she had forwarded a written opinion that Laycock’s initial handling of the Nice Guys affair had been ill-judged. In consequence, though the resulting internal enquiry kick-started by Heck finally cleared Laycock of having any connection with the Nice Guys, he was still disciplined for ‘displaying a level of ineptitude in office that verged on criminal negligence’. That said, Laycock’s demotion from the rank of commander to the rank of inspector hadn’t returned the missing dossier of names, nor did it explain who the mole had been.

‘Whether I was or wasn’t being paranoid, Laycock sank that investigation for no good reason,’ Heck reminded her. ‘He did everything he could to hamper us …’

‘For which he got busted down five ranks,’ she retorted. ‘Good grief Heck, that’s not an insignificant punishment.’

‘He’s a DI at Wembley, ma’am. He’s still higher up the food chain than me.’

Tasker snorted. ‘So that’s it … you’re jealous?’

Heck ignored the comment. ‘The main thing, ma’am, is that Laycock was one of the few people who knew the client list was there. One of the very few who had access to it … if it was him who removed it, this new crew could be after him next.’

‘Why?’ Tasker wondered. ‘You think they’re going to spirit him off to the Bahamas for the rest of his life … in reward for sparing their client base?’

Heck shrugged. ‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind, sir, but hey … you’re the one in charge now. Perhaps it’s time you gave it some thought.’

Tasker bared his teeth, but managed to keep his temper in check as Heck headed back to the DO.

‘He can be an irritating sod at times,’ Gemma said quietly, ‘but he’s right about one thing. We never recovered those missing details of the original Nice Guys’ clients. I’ve always wondered about that. Someone moved them, even if it wasn’t Laycock.’

‘It’s not like you didn’t look for them,’ Tasker replied. ‘Anyway, it’s history now.’

‘Maybe sir, but I’ve never been totally comfortable with the idea that all those rapists are living free among us.’

He shrugged. ‘Now the Nice Guys appear to have returned, maybe we’ll get their clients by a different route. I’m more concerned at present about Heckenburg. He’s going to give us problems, I can sense it already.’

‘He won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to it.’

‘You used to be his girlfriend, didn’t you?’

‘That was a long time ago, sir.’

‘Maybe there’s something you can do on that front.’

She glanced around at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Throw him a little something. Keep him sweet.’

Despite all the chauvinism she’d experienced in her eighteen years as a female police officer, this left Gemma virtually gobsmacked. ‘Are you really asking what I think you’re asking?’

‘It’s a suggestion, that’s all. Oh Christ … don’t start going all “inappropriate comments” on me, Gemma. Let’s live in the real world for a change, eh? We’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands here. We need to keep the lid on it any way we can.’

She lowered her voice. ‘If you think I’d stoop to that, you’ve got the wrong person.’

‘What’s the matter, don’t you fancy him anymore?’

Gemma was acutely aware they were out in the corridor and that ears could be waggling in half a dozen adjoining offices. That Tasker wasn’t was perhaps a bit worrying. ‘Maybe we could just get on with what we’re supposed to be doing,’ she hissed. ‘Like you said, Frank, we’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands … if we ignore it much longer, it’s going to burn both our departments to the ground!’

Chapter 8

The landlord of The Maypole Tavern was a pain-in-the-arse wanker.

At least, that was Detective Inspector Jim Laycock’s view. To start with, his first name was Hubert – who the fuck was called ‘Hubert’ in the twenty-first century? – and though he possessed the sort of build that might have been designed for innkeepers in North London – broad, sloping shoulders, brawny, apelike arms and a big square head – this was offset by the immensity of his beer belly, which was so grotesque that it wobbled over the front of his waistband as he walked, and meant he had to lean backwards to effect any measure of decorum. He had a receding hairline, but there was still sufficient left of his greasy, greying mane at the back for him to tie it in a pretentious pigtail. Laycock didn’t know which he found the more revolting, this, or the round, soft, permanently sweat-shiny ‘baby’s arse’ that Hubert had for a face.

Of course, appearances weren’t everything.

If they were, Laycock himself – with his handsome looks and impressive physique (though it might be a little flabbier now than it used to be) – wouldn’t be in such a rut as this: disliked by his juniors, mistrusted by his seniors, despised by the villains to a degree where they’d probably kill him if they got half a chance, and more than happy to drown these sorrows each night with as much beer as he could get down himself.

‘Kill me, eh?’ he muttered, propping up the Maypole bar. ‘Yeah … let them try!’

They’d get what was coming. And so would that scrote of a landlord, Hubert Mollop – or whatever his full fucking name was. The bastard thought Laycock didn’t know he allowed rent-boys on the premises. This wasn’t a gay pub, not officially, but Mollop was a shirt-lifter of the first order – Laycock felt certain. He’d had it on good authority there was a private room here, a place unknown to regular patrons, where underage male prostitutes came to entertain their clients, paying the sympathetic landlord a generous cut of their earnings.

As usual, the problem was proving it.

The bastard was too clever to leave anything lying around that might incriminate him, or to trust his dirty little secrets to anyone he didn’t know intimately. The local catamites might be able to help – the trouble was that Laycock, though he was now running day-to-day divisional CID operations at Wembley nick, hadn’t been there long enough yet to develop contacts with that particular crowd, which meant he had to rely on the two informers who’d first tipped him off about Mollop, neither of whom was totally reliable due to their both having been banned from The Maypole in the recent past. That was one reason the rest of Laycock’s CID team didn’t feel the info was kosher, and the main reason he hadn’t tried to share what he’d learned with the local vice squad.

But there was no rush. Laycock wasn’t going anywhere – so he could afford to watch and wait. In any case, this was only one of several pubs on his patch that he increasingly found he had a problem with as he made his nightly rounds of them. There was low-level dealing going on in some of them, not to mention regular underage drinking. In all cases, it stemmed from the uncouth bastards who ran these establishments. They were all either slobs or nonces or druggies themselves. At least, this was the impression Laycock got, and his grasses tended to support this view, even if his team didn’t.

Not that he cared what those tossers thought.

It amazed Laycock how the rest of Wembley CID thought he didn’t know about the dissent-filled discussions they held behind his back, how they’d tell any senior guv’nor who’d listen how unimpressed they were by his sour demeanour and vindictive attitude – and all because of that one bad call he’d made. They didn’t know what a sleek, sharp animal he’d been in the days when he was a high-flyer; how much of an achiever he was; how much of a moderniser. Good Christ, there were five women in the Wembley office. What chance would those dozy bints have had making it into CID if it hadn’t been for supervisors like him pulling rank on the old dinosaurs in the job, suppressing the ‘canteen culture’, paving the way for the advancement of minorities?

Yet it was curious – he finished his tenth pint of the evening in a single swallow and called curtly for another – how right-wing he himself now felt he’d become. It was disturbing how personal disaster, not to mention the ruination of all your dreams and ambitions, could bring out the beast in you.

The slatternly crowd who filled these problem pubs and bars, who even now were milling around him, binge-drinking, puking, falling on their faces – these drunks, these drug addicts – he’d once felt sorry for them, had only been able to imagine the pain of their abusive upbringings, the desolation of their everyday lives … and yet now he regarded them as vermin wallowing in sewers of self-inflicted degradation.

Who knew? Maybe he’d always felt that way deep down.

He quaffed another pint. Perhaps all that politically correct stuff – the diversity seminars he’d made his managers attend, the positive discrimination he’d practised – had been so much pointless fluff, so much pretence, so much … what had that maniac Heck called it … ‘spin’? Perhaps at heart Laycock had been just like the rank and file, mainly interested in clearing the trash off the streets. Maybe he’d just been playing at being the good guy. And perhaps now, with the bastards on the top floor having rejected it, he’d decided: What the fuck? You might as well see the real me, a humourless, judgemental SOB, who’ll happily bracket all lowlifes together and pull the trigger on them at the same time if that’s the quickest, easiest way to do it.

He’d show the bastards, he thought, as he left the dregs of his pint on the bar top and tottered to the door connecting with the toilets. He’d make the arrests, get the convictions, clean up this fucking cow-town, and when the pompous shithouses from New Scotland Yard came to give him his medal, he’d tell them to fuck right off.

There was no one else in the toilets, which Laycock supposed he ought to be thankful for. There were far too many scrotes with sleeve tattoos, crappy earrings and Burberry caps loitering in mysterious little groups in pub bogs these days. They really must think the rest of society was stupid. Well, their time was coming. At least in this neighbourhood. He wandered to the nearest urinal, unzipped and let it go – four pints’ worth. That was as many as he’d thought he’d had since he’d last taken a leak.

It wasn’t something to be proud of, he supposed. It even made him feel a little hypocritical. But then Laycock drank for a reason; for one thing it helped cushion his monumental fall from grace, and at the same time, in a weird contradiction he felt no inclination to try and explain, he fancied it clarified his thinking, focused his aims. And of course he needed to be in these pubs; needed to find out for sure what was going on; needed to know indisputably who the lice were he could earmark for elimination.

So absorbed was Laycock in this line of thought that he only vaguely noticed someone else had come into the toilets. A brief glance over his shoulder detected a man wearing a grey hoodie under a khaki flak-jacket, now with his back turned as he too stood at a urinal. Another fucking hoodie, Laycock thought. Antisocial bastards. Terrorising the world with their pseudo-American gangsta wannabe attitude. No doubt, when the time came, he’d be rounding a few of those losers up as well. But first he needed the evidence to answer those all-important questions. Who actually was it? Who was dealing, who was fencing, who was catering to the kiddie-fiddlers …