The Killing Club
Authors: Paul Finch
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Mystery & Detective, #Suspense
For my children, Eleanor and Harry, with whom I shared many a chilling tale when they were tots, but whose enthusiasm is as strong now as it ever was
Table of Contents
Gull Rock was just about the last place on Earth.
Situated on a bleak headland south of that vast tidal inlet called ‘the Wash’, it was far removed from any kind of civilisation, and battered constantly by furious elements. Even on England’s east coast, no place was lonelier, drearier, nor more intimidating in terms of its sheer isolation. Though ultimately this was a good thing, for Gull Rock Prison (aka HM Prison Brancaster) held the very worst of the worst. And this was no exaggeration, even by the standards of ‘Category A’. None of Gull Rock’s inmates was serving less than ten years, and they included in their number some of the most depraved murderers, most violent robbers and most relentless rapists in Britain, not to mention gangsters, terrorists and urban street-hoodlums for whom the word ‘deranged’ could have been invented.
When Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper drove onto its visitor car park that dull morning, her aquamarine Mercedes E-class was the only vehicle there, but this was no surprise. Visits to inmates at Gull Rock were strictly limited.
She climbed out and regarded the distant concrete edifice. It was early September, but this was an exposed location; a stiff breeze gusted in across the North Sea, driving uncountable whitecaps ahead of it, lofting hundreds of raucous seabirds skyward, and ruffling her tangle of ash-blonde hair. She buttoned up her raincoat and adjusted the bundle of plastic-wrapped folders under her arm.
Another vehicle now rumbled off the approach road, and pulled into a parking bay alongside her: a white Toyota GT.
She ignored it, staring at the outline of the prison. In keeping with its ‘special security’ status, it was noticeably lacking in windows. The grey walls of its various residential blocks were faceless and sheer, any connecting passages between them running underground. A towering outer wall, topped with barbed wire, encircled these soulless inner structures, the only gate in it a massive slab of reinforced steel, while outside it lay concentric rings of electrified fencing.
The occupant of the Toyota climbed out. His tall, athletic form was fitted snugly into a tailored Armani suit. A head of close-cropped white curls revealed his advancing years – he was close on fifty – but he had a lean, bronzed visage on which his semi-permanent frown was at once both dangerous and attractive. He was Commander Frank Tasker of Scotland Yard, and he too had a heap of paperwork with him, zipped into plastic folders.
‘I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, Gemma,’ Tasker said, pulling on his waterproof. ‘But we’ve got to start making headway on this soon.’
Gemma nodded. ‘I understand that, sir. But everything’s on schedule.’
‘I wish I was as sure about that as you. We’ve interviewed him six times now. Is he going to crack, or isn’t he?’
‘Guys like Peter Rochester don’t crack, sir,’ she replied. ‘It’s a case of wearing them down, slowly but surely.’
‘The time factor …’
‘Has been taken into consideration. I promise you, sir … we’re getting there.’
Tasker sniffed. ‘I don’t know who he thinks he’s being loyal to. I mean, they didn’t give a shit about him … why should he give a shit about them?’
‘Probably a military thing,’ she said. ‘Rochester reached the rank of Adjudant-Chef. You don’t manage that in the Foreign Legion if you’re a non-French national … not without really impressing people. Plus they say he commanded total loyalty from his men. And that continued when he was a merc. You don’t carry that off either unless you give a bit back.’
‘You’re saying Rochester’s lot like each other?’
‘Yes, but that’s only one of several differences between them and the run-of-the-mill mobs we usually have to deal with.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m not going to argue with that. You’ve done most of the homework on this case. The original question stands, though … how long?’
‘Couple more sessions. I think we’re almost there.’
‘And you’ve borne in mind what I told you about DS Heckenburg?’
She half-smiled. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘We don’t want him anywhere near this, Gemma.’
‘He isn’t.’
‘He’s a loose cannon at the best of times, but he could really screw this up for us.’
‘It’s alright, sir.’
‘I’m surprised he hasn’t at least been asking questions.’
‘Well … he has.’
Tasker looked distracted by that. ‘And?’
‘I’m his guv’nor. When I tell him it’s off-limits, he accepts it.’
‘Does he know how many times you’ve interviewed Rochester?’
‘He’s been too busy recently. I’ve made sure of it.’
Tasker assessed their surroundings as he pondered this. Continents of storm clouds approached over the sea, drawing palls of misty gloom beneath them. Plumes of colourless sand blew up around the car park’s edges. The hard net fencing droned in the wind. In the midst of it all, the prison stood stark and silent, an eternal rock on this windswept point, nothing beyond it but rolling, breaking waves.
‘Hellhole, that place,’ Tasker said with a shudder. ‘I mean, it’s clean enough … even sterile. But you really feel you’ve reached the end of the line when you’re in there. Particularly that Special Supervision Unit. Talk about a box inside a box.’
He glanced uneasily over his shoulder.
‘Something wrong, sir?’ Gemma asked.
‘Call me paranoid, but I keep expecting Heckenburg to show up.’
‘I’ve told you, Heck’s busy.’
‘How busy?’
‘Up-to-his-eyebrows busy,’ she said. ‘In one of the nastiest cases I’ve seen for quite some time. Don’t worry … we’ve got Mad Mike Silver and whatever’s left of the Nice Guys Club all to ourselves.’
In a strange way, Greg Matthews looked the way his name seemed to imply he should. Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg, or ‘Heck’, as his colleagues knew him, couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something forceful and energetic about that name –
Greg Matthews
. As if this was a guy who didn’t waste time dilly-dallying. There was also something ‘Middle England’ about it, something educated, something well-heeled. And these were definitely the combined impressions Heck had of the man himself, as he watched the video-feed from the interview room at Gillbridge Avenue police station in Sunderland.
Matthews was somewhere in his early thirties, stockily built, with ashen features and wiry, copper-coloured hair. When first arrested he’d been clad in designer ‘urban combat’ gear: a padded green flak-jacket and a grey hoodie, stonewashed jeans and bovver boots, as they’d once been known. All of that had now been taken away from him, of course, as he was clad for custody in clean white paper, though he’d been allowed to retain his round-lensed ‘John Lennon’ spectacles, as apparently he was blind as a mole without them.
None of this had dampened the prisoner’s passion.
Three hours into his interview, he was still as full of his own foul-mouthed righteousness as he had been on first getting his collar felt. ‘It’s not my problem if someone thinks they’ve had it up to here with these neo-Nazi pigs!’ he said in a cultured accent, far removed from the distinctive Mackem normally found in these parts. ‘The only thing that actually doesn’t surprise me about this is that another bunch of Nazi pigs, i.e. you people, are in a mad rush to find out who’s responsible.’
‘The question stands, Mr Matthews,’ Detective Inspector Jane Higginson replied. She was a smooth, very cool customer. Her dark hair was cut short but neatly styled; her accent was much more local than Matthews’s, betraying solid blue-collar origins. ‘Why aren’t you able to tell us what you were doing on the night of August 15?’
‘Because it was five fucking weeks ago! And unlike you and your little wind-up clockwork toy friends, I don’t have to keep a careful account of everything I get up to in an officious little pocket-book. Not that I think
you
do, by the way. We could look through your notes now, and I doubt we’ll find any reference to harassment of ethnic or sexual minorities, intimidation of protest groups, illegal searches of private premises, brutality against ordinary working-class people, or general, casual misuse of authority in any of the other ways you no doubt indulge in on a daily basis …’
Matthews was articulate, Heck had to concede that, which was probably par for the course. He was leader of a self-styled ‘action group’ loosely affiliated to various militant student societies. He and his cronies were political firebrands, anarchists by their own admission … but did that make them killers?
‘What about August 15?’ Higginson persisted. ‘Let me jog your memory … it was a Saturday. That must help a bit.’
‘I do lots of different things on Saturdays.’
‘You don’t keep a record or diary? An industrious man like you.’
That was a sensible question, Heck thought. He’d been present when Matthews was arrested that morning inside his so-called HQ, which was basically a bike shed, though it had been packed with leaflets and pamphlets, and its walls were covered with posters and action-planners. Two state-of-the-art computers had also been seized. Matthews didn’t just talk the talk.
‘The only reason you can be refusing to cooperate on this, Mr Matthews, is because you’ve got something to hide,’ the Detective Constable acting as Higginson’s bagman said.
‘Or because you’re so deluded that you’re more concerned about your street-cred than your personal liberty,’ Higginson suggested.
Matthews bared his teeth. ‘You really are a prissy, smarty-pants bitch, aren’t you?’
‘Moderate your language and tone, Mr Matthews,’ the DC warned him.
‘Or what? You’ll beat me up?’ Matthews laughed. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t already. Go on. There’s nothing to stop you. I think you’ll find I can take it.’
That depressed Heck, at least with regard to any chance these arrests might lead to a conviction. The guy didn’t even realise the films and tapes made of interviews in custody were carefully audited; they couldn’t just disappear. Along with Matthews’s refusal to ask for legal advice, not to mention the ‘no result’ search they’d placed on him and his group with Special Branch, it all combined to suggest they were dealing with a pretender rather than an actual player.
‘If only beating was where you lot drew the line,’ the DC said. ‘When did you decide you were actually going to murder Nathan Crabtree?’
‘This is such bollocks.’
‘Before or after the twentieth time you threatened to kill him online?’ Higginson asked.
Matthews feigned amusement. ‘If that’s the best you’ve got, I pity you.’
Online, Matthews had regularly visited a number of rough and ready social-networking sites, usually hosted overseas, which catered for extremist ideologies. Their stock-in-trade were bitter, rancour-filled exchanges between anonymous individuals with ridiculous monikers. In normal times, any political forum would have been a strange place for an uncouth bunch like Nathan Crabtree and the other two victims, John Selleck and Simon Dean – quasi-political boot-boys with scarcely an educated brain-cell between them – to finish up, but from what Heck could see, the internet was increasingly allowing crazy activists to find an audible voice.