The Killing Club (14 page)

Kurt pondered this as he fished a fragment of paper from his jacket pocket, and unfolded it. ‘To be honest, I’m less concerned about this cop Heckenburg than I am about these two.’ He glanced at the paper. ‘Commander Frank Tasker and Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper …?’

‘What about them?’

‘Well … they’ve been talking to you recently, Mike. A lot.’

Silver shrugged. ‘They were trying to get me to blow the gaff on the rest of you guys.’

‘And?’

‘I didn’t. Obviously.’

‘What did they offer you?’

‘What could they offer me?’ Silver shrugged again. ‘I was convicted of kidnapping and murdering thirty-eight women. You think the British public would sit by and let them make some kind of deal with me?’

‘So all these interviews in Brancaster Prison … they just led nowhere?’

‘I strung ’em along … but that was to make it look like I was playing ball, maybe crank some petty privileges out of them.’

‘You were happy to spend the rest of your life in Gull Rock, Mike?’ Cullen asked doubtfully.

‘It wasn’t like I could do much about it.’ Silver had managed to draw his right hand from under the blanket and was slowly, cautiously flexing it. ‘But believe it or not, it isn’t actually so bad. I was in the Special Supervision Unit. There were only four others in there with me. A crazy old fella who dismembered his two grandkids to see how they worked. A mob enforcer with twenty kills to his name, but who’s now virtually blind thanks to getting shot in the back of the head when the screws let him out to attend his brother’s funeral. A rape-strangler who specialised in teenage prostitutes. And a fifty-year-old social reject who still relied for everything on his octogenarian mum, and got his kicks setting fire to old folks’ homes. Now you tell me … who do you think was running
that
wing?’

‘Congratulations on being king of a pretty goddamn pathetic castle,’ Cullen said.

‘Hey, it could’ve been worse. If I was outside the SSU and in with the general population, it might’ve turned nasty very quickly.’

‘Is that what they threatened you with if you didn’t cooperate?’ Kurt wondered.

‘Once or twice.’

‘You had no legal recourse?’

‘I may have had. I don’t know … we never got that far. Like I say, I kept stringing them along.’

Kurt mulled this over. ‘The main thing is you never talked to them about us?’

‘In truth, there wouldn’t have been a lot I could tell them, would there? I mean, I know who you guys are, I know roughly where your respective centres of operation are … but I haven’t been abroad for quite a few years now. And you’d be damn stupid if you didn’t keep moving things around, mixing personnel, switching IDs …’

‘Like you did, you mean?’ Cullen said. ‘When one cop on his own pulled your entire crew apart.’

Silver regarded him coolly. ‘You might show a little fucking respect, Shaun. I brought you into this line, remember?’

‘Yeah, you did,’ Cullen said. ‘And I’m grateful, Mike, I really am. But let’s face it … law enforcement bodies all over the world have infiltrated organised crime, international terrorism, dissident political groups. They’ve even penetrated each other’s networks. Everyone out there knows what everyone else is doing. Except us. We’ve always stayed under the radar.’

‘Until now,’ Kurt added. ‘When we’ve suddenly got this great big hole in our security wall … called Great Britain.’

‘I’m aware we fucked up over here, Kurt,’ Silver said. ‘But we paid the price. It wasn’t just me getting slammed inside. Eric Ezekial got blown to kingdom come. You knew Deke, didn’t you, Alex?’

‘I did, aye,’ Corporal Mulroony replied in his Glaswegian brogue. ‘Good man.’

‘Yeah, well you can thank Heckenburg personally for that one. Sonny Kilmor was shot in the back by some shit-arse London gangster. Tommy Hobbs got his neck broken.’

‘Shot in the back?’ the black guy called Bruno said, sounding disappointed.

‘You knew Trooper Kilmor?’ Silver asked.

Bruno nodded. ‘He was a legend in 3-Para.’

‘There you fucking go. We paid the price, Kurt.’

‘You may have done, Mike,’ the Dane replied. ‘But like I say, you left the back door open.’

‘Then close it … if you must.’

‘We’re in the process of that.’ Kurt patted the patient’s knee and stood up. ‘But we’ve gotta be sure we close it properly. And for good.’

Briefly, they stood looking at him. Their expressions weren’t exactly hostile, but they were blank, unreadable – and that was never a good sign. Silver’s scalp began to prickle.

‘You don’t trust me, do you?’ he said slowly.

‘We’ve gotta be
absolutely
sure, Mike,’ Kurt reiterated.

‘And my word’s not good enough?’

‘There was a time when you were the best liar I knew. That suited us then.’

‘But now things have changed,’ Cullen added, the left side of his mouth hitching into a lopsided smile. The American was an ultra-reliable operative; a professional through and through. But there were some aspects of his work he enjoyed more than others.

‘You bastard, Shaun,’ Silver said, a sense of dread knotting his lower belly. ‘All the favours I’ve done you …’

‘Well … you made me number three in this outfit. I owe you for that.’

‘I can make you number two. Just say the word.’

‘But I’m already number two. And I’ve got Kurt to thank for that.’

Silver switched his attention to the Dane. ‘Come on, Kurt. You know me … we’re friends.’

Kurt shrugged. ‘You just offered my job to Shaun. Is that how you treat friends?’

‘You fucking snake-in-the-grass!’

‘Despite that, I’m not going to make this personal.’ Behind Kurt, a dingy drape was drawn over the single window; dimness flooded in. ‘All we want, Mike, is the truth.’

‘You wouldn’t know the truth if it sank its teeth into your bollocks and twisted them off. You’re a fucking caveman, Kurt … and you’ll lead these guys to disaster.’

Cullen snorted. ‘Says the one who’s endangered our entire operation.’

Silver glared at him. ‘You’d better do what you’ve got to do, Shaun … but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t lead anywhere.’

‘I sure hope it doesn’t,’ Cullen said with apparent sincerity as he unzipped his combat jacket. ‘Whatever today’s outcome, I always kind of liked you.’

Chapter 12

‘Laycock hadn’t taken his demotion well,’ Shawna McCluskey said. ‘He got the idea he’d washed up in some hellhole, surrounded by society’s worst.’

Heck sipped his coffee. ‘Wembley, a hellhole? I’ve seen a lot worse.’

‘Exactly. Sounds like he’d lost it.’

Heck contemplated this as they sat together in the National Crime Group canteen. It was lunchtime on the day after his arrest, three days after the attack on the prison cavalcade, and the place was busier than usual, mainly due to the extra bodies brought in from SOCAR.

‘Are we absolutely sure some local posse wasn’t responsible for this?’ Heck wondered. ‘Maybe some minor players Laycock had been winding up?’

‘Wembley CID reckon he was winding no one up but them. Ever since he arrived there, he was drinking. Occasionally while he was on duty. Came up with loads of ideas, but nothing workable. Spent most of his time signing off other people’s paperwork.’

Heck snorted. ‘Just like when he was here. Or
not
signing it off, in my case.’

‘Whatever else he was, Heck, he didn’t deserve to get his brains hammered out.’

‘I can introduce you to thirty-eight sets of grieving parents who’d give you an argument on that. It’s accurate he was found in a burnt-out van in Hornsey?’

‘Yeah. In the grounds of an abandoned house.
BDEL
had been carved on its door.’

‘That seems weird,’ Heck said. ‘Doesn’t fit the former pattern. I mean, the Nice Guys never left a signature before. What about Laycock … much left of him for the lab-rats?’

‘Enough. He was pretty badly burned but they reckon he was dead before the fire was lit. Blunt force trauma all over his body.’

Heck contemplated this. Laycock had been a policeman, but it was a struggle to feel pity for him. The guy had come to a grisly end, but so had a good number of others – and in their case Heck still felt certain Laycock had been partly responsible. Whenever he viewed the gruesome leftovers of criminals who’d been turned on by their own, it filled him with revulsion – the sight of mutilated flesh always did – but no real sadness.

‘Any witnesses?’

‘Only the CCTV at the side of the pub. It caught the van leaving.’

‘The van was a knocker, you say?’

Shawna nodded. ‘Stolen from Southall early yesterday morning.’

‘More than one assailant, I assume?’

She shrugged. ‘One assailant in the pub toilet, they think … probably someone else driving the van. Maybe a couple of others to help chuck him into it.’

Heck sat back. ‘The more of them the better … less chance they’ll have got away without leaving something at the scene.’

‘Gemma’s not expecting the forensics will do us much good … if this crew have come in from abroad, the chances are they won’t be in the system.’

‘It’ll do us good if we manage to get our mitts on a couple of them,’ Heck said.

‘
You
won’t be getting your mitts on anyone,’ a voice interrupted.

Nick Gribbins had approached them, unseen. His right wrist was in a cast, but not in a sling, and by his formal attire he was still on duty. He no longer regarded Heck with suspicion – Heck’s story about visiting a takeaway on the night in question had checked out, while a woman living on the other side of the railway from his flat had confirmed she’d seen the light in his bedroom and had spotted him moving around at about half-past midnight, which made his involvement in Laycock’s abduction impossible. But they’d hardly hit things off. The SOCAR sergeant’s gaze was still an icy shade of grey.

‘You’re wanted downstairs, Heckenburg … now.’

Heck indicated the dregs of his coffee. ‘Gotta finish this first. Might take a while.’

‘It isn’t a fucking request!’

‘Perhaps it
should
have been. That may have been where you went wrong.’

‘You really are an obnoxious prat, aren’t you?’

‘And you couldn’t raise a wank in a warm bath … and that was before I busted your hand.’

‘You want to see how busted it really is?’

Heck jumped to his feet, but now Shawna McCluskey intervened. ‘Hey!’ She rounded the table. ‘What’s all this testosterone crap? This is a sodding canteen … people are trying to have a quiet cuppa in here!’

The men continued to eyeball each other.

‘It’s your own DSU who wants you downstairs,’ Gribbins said tightly. ‘I don’t know why … I just said I’d deliver the message. But
she
didn’t bloody request either.’

He turned on his heel, and strode to the service counter. Heck glanced at Shawna, who looked vaguely disappointed in him.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Oh … nothing.’ She grabbed her jacket. ‘I just wondered if it ever occurred to you that laying into bystanders because the real bastards are out of reach might be counter-productive?’

‘Come on, Shawna. You heard him …’

‘Yeah, I heard you too. You’re like a kid sometimes.’

‘You’re like a kid,
sergeant
,’ he corrected her, but she only half-smiled. ‘Hey, DC McCluskey … they turned my flat inside out!’

‘Like anyone’d notice,’ she replied. ‘The point is, we’re all on the same side.’

‘When you’ve got a sec, remind SOCAR of that.’

Heck headed out of the door, and walked downstairs in a huff. But in truth, her words had made an impact. His original investigation into the Nice Guys, into the kidnap, rape, torture and murder of thirty-eight women – thirty-eight
at least
, he reminded himself – had been the worst experience of his professional life. On top of that, he himself had been beaten and shot. Lauren Wraxford, a civilian he’d formed a real attachment with, had been stabbed through the heart. The perpetrators, a bunch of mercenary scum, had been plying their filthy trade for years in distant lands – and there’d been nothing insane about them, nothing sick, nothing beyond the scope of human responsibility. The acquisition of wealth was their sole concern, and they didn’t care who died in unimaginable terror, agony and despair as a result. Only when they’d brought their business to Britain under Mad Mike Silver had they finally fallen foul of law enforcement, but they hadn’t fallen foul of it nearly enough for Heck’s taste. Even though several of them had died and Silver had received a full life sentence, Heck had long suspected there were more of them out there – and now he knew it for a fact. He wasn’t sure how he’d react if those remaining ever came under his hand; they’d just better hope he didn’t have a weapon in it. He’d often been criticised in his career for being too obsessive, too extreme. But it was difficult in the case of the Nice Guys to imagine there could be any other way. And it wasn’t as if his worst fears hadn’t, at least to some extent, been justified. He ought to have realised there was no prison in Britain secure enough for a bastard like Mad Mike. The notion that he was out again, free to do anything he wanted – and God alone knew what that might be – was more than Heck could stomach. And yet each time he thought along these lines, or even attempted to justify in his own mind the hatred he felt for Silver and that gang of nameless, faceless killers, it reminded him more and more why he shouldn’t be involved. And as Shawna had said, taking his frustrations out on those who
were
would hardly help.

He passed the former media suite, the doors to which stood open. Glancing through, he saw that the new MIR was now almost totally functional. Though Operation Thunderclap hadn’t officially been launched yet, personnel were already crammed around every desk. Photographs and diagrams covered the walls, and in the centre of the room there was a large VDU display bearing a massive 3D image of the crime scene at Brancaster; evidently it was coming through a live feed, because figures in Tyvek could be seen stepping warily between the ruined hulks of vehicles. Alongside that, on two display boards, were two enlarged photos of the
BDEL
engraving – the first on the police car, the second on the battered wooden door of a derelict house.