crew hadn’t quite resorted to that just yet, but with Langton on the team how far off could it actually be?
The Wild Bunch had finally been taken down by GMP’s Serious Crimes Division, but somehow Langton, who even now was suspected of having been a senior killer in their ranks, had slipped through the prosecution net. He’d signed on for a brief time with Vic Ship, but then he too had got greedy and had relocated to Bradburn to serve as Lee Shaughnessy’s deputy. How long he’d be happy in that secondary role was anyone’s guess, but for the moment at least he made a set of very nasty opponents even nastier still.
Heck was already wondering if Langton could be the lunatic behind the flamethrower. His mugshot depicted a tough-looking black dude in his early thirties. He was broad as an ox across the shoulders, and now in his post-sportsman days was inclined towards heaviness, though there was still something solid and virile about him. He had broad, even features, but wore his hair in a mop of dreads and his eyes burned with an odd metallic-grey lustre. His sneering half-smile revealed a single golden tooth.
As he folded it all away and finished his coffee, Heck was thoughtful.
Shaughnessy’s lot were rough customers and no mistake. A real bunch of cowboys, but they’d still be meat and drink for Vic Ship’s Russian assassins, not to mention John Sagan – as that pair of eviscerated losers in the landfill had discovered.
It was an unusual thing, he reflected, that all these animals were preying on each other and the only thing the cops actually needed to do was sit there and watch as they gradually and bloodily depopulated their own hate-filled world – but instead, SCU was going to intervene.
Damn right it was going to intervene.
Paperwork tucked under his arm, he walked back out towards the car park.
It would always intervene.
If it failed to do that innocent bystanders would get hurt, as they invariably did. And not all the bastards would perish anyway; some, most likely the very worst of them, would survive, stronger, meaner, wealthier, more deeply and widely feared than ever before.
No, the rule of law could never give way to the rule of chaos.
But more important than any of that, John Sagan was not going to die in some crazy midnight crossfire, or in a cloud of flame, or at the hands of Lee Shaughnessy or his brute-of-the-moment, Marvin Langton.
John Sagan was Heck’s.
As Heck pulled off the M6 onto the slip-road just after seven that evening, it was raining. It had been dry, mild and spring-like when he’d left London early afternoon, but he’d often suspected that the Northwest had a micro-climate all of its own. As he followed the main dual carriageway into Bradburn, passing the outlying estates, he saw leaves sprouting on hedges, gardens slowly turning green again. But what initially was drizzle had now become a downpour, the sky overhead as grey as lead, and none of that would help improve the atmosphere of a dump like his hometown. Though as Heck drove on, he couldn’t help wondering if he was being a little hard on the old place; it was somewhere he’d enjoyed a happy and uncomplicated childhood after all. Even the early years of his adolescence had been fun – until the thing that had destroyed his family.
It struck him now that maybe this latter event, which had occurred when he was fifteen, had soured the place for him more than it actually deserved. Bradburn had never really recovered from the wholesale closing of its coalmines and mills during the 1960s and 1970s. These days, it was a tale of drab red-brick streets and multiple tower blocks, and here and there the relics of factories, most of them with boarded windows and chimneys that hadn’t smoked in decades. But it was no more run-down than many other urban boroughs that once had depended on heavy industry and now were struggling to adjust to an age in which all that was history. There were some jobs here, but higher-than-average unemployment was an issue that never seemed to go away.
Heck left the dual carriageway to follow lesser routes through intermittent clusters of shops and houses, most on the shabby side. Every other pub he saw was closed, though of course in the twenty-first century that wasn’t solely a Bradburn problem.
It was now half past seven, and Gemma wasn’t expecting him at the Incident Room until the following morning. He was half tempted to stick his nose in anyway, just to grab himself an update, but as he hadn’t yet found any lodgings, he resolved to sort that out first, and the most obvious port of call was his sister’s house. He wasn’t overly keen on the idea, but Dana would never let him hear the last of it if he arrived in Bradburn and didn’t check in with her at the first opportunity. So once he’d penetrated the labyrinthine outer suburbs, he headed inward for what they’d always known as the Old Town, a large residential district lying east of the town centre.
He cut around this central zone, much of which was pedestrianised, via the Blackhall ward. This had always been the town’s poorest quarter, and by the looks of it things hadn’t improved. Its sordid streets appeared semi-derelict, while the lighting was dismal, the little there was of it leaching into smoky bricks and oily flagstones. Beyond Blackhall, Heck swung a left, following Riverside Way, which skirted along the edge of the River Pennington, passing numerous garages, scrapyards and workshops built into railway arches, and several more blocks of high-rise flats, before turning right onto Wardley Rise, which ascended gently into the residential parish of St Nathaniel’s, or the Old Town, at the centre of which stood the teetering needle spire of St Nathaniel’s Roman Catholic Church, known locally as ‘St Nat’s’.
According to a local newspaper, Heck’s home neighbourhood had once ‘summed up everything the old North was about’. It had a lively community, was strongly Catholic and therefore more orderly and law-abiding than a visitor might expect. It was also famous for housing St Nathaniel’s ARLFC, created by Irish monks back in the candle-lit years of the nineteenth century to give local deprived youth an outlet for their aggression, and now one of the most successful amateur rugby league clubs in the whole of Northwest Counties. As a schoolboy star, Heck had represented its various junior teams with distinction. In every way, St Nat’s had been picture-postcard Bradburn: parallel rows of slate roofs and brick chimneys, mills towering in the background. Grimy but picturesque, and also safe – tribes of kids playing on every street corner, mums and grandmas leaning in doorways, chatting idly. Of course that had been the way it was.
As Heck prowled these benighted neighbourhoods now, he scarcely saw a soul.
That might just be down to the rain and the fact it was midweek. Or alternatively, perhaps this district too had fallen onto hard times. Maybe muggers and street-gangs haunted its shadowy backstreets; or perhaps the escalating underworld violence in general was oppressing everybody.
That said, the Old Town wasn’t exactly dead. Not quite yet. Here and there, streams of warm lamplight filtered through curtained windows, though none at all showed from 23 Cranby Street, the Heckenburg family home.
Heck pulled up in front and switched his engine off. The tiny terraced house’s front curtains were open, but the house itself stood in darkness.
He sat still, pondering.
Not much in Cranby Street had changed, except that there were fewer houses. At least half of them had been demolished at some point in the past, but down at the far end there was still open access through to the canal and the lock-gates, and on the other side the reclaimed spoil-land that had later been turned into the rugby league pitch where a juvenile Heck would
