descended. At the first turn in the stair, he saw a startling piece of graffiti on the facing wall. Some vandal had used venom-green paint to daub the words:
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here …
And underneath it:
… if you had any in the fucking first place
Heck understood the meaning of this when he looked right, to where the final flight of steps descended three or four feet, before connecting with a corridor built from bare brick and smelling strongly of mildew. Exposed piping, unlagged but dangling with cobwebs, ran the full length of it. Heck could just about see this thanks to the illumination provided by a series of grimy light bulbs mounted every ten yards in wire-mesh cages crusted with limescale. Some forty yards ahead, a pair of doorways led off opposite each other, and a little way beyond those, at the corridor’s far end, stood a closed door made of what looked like solid steel.
Heck walked forward, footsteps clicking on damp cement.
On reaching the facing doorways, he glanced into two squat brick rooms, in which massive cisterns churned quietly. He strode on towards the steel door. It was heavy, full of rivets and had no visible handle.
Just as he reached it, it slid open on its greased runner.
Snake Fletcher stood there, the eyes inscrutable behind the bottle-thick lenses of his heavy-framed glasses.
‘Welcome,’ he said.
‘Some welcome,’ Heck replied. ‘What’s wrong with the pub, or a park bench?’
‘I told you, Heck … I’m not going topside at the mo.’
‘Never had you down as the sort who scares easily.’
‘Then you don’t know me as well as you think, eh?’
That was most likely true, Heck conceded, as Snake withdrew into the dank chamber beyond the heavy door.
Some informants were interested in one thing only: the money they earned off the scalps of those fellow criminals they sent to their doom. Others were trying to pay off scores or remove rivals. But Snake didn’t seem to tick any of those boxes. And that had always troubled Heck about this case. If you couldn’t work someone out from the word ‘go’, if you’d never been able to fathom their purpose … how could you really trust them?
He’d first encountered the guy while working in Tower Hamlets Robbery. He’d pulled in a desperate youngster, Billy Fletcher, Snake’s little brother, for participating in a string of corner-shop stick-ups. There wasn’t much down for Billy at the time, but Heck had managed to persuade his colleagues that the young idiot had been drawn into the crimes through his heroin addiction. He’d also persuaded Billy to turn evidence, thus saving himself both from prison and underworld retribution. Snake hadn’t seen his brother for fifteen years now, as he was safely inside a witness protection scheme, but that didn’t matter to him. At least, the kid was still alive. And after that, Snake had always felt that Heck, of all the coppers in London, was someone he could trust.
But still … you could never afford to be totally sure of an informant’s motives.
It wasn’t as if Snake Fletcher was the most prepossessing-looking bloke.
The first time Heck had seen him, he’d made him for an over-the-hill metalhead: early forties, bespectacled, ratty hair and beard, faded tats on his gangling arms, ragged, oily denims. Now, fifteen years later, his image hadn’t changed much, except that he was thinner and greyer and had ditched the proto-biker gear for a set of dingy caretaker’s overalls. For all that, he still smelled strongly of cig smoke and sweat.
‘You having a cuppa, or what?’ he asked.
A bare bulb showed that his room was built from brick and crammed with unidentifiable clutter. If Snake himself had been pungent, the reek of dirty underclothes and soiled sheets, which spilled out of the subterranean hovel, was eye-watering.
‘I’ll come in,’ Heck said. ‘I’m not so bothered about the cuppa though. Nice welcome for all the God-fearing church folk, by the way.’
Snake chuckled. ‘You mean the “abandon all hope” thing? Yeah, some skank broke in about three weeks ago. Father Wilkin, he’s the parish priest … he asked me to clean it off, but I need to get some paint. It’s not a priority. He never comes down here, never mind any of the parishioners.’
Which was undoubtedly a good thing, Heck decided.
From its various mops, buckets, brushes, bottles of bleach and boxes of random junk, the room was clearly a caretaker’s lock-up. But Snake had also adapted it into a living space, even though it was small and windowless. He’d dragged in a truckle bed from somewhere (its sheets in a rumpled, filthy state), a few bits of second-hand furniture, and even a chemical toilet, though by its stench, this was sorely in need of emptying.
Snake sidled to a rickety sideboard on which streaky tea-making things sat among crumbs and puddles of spilled milk. ‘So, tell me … did you get them all?’
‘We’ve charged five men with various offences relating to the priest murders,’ Heck said. ‘They’re all been remanded in custody.’
Snake nodded, as he plugged his kettle in. ‘Names?’
‘Sherwin Lightfoot – still can’t get over that one – Michael Hapwood, Dennis Purdham, Jason Renwick and Ranald Ulfskar, aka Albert Jones. That’s all of them, yeah?’
‘Far as I’m aware.’
‘Well … they won’t be darkening any church doors in the near future.’
Snake spooned coffee granules into a mug. ‘I’ll be laying low for a while, all the same.’
‘No one knows you gave us the tip, if that’s what’s bothering you.’
‘They’ll be watching, though. Wondering.’ Snake shook his grizzled head. ‘If I’m not dutifully despondent about what’s happened to our worshipful leaders, they’ll ask themselves why.’
‘Who’s they?’ Heck asked. ‘You just said we’d got them all.’
‘You’ve got the hardcore. The fanatics. But there’re others.’
‘You mean other activists?’
‘Nah, there are no more priest killers. The rest are just gobshites. But … if Ulf and his nutters get off for any reason, someone’ll tell them what I’ve been up to.’
He continued to make his coffee. Heck watched him, curious.
‘Snake … you certain there’s no one else we should be looking at?’
‘No one who scares me as much as Ulf and his cronies. Sure you don’t want one?’
Heck shook his head and checked his phone, noting that he’d received a text from Gemma.
ETA office?
That had been nearly five minutes ago now, which meant she’d shortly be ringing him. He turned the device off
