Hysterical with pain or fear.
‘DS Heckenburg to Charlie Six, urgent message!’ He dashed up the remaining steps, and took an entry leading to the front of the maisonette. ‘Please expedite that support – I can hear violence inside the property and a child in distress, over!’
He halted under the stoop. Light shafted through the frosted panel in the front door, yet little was visible on the other side – except for brief flurries of indistinct movement. Angry shouts still echoed from within.
Heck zipped his jacket and knocked loudly. ‘Police officer! Can you open up please?’
There was instantaneous silence – apart from the baby, whose sobbing had diminished to a low, feeble keening.
Heck knocked again. ‘This is the police – I need you to open up!’ He glimpsed further hurried motion behind the distorted glass.
When he next struck the door, he led with his shoulder.
It required three heavy buffets to crash the woodwork inwards, splinters flying, bolts and hinges catapulting loose. As the door fell in front of him Heck saw a narrow, wreckage-strewn corridor leading into a small kitchen, where a tall male in a duffel coat was in the process of exiting the property via a back door. Heck charged down the corridor. As he did, a woman emerged from a side room, bruised and tear-stained, hair disorderly, mascara streaking her cheeks. She wore a ragged orange dressing gown and clutched a baby to her breast, its face a livid, blotchy red.
‘What do you want?’ she screeched, blocking Heck’s passage. ‘You can’t barge in here!’
Heck stepped around her. ‘Out the way please, miss!’
‘But he’s not done nothing!’ She grabbed Heck’s collar, her sharp fingernails raking the skin on his neck. ‘Can’t you bastards stop harassing him!’
Heck had to pull hard to extricate himself. ‘Hasn’t he just beaten you up?’
‘That’s cos I didn’t want him to leave …’
‘He’s a bloody nutter, love!’
‘It’s nothing … I don’t mind it.’
‘Others do!’ Heck yanked himself free – to renewed wailing from the woman and child – and continued into the kitchen and out through the back door, emerging onto a toy-strewn patio just as a burly outline loped down the steps towards the garage, only a few yards in front of him. The guy had something in his hand, which Heck at first took for a bag; then he realised that it was a motorbike helmet. ‘Jimmy Hood!’ he shouted, scrambling down the steps in pursuit. ‘Police officer – stay where you are!’
Hood’s response was to leap the remaining three or four steps, pulling the helmet on and battering his way through the garage’s rear door. Heck jumped the last steps as well, sliding and tumbling on the earthen slope, but reaching the garage doorway only seconds behind his quarry. He shouldered it open to find Hood seated on the Suzuki, kicking it to life. Its glaring headlight sprang across the alley. The roars of its engine filled the gutted structure.
‘Don’t be a bloody fool!’ Heck bellowed.
Hood glanced round – just long enough to flip Heck the finger and hit the gas, the Suzuki bucking forward, almost pulling a wheelie it accelerated with such speed.
But the fugitive only made it ten yards, at which point, with a terrific BANG, the bike’s rear wheel was jerked back beneath him. He somersaulted over the handlebars, slamming upside down against another garage door before flopping onto the cobblestones, where he lay twisted and groaning. The bike came to rest a few yards away, chugging loudly, smoke pouring from its shattered exhaust.
‘Bit remiss of you, Jimmy,’ Heck said, emerging into the alley, toeing at the length of chain still pulled taut between the buckled rear wheel and the upright girder inside the garage. ‘Not checking that something hadn’t got mysteriously wrapped round your rear axle.’
Flickering blue lights appeared as local patrol cars turned into view at either end of the alley, slowly wending their way forward. Hood managed to roll over onto his back, but could do nothing except lie there, glaring with glassy, soulless eyes through the aperture where his visor had been smashed away.
Heck dug handcuffs from his back pocket and suspended them in full view. ‘Either way, pal, you don’t have to say anything. But it may harm your defence …’
It took a near-death experience to make Harold Lansing realise that he needed to start enjoying life more. Of course, those who didn’t know him would have been startled to learn that he wasn’t leading a very full and pleasurable existence in the first place.
A 45-year-old multi-millionaire bachelor, he was exceptionally handsome – sun-bronzed, with a shock of crisp, grey hair – always fashionably dressed even in casuals, and the owner of two nifty motors, a Bentley Continental V8 and a Hyundai Veloster sport, so it seemed highly unlikely that he wasn’t already one of the most contented men in Britain. He also owned three sumptuous properties: a villa on the Côte d’Azur, where he spent the odd three-day break, a flash apartment in Swiss Cottage, purpose-bought as a crashpad from which to take in the London scene, and his ‘rural retreat’, as he referred to it, though it was actually his regular residence: a palatial, eight-bedroom former farmhouse in the Surrey countryside called Rosewood Grange. With 300 acres of verdant gardens attached, a private tennis court and croquet lawn, its own indoor swimming pool and the near-obligatory complement of priceless artworks and antiques, you’d have expected Rosewood Grange to be the jewel in a party king’s crown, the epicentre of a lavish, playboy lifestyle, where all the best people, including the most glamorous and connected women, came every weekend to get off their face.
Except that it didn’t serve that purpose, and it never really had.
Looks could be deceptive.
Aside from the occasional round of golf and a few restful hours spent angling on the River Mole, Lansing dedicated more energy towards supporting charitable causes than he did his own leisure. In addition, he was a workaholic. He ran several computer companies from his private office in Reigate, and had made the bulk of his money selling software products in the United States and the Far East. He also owned a chain of country inns and hotels aimed at a wealthy clientele. What was more, he liked to stay hands-on with all these interests – not because he didn’t trust his carefully appointed underlings, but more because he couldn’t conceive of a lifestyle spent, to use one of his own phrases, twiddling his thumbs all day.
However, now maybe – just maybe – thanks to a recent accident and a subsequent two-week sojourn in hospital, several days of which he’d spent hooked to a bank of ‘vital signs’ monitors in Intensive Care, he was beginning to readdress things.
As he threw his briefcase into the back of his Bentley that beautiful July morning, he paused briefly to admire the lush, sun-dappled greenery enclosing his home, and to breathe the seductive scents of the English woodland: rosebud, honeysuckle, fresh mint. Quite an improvement on the starch, bleach, and liberally applied antiseptics of the hospital.
Good Lord, it was great to be alive. But how much of a life was he actually
