isn’t enough.’
‘There’s no case, alright?’ Heck stared at him as earnestly as he could. ‘I’ve told you this before. Your Noreen went missing. I’m sorry about that, but she was nineteen and a big girl. She had money, she had her independence – she’s hardly what you’d class as a vulnerable person. You need to accept the possibility that she might have disappeared because she wanted to.’
‘She was out with her mates in the West End,’ Ballamara reminded him. ‘It was their usual Saturday night get-together. All she had with her was her handbag and the very skimpy clothes she was standing up in. The next day I searched her flat, myself. The wardrobes were still full. All her suitcases were there, her passport was in the fucking drawer, for Christ’s sake.’
Heck didn’t really know how to reply. They’d had this conversation over and over, and in any case the gangster was preaching to the converted. Heck also believed that Noreen Ballamara had fallen victim to foul play, and, in that respect, his toeing the ‘official’ line was becoming thankless and tiresome.
‘Look Ballamara,’ he finally said, ‘you need to understand …’
‘Mister Ballamara, while we’re insisting on formalities.’
‘Mr Ballamara, it’s not me you’ve got to convince. But with no body, no crime scene and basically no evidence of anything at all, I’m pissing in the wind. At present, all we can do is class Noreen as a missing person.’
‘And what about all the others?’
‘The same thing. There’s no proof that any of these disappearances are connected.’
‘You don’t think it’s a hell of a coincidence?’
‘Look at the bigger picture. Thousands of people drop out of sight every year, but only a fraction of them in suspicious circumstances.’
Ballamara nodded at this and smiled. ‘In which case, why are you, an officer in the NCG’s Serial Crimes Unit, looking into these particular forty cases?’
‘That’s what my gaffers are wondering.’
‘It isn’t good enough, Heckenburg. I want answers.’
‘What do you think I want?’
‘I don’t give a flying fuck what you want!’ The gangster leaned across and peered into Heck’s face with lupine intensity. He’d now blanched to a very unhealthy shade of white and was so close that his breath filled the cop’s nostrils with a reek of peppermint. When he spoke again, it was in a low, menacing monotone. ‘Now you listen, my son. I’ve had it up to here with this bullshit. So from now on, you aren’t just working for the police – you’re working for me. Consider the fact that you’re still walking around with an intact spine your salary. Now get out and get back on the job, or I’ll personally rearrange your face so your fucking mum wouldn’t recognise it.’
Right on cue, the car door opened again.
Heck found himself being helped out by Asquith, though, with a bunched fist gripping him by the back of his collar, it was the sort of help he probably didn’t need. The door closed with a thud, and then Heck was standing in the road watching as Asquith sidled around the vehicle to the front passenger door, and Loxton made to climb behind the steering wheel.
‘Don’t suppose you lot have been looking for Noreen, have you?’ Heck asked them.
Loxton eyed him as though he couldn’t believe a copper could ask so stupid a question. ‘Course we fucking have.’
‘Any leads you’d care to share?’
‘Dale!’ Ballamara shouted from inside the car. ‘Stop jawing with that fucking waste of space. He hasn’t got time for idle chat.’
Heck stood back as the Bentley swerved off the rubble and drove away in a cloud of dust and debris. In truth, there was any number of things he could have charged Bobby Ballamara with. That morning alone he was good for wasting police time, threatening to kill, unlawful imprisonment, and so on. But these were Mickey Mouse offences, arrests that would only distract from the main story, which was the thirty-eight missing women that Heck had been looking for since the beginning of 2010. What was more, Bobby Ballamara and his boys who, by their own admission, were keeping their ear to the ground, had a potentially useful role to play in this, so alienating them even further would be self-defeating. Besides, for all his bravado, Ballamara was unlikely to whack a copper. He was strictly old school. A vicious, violent racketeer, he wouldn’t hesitate to have a fellow lowlife’s brains beaten out of him if he felt like it. But his traditional gangland ethics made him seem anachronistic in this age of crazy, gun-toting killers who’d think nothing of massacring school-kids should they get in the way.
Heck walked back to his car, only to spot that its front nearside tyre was flat. For an angry moment he assumed that either Asquith or Loxton had got bored while he’d been in conversation with their boss. But then he saw the rusty nail sticking out of it, almost certainly picked up on the patch of burned ground that he’d used as a turning-space earlier. Irritated with his own carelessness, and feeling way too tired for the physical effort now required, he went to the boot for his spare.
That was when it began to rain.
Each time Louise woke up it seemed like she was emerging from a horrific nightmare, only to discover that it was reality.
She was in the boot of a vehicle – she’d realised that much from the rumbling of the engine and the constant jolting and bumping. Her hands were secured behind her back in what felt like a pair of plastic cuffs, which were pulled so tight that they burned into her flesh. Her legs were crooked painfully beneath her because she couldn’t lie full-length in such an enclosed space. It was pitch-black and stiflingly hot; her clothes were damp with sweat, and yet her body was utterly frozen with terror. She didn’t know how long she’d been in here. It seemed like days, though surely it couldn’t have been that long – a day and a night maybe, possibly a little longer? Either way, she was parched with thirst, hunger was gnawing her insides out and the atmosphere was unspeakably foul as she’d urinated on herself at least twice. Yet none of that compared to the mind-numbing fear of what might lie ahead.
A piece of duct-tape had been smacked across her mouth and wrapped around the back of her head so she could barely whimper, let alone scream. A blindfold made of cloth was bound around her eyes. The memory of what had happened on the quiet country road was only vague. Whoever the man was who’d attacked her – if it had been a man (that diabolical face was still imprinted on her mind) – he’d choked her into unconsciousness. But at least that brief instant of agony and dread had been swift. She’d have swapped the merciful oblivion it brought for the prolonged, torturous ordeal that she was going through now. She’d been enclosed in this metal coffin for so long that she’d even slept once or twice, though that was mainly because each time when she’d woken she’d thrashed about frantically until she was exhausted. Louise struggled again, futilely, wailing beneath her gag. The problem was that the boot was claustropho-bically tight and confined; its lid was only a couple of inches above her, and she had no leverage with which to kick against it.
For the thousandth time, her thoughts raced chaotically as she tried to recall the contradictory advice
