Heck didn’t have time to be concerned; he swung around and began to climb down, his ears ringing. The ladder was discomfortingly narrow; he could only descend it by placing hand directly below hand, foot directly below foot. When he reached halfway, he saw that it had been built in sections which slid over the top of each other. His weight automatically disengaged the first one, and he rode down for ten feet or so, juddering to a halt, the force of which almost dislodged him, though the impact of this then disengaged the third and final section as well – and he descended all the way to the ground. His grip slipped en route, and he plummeted the last five feet, but landed upright. He rounded the corner onto a cobbled side street – just in time to confront Cameron Boyd running towards him from the station exit.
The look on Boyd’s sweat-soaked face was priceless; it would have been funny had Heck not been equally exhausted.
The felon veered sideways across the main road, threading between the honking vehicles, hurdling over bonnets. Heck followed, more horns blaring, more cars skidding to avoid hitting him. He had no breath left with which to respond to the shouts of abuse. Police sirens could be heard over the hubbub, but no blues and twos were visible yet. Boyd made it to the far side, and took a passage between two dingy shops. Heck bawled into his radio. ‘Ardwick station! Crossing a main road … think it’s Devonshire Street!’
At the end of the passage there was a tall, barred gate – but it stood open. Boyd had already passed through it and was now headed across a small, brick-strewn lot. Heck clumped after him. Just ahead, a chain-link fence separated the lot from an area of railway sidings, where cement-mixers, portakabins and parked-up JCBs indicated that building work was in progress. Boyd halted to pick up a length of rusty chain, and flung it. It struck Heck like a bolas, wrapping around his legs, and tripping him. This bought Boyd a little extra time, but now headlights came spearing through the portakabins and the plastic-covered piles of building materials. The Bedford van swerved into view.
‘Good lad, Andy!’ Heck shouted, extricating himself from the chain. He got up and staggered into the sidings.
Boyd blundered towards the railway line, though the tall mesh fence would prevent him going further than that. Hearing the van screech to a halt just behind him, he attempted to curve back between mountainous stacks of house-bricks. The one in front of him was only about four feet high. He climbed up on top of it, lurching across and trying to jump up onto the next, which was a couple of feet higher.
Heck was still about fifty yards away, but he saw what was happening. He also saw Andy Gregson climbing in pursuit.
‘Where do you think you’re going!’ Gregson shouted. ‘Fucking idiot! Give it up!’
Boyd continued up onto the next pile of bricks and the next one after that. Gregson was much the fresher of the two, not to mention younger and fitter. As they ascended from one level to the next, loose bricks shifting beneath their feet, he gained steadily. Boyd was about fifteen feet up and shinning his way to the top of the highest stack, when the first brick was dislodged beneath his sliding foot.
It was an accident – that much was plain; Heck saw it clearly as he ran forward. But the brick still fell six or seven feet before it struck Gregson in the face. The second fell a similar distance, as did the third, the one that caught him in the middle of his cranium. This particular stack had been poorly made. It comprised individual towers balanced against each other, rather than carefully-aligned layers. So when one of these now teetered over, another followed, and then another. As the entire structure fell chaotically apart, Boyd crashed to earth on the far side, gasping as the wind was driven out of him, but sufficiently aware of his peril to roll and roll until he was out of the way.
Andy Gregson was less fortunate. He’d already been clobbered by the first three bricks, and slumped half-senseless as the avalanche descended on him.
‘
ANDY!
’ Heck bellowed, his voice almost drowned by the clattering, cacophonous rumble. After several seconds wafting through a choking cloud of brick-dust, he found the young cop jackknifed backwards, half buried in broken bricks. His head and torso were completely hidden, but he was moving slightly.
‘DS Heckenburg to Echo Control!’ Heck shouted into his radio. ‘Urgent message! DC Gregson down and seriously injured. Get an ambulance to the railway sidings off Devonshire Street now! Do it now! And get me some back-up for Christ’s sake!’ Frantically, he heaved lumps of shattered rubble aside. ‘Andy?’
He uncovered a shirt thick with grime and blood, and then a severely battered face, both its eye-sockets and cheekbones busted at a guess, its nose flattened, multiple lacerations extending far above the hairline, from which fresh blood was throbbing. Heck placed two fingers to Gregson’s neck to check his carotid; it was still pulsing – but the kid was losing his life-fluid at a rate of knots. Heck could hear sirens, but they still sounded far, far away.
‘Get someone here
NOW
!’ he bellowed into his radio. ‘Casualty has a severe head trauma, and multiple other injuries …’
‘I’m alright … sarge,’ Gregson mumbled. ‘Alright …’
‘You’re going to be okay,’ Heck said. ‘Ambulance’ll be here in no time …’
A rattling of chain-links distracted him. He glanced up: not thirty yards away, beyond the fallen mound of bricks, Cameron Boyd was attempting to climb the mesh fence. Heck could barely conceal the snarl in his voice.
‘I’ll be back in one minute, pal,’ he said into Gregson’s ear. ‘One minute, tops.’
Boyd, who looked too weary to climb further, had only made it to about five feet in the air; clearly his body was a deadweight. It should have been no problem for Heck to grab him from behind and haul him down. But again, with that jungle animal instinct, Boyd detected an enemy’s approach. He turned and jumped down; his knees buckled and he was so tired that he couldn’t evade the first haymaker Heck swung at him. It took him full on the left side of his face, sending him sprawling into the dirt.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Heck said. Boyd tried to crawl away on all fours. Heck kicked his backside. ‘But it may harm your defence …’ Boyd went into a forward roll, this time getting to his feet and reaching under his jacket, pulling out his spike; Heck grinned crookedly – now he could claim self-defence, ‘… if you fail to mention something you may later rely on in court.’
Boyd charged, spike raised. Heck met him in the throat with a forearm smash.
‘But anything you do say …’ Boyd lost his spike as he went gargling to the floor. Heck grabbed him by the sweat-soaked collar, and lifted him about a foot from the ground so that his next right hook would rocket straight to the jaw, ‘… may be given in evidence!’
‘I ought to inform you that we’ve photographed my client’s injuries, and that we intend to make a full and official complaint,’ the solicitor said.
His name was Snodgrass; he was immaculately suited, as they always were, but also tall and weak-chinned, with short sandy hair and pale, watery-blue eyes.
‘Do so,’ Heck replied as they walked down the custody suite corridor at Longsight Police Station. ‘Both DC Gregson and I will happily tell any enquiry that we saw your client fall off a fifteen-foot pile of bricks.’
‘He should be in hospital, not here.’
‘The Greater Manchester medical officer has passed him fit for interview. That’s good enough for me.’
‘Your attitude is most unhelpful, Sergeant Heckenburg.’
Heck rounded on him. ‘No, what’s unhelpful, Mr Snodgrass, is your insistence on representing
both
of these … suspects.’
The doors to two separate interview rooms faced each other across the corridor. Gary Quinnell stood by the one on the left, Shawna McCluskey, who had almost as big a plaster across her nose as Heck had on his left temple, on the right. Terry Mullany was inside the room Quinnell was guarding; Cameron Boyd was in the other.
Snodgrass merely shrugged. ‘As both my clients are being held on suspicion of committing the same offences, namely a series of heinous murders, it seems entirely reasonable.’
‘It’s not remotely reasonable,’ Heck retorted. ‘It’s the oldest delaying tactic in the book, and it won’t wash! You know it means we can only question our suspects one at a time. You’re deliberately running the clock down.’
It wasn’t normally his practice to be so bullish with legal reps. These guys were only here doing a job, despite the public’s instinctive dislike of them; their serpentine skills were something many an embattled police officer had been glad of in the past. But while they were chatting, Gemma was at the Longsight Royal Infirmary, where Andy Gregson was undergoing life-saving surgery.
‘You realise you’re going to get torn apart in court, don’t you?’ Boyd grinned across the interview room table. It wasn’t a pretty sight; his brown teeth were ugly enough, but now several were missing. Bloodstains were still visible around his swollen mouth.
‘For what, Cameron?’ Heck asked.
Boyd threw a cocksure glance at Snodgrass, who was making notes alongside him. ‘For what, he says! Well, how about kicking my fucking face in while you were locking me up?’
‘You resisted arrest, Cameron … very violently indeed. In fact you came at me with a deadly weapon.’ Heck produced a sealed plastic package containing Boyd’s so-called spike. ‘For the tape, I’m showing Cameron Boyd Exhibit MH1, which is an industrial screwdriver, the tip of which appears to have been sharpened to a point. This is yours, isn’t it, Cameron?’
‘Never seen it before in my fucking life.’
‘It hasn’t been checked yet, but I’m pretty sure it’ll have your fingerprints all over it, given that you were wielding it like a knife when you attacked me.’
‘You planted them. Wrapped my hand around it while I was out for the count.’
‘You also used it against a young girl called Sally Baines. She was on the train tonight travelling from Glossop to Manchester Piccadilly, the same train you boarded at Ashburys station at roughly nine-forty p.m. You may remember … you put her into an arm lock and pushed the spike against her throat. You actually drew blood, Cameron, you wounded her. And all she was doing was sitting there, reading a magazine.’
Boyd gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘I’m sorry for this tart, but it wasn’t me.’
‘As well as Sally Baines, there was Martin Ruckworth. He was the conductor on the same train. Remember him? You smashed the spike across the top of his nose, causing him severe facial injuries. I’m sure you recollect that.’
‘Same reply. Wasn’t me.’
‘Then there were all the other people on the train who also saw you,’ Shawna McCluskey said.
Boyd glanced at her and shrugged. ‘They’ll have seen someone. I’m sorry this bad thing happened, but like I say, it wasn’t me.’
‘If that’s true,’ Heck said, ‘after I confronted you at the exit of Ardwick station, why did you run off onto the railway sidings?’
‘Now we’re getting to the truth.’ Boyd examined his chewed, dirty fingernails. ‘I wasn’t on that train, but I
was
at Ardwick. I was checking train times on the noticeboard. I’m off to see my mum tomorrow in Hadfield. I come away, walk around the corner, and there’s you. Just jumped off this ladder. I didn’t have a fucking clue who you were, but you look like a right thug, you must admit. You came straight at me, spooked me, I ran. When you started chasing, that’s when I really legged it. What else am I supposed to do?’
‘So you’re claiming mistaken identity?’ Shawna asked him. ‘DS Heckenburg and DC Gregson were chasing someone else and somehow you got mixed up with that person?’
‘Telling me that couldn’t happen?’ Boyd said. ‘At night? The way this fella was going at it? Like a fucking madman, he was. Eyes rolling, sweat pouring.’
She smiled. ‘It’s an interesting story, Cameron. But the chase actually started when you ran out of The Hayrick pub in Gorton, where DS Heckenburg and DC Gregson had been observing you earlier in the evening.’
‘Observing someone maybe. Wasn’t me.’
‘What we’re really interested to know, Cameron, is why you actually ran out of The Hayrick in the first place,’ Heck said. ‘We’ve got your phone so we know it happened as soon as you received a call from an associate of yours, Terry Mullany.’
‘Terry’s a mate. Rings me from time to time. Doesn’t mean anything.’
‘So you admit you were in The Hayrick pub when you received that call?’
‘What does it fucking matter? I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘So why did you run like the clappers?’ Shawna asked. ‘Why were you so desperate to get away that you injured three innocent civilians, one of them severely?’
‘Deny the incident on the train all you want, Cameron,’ Heck said. ‘But we’ve got your prints on the weapon and we’ve got witness statements coming out of our back pockets. All we need to do is put you in front of an ID parade, and all the people you assaulted, not to mention everyone else on that train, will pick you out with no difficulty at all. And that’s before we even look at the CCTV footage.’
‘Put-up job,’ Boyd sneered. His demeanour was still that of someone who had nothing to worry about, but a trickle of sweat down his left cheek suggested otherwise. ‘Always the same.’
‘Let’s try something else,’ Heck said. ‘Where were you on Bonfire Night last year?’
Boyd feigned amusement. ‘Wait, don’t tell me … you’re trying to frame me for those Desecrator murders?’
‘Where were you?’ Shawna asked.
‘Probably in some pub, watching fireworks I didn’t pay for … like every other fucker with any sense.’
‘Get over to Preston much, do you?’
‘Never been there in my fucking life.’
‘How about Yorkshire?’ Heck asked. ‘Get over there much?’
‘As little as fucking possible.’
‘Were you over there last December … specifically around Christmas?’
‘No. I like to spend Christmas at home.’
Heck leaned back in his chair. ‘We have a witness who says different. We have a witness who can’t just place you in Yorkshire, but in Leeds, at the actual scene of the second murder.’