The Killing Club
‘Excuse me, sarge … can you confirm that you’re pursuing a suspect in the Hendon murders, over?’
‘That’s affirmative. His name is Ernest Cooper, male IC1, tall, six-two or six-three, late fifties, over.’
‘Whereabouts are you, over?’
‘That’s the problem. I don’t bloody know.’ Heck could have beaten himself up at that moment. He hadn’t even memorised Ernest Cooper’s address, and he’d dropped the warrant back in the house, so he had no point of reference at all. All he knew was that he was somewhere in Sunderland’s East End.
‘Can you contact PC Jerry Farthing?’ Heck hadn’t memorised Farthing’s collar number either, which was another black mark against him. ‘He’ll tell you where we are, over.’
‘Affirmative. Stand by.’
‘I can hardly stand by,’ Heck said under his breath, as he jogged through the gate onto a broad, cindery parking area. About thirty yards ahead, the scabrous edifice of the main building was visible. Its upper windows were yawning cavities. A protruding lattice of rusted metalwork ran along the front, about fifteen feet up; the relic of a canopy, beneath which wagons would have idled. Fragments of mildewed signage remained, but were unreadable.
Heck hesitated to go further. Was it feasible that Cooper, fit as he was, could have got this far ahead? The problem was there didn’t seem to have been anywhere else he could run to. It was all a bit worrying, of course, because if Cooper was the perp, and it now seemed highly likely he was, there were only three reasons why he’d run like this: either there was somewhere else he could go, some bolthole where he could lie low; his personal liberty was less important to him than finishing off the work he’d set himself, eliminating Nathan Crabtree’s gang; or both of the above.
In no doubt that he needed to catch this guy right now, Heck advanced towards the building, scanning it for any identifying marks he could pass to Comms. Most of its ground-floor entrances were covered by wooden hoardings, but the most central one had collapsed, exposing black emptiness.
He stepped through this, ultra-warily.
Total darkness enclosed him – but only for a second. Very rapidly, dimmer light sources became apparent, and his eyes attuned to an area that was like a small lobby, half-flooded with water, crammed with broken bricks and masonry. Anyone attempting to dash through here would likely have fractured an ankle. Instead, Heck tip-toed through it, balancing on planks and fallen joists. A secondary door led into a cavernous inner chamber, the entrance to which was only accessible at the end of sixty yards of cage-like corridor, lagging and bits of cable hanging down through its mesh ceiling.
Again, Heck halted. Going further on his own was asking for trouble. Cooper had the khukuri knife – and he was clearly a dab hand at using it. With a single blow, he’d disabled a police car. Speaking of which – Heck gritted his teeth with fury at Jerry Farthing. Any bobby with his experience ought to have known that checking damage to a company vehicle was of less importance than apprehending a suspect. In fact, he would have known it. The reason Jerry had refused to join the chase was a lack of motivation. Whether that was down to fear or laziness, Heck wasn’t entirely sure, but the bastard was clearly past his best.
Then, to his surprise, he heard the chugging of an engine outside.
He scrambled back through the brick-strewn lobby, and felt a vague pang of guilt at the sight of Farthing’s Astra wallowing to an unsteady halt on the forecourt, its front nearside tyre hanging in ribbons. He walked quickly over there. ‘Have you put Comms in the picture? I wasn’t able to …’ His words petered out.
Farthing, white-faced and sweating, climbed slowly from the driver’s side, while someone else climbed from the passenger side. The newcomer was slim but tall, about six-foot-three. He was in his late fifties, with lean, angular features and pale blue eyes. He had grey hair cut so short that it was really no more than a circular patch on top of his head, and a clipped grey moustache. He wore a fawn tracksuit, and a khaki belt, into the left-hand side of which the khukuri knife was tucked. This was a truly admirable object – its blade shone wickedly and there was a carved steel lion’s head at its pommel. But he also wielded a firearm: a Luger nine-millimetre, that most iconic weapon of the Third Reich, which he now trained squarely on Farthing’s head.
They’d been fooled, Heck realised. He’d gone straight through that gate in the fence without considering that their quarry might be somewhere closer to home – hiding under the police car perhaps, or squatting around the back of it.
‘Please tell me you managed to get a call out first?’ Heck said to Farthing.
But Farthing was too busy jabbering to his captor. ‘Mr Cooper … this is ridiculous. You’re not going to shoot us. I mean, come on, you can’t …’
‘Shut up,’ Cooper said, quietly but curtly.
‘Look, we were only here to ask you a couple of questions …’
‘I said shut up!’
‘Jesus, man … you can’t just fucking shoot us!’
‘Don’t do anything rash, Mr Cooper,’ Heck advised.
‘Rash implies unnecessary, pointless, futile.’ Cooper’s accent was noticeably Sunderland, but more refined than most. He waggled with his pistol, indicating that Farthing should walk over and stand alongside Heck, which he duly did. ‘I assure you, Sergeant Heckenburg … the action I take here today will be none of those things. Now empty your pockets, please. Every weapon you’re carrying, every communication device. I want them placed on the ground. When you’ve done that, put your hands up.’
Heck stooped, laying down his radio, mobile phone and handcuffs. Cooper watched him intently and yet unemotionally. His pale blue eyes were like teddy bear buttons; it was quite the most unnatural colour Heck had ever seen.
‘That looks like an original 1940s Luger to me, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Another spoil of war?’
‘Inside!’ Cooper indicated the yawning doorway behind them.
Heck held his ground, fingers flexing. He glanced around. There wasn’t a building overlooking them. The only high points in sight were the towering hulks of disused cranes. Directly overhead, the sun had gone in, tumbleweeds of cloud scudding through a colourless sky.
Cooper pointed the Luger directly at Heck’s face. ‘I said move.’
Heck turned, hands raised. Farthing did the same, half-stumbling, the eyes bulging in his sweaty, froglike face.
‘I’m guessing you haven’t tried to fire that before?’ Heck said over his shoulder.
‘It’s fully loaded, I assure you,’ Cooper replied.
‘Yeah, but what do you think’ll happen if you fire it now … for the first time in seventy years?’
‘Keep walking,’ Cooper instructed.
Farthing whimpered as the dark entrance loomed in front of them. Heck glanced sideways; tears had appeared on the chubby cop’s milk-pale cheeks.
‘You still need a way out of this, Mr Cooper,’ Heck said. ‘Shoot us now, and what happens next?’
‘That hardly matters to you.’
‘But what about you? Won’t be much chance of getting the rest of Crabtree’s gang if you’re sitting in jail. It might be the other way around. Crabtree’s lot will have friends on the inside …’ Bricks and other rubble clattered under their feet as they stumbled into the mildew-scented interior.
‘If I feared retaliation, I’d never have embarked on this course,’ Cooper said.
‘And what course was that?’ Heck wondered. ‘Bumping off some Nazis? Carrying on your father’s good work?’
‘Father was the finest of the fine. During this nation’s darkest hour, fighting men like him shone.’
‘Pity he didn’t restrict himself to the fighting, eh? Pity he became a war criminal.’
‘It’s no crime to execute those responsible for heinous deeds.’ Cooper’s voice had imperceptibly tautened. ‘Father was always an honest man. He believed in justice and a firm response to wickedness. Along there … all the way to the end.’
They now faced the meshwork corridor with its hanging cables and rags of lagging. The open spaces beyond it were hidden in funereal gloom.
Farthing all but sobbed aloud.
‘And what wickedness were Nathan Crabtree and his cronies committing?’ Heck asked, starting forward, eyes darting right and left.
‘The mere fact you have to ask that condemns you … but their main fault is simply being who they are.’
‘You don’t share their views? I’m surprised.’
‘Which again shows how little you know, sergeant. Animals like that … they call themselves British. And yet they terrorise the weak, punish the innocent. They call themselves patriots … even though they defame our flag, besmirch our name …’
‘So how’d you do it?’ Heck asked. ‘Lure them to their doom. I’m guessing they didn’t know they had a runner on their hands?’
‘What are you doing?’ Farthing blurted, suddenly jerking out of his tearful reverie. ‘We don’t want to know, okay Mr Cooper? We don’t want to know anything.’
Cooper appeared not to have heard the outburst. ‘I propositioned the two henchmen. Made sexual remarks to them. One while he was using a public lavatory. The other while he was crossing a public park.’
‘As easy as that, eh?’ Heck said.
‘Dumb animals follow their instincts. As for Crabtree, I presented him with certain photographs I’d discovered on the internet. Offered them for sale to him in a pub. I knew he would pursue me for as long as was necessary.’
‘And in each case, when you got to the pre-prepared spot, you just turned around and pulled your Luger?’
‘The brutes are so easy. They were even easier to render unconscious. If your forensics people were ever to examine my khukuri, they’d find as many blood flecks lodged in its lion head hilt as they would in the grooves or bevels of its blade.’
‘They aren’t going to find it, Mr Cooper,’ Farthing said in an attempted manlier tone. ‘You have my word on that. Look … we couldn’t stand Crabtree and his Nazi pals either! We’re glad they’re dead. We weren’t investigating this case very hard …’
‘I’d like to believe you, PC Farthing,’ Cooper said, ‘I really would. But in modern Britain, the establishment – an amoral, drug-addled band born of the 1960s and 1970s, of whom you are the willing servants – have proved numerous times how uninterested they are in finding justice for the oppressed, and in fact have expended much more energy defending the rights of the vile. So no, I don’t believe you.’
Heck said nothing. They were now approaching the end of the meshwork passage, though just before that a sheet of grimy polythene part-hung down overhead.
‘Okay … you don’t like us.’ Farthing’s voice turned whiney again. ‘But what good is killing two bobbies? Look … I’ve got a wife and three daughters! What’s it going to do to them if they never see me again? How will they cope?’
‘Widows and fatherless children were left equally bereft in the years following the war,’ Cooper replied. ‘They managed.’
‘Oh, cut the crap!’ the PC snapped in a strangled tone. He swung sharply round, the eyes bulging like wet marbles in his pallid, frightened face. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it! Don’t bore us with your good old stiff-upper-lip “who-d’you-think-you’re-kidding-Mr-Hitler” bullshit!’
Heck spun around too, taking advantage of the distraction to grab the edge of the hanging polythene and yank the entire thing down; a crumpled mass of water-laden sheeting, which covered their startled captor head to foot.
Cooper didn’t fall beneath the weight of it, but it hampered him and blinded him. He never even saw the rocketing punch that Heck threw at his face, but grunted on impact. There was a splat of scarlet on the other side of the sheeting, and yet he remained upright. Already he was fighting the encumbrance off, levelling his Luger.
‘Leg it!’ Heck shouted, snatching Farthing by the sleeve.
‘What … where to?’
‘Anywhere! Just bloody leg it!’
Chapter 4
They ran together, but in no particular direction. The wilderness of the shop floor lay all around them, littered with rubble – but it was wide open. There was nowhere to duck or hide. Heck glanced back. Cooper was stumbling out from the mesh corridor.
‘Down here!’ Farthing squawked. To the left, a steel stairway dropped through an aperture into dimness.
They descended without thinking. Some ten feet down, it deposited them in a concrete corridor with numerous doors leading off it, though at its farthest end, maybe eighty yards away, there was a smudge of light. They ran towards this, but only seconds later heard the heavy clunking of feet on the stair behind.
‘Oh Christ!’ Farthing gasped.
Passing door after door, they saw nothing but mould-streaked walls, rotted pipe-work. Heck glanced back again. The tall, rangy form of Cooper was pursuing them along the passage, silhouetted on the light seeping down the stair. He was walking rather than running, but with long, loping strides. Heck was confused as to why, in this narrow field of vision, he hadn’t already opened fire. Possibly, just maybe, it was his eyes. Cooper was nearly sixty, and perhaps didn’t have his glasses with him. It was certainly the case that he’d had to get close to his other victims. This gave them a chance, of sorts.
Heck bundled Farthing around the corner onto another shop floor. This one was dimmer than the first, and strewn with further rubble, but still there was nowhere to hide.
‘Oh … shit!’ Farthing stammered.
Heck pushed him towards a double-sized doorway, and beyond this into a tall timber passage that was broad enough for forklift trucks to drive down it. Their footfalls echoed as they hammered along, emerging fifty yards later in what had once been an internal loading bay, a series of concrete platforms abutting into a hangar-like space where HGVs were once accommodated. It was filled with litter and old leaves, and stank of oil.
There was no further access from here. Panting, Heck could only gaze at the huge folding steel doors that separated them from the outside. Again, they heard feet reverberating along the service passage behind.
‘Fuck!’ Farthing hissed.
They scrambled through a smaller-sized doorway on the right, entering a confused sprawl of interconnecting offices and corridors. Again, all were cluttered with rubbish and cross-cut by shafts of light penetrating from various external windows, though most of these had been closed off with corrugated metal. They turned several corners, before blundering into a final room, and finding there was nowhere else to run.
They slid to a halt, sparkling with sweat. Farthing made to double back, but Heck motioned for silence.
Seconds passed as they listened.
Suddenly, there was no other sound.
‘Let’s kick our way out,’ Farthing said, lurching towards the window, which no longer sported glass beneath its metal cladding.
‘Wait!’ Heck whispered.
They froze again. Still there was no sound. Had the maniac lost them? Or was he creeping up even now?
‘Fuck this!’ Farthing said, but Heck grabbed his arm.
‘Just wait! He’s had a couple of chances to pop us, and he hasn’t taken them. It may be he needs to get close.’
‘So?’
‘So hang on! We don’t know how solid that shutter is. It could take us five minutes, and if we make a racket it’ll bring him right to us.’
Farthing licked his lips. ‘You go see where he is … I’ll try and get it loose quietly.’
Heck padded back to the door, stopping alongside a low shelf, on which someone had left a wrench. It was old and rusty, but still satisfyingly heavy. He grabbed it, and peered out into the half-lit corridor. To his left it right-angled out of sight; to his right it ran straight for forty yards before vanishing into shadow. He glanced back, to where Farthing was feeling around the edges of the corrugated metal. With a slight creak, it shifted. The PC gazed at Heck.
‘Couple of kicks and this is gone, I’m telling you!’
Heck motioned to him to wait just a second, and slipped out into the corridor, walking to the nearby corner. Around it, the passage led twenty yards to what looked like a fire-exit. He hurried up there and shoved down on the escape-bar, but there was no budge in it. As he pondered this, there came a series of thundering blows from behind. He knew that it was Farthing – hammering on metal.
He darted back to the corner and around into the main corridor, just in time to see the tall shape of Cooper loom out of the shadows at the far end, gun levelled.
‘You total prat!’ Heck shouted, barging back into the office.
Farthing was still working on the corrugated metal, half of which had been bashed through, though the rest of it wouldn’t shift. ‘Didn’t know where you were!’ he wailed. ‘I thought he’d nabbed you!’
‘Fucking idiot!’ Heck grabbed up an office chair, hurling it through the air.
The impact was cacophonous, and the rest of the corrugated shutter fell away, more dim light spilling inward. Farthing vaulted out through the empty frame first. Heck followed, sensing the figure appear in the office door behind.
‘Oh shit!’ Farthing screamed.
They weren’t outside.
They were in another enclosed space; some kind of garage, empty except for dust and debris. Farthing staggered across it towards a set of double doors, the central cleft of which promised daylight. Heck twirled back to the window. Cooper was framed on the other side, bloody-chinned, gazing along his pistol barrel.
Heck threw the wrench.
It flashed through the air, a spinning blur, and struck its target in the middle of his chest. Cooper went down with a choked gasp and Heck tensed, ready to pounce back through the empty frame and overpower him, but there was no clatter of a firearm dropping loose. So he turned and hurtled across the garage, to where Farthing was throwing his shoulder at the double doors. Heck joined him, left foot first. With a splintering crash, the bolt on the other side gave way. The doors swung open, and fresh air poured in. They tottered out into a yard which seemed to run along the back of the main building and was dotted with the relics of cars and trucks. Another brick wall, maybe twelve feet high, hemmed them in.
‘That way,’ Heck said, pointing left.
About seventy yards in that direction stood a pair of tall wrought-iron gates. They were closed and chained, but there was a gap between the top of the gates and the overarching brickwork. It was a climb, but it wouldn’t be impossible.
Farthing shook his head. ‘N— no … that way!’
He pointed right, where only thirty yards away, beyond the gutted shell of a van, stood a single gate – this one wide open. Some instinct told Heck this was a mistake – but Farthing was already stumbling towards it. Heck followed, glancing over his shoulder. There was still no sign of Cooper. The wrench had caught him a good one; there was even a chance it had done the job for them, but that would be a hell of a gamble.
‘Bloody hell, no!’ Farthing cried. Now that he’d circled the van, he could see through the narrow gate – into a cul-de-sac; a smaller yard encircled by yet another high wall, this one surmounted with shards of glass.
With a creak of hinges, the garage door opened behind them.
Heck snatched Farthing’s collar and dragged him down to his knees, so the wrecked van would fleetingly screen them. He flattened himself on the concrete to gaze underneath it. Cooper’s feet limped into view on the other side. The guy was obviously hurt, limping and breathing heavily; he moved away from the garage slowly, warily – scanning for his prey.
‘Doesn’t give up, like, does he?’ Farthing breathed. He slumped alongside Heck, shoulders pressed back against the crumpled bodywork. His face was pasty-white, and dabbled with beads of hanging sweat. ‘Really … really wants to kill us.’
‘Got no choice,’ Heck mumbled, still watching.
Cooper had advanced about ten yards, and now appeared to be pivoting around. If he ventured right, he’d locate them almost immediately. But if he went left, towards the double-gate, there was a possibility they could sneak into the garage and double back.
Only after several torturous seconds did the gunman make his choice, cautiously edging left. Heck held his breath, though Farthing appeared to be struggling with his. He gave a slow, sharp gasp.
‘Shhh!’ Heck said.
Cooper progressed into the wider yard, checking every nook and cranny.
‘Can you make it back through the building?’ Heck asked, glancing up.
Farthing looked dismayed. ‘All that … all that way again?’
‘I’m guessing he already knows that smaller gate leads nowhere. So he’s covering the other one. He’s got us bottled up in here. All he needs to do now is find us. We’ve got to make a run for it.’
‘I don’t know …’ Farthing shook his head, clutching the side of his chest. ‘I don’t know if it’s my heart, but …’
‘Your heart?’
Fresh sweat streamed down the older PC’s face; he wasn’t so much white now, as green. ‘Something’s wrong. I’m not in shape … as you’ve probably seen.’
Heck glanced back under the vehicle. Cooper’s legs were a considerable distance away – maybe sixty yards. If he was short-sighted, that might be an adequate distance for them to chance it. But now Farthing had a problem with his heart …?
‘It never bloody rains,’ Heck said under his breath. He glanced back up. ‘And you’ve got a wife and three daughters, haven’t you?’
Farthing nodded and swallowed, his brow tightly furrowed.
Heck sighed and made his decision. ‘If I can get back inside and leg it through the interior, it may draw him away. If I manage that, can you at least make it to that double-gate over there?’
‘Don’t know if I’ll be able to climb over it …’
‘Jerry … rough as you may feel, you’re going to have to do something. The SAS aren’t going to turn up!’
Farthing looked agonised by the choice he was facing, but finally nodded. ‘Suppose I’ve … more chance getting over that gate than of making it all the way back through this place … especially if you’ve drawn him off. But … what if you get lost in there? He knows his way around!’
Heck shrugged. ‘Chance I’ll have to take.’
‘A bloody hell of a chance!’
‘Least there’s no one at home who’s going to miss me.’
Heck glanced under the van again – Cooper had reached the far end of the yard. It was now or never. He turned to Farthing and offered his hand. Farthing at first looked surprised, but then nodded and gripped it, his palm moist, clammy.
Heck got up and ran, bombing the short distance towards the garage.
It hadn’t been so complex a route through the old factory, he was sure – but he couldn’t picture it easily. All he could do was keep going – and yet that resolve faltered when he was halfway over and spied the tall shape of Cooper sprinting back towards him. Heck had the brief, crazy notion to swerve away from the garage and barrel straight at the nutter, taking him down with a head-on rugby tackle. But no … all the bastard needed was proximity. The second he got Heck in range, he’d shoot.
So thinking, Heck veered into the garage. The window yawned ahead of him, and he was so pumped with adrenaline that he felt he could dive straight through it. Maybe get hold of the wrench again, maybe peg it at Cooper a second time, wind him even more badly …
He tripped.
His toe caught on the corrugated sheet when he was ten feet short of his goal. He went sprawling forward, landing hard, the palms of his hands grinding over the glass-strewn concrete, his jaw striking it with dizzying force.
Struggling against grogginess, Heck rolled over onto his back – only to see the rangy form of Cooper come ghosting through the gloom of the garage and stop about three feet away. Despite his exertions, the oldster looked remarkably cool; aside from the sweat on his brow and dabs of dried blood on his chin, he was amazingly unflustered. He’d drawn the khukuri, and now raised it aloft with one hand. With the other, he pointed his Luger down at Heck.