Paul Finch - The Killing Club

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.

‘For all the trouble you’ve put me to, sergeant,’ he said, ‘I still regret this. You were a worthier opponent than the others. Please take that as a compliment.’

And he fired.

Or tried to. It was the aged, internally rusted mechanism that betrayed him. It detonated in his fist with a blinding blot of flame and a clung of rending metal.

Heck blinked and flinched as hot fragments scattered over him: splinters of scalding metal, and flecks of softer, wetter material. His heart almost skipped a beat as he lay there, but he was unhurt. Warily, he opened his eyes again – to find that Cooper was still on his feet, but white-faced, and glassy-eyed. Only slowly did he twist his head around to survey the smouldering lump of meat where his right hand had once been. Ironically, what remained of the gun was still present, dangling from his sole remaining finger, though that was more bone than flesh.

The knife fell to the floor with a clatter, but the shriek of agony rising in Cooper’s chest didn’t get a chance to erupt before Heck had sprung upright and rammed two heavy punches into his lower body. The third caught Cooper in the mouth, and knocked his head spinning.

‘I don’t often hit the afflicted,’ Heck said, circling as the guy tottered, and then firing in a fourth and a fifth blow, the latter hurling the gunman senseless to the ground. ‘But at least it’s the kind of firm response your dad would have appreciated.’

‘I guess I’m somewhat diminished in your eyes,’ Farthing said.

Heck glanced around. He stood by the garage door, sipping coffee from a paper beaker. His clothes were still damp, the palms of his hands stinging where they’d been skinned, though a couple of light dressings had since been applied. The factory yard was alive with radio static and filled with police vehicles, their blues and twos swirling in slow, lazy patterns. The ambulance carrying Ernest Cooper, now cuffed safely to one of DI Higginson’s oppos, pulled slowly away through the open double-gate. The DI herself followed in an unmarked car.

Farthing, still pale around the gills, clutched his hat to his belly – a vaguely sheepish gesture. His expression was tense, worried.

‘Diminished?’ Heck still had half an eye on the garage interior, where the firearms team, who, having made safe the bloody tangle of metal that had once been the Luger, had picked it up with a pair of forceps and were feeding it into a sterile sack.

‘Well if I’m not, I should be. I was shit scared.’

‘You think I wasn’t?’ Heck replied.

‘Aye … but you kept it together. Me … I just sat there, like.’ Farthing’s cheeks reddened. ‘Didn’t know what to do. Just sat there, waiting for it.’

Heck shrugged. ‘You were tired … and you weren’t feeling so good.’

‘That’s another thing. There was nothing wrong with me.’

He let that point hang, waiting nervously for Heck’s response – which, when it came, was no more than a raised eyebrow.

‘I know I’m not fit,’ Farthing said. ‘Let’s face it, I’m a fat bastard … I couldn’t have run much longer. But I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was just paralysed with fear. I’d have done anything to get you to take the risk … while I sat it out.’

Heck shrugged again. ‘My head was scrambled too. I’d already figured he couldn’t see very well. I mentioned that his gun was probably kaput … the odds would likely have been better if I’d just taken him on.’

‘What a thought.’ Farthing shuddered – he’d already vomited once, not long after support units had arrived; briefly, Heck thought he was going to do it again. ‘Taken him on? A madman like him?’

‘It’s about survival,’ Heck said. ‘If you’re worried you let me down, Jerry, you didn’t. Your wife and daughters are more important to you than I am … course they are. No one would argue with that.’

‘That’s the other thing.’ Now Farthing really did avert his gaze. ‘I haven’t got a wife and daughters. Haven’t even got a girlfriend. I mean, face it … who’d have me ?’

Heck regarded him long and hard, too tired to voice the brief, fierce annoyance he suddenly felt.

Farthing shrugged as he watched the ground, shuffling his feet. ‘Might as well own up to it now. We’ll be living in each other’s pockets for the next few days, getting the story straight. Bulldog’ll be all over us …’

‘And I’d learn the truth from someone else?’ Heck said. ‘And as a result, I might inadvertently let it slip how you behaved back there? So even though you’re coming clean now, you’re not exactly doing it for honourable reasons, are you?’

But just as quickly as his anger had risen, it subsided again. Shouting and kicking-off would serve no purpose now. Plus he had no energy for it.

‘It was just chat,’ the PC added unnecessarily. ‘I was trying to save my own arse.’

‘Well … it worked. In a roundabout sort of way. Don’t knock it.’

‘I’m sorry, like.’

‘Let’s just say you owe me one.’

‘I’m sorry about something else too.’ Farthing blew out a long, weary breath. ‘Sorry that I don’t have anyone to go home to. First time I’ve ever thought that … just about now, that little house of mine is going to feel a bit empty.’

‘We’ve got our lives, haven’t we?’ Heck grunted. ‘Bloody hell, Jerry, we can’t expect everything .’

It was another of those mid-September nights that left you in no doubt autumn had arrived. Darkness came early, and with the darkness an unseasonal chill. The trees were still in plumage, but strengthening winds rattled their dank branches, whipping their leaves, sending black, cavorting shadows along rain-damp city streets.

Heck saw none of this as he drove his white Citroën DS4 into the personnel car park at New Scotland Yard. He’d travelled all the way from Sunderland that afternoon without taking a break: nearly two hundred and fifty miles.