Paul Finch - Hunted

At present, however, even Gemma Piper seemed a little unsure how to play it where Heck was concerned. His ex-girlfriend from many years earlier, when they’d both been divisional detective constables, she and he had spent much of their careers alongside each other, but had often disagreed over procedure. As recently as last autumn, a colossal falling-out between them had resulted in Heck leaving SCU altogether and spending a short time at a remote posting up in the Lake District. He’d only returned to SCU at the end of last year at Gemma’s urging, after a case they’d ended up working together in the Lakes had come to a successful conclusion. But even now, after they’d been back on the same team for several months, both of them were still wondering if their relationship would ever be the same again.

‘Remind me why you couldn’t trace that call back to Devlin?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘It was made on a throwaway phone. And before you ask, ma’am, we searched his pad high and low after, with a warrant … we found nothing.’

‘Well … some you win, some you lose.’ Which was an uncharacte‌ristically mild response given Gemma’s normal perfectionist nature.

‘Were you in the court lobby?’ he asked. ‘Only, I didn’t see you.’

‘Listened on the car radio. Live news feed.’

‘Ah …’ He gave a wry smile. Heck knew Gemma’s moods better than anyone, and he knew she wouldn’t be impressed that his brief explosion had been broadcast to the nation. Having seen SCU’s work in the past badly hampered by press intrusion, she was now ultra-sensitive about the way her team was portrayed in public; she much preferred her officers to remain cool and tightlipped under pressure. However, she still seemed to be giving him leeway, consciously trying to avoid a row.

‘It won’t do us any harm,’ he added. ‘Hood’s barrister has already announced that they’re examining grounds for an appeal. I’d say there were considerably less after Devlin’s little outburst in there. Indirectly or not, he basically confirmed that Hood is guilty as charged.’

‘One of the braindead, eh?’

‘One of the many.’

Heck ran the events in the lobby through his mind, and was surprised to feel dispirited by them rather than aggravated. Even after years of murder investigations, it still astonished him that so many folk would aggressively rally around killers, rapists, and other dangerous offenders, attempting to defend the indefensible simply because the accused was ‘their mate’, at the same time fully convinced that they themselves held no responsibility for the development of such monsters. It wasn’t even as if they could all use pig-ignorance as an excuse. Alan Devlin was no dullard, for one; he’d engineered an opportunity for Hood to escape the police and at the same time had skilfully manoeuvred himself into a position where he could be accused of nothing.

‘Not to worry,’ Gemma said. ‘You got the main result. We can’t really ask for more than that.’

Heck eyed her curiously. ‘You’ve come all the way from London just to tell me that?’

‘No, I’ve come to buy you lunch.’

‘Come again?’

She took the car keys from her jacket pocket. ‘To congratulate you. You’ve put in a lot of hours on this job, and it’s paid off.’

‘No disrespect, ma’am, but I always put in a lot of hours.’

‘Heck … I’m offering you lunch, not a knighthood. Plus I want a little chat. So get in your car and follow me. I’ve already reserved us a table, but they’re not going to hold it indefinitely.’

‘Matt Grinton was on the phone last night,’ Gemma said over her Caesar salad. ‘Whatever today’s outcome was going to be, you still got his vote. He praised, and I quote, “your work ethic, your attention to detail, your willingness to think outside the box, your all-round professionalism and, above all, the trust you place in your instincts”.’

Heck paused over his chicken pie and chips. Around them, the lunchtime clientele in the country inn murmured as they ate and drank. Summer sunshine poured through the tall glazed panels of the conservatory annexe in which they were seated. He took a sip of Diet Coke. ‘My instinct that Alan Devlin was lying to us was a fifty-fifty gamble. It could easily have gone the other way.’

‘But it didn’t. And that’s the trick. If Hood had left Nottingham, Christ knows where he’d have washed up. We’d have had another spate of old lady murders in some other part of the country, which would have meant starting the whole thing from scratch.’

‘We’ll have to start another one from scratch again at some point, ma’am. There always seems to be someone out there with an irresistible urge to kill and kill.’

Gemma watched him eat. She’d suspected all the way through that Heck had willingly taken the Nottingham assignment because of events involving his deceased brother many, many years ago. Tom Heckenburg had been wrongly convicted of robbing and brutalising a number of OAPs while Heck was still a schoolboy. Though Tom was later exonerated, this only came after he’d committed suicide in prison. Not only had the nightmare experience driven Heck to join the police – ‘clearly the bastards needed someone to show them how the job should be done,’ as he’d once told her while drunk, a policy he’d followed to the letter ever since – but it had given him a particular bee in his bonnet about hoodlums who targeted the elderly and frail. Not that he ever lost control while investigating these kinds of crimes. Oh, Heck was a wild card; he was fully capable of ‘going off on one’ as they said in his native Lancashire, but in Gemma’s opinion this gave him an edge that many of her other detectives lacked. He was also meticulous and thorough, but more important than any of that, he got results.

‘The bigger picture,’ she said, ‘is that things have recently gone SCU’s way. This last one’s a bit of a cherry on the cake. At least two television companies, one of them American, have enquired about putting us on film in a warts and all documentary. Joe Wullerton’s said no.’

‘Good,’ Heck replied.

‘For the time being.’

‘Ah …’

‘No one’s sharpening their knives for us at present, Heck, but we never know when funds will get tight again. Under those circs, a bit of positive free publicity would do us no harm.’

‘And what if there are too many warts?’

‘There wouldn’t be. I’d keep your antics well away from the cameras.’

He half smiled as he finished off his meal.

‘I say that because I don’t want to give the impression that you’re some kind of man of the moment,’ she added.

‘Perish the thought, ma’am.’

‘Hell of a job on the Lady Killer, but that’s the total of it … work is work. There’s no reward coming; except this lunch.’ Fleetingly, she looked embarrassed. ‘My little thank-you. Just so you don’t feel completely under-appreciated.’

He pushed his empty dish and cutlery aside. ‘Sooner have a bit of nice grub than an empty promotion, ma’am.’

‘Most coppers wouldn’t consider any kind of promotion “empty”,’ she said. ‘You’re saying you still wouldn’t accept one even if it was available?’

He shrugged. ‘You know I wouldn’t know what to do with an office of my own. And that I’d get bored sitting behind a desk all day, even a posh one. That said, the pay rise wouldn’t go amiss.’

‘We’re all frozen in time on that score, Heck – which you know perfectly well.’

‘In which case the free lunch will have to suffice.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ she said. ‘Especially as I need a favour.’