Paul Finch - Hunted

Heck sipped at his pint. ‘Sounds to me like you want Harold Lansing to have been murdered?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Neither did I. I mean you want your instinct to have been proved right.’

‘And that’s somehow incorrect of me?’

‘Not at all. Look.’ Heck put his drink down. ‘I’m here for a similar reason. Another officer looked at this case and felt the same way as you. You’ve been very honest, Gail, so I’ll be honest too – I can call you “Gail”? Feels less formal than DC Honeyford.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I’m only actually in Surrey as a favour to my guv’nor, who’s doing a favour for someone else. As soon as it becomes evident there’s nothing in this case for SCU, I’ll head home. I promise you. You’ll have a clear run at it without any interference from the Yard. But for the moment it can only help if we work on this together. You’ve already gone out on a limb. I appreciate you’re an independent-minded detective, but you must have felt pretty alone on this so far.’

She watched him warily. ‘Just so long as you know I’m not your gofer.’

‘Course not.’

‘I know you work for a specialist outfit and all that, but I’m good at my job too.’

‘I totally believe that.’

‘I’m not going to be bossed around or made to feel like an office junior.’

Heck displayed empty palms. ‘Not my style at all.’

‘Someone else surrendering to your charms, Gail?’ came a gruff but amused voice.

A man had approached them, unnoticed. He was tall, with a big, angular frame, clad in a rumpled brown suit and an open-necked green shirt. He had longish, sandy hair, pale blue eyes, and gruesomely pockmarked cheeks – as if he’d ploughed his fingernails through rampant acne while still a juvenile. He’d wandered over uninvited and now stood so close that Heck could smell his rank combination of cigarette smoke and cologne.

‘What do you want, Ron?’ Gail asked in a patient tone.

‘Me?’ He feigned hurt. ‘Nothing … just a quick pleasantry.’

‘That’d be a first.’

He chortled. ‘Still wasting your time chasing ghosts at Rosewood Grange?’

Gail flicked her gaze to Heck. ‘This is DS Pavey. Street Thefts.’

Heck glanced up at him. ‘How are you?’ he said, nodding.

‘And who’s this?’ Pavey asked her, not bothering to respond to or even acknowledge Heck’s question.

‘This is DS Heckenburg. Serial Crimes, New Scotland Yard.’

Pavey gave a low whistle, and finally deigned to look round at Heck. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’

‘Up to you, I guess,’ Heck replied.

Pavey turned back to Gail; evidently that question had been addressed to her too. ‘You two working on something?’

‘What’s it to you, Ron?’ she wondered.

Pavey smiled to himself before sauntering away to the bar. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, DS Heckenburg.’

‘Dare I ask?’ Heck said, watching him rejoin a group of several other suited men, presumably fellow detectives gathering for an end-of-shift drink.

Gail sipped her lemonade, though she’d flushed a noticeable shade of pink. The ice maiden wasn’t perhaps as cool as she’d have him believe. ‘Do you really need to?’ she said.

‘Idiot from the past, eh?’

‘Not long enough in the past. Don’t worry about it. He’s gone.’

But several times over the next fifteen minutes, Heck caught DS Pavey stealing irritable peeks in their direction. From the expression on his ugly, notched face, it didn’t look as if he’d gone very far.

‘So who arranged Lansing’s funeral?’ Heck asked.

‘His former girlfriend,’ Gail replied as she gunned her canary-yellow Fiat Punto along the twisting Surrey lanes. ‘Monica Chatreaux.’

Heck glanced up from the paperwork littered across his lap. ‘As in Monica Chatreaux the supermodel?’

‘Correct.’

Heck mused on this. He was seated in the front passenger seat. Beyond the windows, woods and farmland skimmed past in sunny shimmers of green and gold.

‘And was she really his former girlfriend … or just his friend?’

‘Girlfriend apparently.’

‘So he wasn’t gay?’

Gail shook her head. ‘I considered that possibility – bloke of his age living alone, but apparently not.’

Heck glanced again through the documentation. ‘Death occurred on 6 July, funeral held on 16 July. Not a lot of time between the two.’

‘Week and a half is about normal where I come from.’

‘When there are sus circs?’

‘Once the coroner had delivered his verdict, it was a bit difficult hanging on to the body.’

‘So was Lansing cremated or buried?’

‘Buried. Banstead Municipal Cemetery.’

‘Good.’

She fired a glance at him. ‘Good?’

‘Yeah … if we need to dig him up again, we can.’

Gail shook her head at the mere thought, and returned her attention to the road, though at this early hour on a Saturday morning it was unlikely they’d meet much other traffic. In truth, Heck wasn’t keen on the idea of exhumation either. He’d been present at several in his time, and it never failed to knock him sick. Lord alone knew what condition Lansing’s body would be in by now. It was bad enough in the photos taken on first arrival at the mortuary. He flipped through them again, one after another.

The poor guy had effectively been chargrilled. All five layers of his epidermis had vanished. In its place lay a coating of crispy fat and melted muscle tissue. Here and there, nubs of bone gleamed amid the glutinous, oil-yellow pulp. Worst of all was Lansing’s face. No distinctive features had remained. Most of the flesh was gone; the grey orbs of his eyes had sunk into their sockets like ruptured grapes; the bones themselves sagged inward, fragmented, reduced to a jigsaw puzzle.

‘Died as a result of fourth-degree burns,’ Heck noted, scanning the details of the postmortem. ‘Yet it’s interesting that his corpse displayed other significant traumas too.’

‘Yeah, but all consistent with him having experienced a high-speed impact.’

‘Was he wearing his seatbelt?’

‘Difficult to say. The interior of the car was reduced to ashes. We think the airbag deployed.’

‘And yet he still suffered extensive facial injuries?’

‘I wondered about that too,’ Gail said. ‘Especially as it wasn’t a head-on collision.’

‘What’s even odder is that this is a guy with no prior driving convictions and no previous insurance claims. He’s as conscientious as they come, and yet we’re expected to believe that he pulled out onto a main road without checking it was clear.’

She glanced at him again. ‘When you say “we’re expected to believe”, what other choice do we have? That’s evidently what he did?’

‘And no drugs or alcohol in his system either,’ Heck mused. ‘I see he lost several teeth in the accident.’

‘Most were discovered in his stomach.’

‘Most but not all.’

‘I’ve put a request through to have that one you found on the roadside fast-tracked. Don’t see how it could have ended up out there when he was still in the car.’

‘Neither do I.’ Heck looked up as they entered the outskirts of Horsham. ‘Course, it’s not necessarily Lansing’s tooth.’

‘Don’t fret, once we find the motive we’ll find the method.’ Gail spoke with an air of confidence. ‘And that won’t be difficult. Lansing was filthy rich. What better reason to knock someone off?’

‘It depends. I asked you yesterday who his main beneficiaries are. We got distracted before you could answer.’

‘His will was straightforward enough,’ she replied. ‘Written some time ago, with no suggestion that it’s been altered since. He has no dependants, no relatives. Quite a bit of his estate was to be divided up between the various charities he supported. They’re all squeaky clean, I’ve checked them. Monica Chatreaux’s in for a cut. She gets Rosewood Grange …’