Paul Finch - Ashes to Ashes - An unputdownable thriller from the Sunday Times bestseller

Danny tottered around like a burning mannequin. He blundered back into the dark alleyway, thrusting his way headlong, the dancing firelight shooting ahead of him and up the brick walls, his arms weaving glittering patterns. He didn’t just feel the heat all over him, but inside him – inside his head even. Along with a pain he’d never known, a pain that clawed through his muscles and nerves and bones, shredding his very sanity it was so unbearable, and yet somehow he kept going, one unsteady foot following another, until he’d passed his normal pitch and was out at the other end, on the cinder towpath.

And now, in the reeling, tortured inferno of his mind, he realised why he had done this.

His brain was malfunctioning, but his body had made the decision for him.

He sensed the canal in front.

Staggering another few yards, he pitched down face-first into the water, a hissing cloud erupting behind him.

At first it was so frigid that it was like passing out of reality, and yet as well as quenching the flames, it served to numb him – to an extreme degree, to a point where he was able to flounder across the channel like a crazed fish. The semi-liquid flesh unravelled from his twisted limbs, but he threw himself forward until he reached the far side, where, with eyeballs seared beyond use, he thudded into a wall of bricks hung with tufts of rank vegetation. His blistered hands groped left and found an upright ladder, rusted and rotted in its moorings, but just about capable of holding his weight as he hauled his agonised form to the top of it, and there flopped wheezing onto another cinder path.

Danny’s tongue had melted to a molten stub in the scalded cave of his mouth, so he couldn’t even sob let alone scream. His nose had gone, along with his eardrums and eyelids. He had minimal senses left with which to detect the armoured, helmeted figure that had clumped steadily after him down the warehouse alley, petrol tank sloshing in the harness on its back, and now came over the canal as well, footfalls louder on the metal footbridge some twenty yards to the left.

Even when the hulking, pitiless form came and stood right over him, the shuddering, mewling wreck that had once been Danny Hollister didn’t know it was there. Thus it met no opposition, not even a protest, as it trained its weapon down, and from point-blank range blasted him with flame again, and again, and again.

Heck didn’t hang around at court to celebrate the conviction of three-times-rapist Charlie Wheeler, despite the bastard receiving the severe but appropriate penalty of three life sentences including a judge’s recommendation that he serve no less than 45 years. While DI Dave Brunwick, who’d officially headed the Wimbledon enquiry, spoke to a bank of microphones and news cameras outside the front of the Old Bailey, Heck left via a rear door and hurried off back to Staples Corner, arriving there just around lunchtime, where he grabbed a quick sandwich before hitting the motorway.

Three days had now passed since Gemma had taken several other SCU detectives north to liaise with the Greater Manchester Police in Bradburn, but plenty more had happened since. To start with, there’d been another fatal fire-attack in the town. This time it was a drugs dealer called Daniel Hollister, another goon believed to have been on Vic Ship’s payroll, and the modus operandi had been near enough exactly the same as that used in the sex-shop attack: the victim sprayed with some combustible accelerant, most likely petrol, while the delivery mechanism – quite literally a flamethrower – had been clearly identified on this occasion because the armoured and helmeted killer had got caught in the act on CCTV, though the footage wasn’t of the best quality. Only yesterday, Gemma, in company with DI Katie Hayes of the Greater Manchester Serious Crimes Division, had held a joint press conference at Bradburn Central police station to announce that a pre-existing investigative SCU taskforce, Operation Wandering Wolf, had now been expanded to tackle in full the escalating underworld war in the town.

Already feeling left behind by these events, Heck initially sped along the M1, not that he was looking forward to reaching his destination. As Gemma had intimated, there was no love lost between Heck and Bradburn, though in some ways it was quite illogical. Back in his youth, a major domestic crisis – not unconnected to his embarking on a career in the police – had put a deep rift between himself and his immediate family, which hadn’t been easily bridged.

In truth, it hadn’t properly been bridged even now, though Heck and his sole surviving close relative, his older sister Dana, were in regular contact and the tone was friendly enough. Dana’s only daughter, Sarah, knew Heck simply as ‘Uncle Mark’ and though she hadn’t been around in the bad old days and with luck had never been informed about them, she hadn’t seen him often enough to forge any kind of real emotional bond with him.

So … no, Heck didn’t particularly enjoy going back to Bradburn, but this would never stop him. It was true what he’d told Gemma: the past was the past as far as he was concerned; it was time to let bygones be bygones. In any case, he’d now lived almost as long in London as he had in Lancashire, having voluntarily transferred from the Greater Manchester Police to the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty, shortly after joining the force. He didn’t consider himself a Bradburn native any more. So why should it matter? More important than any of that was finding John Sagan, though it already sounded as if Gemma had succumbed to the inevitable and, to avoid putting out any GMP noses, had made her team available to launch a full-scale assault against all the mobsters who were making life such a misery up there.

By mid-afternoon, the traffic flow had increased, worsening noticeably when Heck hit the M6, forcing him to divert onto the toll-road at Coleshill. From there, the driving was easier so he was able to take a guilt-free break at Norton Canes Services.

Over a coffee, he perused the latest batch of paperwork emailed down that morning by the admin staff on Wandering Wolf.

This latest intelligence finally confirmed that the Bradburn feud was being waged between Vic Ship’s Manchester-based firm and a breakaway crew who had once run Bradburn on Ship’s behalf but now were looking to go independent. There was no evidence as yet, at least nothing firm, that John Sagan had hooked up with Ship, but if there was a retaliatory strike for the fire-attack on Daniel Hollister, which the taskforce was now nervously anticipating, and it involved torture and the use of chloroform to overpower the subject, it would be as good as a signature.

In the meantime, purely in terms of numbers and expertise, the contrasts between the two factions could not be more extreme.

As Heck had already seen, Ship headed a traditional inner-city crime family whose main areas of influence were tough districts like Whalley Range, Fallowfield, Rusholme and Longsight. According to the intel, Ship’s crew dabbled in all the usual activities – pimping, loansharking, protection, drugs – and had a much-feared reputation. They could and would use serious violence if they deemed it necessary, and in the long term, even before this latest shooting war, were suspected of involvement in the murders of at least four rival gangsters. That said, on the whole it was believed that Ship’s mob observed the old-fashioned laws of gangland etiquette in that mainly they messed with their own kind while the general public didn’t even know they existed. This didn’t make them Robin Hood and his Merry Men – they were high-level criminals, whose numbers and activities were on the rise thanks to a new infusion of Russian boevik s, which literally translated into English as ‘warriors’. It seemed that Vic Ship, in his capacity as self-appointed Manchester godfather, had recently made contact with the Tatarstan Brigade in St Petersburg, a deadly cartel who had apparently been looking for an alliance in Britain to open new markets for their narcotics. If nothing else, the expectation of this hook-up was that Ship’s crew would start to display a greater degree of viciousness. The Russian mob weren’t slow to stomp on their opponents, and that would include policemen, judges, politicians, ordinary citizens, anyone. More to the point, with these Russian torpedoes in harness, alongside a merciless enforcer like Sagan, Ship’s outfit ought to be more than a match for anyone if it came to a genuine gangster war.