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

As a result, Lee Shaughnessy – alleged head of the breakaway group in Bradburn, and Ship’s main rival in the town – could not have looked more out of his depth.

In contrast to Ship’s brutish mugshot, Shaughnessy’s official photo depicted a much younger guy, thirty at the most and remarkably unblemished by his chosen lifestyle. There wasn’t a shaving nick to be seen, let alone a full-blown scar. In fact, with his neatly combed white-blond hair, grey eyes and refined, almost pleasant features, he was a boy next door, the guy you’d be totally happy with if your daughter brought him home. And yet his criminal record was ghastly. He was a Bradburn local, but he’d been in trouble all his life, with multiple convictions for burglary, robbery, car theft and assault. At the tender age of twelve, he’d raped and beaten the female warden in charge of the secure care-home where he was installed. All the credentials you needed, Heck supposed, to eventually work for someone like Vic Ship, though Shaughnessy had only come to the gang boss’s notice in his mid-twenties while serving four years for attacking a police observation post opposite his house at a time when he was suspected of planning a post office raid – two undercover officers were battered unconscious and fifty grand’s worth of surveillance kit was smashed up.

But it was under Ship’s tutelage that Shaughnessy had really blossomed. Acting as the Manchester mob’s chief lieutenant in Bradburn, his brief had been to take charge of the local drugs trade, and lean on the pub and club owners for protection money – all of which he’d pulled off with aplomb. So much aplomb that he’d soon flooded the town’s estates with heroin and crack, while there was scarcely a nightspot where he didn’t have at least some interest. The readies had rolled in, but, perhaps inevitably, Shaughnessy had soon got tired of taking only a small cut when he could (and, in his mind, should) have been taking everything. So he’d recently broken away, taking many of Ship’s Bradburn business interests with him.

GMP were fairly sure the recent war had commenced with the murders, on Shaughnessy’s orders, of the sex-shop managers and Ship loyalists Les Harris and Barrie Briggs, though there was some surprise that Shaughnessy had laid so open and violent a challenge at the door of the larger syndicate, especially as burning two men alive was an extreme punishment even by gangland standards – unless there’d been some provocation by Ship first which had not yet come to the police’s attention. One theory was that this use of fire was intended to be exemplary – in other words a message for any other Ship soldiers still remaining in Bradburn. GMP intelligence officers also felt that such savagery would not be completely atypical of Shaughnessy’s outfit, who were said to be wilder than the norm. Shaughnessy had achieved this by bringing together the worst of the worst in Bradburn’s previously disorganised criminal underworld, recruiting only the most dangerous and unstable individuals: alienated, disenfranchised young punks who were more than willing to rip the world a new one to get what they believed they were owed, and now, under his guidance, would have the knowhow and the means.

As a footnote, Shaughnessy’s mob were also well armed. Ship’s crew produced firearms when it suited them, but only in certain circumstances. By contrast, Shaughnessy’s crew carried guns as a mark of their manhood, a status symbol by which they would demand respect.

Heck shook his head as he perused this material.

Bradburn, his home and a former colliery and mill-town – turned into Dodge City.

It meant more drugs, more vice, more corruption, more opportunities for underachievers to break out of the poverty trap by embracing violence. On top of that, Shaughnessy’s crew in particular were leaning towards public displays of aggression. In their eyes, profit and discretion didn’t necessarily go together. To them, it was as much about status and bling and swaggering down streets that lived in terror of them. And looking further down the page, it became apparent where this attitude, and the guns, had come from. Because Shaughnessy’s number two was another Vic Ship defector, a certain Marvin Langton. Heck had heard that name even in London.

Before joining Ship, Langton, a one-time pro boxer, had been a member of the so-called Wild Bunch, a mixed-race Moss Side posse. They’d almost exclusively been drugs traffickers, but they’d believed strongly in firepower and turf wars, and had become notorious in Manchester’s poorest quarter for such American-style innovations as drive-by shootings, kerb-crunching – where the unlucky victim’s open mouth was slammed down on the edge of a kerbstone – and gang initiation rites involving the random murders of everyday citizens.

Shaughnessy and his crew hadn’t quite resorted to that just yet, but with Langton on the team how far off could it actually be?

The Wild Bunch had finally been taken down by GMP’s Serious Crimes Division, but somehow Langton, who even now was suspected of having been a senior killer in their ranks, had slipped through the prosecution net. He’d signed on for a brief time with Vic Ship, but then he too had got greedy and had relocated to Bradburn to serve as Lee Shaughnessy’s deputy. How long he’d be happy in that secondary role was anyone’s guess, but for the moment at least he made a set of very nasty opponents even nastier still.

Heck was already wondering if Langton could be the lunatic behind the flamethrower. His mugshot depicted a tough-looking black dude in his early thirties. He was broad as an ox across the shoulders, and now in his post-sportsman days was inclined towards heaviness, though there was still something solid and virile about him. He had broad, even features, but wore his hair in a mop of dreads and his eyes burned with an odd metallic-grey lustre. His sneering half-smile revealed a single golden tooth.

As he folded it all away and finished his coffee, Heck was thoughtful.

Shaughnessy’s lot were rough customers and no mistake. A real bunch of cowboys, but they’d still be meat and drink for Vic Ship’s Russian assassins, not to mention John Sagan – as that pair of eviscerated losers in the landfill had discovered.

It was an unusual thing, he reflected, that all these animals were preying on each other and the only thing the cops actually needed to do was sit there and watch as they gradually and bloodily depopulated their own hate-filled world – but instead, SCU was going to intervene.

Damn right it was going to intervene.

Paperwork tucked under his arm, he walked back out towards the car park.

It would always intervene.

If it failed to do that innocent bystanders would get hurt, as they invariably did. And not all the bastards would perish anyway; some, most likely the very worst of them, would survive, stronger, meaner, wealthier, more deeply and widely feared than ever before.

No, the rule of law could never give way to the rule of chaos.

But more important than any of that, John Sagan was not going to die in some crazy midnight crossfire, or in a cloud of flame, or at the hands of Lee Shaughnessy or his brute-of-the-moment, Marvin Langton.

John Sagan was Heck’s.

As Heck pulled off the M6 onto the slip-road just after seven that evening, it was raining. It had been dry, mild and spring-like when he’d left London early afternoon, but he’d often suspected that the Northwest had a micro-climate all of its own. As he followed the main dual carriageway into Bradburn, passing the outlying estates, he saw leaves sprouting on hedges, gardens slowly turning green again. But what initially was drizzle had now become a downpour, the sky overhead as grey as lead, and none of that would help improve the atmosphere of a dump like his hometown. Though as Heck drove on, he couldn’t help wondering if he was being a little hard on the old place; it was somewhere he’d enjoyed a happy and uncomplicated childhood after all. Even the early years of his adolescence had been fun – until the thing that had destroyed his family.