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

It struck him now that maybe this latter event, which had occurred when he was fifteen, had soured the place for him more than it actually deserved. Bradburn had never really recovered from the wholesale closing of its coalmines and mills during the 1960s and 1970s. These days, it was a tale of drab red-brick streets and multiple tower blocks, and here and there the relics of factories, most of them with boarded windows and chimneys that hadn’t smoked in decades. But it was no more run-down than many other urban boroughs that once had depended on heavy industry and now were struggling to adjust to an age in which all that was history. There were some jobs here, but higher-than-average unemployment was an issue that never seemed to go away.

Heck left the dual carriageway to follow lesser routes through intermittent clusters of shops and houses, most on the shabby side. Every other pub he saw was closed, though of course in the twenty-first century that wasn’t solely a Bradburn problem.

It was now half past seven, and Gemma wasn’t expecting him at the Incident Room until the following morning. He was half tempted to stick his nose in anyway, just to grab himself an update, but as he hadn’t yet found any lodgings, he resolved to sort that out first, and the most obvious port of call was his sister’s house. He wasn’t overly keen on the idea, but Dana would never let him hear the last of it if he arrived in Bradburn and didn’t check in with her at the first opportunity. So once he’d penetrated the labyrinthine outer suburbs, he headed inward for what they’d always known as the Old Town, a large residential district lying east of the town centre.

He cut around this central zone, much of which was pedestrianised, via the Blackhall ward. This had always been the town’s poorest quarter, and by the looks of it things hadn’t improved. Its sordid streets appeared semi-derelict, while the lighting was dismal, the little there was of it leaching into smoky bricks and oily flagstones. Beyond Blackhall, Heck swung a left, following Riverside Way, which skirted along the edge of the River Pennington, passing numerous garages, scrapyards and workshops built into railway arches, and several more blocks of high-rise flats, before turning right onto Wardley Rise, which ascended gently into the residential parish of St Nathaniel’s, or the Old Town, at the centre of which stood the teetering needle spire of St Nathaniel’s Roman Catholic Church, known locally as ‘St Nat’s’.

According to a local newspaper, Heck’s home neighbourhood had once ‘summed up everything the old North was about’. It had a lively community, was strongly Catholic and therefore more orderly and law-abiding than a visitor might expect. It was also famous for housing St Nathaniel’s ARLFC, created by Irish monks back in the candle-lit years of the nineteenth century to give local deprived youth an outlet for their aggression, and now one of the most successful amateur rugby league clubs in the whole of Northwest Counties. As a schoolboy star, Heck had represented its various junior teams with distinction. In every way, St Nat’s had been picture-postcard Bradburn: parallel rows of slate roofs and brick chimneys, mills towering in the background. Grimy but picturesque, and also safe – tribes of kids playing on every street corner, mums and grandmas leaning in doorways, chatting idly. Of course that had been the way it was .

As Heck prowled these benighted neighbourhoods now, he scarcely saw a soul.

That might just be down to the rain and the fact it was midweek. Or alternatively, perhaps this district too had fallen onto hard times. Maybe muggers and street-gangs haunted its shadowy backstreets; or perhaps the escalating underworld violence in general was oppressing everybody.

That said, the Old Town wasn’t exactly dead. Not quite yet. Here and there, streams of warm lamplight filtered through curtained windows, though none at all showed from 23 Cranby Street, the Heckenburg family home.

Heck pulled up in front and switched his engine off. The tiny terraced house’s front curtains were open, but the house itself stood in darkness.

He sat still, pondering.

Not much in Cranby Street had changed, except that there were fewer houses. At least half of them had been demolished at some point in the past, but down at the far end there was still open access through to the canal and the lock-gates, and on the other side the reclaimed spoil-land that had later been turned into the rugby league pitch where a juvenile Heck would score many of his tries. But that was so long ago, and so much had happened since, that it seemed hard to equate this desolate little backwater with the place where he’d spent his early life. And the fact that the house was still in his family made no difference.

Dana – Dana Black, as she’d kept her married name despite having long separated from her waster of a husband – was the sole occupant of number 23, along with Sarah, her sixteen-year-old daughter. Heck hadn’t expected that they wouldn’t be here. It wasn’t quite Easter yet and the kids were still in school, so it had never entered his head that they could be away.

His gaze roved again over the sorry little façade. Like the rest of the street, number 23 only ever seemed to change by getting smaller. It felt incredible that all the Heckenburgs had once dwelled here together: George and Mary, the parents, and their three children, Dana, the eldest, Mark, the youngest, and in the middle … Tom.

It was a deep irony that the head of the Heckenburg clan, George, and Heck’s older brother, Tom, had looked so like each other. Tom had been tall and lean, whereas George had been burly, but there were clear similarities: prominent noses, high, hard cheekbones. Of course, whereas George always stuck with the sober grey suits of his own youth, the sensible ties, the short, brilliantined hair, Tom had preferred the disorderly ‘mophead’ look of the late-80s rock scene (dyeing it straw-blond into the bargain), the tour T-shirts and stone-washed jeans with the knees torn out of them. Father and son had been worlds apart in so many ways. In fact, back in that era, Heck, who was younger than Tom by three years, had been the success story, the ‘normal one’ as his mum and dad would say. Mainly this was due to his star-athlete status at school, and because he and his mates were less a group of intellectual rebels, more a bunch of lads around town, which was something factory worker George Heckenburg could more easily understand.

But the real schism between father and eldest son had only come when Tom got into drugs.

Heck shook his head, deciding he was getting nowhere with such painful reminiscence.

Briefly, he rubbed at a crick in the back of his neck, which was stiffening fast, a result of the long motorway journey he’d just completed. He could certainly have used a warm bath right now, not to mention a hot meal, but it didn’t look as if that was going to happen here.

That said, he at least had to check before resorting to Plan B. He climbed out into the wet and knocked on Dana’s door. There was no response.

He retreated to the car and assessed the building again. The absence of light was very telling, not to mention the absence of drawn curtains or of a television left playing to itself – the kind of precautions an everyday householder would take if they’d just popped around the corner to the chippie. He glanced along the street. A few cars were parked, and there were lights in other windows. But it was improbable there’d be anyone living here now who’d recognise him. If anything, an unknown bloke of his age, wearing jeans, trainers, a zip-up jacket and hoodie, wandering around in the dark and knocking on doors would elicit fear rather than neighbourly assistance.