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

He climbed back into his Megane, glancing one last time at the house he’d used to call home.

*

With a crunch of brakes, Heck stopped on the car park to St Nathaniel’s. Another place he’d once called home, albeit very briefly. Though it didn’t feel that way now.

The towering religious edifice had been the focal point of this district since the Old Town was first built to house Irish immigrants shipped in as part of the Industrial Revolution. All Heck’s life this had been the beating heart of Bradburn, though again he couldn’t help but wonder how vigorously it beat in the twenty-first century. He hadn’t encountered too many people in the past few years for whom spiritual succour was a high priority. He wasn’t here himself for that reason. He had a more practical purpose in mind – to get directions to a decent billet, and maybe at the same time say hello to his late mother’s younger brother, Father Pat McPhearson, who also happened to be parish priest at St Nat’s.

Heck climbed out and looked the church over. Some parts of its venerable old structure were clad with scaffolding, while its windows were dark and doors locked – though that was no surprise at this time of night. Once, England’s churches were left open twenty-four/seven, their interiors shimmering with candlelight so they could provide a haven for souls in distress whatever the hour. But now a church was just as likely to get robbed and vandalised as any other easily accessible building. Heck crossed the car park on foot to the presbytery, skirting around tins of paint and tools propped against its gatepost. It looked as if extensive refurbishments were under way, probably not before time, given the state of the two-hundred-year-old church.

The presbytery itself wasn’t quite so old, perhaps dating from the late-Victorian period, but evinced the simple austerity of the ecclesiastical life: a narrow building, but tall, again built from red brick, with a steeply sloped roof of heavy grey slate. The fanlight above its large front door was filled with stained glass, as were sections of the two arched windows to either side of it. Both of these were curtained, but dull lamplight speared out.

As Heck rang the doorbell, he recollected the brief time he’d spent lodging here after his family had unanimously decided they didn’t want an officer of the law living under their roof. He’d taken official police digs at first, but those had been in short supply back in the mid-1990s – most of the old section-houses were being sold off. So he’d soon finished up here. His uncle, Father Pat as the local schoolchildren had known him, though equally bemused by his nephew’s decision to join the force, had at least shown a spirit of Christian kindness. Heck had crashed in the presbytery’s spare room until he could afford his own place.

‘How can I help you?’ came a terse Irish voice.

Heck had been so lost in his thoughts that he hadn’t realised the door had opened.

An extremely short woman stood there – five feet at the most – with a truculent, weather-beaten face and thinning red-grey hair. Heck recognised her as Mrs O’Malley, his uncle’s housekeeper. She’d filled out a little since he’d last seen her, which was roughly nineteen years ago. She’d been stocky before, but now was quite plump – an impression enhanced by the thick raincoat she was in the process of buttoning up with a set of stubby, ring-covered fingers.

‘Erm … Mrs O’Malley?’

‘Yes?’ she said impatiently, as if this was something he should surely already know.

She’d been the official housekeeper here for the last thirty years, but she clearly didn’t recognise him. And it was hardly fair to expect otherwise. He hadn’t changed too much in physical terms. He’d been six feet tall then and was six feet tall now. He’d been lean, weighing in at an athletic thirteen and a half stone, and was only slightly above that all these years later. But the smart police uniform had gone, along with the short-back-and-sides, and the unscarred, unlived-in face. It was tempting to say: ‘Hey, it’s me – Mark. I’ve come back to see you after all this time.’ But Mrs O’Malley, who’d always been an irascible soul, was the last person he would ever have come back to visit voluntarily.

‘There’s no bed here,’ she added, before he could say anything. ‘The spare room’s now a lumber room. You’ll have to find one of the shelters down in town.’

Heck was a little surprised. OK, he was wearing jeans, trainers and a hoodie top, but none of it was tatty. Perhaps, if he was so easily mistaken for a hobo, he shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to dress down in Peckham.

‘I’m looking for Father Pat,’ he said. ‘I’d just like a quick word.’

‘He’s not in.’ She stepped out into the porch as she closed the door behind her. Its latch clunked home with an air of finality. ‘He’s making his evening rounds.’

These ‘evening rounds’ had been part of Heck’s uncle’s routine for as long as he remembered. Once the day’s Masses had been said, Father Pat would visit the hospitals and hospices, then the homeless centres, then the houses of the sick and the bereaved and the down-at-heart. That wasn’t the sort of thing you could wrap up in half an hour.

‘OK.’ Heck turned away. ‘Thanks.’

‘He might – just might – pop into The Coal Hole down on Shadwell Road,’ she called after him. ‘But only if he has a bit of time left.’

Heck glanced back and nodded. He knew where The Coal Hole was. Father Pat might be a priest, and a good one too, but he was occasionally partial to a small whiskey.

‘If he misses you tonight, I’ll be seeing him again in the morning. Who shall I say called?’

‘Mark – his nephew.’

There was a long, cool silence, the woman’s features inscrutable in the dimness. Finally, she said, ‘Well, well … you wouldn’t by any chance be in trouble again?’

Mrs O’Malley was another who’d disapproved of what Heck had done all those years ago. Descended from a long line of Irish Republicans, she’d disapproved of the British police in general, so she’d felt especially affronted by Heck taking up lodgings here.

‘No, I’m not in trouble, Mrs O’Malley,’ Heck replied. ‘But you guys may be.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘ All of you.’ He walked on to the gate.

‘If Father Pat asks?’ she called again, now sounding a tad concerned.

‘Yep,’ Heck said over his shoulder. ‘Him too.’

Bradburn wasn’t just known for being a grim town up north. It had also produced several celebrated sons and daughters who’d made an impact in the entertainment industry.

One of the most controversial of these – at least in his time – was Terry Bayber, a knockabout northern comic whose heyday was the late 1940s and early 1950s, but who’d mainly been famous back then for being irreverent and even ‘subversive’ according to one daily newspaper. Bayber’s risqué routines were always aided and abetted by his busty, blonde and ever scantily clad girlfriend and business partner, Mavis Broom, ‘Our Mavis’, who was the recipient of endless light-hearted innuendo throughout his shows. Bayber’s death in 1954, at the age of 55, was very premature, but his memory lived on, certainly on his home patch, where campaigners had lobbied from an early stage for a permanent memorial to him. Only now had this dream finally become reality, with Bradburn Council coughing up, and further donations coming from local businesses, to produce a seven-foot-tall bronze figure mounted on a plinth in the town’s central Plaza.

But this was Bradburn, so things had not gone entirely smoothly.