‘Because it was five fucking weeks ago! And unlike you and your little wind-up clockwork toy friends, I don’t have to keep a careful account of everything I get up to in an officious little pocket-book. Not that I think you do, by the way. We could look through your notes now, and I doubt we’ll find any reference to harassment of ethnic or sexual minorities, intimidation of protest groups, illegal searches of private premises, brutality against ordinary working-class people, or general, casual misuse of authority in any of the other ways you no doubt indulge in on a daily basis …’
Matthews was articulate, Heck had to concede that, which was probably par for the course. He was leader of a self-styled ‘action group’ loosely affiliated to various militant student societies. He and his cronies were political firebrands, anarchists by their own admission … but did that make them killers?
‘What about August 15?’ Higginson persisted. ‘Let me jog your memory … it was a Saturday. That must help a bit.’
‘I do lots of different things on Saturdays.’
‘You don’t keep a record or diary? An industrious man like you.’
That was a sensible question, Heck thought. He’d been present when Matthews was arrested that morning inside his so-called HQ, which was basically a bike shed, though it had been packed with leaflets and pamphlets, and its walls were covered with posters and action-planners. Two state-of-the-art computers had also been seized. Matthews didn’t just talk the talk.
‘The only reason you can be refusing to cooperate on this, Mr Matthews, is because you’ve got something to hide,’ the Detective Constable acting as Higginson’s bagman said.
‘Or because you’re so deluded that you’re more concerned about your street-cred than your personal liberty,’ Higginson suggested.
Matthews bared his teeth. ‘You really are a prissy, smarty-pants bitch, aren’t you?’
‘Moderate your language and tone, Mr Matthews,’ the DC warned him.
‘Or what? You’ll beat me up?’ Matthews laughed. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t already. Go on. There’s nothing to stop you. I think you’ll find I can take it.’
That depressed Heck, at least with regard to any chance these arrests might lead to a conviction. The guy didn’t even realise the films and tapes made of interviews in custody were carefully audited; they couldn’t just disappear. Along with Matthews’s refusal to ask for legal advice, not to mention the ‘no result’ search they’d placed on him and his group with Special Branch, it all combined to suggest they were dealing with a pretender rather than an actual player.
‘If only beating was where you lot drew the line,’ the DC said. ‘When did you decide you were actually going to murder Nathan Crabtree?’
‘This is such bollocks.’
‘Before or after the twentieth time you threatened to kill him online?’ Higginson asked.
Matthews feigned amusement. ‘If that’s the best you’ve got, I pity you.’
Online, Matthews had regularly visited a number of rough and ready social-networking sites, usually hosted overseas, which catered for extremist ideologies. Their stock-in-trade were bitter, rancour-filled exchanges between anonymous individuals with ridiculous monikers. In normal times, any political forum would have been a strange place for an uncouth bunch like Nathan Crabtree and the other two victims, John Selleck and Simon Dean – quasi-political boot-boys with scarcely an educated brain-cell between them – to finish up, but from what Heck could see, the internet was increasingly allowing crazy activists to find an audible voice.
Heck turned from the video monitor, and ambled across the ‘Operation Bulldog’ Incident Room to the display boards bearing images of the crime scenes. There were three in total, and each one was located in a different corner of Hendon, Sunderland’s old dockland.
The first, where Selleck had died, was inside a derelict garage; the second, the site of Dean’s death, on a canal bank; and the third – the death-scene of Nathan Crabtree himself – under a railway arch. From the close-up glossies, it ought to have been easy to distinguish the victims as white males in their mid-to-late twenties, but it wasn’t. So much blood had streamed down the faces and upper bodies from the multiple contusions to their crania, and had virtually exploded from the yawning, crimson chasms where their throats had once been, that no facial features were visible. Even distinguishing marks like tattoos, scars and piercings had been obliterated – at least until such time as the medical examiners had been able to move the bodies and wash them down.
The murders had happened over a three-week period the previous August, and though they’d raised a few eyebrows among the police, that had been more through surprise than dismay – because Crabtree and his crew had been well-known scumbags. Members of a semi-organised group called the National Socialist Elite, they were basically skinheads without the haircuts, but also football hooligans and small-time drug dealers. They’d spent most of the last few years menacing local householders, drinking, brawling and alternately bullying or trying to indoctrinate younger residents with their unique brand of hard-line British ‘patriotism’. They’d been against Muslims, queers, lefties and – taking a break from the political stuff, just to win some brownie points with the common man – nonces. They were believed to be responsible for the brutal beating of an OAP in his own home after the rumour had got around that he was listed on the Sex Offenders’ Register. The rumour had later turned out to be incorrect, but either way, the case against them was unproved.
‘No, he was a paedo, for sure … and the lads knew it,’ Crabtree was reported to have said, after the revelation the victim was innocent. ‘Someone needed to sort him.’
The problem was, someone had now sorted the lads.
And in spectacular fashion.
The first victim had simply been dragged into a garage, and there beaten unconscious before having his throat cut with a sharp, heavy blade. At the time it could have been anything from a mugging gone wrong to a personal score. But then the other two had been nabbed over the following two weeks, and it became apparent that something more sinister was going on. The second victim, after being hammered with a blunt instrument, had been bound to a fence on the side of a canal, and had his throat cut with the same blade as before. In Nathan Crabtree’s case, the perpetrators had gone even further. Though his body had been found under a railway bridge, it had first been bound upright to a brick pillar with barbed wire, before his throat was slashed.
Heck appraised this scene the longest.
The wire was a nasty touch. Not just a sadistic measure designed to inflict maximum pain and distress, but indicative of enjoyment on the part of the killer. Whoever the perpetrator was – Heck wasn’t convinced they were dealing with more than one, but then he wasn’t in charge here – he’d displayed an aggressive loathing of his three targets, particularly Crabtree. Okay, that put Greg Matthews back into the picture – he’d clashed online with these right-wing apes more times than Heck could count, but there was still nothing in his past to suggest he was capable of such violence.
And then there was that damned barbed wire.
Heck couldn’t help thinking the use of such material was trying to spark a dim and distant memory – but it was proving elusive.
‘You’re not convinced we’ve got the right people, are you?’ someone said.
Heck turned. Detective Sergeant Barry Grant stood to his left, wearing his usual sardonic smile. Often, when Heck was posted out to Counties in his capacity as SCU consultant – or rather, a specialist investigator from the Serial Crimes Unit – he encountered a degree of resistance, though not in the case of DS Grant, the taskforce’s File Preparation Officer, and a chap who had so far proved very amenable.
Grant