‘There but for the grace of God go all of us,’ Gail said, pointedly unfazed by his sneery smile.
‘Sounding like my kind of girl already,’ Quinnell guffawed, slapping her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, though … I’m already spoken for.’
The others laughed and continued to straighten the new-look office. But when Gail went into the adjoining room to find the locker Eric Fisher had allocated her, Finnegan slid over.
‘Lucky bastard,’ he said to Heck. ‘Don’t know how you fucking do it.’
‘You wouldn’t want to work with Gail, Charlie,’ Heck replied. ‘She’d be too much of a distraction. You know how hard you have to focus just to get the basics right.’
‘Aha,’ Fisher interrupted, leafing through the Sledgehammer file Gail had left on her desk. ‘So, you two are going after Creeley.’
‘Don’t know,’ Heck replied. ‘Haven’t looked at it yet.’
‘Eddie Creeley. He’s a rough customer, I’ll tell you.’
Heck seemed to remember hearing something about him. If recollection served, Eddie Creeley was an offender from the North-East suspected of armed robbery and murder.
‘I don’t know much about Sledgehammer yet,’ he admitted.
‘A new initiative,’ Fisher explained. ‘We’ve received a list of bad guys who’ve so far eluded arrest and, thanks to info provided by Interpol, are still believed to be in the UK. We’re the ones who are charged with rounding them up.’
‘Us and Cold Case?’
‘Well … they’re mostly older cases, so the Coldies are providing intel and back-up.’
Heck took the file and glanced through it himself. Immediately, he was struck by a mugshot of Eddie Creeley, who’d probably been somewhere in his early thirties when the pic was taken. He was an archetype: not a bruiser as such, but cold, cruel, with a lean, aquiline face, greased-back black hair, black sideburns and small, dark eyes. Just flicking through a few more documents, the huge extent and heinous nature of the crimes he was suspected of became clear. He was perhaps most well-known in connection with a violent £7 million armed robbery at a security company in Newark-on-Trent, during which he’d taken two employees hostage, handcuffed them and injected them with drain cleaner to disable them – one later dying and the other suffering permanent brain damage. But more recently for a home invasion, wherein he took two civilian hostages; the female occupant died after she too was injected with a toxic substance, while her husband, though he survived, was shot twice.
‘Everyone’s drawn cards of a similarly nasty ilk,’ Fisher commented. ‘There are no small-time offenders on the Sledgehammer list.’
‘Two of us for each one,’ Heck mused. ‘How much actual support are we going to get?’
Fisher shrugged. ‘As many PSOs as you can scrounge out of whichever force area you end up working in. But that’ll be down to you.’
Heck glanced at him. ‘For real?’
‘Yeah. Times are hard all over, pal. The word is the UK can’t afford coppers any more.’
They turned and saw that Gail had reappeared and had been listening to the conversation.
‘No pressure then,’ she said.
It always struck Nan as odd that August, which so many folk thought of as the height of summer, was actually more like its end. OK, the schools were closed and people went away, and it was generally the warmest, driest month in the calendar, but the hours of daylight were noticeably shorter than they were in June, when the official midsummer fell.
It particularly took her by surprise that evening, when she opted to walk home from the Spar, having just worked the back shift, and pick up a fish-and-chip tea on the way. It was only half past eight when she left the building by the side door, but already it was going dark. Unnerved, she followed the side passage to the shop’s small forecourt, where she encountered another problem: that irritating bunch of school-age hooligans who always hung out here in the evenings. Yes, they were only kids, and Nan was forty-eight, but she wasn’t a particularly tall or powerfully built woman, and the age gap counted for so little these days. During her own childhood, adults had ruled the roost, way more than was even remotely reasonable. But it still felt wrong that she should be frightened of these youngsters, even if it was inevitable given their rat-like faces and their habit of using obscene words every other sentence with no fear of consequence.
The profanity didn’t bother her, if she was honest. Not after the youthful home life she’d led. And anyway, you couldn’t really blame them for that when it was so routine. Every new movie was full of it; comedians on TV used it to get laughs instead of actually being funny. No, it wasn’t the bad language that she hated; it was the name-calling.
‘Oy, Toothless Mary!’ one of them shouted as she walked away, huddled inside her anorak, clutching her handbag tightly.
Cackles of heartless laughter sounded from the rest of them.
She’d hoped that with it being dusk, they wouldn’t have noticed her. No such luck.
‘Oy, Toothless!’ one of them called again, as she crossed the road towards the chippie.
Nan was determined not to cry, reminding herself that this was entirely her own fault. Last February, it had been. It was wet, miserable, bitterly cold – and she’d had the sniffles. How ridiculous of her, though, to hit a sneezing fit just after she’d finished work. How even more ridiculous that she hadn’t fixed her dentures properly, four of them shooting out of her mouth and scattering across the pavement the very second she’d entered the forecourt.
They would never let her forget it.
No, she wasn’t going to cry. But she wasn’t sticking around either. Through the smeary rectangle of the chip shop window, she saw there was nobody waiting at the counter. On one hand, that might mean that Nan would get served quickly, but on the other it might mean that, at this time of evening, nearly everything had gone. If that was the case, they might have to fry her a new piece of cod, and that could take ten minutes. There’d be nothing to stop one of those callous young brutes traipsing across the road to amuse himself even more at her expense. It was better just to vacate the district, she decided. She’d have some bread and butter when she got home.
As it was now mid-evening, and full darkness was falling, she wouldn’t normally have taken the wooded footpath known locally as the Strode, which led between the small shopping centre where she worked and her home housing estate. In truth, it sounded a bit melodramatic to call it a ‘wooded footpath’. That gave the impression of a track in a forest, but it was nothing like that really; more like two hundred yards of beaten grit with a narrow belt of trees separating it from the council playing fields on the right and a wall of shrubbery on the left, with privately owned houses beyond that. Not that this made much difference in the dark, because the Strode was only served by two streetlamps, one at either end, which didn’t do much to light it. As such, Nan wasn’t always keen to use it even during the day. But on this occasion, she didn’t think twice. She just wanted to get home, and this was the quickest route.
She pressed hurriedly on down the path. The tree trunks on her right were stanchions in deep shadow, the playing fields already invisible. The dull glow of house lamps filtering from behind drawn curtains only minimally penetrated the bulwark of vegetation on her left.
Though the end of the Strode was still a good hundred yards distant, Nan told herself that there was nothing to be frightened of. But she was undeniably alone – all she could hear was her own breathing and the steady crunch of