Stalkers

‘I am armed. I’ve got you.’

But even Lauren, fearless and efficient as she’d proved to be in the bar fight, was visibly unnerved by this environment. As they proceeded up to the second floor, the front door felt as though it was falling further and further behind them.

‘I’m serious,’ Lauren said. ‘What if O’Hoorigan’s pals from the Dog amp; Butcher are waiting up here for round two?’

‘If there’re any of them fit to walk,’ he said.

But she’d made a good point — even if the men from the pub weren’t here, Deke had mentioned that O’Hoorigan had used this place to buy drugs, which could mean there’d be junkies around, and though junkies, as a rule, weren’t tough opposition, they might be carrying syringes. He fished about before picking up a heavy piece of wood; a ceiling lathe with cement caked around one end of it.

They continued. At the midway point where each flight of stairs switched back on itself, a tall, narrow aperture in the outer wall gave a restricted view into the courtyard below. Each time, more by instinct than logic, they peered down — as if to check that hostile forces weren’t gathering at their rear. They never saw anyone down there, though when they reached the stair between the fourth floor and the fifth, they thought they heard a harsh male voice shouting something.

They stood and listened for a while, but heard nothing else.

Again Heck wondered about this guy, Deke — what did he stand to gain by telling them where O’Hoorigan was hiding? If that was what he’d done. It didn’t compute that Deke was in cahoots with O’Hoorigan and trying to send them the wrong way, not after he’d just beaten the hell out of the burglar’s friends. But to have casually given them the location of O’Hoorigan’s hide-out, when others were prepared to lose teeth to protect it, suggested that his motives amounted to more than personal dislike. Deke, whoever he was, clearly wasn’t a Salford lad — that much was evident from his accent. But the role he was playing in this affair was still a mystery, and the more Heck thought about it, an increasingly ominous one.

When they reached the top floor, extensive weather damage was visible. The ceilings were decayed and, in many cases, dripping water. They moved through a fire door onto an outer gantry. It was good to get back into the fresh air — the fetid stench of the stairwell had been cloying — but again they now felt exposed to prying eyes. The courtyard, which looked a long way down, still lay empty.

They advanced, Heck checking off the door numbers as they passed, which wasn’t easy as most of the doors had either been kicked down or burned. The interiors beyond them were opaque with shadow. Halfway along, a metal plate hung over an entrance to their left; it bore the numbers: 60–70. They passed beneath it, entering another internal passage, though this one turned out to be a cul-de-sac and was about two inches deep in water. A grime-coated window occupied its far end. No doubt this looked down on the motorway, but the light it admitted was pitiful, seeming to dwindle as they advanced.

‘You smell something bad?’ Lauren whispered, wrinkling her nose.

‘You mean worse than everything else we’re smelling in here?’

She sniffed at the air, shaking her head. ‘I thought … it doesn’t matter.’

The next few doors were intact, though covered in paint. But then they came to number sixty-eight, which was missing entirely, and in the entrance to which three supermarket trolleys had been jammed together, creating a near-immovable obstruction that jutted out and half blocked the passage. The light was now so poor that they had to grope their way past this, though both were acutely aware that the next apartment was the one they wanted, and they moved with extreme stealth.

When they got to it, they saw that this door too had been removed — there was no sign of it, either in the doorway itself or amid the soaked trash that littered the passage. Like all the others, this flat was pitch dark inside.

Initially they flattened themselves against the wall and waited. But they heard nothing. Heck glanced into Lauren’s face. In the dim light, her brow shone with sweat, but her lips were set in a defiant frown. There was no denying it; he was glad to have her with him at this moment.

‘You ready?’ he mouthed.

She nodded.

He counted down in his head — three — two — one. Then he hefted the cudgel, and spun around, going straight through the entrance. Lauren followed.

If it ever had been a proper squat, it didn’t appear to be being used for that purpose now. The central corridor was cluttered with masses of shattered crockery and clumps of soggy plaster, which had dropped from the ceiling. Two doors opened immediately to rooms on the left and right. The one on the left had once been a kitchen but was now a gutted shell, black with filth and reeking of damp. The room on the right might have been a bedroom: a slashed, stained mattress lay in the middle, swamped on all sides by chip wrappers and food cartons — which suggested that someone had been staying here in the recent past. But in neither case was anyone present now.

‘He’d have to be absolutely desperate to lie low in here,’ Lauren said, revolted.

‘Or absolutely terrified,’ Heck replied.

They moved towards the room at the end. By now, Heck would normally have raised his voice to let the occupants know this was a raid and that police officers were on the premises. But of course none of that was possible.

When they reached the end room, he hesitated before going in. Lauren had been right, there was a smell — and it was vile. He glanced round at her. Her eyes were wide, almost rabbit-like. He pushed on in — but then stopped again, so abruptly that she blundered into the back of him. Neither was really sure what they’d been expecting to find in there. Perhaps they’d only been half-expecting to find Ron O’Hoorigan.

But they certainly hadn’t been expecting to find him like this.

They could tell it was O’Hoorigan because of his green canvas trousers, but that was the only way. He’d been suspended upside down from the central light fitting, his ankles tied with a coaxial cord, which had then been drawn behind his back and used to bind his wrists as well. He hadn’t been dead too long: the blood spattered all over the walls looked relatively fresh. And his intestines, which had been yanked out from his stomach in oily red and purple ravels and left to hang over his chest and face, were still glistening with moisture.

This latter detail explained the nauseating smell.

It wasn’t decay — it was offal, ordure, human bowels ripped brutally open, their fecal contents allowed to drain onto the floor.

A cloud of bluebottles exploded from O’Hoorigan’s belly cavity, and from the pool of filth underneath him. Heck and Lauren fell back choking as the droning horrors swept around them, getting into their faces and hair, even into their mouths.

They staggered out of the flat together, gagging. Heck, despite having attended countless murders before, had to lean on the facing wall to fight down queasiness. Lauren, though she’d fought on the real battlefield, wasn’t in a much better state — she crouched alongside him. Both were gasping for air.

‘Christ,’ Heck said. ‘Jesus Christ …’

‘Heck, I …’ She hawked and spat. ‘I …’

‘That guy was clearly an arsehole, but he never deserved …’

‘Heck, I’ve seen this before. I mean the MO.’

He glanced round at her. ‘What … where?’

She stood up, mopping her mouth with her sleeve. ‘Iraq.’

She glanced back into the flat and down its central corridor. Now that their eyes had adjusted to the murk, the ghastly shape could still be seen hanging beyond the open door at the far end.

‘Tell me about it,’ Heck said.

‘It can’t be relevant to this …’

‘I’ll decide whether it’s relevant or not.’

‘Okay.’ She still looked sickly. ‘It had been done to three Arab men, insurgents who were believed to have been planting roadside bombs. Their killers were never apprehended.’

Heck pondered this — but his thoughts were interrupted by the screech of a vehicle skidding to a halt.

It was difficult in the dank passage to judge which direction the sound had come from. The motorway lay just beyond the end window, but there was an ongoing rumble of traffic from that direction, and it was muffled. What