they’d just heard had been loud and clear. Heck lurched back towards the gantry overlooking the courtyard. As he did, he heard another car screeching to a halt. He reached the balustrade and looked down. Two police cars were parked below. An officer had got out of each. As Heck watched, a third police vehicle — this one looked like a dog unit — came thundering through the courtyard entrance.
Lauren joined him. ‘Timely arrival,’ she said, relieved.
‘Timely arrival — nothing!’ Heck retorted.
He glanced down at his training shoes; they were bloodied. Lauren’s were the same. Two trails of reddish footprints were visible on the gantry walk behind them. He glanced at his sweatshirt; perhaps inevitably, blood was also smeared there — along its left sleeve.
‘We’ve been set up,’ he said slowly.
‘What do you mean?’
A fourth police vehicle hurtled into view. It was another dog-van. Seconds later, the two dog-handlers, their animals straining at the leash, were picking their way through the rubbish towards the entrance Heck and Lauren had used to get up here.
‘We’re going to carry the can for this,’ Heck said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
He stared at her, amazed that she could be so naive. ‘We’ve been looking for Ron O’Hoorigan, haven’t we? Asking anyone who’d listen. Not only that, we’ve beaten the crap out of some guys who didn’t want to help us. Now we’re at his murder scene and we’ve got his blood all over us!’
It still took several moments for the import of this to dawn on Lauren, as though she was dazed by the speed of events. Heck took her arm and dragged her back from the balustrade. Only one copper was now visible in the courtyard, talking animatedly into his radio. Already a yelping of dogs could be heard from inside the building.
‘We obviously can’t go out the way we came in,’ Heck said.
‘We’re running?’
‘Of course we’re bloody running! There must be a fire exit.’
He raced back down the internal passage. Previously, they hadn’t gone right to the far end. Now they did, and found, as Heck had hoped, a fire escape, though its metal door was badly corroded. When he tried to push the bar down, it wouldn’t budge.
He threw his whole weight against it, but it still didn’t move.
Lauren joined in — they hit the metal together, and there was a
Wind and traffic noise assailed them as they peered down. The stair descended to earth via a straight concrete shaft, which was open to the air on the motorway side. Whether or not the coppers in the building heard this racket was unclear, but the dogs sounded a lot nearer — they were barking excitedly.
‘Come on,’ Heck said.
But the spiral stair was as rusty as the door had been. As they started down, it shuddered alarmingly. In some places, the bolts holding it to the building wall had visibly rotted through. From this terrible height, it was easy to imagine that, should the thing collapse, they’d fall clear down to the M602. The foot of the stair rested on a small paved area, only about ten yards by ten; a low wooden fence separated that from the dirt embankment plunging steeply to the motorway, along which an endless procession of cars and lorries was roaring in both directions.
‘This is suicide,’ Lauren said, a dizzying sense of vertigo causing her to sit and try to go down on her backside.
‘So’s the alternative.’ He pulled her to her feet.
They reached the level of the fifth floor, clinging to the hand rails, but now the stair wasn’t just shuddering, it was groaning and creaking. In fact it was swaying, as though it had come loose at the top and was only anchored at the bottom.
‘Heck, we’re going to be killed,’ Lauren wailed, grabbing at his arm with a hand that was almost a talon.
‘Just keep going.’
‘This is crazy. We’ve found a crime scene. We should preserve it.’
‘We’ll get locked up, and that will bollocks everything.’
They were now about halfway down, the decayed steel groaning ever more loudly. Of course, with each level they passed there was another exit-door connecting to the building. At any moment, an officer could burst out from one and intercept them, though most likely the cops would be following the dogs, which were on a different trail.
By the time they got to the second floor, the drop wasn’t quite so perilous. They were now close enough to the ground to see that the door they’d knocked loose above had flattened a section of fencing. But Lauren’s fear had been replaced by anger.
‘This is lunacy,’ she said. ‘Even if we get away, we’re going to become fugitives.’
‘If that’s what’s necessary.’
‘That’s ridiculous! Heck, for Christ’s sake, what are we doing?’
They were still twenty feet from the ground, a sufficient distance to break them both in half if they fell, but Heck stopped and turned so sharply that she almost crashed into him and sent them both tumbling.
‘This is not just about the investigation anymore, Lauren …
She shook her head. ‘You’re a cop, we’ll be protected.’
‘I don’t want to be protected! I want to catch the bastard who’s doing this!’
He continued down almost recklessly fast. She followed, more carefully.
They at last reached the bottom, and exited Gallows Hill via the hole the escape door had made in the fence. They scrambled down the embankment until they were on the motorway hard-shoulder. It was narrow, and juggernauts rocketed past them with only two or three feet’s clearance. The noise of this, exacerbated by the cutting’s canyon-like geometry, was deafening.
‘Alright!’ Lauren shouted. ‘But if my life’s on the line as well, that means you’ve got to take me along. Right to the end.’
‘I’ve no bloody choice now.’ Heck beat the dirt from his hands as they headed east.
Several hundred yards along, when they were well away from the derelict estate, they cut back uphill, climbed under some barbed wire and found themselves amid sheds and allotments. Beyond these, now watching out for police cars, they threaded their way back through the dismal streets to the alley where they’d left Heck’s Fiat.
‘Who’s supposed to have set us up, anyway?’ Lauren asked. ‘You think this guy Deke?’
‘Who else?’
‘I don’t get it. If Deke doesn’t want us around, why didn’t he just let those dickheads in the pub beat us up?’
Heck didn’t reply until he’d climbed behind the wheel, where he stopped to regain his breath. ‘Because getting us beaten up wasn’t enough. Whoever Deke is, he saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: O’Hoorigan — who for some reason we don’t know about yet, may have been in his sights all along. And us.’
‘But he didn’t try to kill us.’
‘No,’ Heck agreed, ‘but like you say, I’m a copper. Killing me would have caused a big stink. This way was better. It would have covered his back, and put us out of the game permanently.’
‘But who the hell is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ Heck switched the engine on. ‘But one thing’s sure … he knows who we are.’
Chapter 19
