‘Not quite.’ They’d now arrived at Elephant amp; Castle, so Heck slid the book out of sight again and they stepped from the train. ‘We stole it during a burglary, remember. It’s inadmissible as evidence, and Deke knows it. He also knows that, when push comes to shove, we want his paymasters more than we want him.’
‘You really think he’ll be prepared to trade them?’
‘He may have no choice. At present, his arse is in a sling.’
They left the station. Whereas Richmond’s sedate streets had been settling down for the night, this part of London — Southwark — was still noisy with traffic, honking horns and belligerent, drunken shouts. They turned left under a brick arch, and followed a narrow side passage.
‘I can’t believe it’ll be that straightforward,’ Lauren said. ‘We’ve hurt him bad, and you know what they say about wounded animals.’
‘Speaking of which …’
The passage now became a tunnel, and led to a tall steel door. A weak bulb illuminated it, showing where blue paint had flaked away, exposing the raw metal beneath. It had the look of a service entrance, as if it had once connected to a warehouse or factory. The bulb over the lintel buzzed and flickered, threatening to plunge them into blackness.
‘What’s this place?’ she asked.
‘A drinking den,’ Heck said. ‘A card school … a knocking shop. Hopefully our lodgings for the night.’
He hammered on the metal with his fist. It reverberated deep inside, as though through vast, empty chambers. There was no immediate response, so he hammered again.
Lauren glanced behind them uneasily: the tunnel dwindled off into shadow; a mouse scurried across it. ‘Who the hell lives in a place like this?’
‘An old acquaintance of mine,’ Heck replied. ‘Someone you thought you were going to have a chat with yourself at one time. His name’s Bobby Ballamara.’
Chapter 24
Gemma read carefully through the print-out that Palliser had just pulled off CrimInt.
‘And this is the last thing he asked Paula Clark to do for him?’ she said.
‘Certainly is,’ Palliser replied.
‘Eric Ezekial? Not the sort of name you’d forget easily.’
Palliser’s office was knee-deep in littered paperwork, most of it having been dragged from the various bags that Heck had brought up from Deptford Green. The larger office beyond the open door, where the Serial Crimes Unit’s detectives had their desks, now lay deserted and dark. Gemma and Palliser, both with collars open and sleeves rolled back, were working by the low light of a single desk lamp.
Palliser yawned. A few moments ago he’d had the sudden inspiration to contact Heck’s former secretary and see if he’d confided anything in her before ‘going on leave’. It had paid dividends, though the woman had torn a strip off him in the process.
‘She wasn’t best pleased when I rang her up at this hour,’ he said.
‘She’ll be even less pleased when I ring her up again, in about two hours, to see if there’s anything she can add,’ Gemma replied. Anyone overhearing this casual comment might have assumed she was joking, but Palliser knew ‘the Lioness’ better than that. ‘This number she faxed it to is definitely up in Manchester?’
He nodded.
Once again, Gemma stabbed Heck’s number into her mobile. Once again, there was no response. Sighing, she put the phone away. She laid the print-out on her desk, alongside a similar print-out for Ron O’Hoorigan and a case file photograph of Genene Wraxford; in trying to pinpoint Lauren Wraxford, the girl Heck was in company with, it hadn’t taken them long to spot that one of the missing women shared the same surname. But she wasn’t their main focus at present. ‘This guy Ezekial is obviously the key,’ Gemma said. ‘Lives in Kingston, I see.’
‘Shall we pay him a call?’
‘No.’ She tapped her teeth with a pen. ‘Find out everything you can about him, Des. But don’t approach him. Same goes for the Wraxford family.’
‘May I ask why?’
She paused, before saying: ‘Heck must have a reason for wanting to stay off the radar. Much as it’s infuriating me, I feel I’ve no option but to respect that a little longer.’
By the furrows on his brow, this wasn’t what Palliser had wanted to hear.
‘You disagree?’ she asked.
‘His reason may not be a good one.’
‘You mean it’s because he’s a murderer?’
‘Of course not. More likely he’s continuing the mission AWOL because he doesn’t want any crap to blow back on you.’ Palliser stood up to go out, but loitered in the doorway. ‘That’s hardly encouraging, is it?’
‘More likely it’s because he doesn’t want me to interfere,’ Gemma argued.
‘Probably it’s both … either way, I’m worried he’s out of his depth.’
‘I’m concerned about that too. I still want to find him. But in the meantime …’ and she picked up the Ezekial print-out, ‘we’re sitting on this lead. At least until Paula Clark feels the urge to blab to someone else, at which point we’ll have to come clean.’
‘Laycock will go fucking ballistic.’
She slipped the print-out into her briefcase. ‘Leave me to worry about that.’
‘This is a total fuck-up, ma’am.’ Such comments were a measure of Palliser’s stress. An old-fashioned type, he rarely used foul language in front of female colleagues, especially not his feisty boss. ‘We should have supported Heck in the first place. I don’t mean covertly. I mean openly. If we were going to do this, we should have stood up to Laycock and demanded the case be kept open.’
‘There were no grounds for that.’ Gemma dragged her coat on. ‘So don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’
‘What’s bloody ridiculous is that Heck may be in danger, and we’re just sitting here.’
‘
‘You won’t trust him?’ Palliser said, as she pushed past. ‘That’s a good one. Have you stopped to think that if he actually trusted
She whirled around and glared at him. But there was no argument. Palliser was being entirely truthful. If not, he wouldn’t have stood there and boldly returned her gaze.
‘I’ll leave you to turn the lights out,’ she finally said. There was an unusual fluster to her cheek. ‘Remember what I said about Ezekial?’
Chapter 25
When the two Greater Manchester Police detectives emerged from the private room attached to the recovery ward, they had a young doctor with them, though it was only the white coat and stethoscope that revealed the doctor’s profession. Aside from that, he wore jeans and an open collar shirt, and thanks to the long hours he’d worked, his jaw was covered in stubble. By contrast, the two detectives were fastidiously neat. The detective superintendent, whose name was Smethurst, was a stone-faced, early middle-aged man with cropped, iron-grey hair and a clipped grey moustache. He wore a shirt and tie under his jacket, none of which were even creased despite the lateness of the hour. His compatriot, Detective Inspector Jarvis, was a woman about ten years his junior. She wore flat shoes, a trouser suit, and carried a shoulder-bag. Her hair, which was mouse-brown, was cut almost as severely as that of her boss.
She beckoned to the two uniformed constables — PCs Hallam and Belshaw — who were waiting on the other side of the passage. They were both young men, not long in the job, still probationers in fact, and they came over
