Sacrifice (17 page)

‘I can do it … I know I can!’

And she meant it; she did, in all seriousness … though she still hoped no one had overheard her. Because though she’d uttered the words with such determination they had almost brought a sob from her throat, they still didn’t sound convincing.

Not even to her own ears.

Heck made his way back to the car and placed his fingerprint sample in a sterile container in the boot, before pulling his gloves off. Below him, Andy Gregson was working his way around the burnt lorry in steadily wider circles. Heck glanced along the road. There was no sign of any support yet, but they shouldn’t be long …

A glint of light caught his eye.

He straightened up, gazing past the lorry and across the spoil-land, which, thanks to his elevated position, now lay before him in a wide, arid plain.

The light glinted again. It was very distant – maybe half a mile away, and it appeared to be located on a low ridge-line covered with scrub vegetation. When the light glinted a third time, Heck moved from suspecting that someone was watching them with binoculars, to a near-certainty that they were.

Fleetingly, he was undecided what to do. It could be a completely blameless action. People wandered the countryside carrying binoculars for all sorts of innocent reasons.

Yeah, right
…

He leapt behind the Peugeot’s wheel and shoved his key into the ignition, the 2.0 turbo diesel engine throbbing to life.

As he roared down the unmade slope, he saw Andy Gregson emerge from around the blackened wreckage, staring at him with mouth open, but there was no time to stop and explain. The underside of Heck’s Peugeot took another battering as he gunned it forward over the rocky, undulating waste, wheels skidding, chassis jolting. He swerved sideways at one point, losing grip on the broken surface; with a sickening crunch, what sounded like his exhaust pipe fractured, his engine thundering in response.

‘Shit!’ Heck snapped.

The ridge drew closer, but only slowly – distances out here were apparently deceptive. He hit troughs and dips, which threw him every which way as he crashed into and over them. Wiry thorns tangled around his wheels; an oil drum clattered away as he clouted it with his nearside headlight, which duly shattered. Despite all, his eyes remained locked on the approaching ridge. He hadn’t seen another flicker of light since he’d jumped into the car, but that was hardly surprising – they’d have spotted him coming, which was why speed was more important than stealth.

With a grinding of axles and squealing of gears, he covered the last fifty yards along a shallow gully, bouncing over heaps of broken masonry and house bricks. A section of sewer pipe made from solid concrete jutted out at one side; only by swift, deft manoeuvres was he able to swerve around it without flaying paint from his flanks. The rutted slope of the ridge, a solid mass of compacted rubble, loomed directly ahead. He hit the brakes, again slewing sideways before staggering to a halt, jumped out and began scrambling uphill as much on all-fours as two feet. It was steeper than he’d expected, but the top couldn’t be far overhead. He fished his phone from his pocket as he climbed.

‘Andy!’

‘What’s going on?’ came the startled reply.

‘Someone’s watching us …’

‘What … who?’

‘Dunno.’

‘That motor of yours’ll be a write-off.’

‘NCG can have the bill. Just stay where you are … Gemma’s en route.’

Heck shoved the phone away. The sweat was dripping off him by the time he reached the top. He stood there, panting, scanning the level ground ahead. It was covered with spoil-land vegetation, twisted, stunted trees for the most part, meshed in clumps, and though it was only spring, knee-deep in brambles and thick green shoots of Idle Jack. There was no sound, not even a twitter of birds – which seemed ominous.

He proceeded warily, seeing only narrow, sun-dappled dells. After a few yards, he glanced behind, realising that he was already losing sight of the open ground he’d driven across; the straggling undergrowth had closed to his rear like a pair of curtains. A voice then came from his right: somewhere in the near-distance, calling to someone.

Heck halted in his tracks, listening hard.

He moved a couple of yards in that direction, pushing aside branches and weeds, still seeing nothing. The voice sounded again. Distinctly deep, distinctly male. As before, it was calling a name, but the name was unrecognisable, and why had it this time sounded as if it was coming from a different direction? Was it the acoustics of this place, or – and this was an eerie notion – was there more than one individual here? Were they hiding out, making sport of him? He fingered at the phone in his pocket, but that would be little or no use – no one else was going to drive over that waste-tip. They’d have to come on foot, and that would take ages. A better plan might be to withdraw, but at what cost? What if the perps were
here
… and he just walked away?

He heard another shout, this one further afield, carrying an echo. Despite his better judgment, Heck ventured forward again, pushing more branches aside, following the path as it zigzagged, still seeing no one, though, as the gradient began to slope downward again, the scrub vegetation thinned out, replacing itself with larger, healthier trees like oaks and sycamores. Beyond these, the ground fell away steeply and suddenly he found himself gazing down into open space, on possibly the last thing he’d expected.

A graveyard … but a graveyard of trains.

Heck was left speechless. Lines of carriages, and even the odd locomotive or two, were drawn up against rusty old buffers, and standing seven or eight in a row on railway tracks thickly overgrown with weeds. Their windows were frosted and filled with jagged black holes where rocks had been thrown. Spray-paint ran over them in arterial red and blue veins; their bodywork was dented, streaked with moss.

At least this explains the echo
, he thought vaguely.

The old siding, which was probably connected in some way to the Liverpool-to-Manchester line, was a good sixty feet below him, lying in a natural valley. The path led down to it via a perilous gradient – so perilous in fact that he might not have bothered trying to descend, until he spied movement down there. What looked like a figure in a hooded, green waterproof had just stepped out of sight behind one of the derelict hulks.

Heck hovered where he was, but the figure did not reappear. He fished his phone from his pocket, but because he was on lower ground than previously, the bulk of the spoil heap reared behind him, blocking out reception. He tried his radio, but the same problem affected it. He shoved the gadgets back into his pockets, making sure to turn down the volume on the radio first – it would be typical of a police PR that it had apparently died on you, only for it to buzz with static just as you were sneaking up on a felon.

He started downhill, walking side-footed to avoid falling, all the time watching the rows of disused rolling-stock. At the foot of the slope, the path veered sharp-right and ran alongside a tall wire-mesh fence, but this was loose in many sections, and Heck had no trouble sliding underneath it. He stood up again, beating the dirt from his hands, listening intently. If people
had
been calling to each other, they weren’t doing it anymore. Was that because he was onto them? He ventured forward, stepping carefully amid thistles and rotted sleepers, peering down the narrow gaps between the vast, silent vehicles, where the shadows were deepest and the foliage grew neck-high. Doors hung open on either side, rank darkness lurking in the gutted interiors behind. There was still no sound. Only as he passed the fifth of these alleys did he spy movement at its far end: a fleeting glint of green. As before, someone had just lurched out of sight. Heck halted, holding his breath, and then an impulse made him spin around. If there was more than one of them, an unseen assailant could be stealing up from behind – but there was no one, just more open space, more rubble.

A row of squarish, yellow frontages faced him from some thirty yards away: abandoned diesels; dented, grimy, daubed with spray-painted obscenities. On the other side of those, corroded rails dwindled off along a canyon filled with underbrush. He turned back to the narrow passage. There was no movement down there now. He glanced up the slope; there was no movement among the trees at the top either. If Gemma had arrived at the suspect lorry, she clearly wasn’t concerned to discover why he’d suddenly dropped off the air. Not yet.

A loud
clang
diverted his attention back down the alley.

It reverberated for several seconds, but still there was no sign of movement.

Heck moved on to the next alley. This one was longer than any of those previous, the two trains between which it had formed consisting of four or five carriages each, instead of one or two. But it was the figure at the far end that most caught his notice.

He jumped backwards, flattening himself out of sight – until he realised that the figure’s back was turned. Again, he saw a heavy green waterproof, its hood pulled up to a goblin-like peak. But the figure, which was broad across the shoulders – to the point of being foursquare, almost like a rugby prop forward – remained perfectly still.

Inviting him to approach.

Oh, I will … but not the way you want me to, pal.

Stealthily as he could, Heck clambered up through an open doorway into the hulk on his left, and found himself looking down an arched gangway littered with glass, overturned tables and the guts of slashed or fire-blackened seats. Aside from the odd jammed-open door, he could see a considerable distance in both directions. By his feet lay a mass of crinkly, yellow newspaper. It looked like the
Daily Mail
; its front page lead expressed horror at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Heck stepped over it, advancing quickly and quietly. At the end of the first carriage, in a boarding area filled with more shattered glass and several half-bricks, he paused to listen. There was no sound from outside, but some indefinable concern made him linger. And then he heard it – a plasticky
crackling
from just behind him.

He twirled, to see a toilet door standing ajar by half a foot or so. Impenetrable green shadow lay on the other side. That crackling again; louder this time. He pictured a heavy waterproof jacket, its wearer shifting position. Was he staring at Heck right now through that open slice of doorway?

Heck had no choice; he charged forward, throwing his shoulder at the door. It barely shifted under his weight; and for a second he completely and absolutely believed that someone was braced against the other side.

And then he saw the truth.

The tiny toilet cubicle had been crammed with plastic rubbish bags. And the intrepid squirrel who’d been investigating them leapt for the broken, moss-covered window and vanished through it in an ash-grey blur.

Heck remained in the doorway for several seconds; head drooped, trying to regain his composure. Then he continued along the train at speed, glancing through one smashed window after another, catching ephemeral glimpses of the eroded bodywork flanking him on either side. He slowed again as he approached what had to be the front of the vehicle, advancing with the lightest footfalls possible. Directly ahead stood the open door to the driver’s compartment. First, Heck sidled to his right, glancing down into the alley. The figure he’d seen ought to be standing just to the front of this position, but now no one was in sight – just an empty gap between the two locomotives.

Swearing under his breath, Heck pushed his way into the driver’s cab. Where once there’d been a bank of controls, all that remained were tufts of oily wiring and rusty rivets where the two seats had been positioned. He slid through the open door and clambered down to the ground, glancing back along the alley, which was still deserted. Only when he advanced into the open did he see the figure again.

It stood thirty yards to his right; as before, its back was turned, but now its left arm hung motionless by its side. The figure appeared to be staring at a half-collapsed siding shed. This time as Heck advanced, he made no attempt at stealth, his feet crunching loudly on gravel. Despite the noise, the hooded figure remained static, refusing to look around – which was faintly unnerving, as was its size. Up close, it looked big enough to break an opponent in half. Heck had a crazy idea about landing a rabbit punch between the burly shoulder-blades, just at the base of the neck, putting the guy out of action before the fight even started, but he didn’t.

‘Police officer!’ he shouted, grabbing the figure’s left wrist, twisting it up and behind the back in a sharp-angled goose-neck.

The figure went down surprisingly easily, gasping with pain, hood flopping sideways.

And Heck saw several things at once: firstly, that though he was big across the shoulders, this guy was late middle-aged and pot-bellied, with a thick growth of grey fuzz on his podgy, florid face; secondly, that he hadn’t heard Heck approach because he was wearing a pair of earphones attached to an iPod; thirdly, he hadn’t moved because he’d been concentrating on an object mounted in front of him on a flimsy tripod – it was an optical level, and it had now fallen over, snapping apart; and finally, the stencilled lettering on the right lapel of his waterproof, which read:
DAYNTON HOMES Ltd.

Heck heard a similar shout to those he’d heard before, though now more intelligible.

‘Mal! You got them flaming earphones on again?’

A second figure, also wearing a green waterproof, perambulated into Heck’s peripheral vision. This one was younger, clean shaved and of much slighter build, but his jacket too was emblazoned with the Daynton Homes logo and he was carrying his own levelling instrument at his shoulder. He stopped dead.

‘Oi! What’s your bloody game!’

‘Alright … easy,’ Heck said, releasing his prisoner. ‘Simple mistake, yeah?’

‘Who are you? This is private land … it belongs to Daynton Homes.’

‘I realise that now.’ Heck dug his warrant card from his pocket. ‘I’m a copper.’