Ashes to Ashes: An unputdownable thriller from the Sunday Times bestseller. Paul Finch

Charlie Wheeler, despite the bastard receiving the severe but appropriate penalty of three life sentences including a judge’s recommendation that he serve no less than 45 years. While DI Dave Brunwick, who’d officially headed the Wimbledon enquiry, spoke to a bank of microphones and news cameras outside the front of the Old Bailey, Heck left via a rear door and hurried off back to Staples Corner, arriving there just around lunchtime, where he grabbed a quick sandwich before hitting the motorway.

      Three days had now passed since Gemma had taken several other SCU detectives north to liaise with the Greater Manchester Police in Bradburn, but plenty more had happened since. To start with, there’d been another fatal fire-attack in the town. This time it was a drugs dealer called Daniel Hollister, another goon believed to have been on Vic Ship’s payroll, and the modus operandi had been near enough exactly the same as that used in the sex-shop attack: the victim sprayed with some combustible accelerant, most likely petrol, while the delivery mechanism – quite literally a flamethrower – had been clearly identified on this occasion because the armoured and helmeted killer had got caught in the act on CCTV, though the footage wasn’t of the best quality. Only yesterday, Gemma, in company with DI Katie Hayes of the Greater Manchester Serious Crimes Division, had held a joint press conference at Bradburn Central police station to announce that a pre-existing investigative SCU taskforce, Operation Wandering Wolf, had now been expanded to tackle in full the escalating underworld war in the town.

      Already feeling left behind by these events, Heck initially sped along the M1, not that he was looking forward to reaching his destination. As Gemma had intimated, there was no love lost between Heck and Bradburn, though in some ways it was quite illogical. Back in his youth, a major domestic crisis – not unconnected to his embarking on a career in the police – had put a deep rift between himself and his immediate family, which hadn’t been easily bridged.

      In truth, it hadn’t properly been bridged even now, though Heck and his sole surviving close relative, his older sister Dana, were in regular contact and the tone was friendly enough. Dana’s only daughter, Sarah, knew Heck simply as ‘Uncle Mark’ and though she hadn’t been around in the bad old days and with luck had never been informed about them, she hadn’t seen him often enough to forge any kind of real emotional bond with him.

      So … no, Heck didn’t particularly enjoy going back to Bradburn, but this would never stop him. It was true what he’d told Gemma: the past was the past as far as he was concerned; it was time to let bygones be bygones. In any case, he’d now lived almost as long in London as he had in Lancashire, having voluntarily transferred from the Greater Manchester Police to the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty, shortly after joining the force. He didn’t consider himself a Bradburn native any more. So why should it matter? More important than any of that was finding John Sagan, though it already sounded as if Gemma had succumbed to the inevitable and, to avoid putting out any GMP noses, had made her team available to launch a full-scale assault against all the mobsters who were making life such a misery up there.

      By mid-afternoon, the traffic flow had increased, worsening noticeably when Heck hit the M6, forcing him to divert onto the toll-road at Coleshill. From there, the driving was easier so he was able to take a guilt-free break at Norton Canes Services.

      Over a coffee, he perused the latest batch of paperwork emailed down that morning by the admin staff on Wandering Wolf.

      This latest intelligence finally confirmed that the Bradburn feud was being waged between Vic Ship’s Manchester-based firm and a breakaway crew who had once run Bradburn on Ship’s behalf but now were looking to go independent. There was no evidence as yet, at least nothing firm, that John Sagan had hooked up with Ship, but if there was a retaliatory strike for the fire-attack on Daniel Hollister, which the taskforce was now nervously anticipating, and it involved torture and the use of chloroform to overpower the subject, it would be as good as a signature.

      In the meantime, purely in terms of numbers and expertise, the contrasts between the two factions could not be more extreme.

      As Heck had already seen, Ship headed a traditional inner-city crime family whose main areas of influence were tough districts like Whalley Range, Fallowfield, Rusholme and Longsight. According to the intel, Ship’s crew dabbled in all the usual activities – pimping, loansharking, protection, drugs – and had a much-feared reputation. They could and would use serious violence if they deemed it necessary, and in the long term, even before this latest shooting war, were suspected of involvement in the murders of at least four rival gangsters. That said, on the whole it was believed that Ship’s mob observed the old-fashioned laws of gangland etiquette in that mainly they messed with their own kind while the general public didn’t even know they existed. This didn’t make them Robin Hood and his Merry Men – they were high-level criminals, whose numbers and activities were on the rise thanks to a new infusion of Russian boeviks, which literally translated into English as ‘warriors’. It seemed that Vic Ship, in his capacity as self-appointed Manchester godfather, had recently made contact with the Tatarstan Brigade in St Petersburg, a deadly cartel who had apparently been looking for an alliance in Britain to open new markets for their narcotics. If nothing else, the expectation of this hook-up was that Ship’s crew would start to display a greater degree of viciousness. The Russian mob weren’t slow to stomp on their opponents, and that would include policemen, judges, politicians, ordinary citizens, anyone. More to the point, with these Russian torpedoes in harness, alongside a merciless enforcer like Sagan, Ship’s outfit ought to be more than a match for anyone if it came to a genuine gangster war.

      As a result, Lee Shaughnessy – alleged head of the breakaway group in Bradburn, and Ship’s main rival in the town – could not have looked more out of his depth.

      In contrast to Ship’s brutish mugshot, Shaughnessy’s official photo depicted a much younger guy, thirty at the most and remarkably unblemished by his chosen lifestyle. There wasn’t a shaving nick to be seen, let alone a full-blown scar. In fact, with his neatly combed white-blond hair, grey eyes and refined, almost pleasant features, he was a boy next door, the guy you’d be totally happy with if your daughter brought him home. And yet his criminal record was ghastly. He was a Bradburn local, but he’d been in trouble all his life, with multiple convictions for burglary, robbery, car theft and assault. At the tender age of twelve, he’d raped and beaten the female warden in charge of the secure care-home where he was installed. All the credentials you needed, Heck supposed, to eventually work for someone like Vic Ship, though Shaughnessy had only come to the gang boss’s notice in his mid-twenties while serving four years for attacking a police observation post opposite his house at a time when he was suspected of planning a post office raid – two undercover officers were battered unconscious and fifty grand’s worth of surveillance kit was smashed up.

      But it was under Ship’s tutelage that Shaughnessy had really blossomed. Acting as the Manchester mob’s chief lieutenant in Bradburn, his brief had been to take charge of the local drugs trade, and lean on the pub and club owners for protection money – all of which he’d pulled off with aplomb. So much aplomb that he’d soon flooded the town’s estates with heroin and crack, while there was scarcely a nightspot where he didn’t have at least some interest. The readies had rolled in, but, perhaps inevitably, Shaughnessy had soon got tired of taking only a small cut when he could (and, in his mind, should) have been taking everything. So he’d recently broken away, taking many of Ship’s Bradburn business interests with him.

      GMP were fairly sure the recent war had commenced with the murders, on Shaughnessy’s orders, of the sex-shop managers and Ship loyalists Les Harris and Barrie Briggs, though there was some surprise that Shaughnessy had laid so open and violent a challenge at the door of the larger syndicate, especially as burning two men alive was an extreme punishment even by gangland standards – unless there’d been some provocation by Ship first which had not yet come to the police’s attention. One theory was that this use of fire was intended to be exemplary – in other words a message for any other Ship soldiers still remaining in Bradburn. GMP intelligence officers also felt that such savagery would not be completely atypical of Shaughnessy’s outfit, who were said to be wilder than the norm. Shaughnessy had achieved this by bringing together the worst of the worst in Bradburn’s previously disorganised criminal underworld, recruiting only the most