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

In his efforts to look the part-time clerk he actually was, Sagan favoured suits, shirts, ties and leather shoes. But that wasn’t the regular costume in this neck of the woods. Far from it.

      And yet this was only one of many contradictions in the curious character that was John Sagan.

      For example, who would have guessed that his real profession was torturer-for-hire? Who would have known from his outward appearance that he was a vicious sadist who loaned his talents to the underworld’s highest bidders, and performed his unspeakable skills all over the country?

      Heck wouldn’t have believed it himself – especially as the Serial Crimes Unit had never heard about John Sagan before – had the intel not come from Penny Flint, who was one of his more trustworthy informants. She’d even told Heck that Sagan had a specially adapted caravan called the ‘Pain Box’, which he took with him on every job. Apparently, this was a mobile torture chamber, kitted on the inside with all kinds of specialist devices ranging from clamps, manacles and cat o’nine tails to pliers, drills, surgical saws, electrodes, knives, needles and, exclusively for use on male victims, a pair of nutcrackers. To make things worse, and apparently to increase the sense of horror for those taken inside there, its whole interior was spattered with dried bloodstains, which Sagan purposely never cleaned off.

      Penny Flint knew all this because, having offended some underworld bigwig, she herself had recently survived a session in the Pain Box – if you could call it surviving; when Heck had gone to see her in her Lewisham flat, she’d been on crutches and looked to have aged thirty years. She’d advised him that there were even medical manuals on the shelves in the Pain Box to aid Sagan in his quest to apply the maximum torment, while its central fixture was a horizontal X-shaped cross, on which the victims would be secured with belts and straps. Video feeds of each session played live on a screen positioned on the ceiling overhead, so that the victims were forced to watch in close detail as they were brutalised.

      As he waited there on the semi-derelict corridor, and took another swig of ‘meths’, Heck recollected the initial reaction back at the Serial Crimes Unit, or SCU as it was officially known in police circles, when he’d first broken the story. Strictly speaking, a freelance torturer operating inside the underworld wasn’t entirely within their normal remit, but it was anyone’s guess how many people this guy had maimed and/or murdered. It was way too tempting a case to simply hand over. Even so, there had been understandable doubts expressed.

       ‘Why haven’t we heard about this guy before?’ DC Shawna McCluskey wanted to know.

      Shawna had grown increasingly cynical and pugnacious the longer she’d served in SCU. These days she never took anything at face value, but it was a fair question. Heck had asked the same of Penny Flint when he’d been to see her. The primary explanation – that Sagan was an arch-pro and that those he was actually paid to kill were disposed of without trace – was plausible enough. But the secondary explanation – that he’d mostly tended to punish gangland figures who’d betrayed or defied their bosses, and so those who were merely tortured and released again would be unwilling to blab – was less so. Contrary to popular belief, the much-mythologised code of silence didn’t extend widely across the underworld. But then, Penny Flint had been the proof of that. From what she’d told Heck, she’d had no idea who Sagan initially was and had merely thought him another customer. She’d gone off with him voluntarily to perform a sex service, or so she’d expected. When they’d arrived at what she assumed was his caravan sitting on a nondescript backstreet in Lewisham, she’d had no idea what was inside it.

      Perhaps if he’d simply beaten her up, Penny would have accepted it as justified punishment for a foolish transgression, but Sagan was nothing if not a meticulous torturer. In her case, after she’d recovered from the chloroform to find herself manacled and helpless, it had been deliberately sexual – the idea being not just to hurt her in a deep and lasting way, but to deprive her of an income afterwards. And that was too much to tolerate.

       ‘Why is Flint tipping us the wink?’ Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper, head of SCU, asked. ‘What does she have to gain?’

       ‘In this case I think it’s personal, ma’am,’ Heck replied.

       ‘That won’t cut it, Heck – we need specifics.’

       ‘Well … she wasn’t very forthcoming on the details, but she’s got a kid now. A baby – less than one year old.’

       ‘Bloody great!’ DC Gary Quinnell chipped in. A burly Welshman and a regular attender at chapel, he was well known for tempering his sometimes brutal brand of law-enforcement with Christian sentiment. ‘God knows what kind of life that little mite’s going to have.’

       ‘The first thing it’s going to get acquainted with is the Food Bank,’ Heck replied. ‘By the looks of Penny, she won’t be working the streets any time soon. Unless she can find some johns who like getting it on with cripples.’

       Gemma shrugged. ‘So she’s got a child and suddenly she’s lost her job. Perfect timing. But how does grassing on John Sagan help with that?’

       ‘It doesn’t, ma’am. But Penny isn’t the sort to go down without a fight. She told me that if she isn’t good for the game any more, she’ll make sure this bastard’s put out of business too.’

       ‘So it’s purely about revenge?’ Gemma still sounded sceptical.

       ‘Penny’s an emotional girl, ma’am. I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her.’

      It hadn’t been a lot to go on, but it had been a start. Heck had touched other snouts for info regarding Sagan, but none had been prepared to talk. At least, not as much as Penny Flint. She’d given them the suspect’s description, his home address, his place of work and so forth. In fact, just about the only thing she hadn’t been able to deliver was the Pain Box, which he supposedly kept in a lock-up somewhere else in South London, though its actual location was his best kept secret. They’d searched hard, but no avenue had led to his ownership of any kind of vehicle other than a battered old Nissan Primera, which he’d owned since 2005 and which was parked outside Fairfax House at this very moment. Of course, it didn’t help that Penny Flint didn’t know the vehicle registration mark of the Pain Box. It had been late at night when Sagan had taken her to it, and, not knowing what was about to happen, she hadn’t been paying attention to detail.

      This was no minor problem.

      Even the medical evidence proving that Penny had been severely assaulted was useless on its own; firstly, because there was nothing to physically link this act to John Sagan, but secondly, and mainly, because Penny valued her status as a cash-earning police informer, and had no intention of giving evidence herself – not in open court. The best they could do in this case was ‘respond to information received from an anonymous tip’ by stopping and searching the caravan for items intended for use in criminal activity, and then ‘discovering’ the many bloodstains inside it, which the forensics boys could later, hopefully, link to an extensive list of past crimes – in that event it wouldn’t matter that Penny wasn’t prepared to witness for them.

       ‘We need that caravan,’ Gemma said emphatically. ‘We could raid his flat, but what would be the point? If this guy’s as careful as Flint says, every incriminating thing in his life is stored in this so-called Pain Box.’

      With regard to Sagan himself, it was highly suspicious how clean he seemed to be. No criminal record was one thing, but his employment, financial and educational histories were also unblemished. The guy appeared to have led a completely uneventful life, which was almost never the case with someone involved in violent crime.

       ‘What we’ve got here is a real Jekyll and Hyde character,’ Heck declared. ‘Openly a picture of respectability, deep down – very deep down – a career degenerate.’

       ‘Inspired comparisons with cool horror stories don’t make a case,’ Gemma replied.