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

Heck bellowed.

      But he was still forty yards away. He raised his pistol, but again had to hesitate – Sagan had dropped to a crouch alongside the policewoman’s crumpled form, merging them both into one. Heck dashed forward as the killer flipped off Shawna’s hat and smashed his reinforced fist several times more into her head and face. Then he snatched up her Glock and fired it once into her chest, before leaping to his feet and bolting towards the parked van.

      Heck slid to a halt and fired. The van’s nearside front window imploded as Sagan scarpered around it, returning fire over his shoulder, and proving uncannily accurate. Nine-millimetre shells ricocheted from the ground just in front of Heck. He fired back, but Sagan was already on the other side of the vehicle and shielded from view. A door slammed closed somewhere along the front of the building. Heck scrambled forward, but kept low. The killer was now indoors; he might have any number of concealed vantage points from which to aim.

      ‘DC McCluskey down with head injuries and a possible gunshot wound,’ Heck shouted into his radio, skidding to one knee alongside her, still scanning the grimy windows overhead.

      In the partial protection of the van, Shawna lay limp. Heck tore open her jacket and gasped with relief when he saw the slug flattened on her Kevlar vest – it hadn’t penetrated. However, her face was a mass of bloodied pulp, her splayed hair glutinous with gore. He probed for the carotid artery. Her throat was slick with blood, but at last he found a pulse.

      An engine now growled to life somewhere inside. Fresh sweat pinpricked Heck’s brow.

      As he leaped to his feet, a pair of double doors some twenty yards to the left exploded outward in a shower of splinters and rusted hinges, and a powerful SUV came barrelling through. Heck backed away from Shawna’s body to get a clear shot. But Sagan was already firing through the open passenger window, wildly, blindly. Heck let off one round before diving for cover, aiming at the SUV’s front tyre but missing by centimetres. In the process he caught a fleeting glimpse of the vehicle’s make and model. A Jeep Cherokee, dark-blue in colour with bull bars across the front, but with its headlights switched off it was impossible to make out the registration number. It was towing a gleaming white caravan, which tilted onto one wheel as the car swerved away across the wasteland, finally righting itself again as it accelerated into the darkness. Heck gave chase for several yards. He even got off one final shot, hitting the caravan’s rear door, which judging by the lack of visible damage, was armoured. And then the target was gone, vanishing around the corner of a warehouse, the roar of its engine rapidly diminishing.

      Heck got urgently onto the radio, relaying as much info as he could while rushing back to Shawna. As before, she lay perfectly still, and now the blood had congealed in her hair.

      When he felt her carotid a second time, there was no pulse.

       Chapter 3

      Calum and Dean walked along King’s Parade as if they owned it, which, to some degree, they did. There were bouncers on all the doors to the numerous bars and nightclubs; surly, brutish types in monkey suits, with gap-toothed grins and dented noses. But if Calum and Dean wanted admission, there was only a small handful who’d say ‘no’. Most of the doormen, if they weren’t involved with them professionally, knew about them by reputation, sufficiently enough to know that serious trouble was easy enough to come by in Bradburn without inviting it.

      Not that, in a normal time and place, Calum and Dean were even close to being adequately attired to gain entry to any nightspot which held itself in reasonable regard.

      The former, who was heavyset – more than was good for a guy in his early/mid-twenties – wore only a pair of grey shell-pants and grey and orange Nike training shoes. He’d removed his ragged pink sweater and now wore it draped across his shoulders, exposing acres of flabby, pallid flesh, particularly around the midriff, not to mention the usual plethora of tasteless tattoos. Whether he felt the evening chill was unclear. In all probability, thanks to his system being overloaded with drugs and drink, he probably didn’t think that he did, though if his body-odour permitted you to get close enough to appraise him in detail, you’d note that the small, pink nipples on his sagging man-boobs stood stiffly to attention.

      Dean was no less dressed-down for the occasion. In his case it was blue and blood-red Nikes and emerald green tracksuit pants with white piping down the sides, a stained string-vest and thick gold neck-chains. Such bling was Dean’s most outstanding feature, cheap and nasty though it all looked, especially the sovereign rings on his fingers and diamond studs in his ears.

      The irony was that, despite all this, neither of the two lads looked especially menacing.

      Calum’s features were rounded and pudgy, with a small nose, a tiny mouth and button-like Teddy Bear eyes. If it hadn’t been for the shaven ginger thatch on his cranium and his various nicks and scars, you could almost have said that he looked soft. Dean, on the other hand, was thin and weasel-like, but closer inspection would reveal that he was wiry rather than bony; he was certainly no weakling. Under his greasy mat of blond locks and between a pair of jug-handle ears, his face was also scarred, his features oddly lopsided, the mouth forever twisted into a weird, lupine grin. Dean didn’t look soft; more like strange.

      And yet they swaggered side-by-side through the Saturday night revellers thronging the pavements – the high-heeled, mini-skirted girls, the boys and men in polo-shirts and jeans – and if an alleyway didn’t clear for them, they cleared one for themselves. This only involved pushing and shoving, but it was still early, not yet midnight.

      It finally got tastier in the cellar bar at Juicy Lucy’s, where a gold and crimson lightshow filled the crammed, sweaty vault with strobe-like patterns. They knocked back several more beers each, after which Calum decided that the teenager next to him had nudged his drinking-arm once too often. The lad was in the midst of smooching a shapely platinum blonde in the tallest shoes and tiniest, most figure-hugging dress either Calum or Dean had ever seen, but even so he got socked in the side of his kisser, and a real bone-cruncher it was.

      Dean guffawed; he could have sworn that the way the blonde tart jerked her head back, he’d filled her mouth with blood and teeth.

      At The Place, the door-staff again let them in without a word. They pushed their way through the dizzying throng to the bar. Here, an older guy with iron grey curls, a leather waistcoat over his flowery shirt and a large earring which looked ridiculous on a codger of his age, shouted an order to the barmaid louder than Dean did. So Calum yanked the surprised guy around by his collar and head-butted him, splitting the bridge of his nose crosswise. The guy’s friends, all equally grey-haired and raddle-cheeked, crowded forward belligerently, and so Dean glassed one of them.

      This incident looked set to turn into a right old fracas, and another punch was swiftly thrown, but this had nothing whatever to do with Calum or Dean – as usual in Bradburn on a wild session-night, when things kicked off they kicked off generally. It didn’t matter for what reason.

      Their next fight, if you could call it that, occurred on the corner of Westgate Street and Audley Way. There was a taxi rank there. Few were queuing yet, most brawling revellers choosing to stay out into the early hours of the morning. That said, one young bloke had hit it too hard too early, and now leaned against the taxi rank pole, being copiously and volubly sick.

      Calum and Dean were passing at the time. They were several feet away, but Dean decided that several flecks of puke had spattered his already dingy, beer-stained trousers. So they assaulted the guy together, Dean catching him under the jaw with a roundhouse, Calum kicking his head like a football after he landed on the pavement.

      ‘Yeeeaaah, bro … goal!’ Dean hooted. ‘Great fucking goal!’

      *

      Calum and Dean did all these things because they could.

      There was no other reason. It gained them nothing except perhaps more notoriety.

      But that didn’t matter