The Killing Club. Paul Finch

One of the very few who had access to it … if it was him who removed it, this new crew could be after him next.’

      ‘Why?’ Tasker wondered. ‘You think they’re going to spirit him off to the Bahamas for the rest of his life … in reward for sparing their client base?’

      Heck shrugged. ‘That wasn’t quite what I had in mind, sir, but hey … you’re the one in charge now. Perhaps it’s time you gave it some thought.’

      Tasker bared his teeth, but managed to keep his temper in check as Heck headed back to the DO.

      ‘He can be an irritating sod at times,’ Gemma said quietly, ‘but he’s right about one thing. We never recovered those missing details of the original Nice Guys’ clients. I’ve always wondered about that. Someone moved them, even if it wasn’t Laycock.’

      ‘It’s not like you didn’t look for them,’ Tasker replied. ‘Anyway, it’s history now.’

      ‘Maybe sir, but I’ve never been totally comfortable with the idea that all those rapists are living free among us.’

      He shrugged. ‘Now the Nice Guys appear to have returned, maybe we’ll get their clients by a different route. I’m more concerned at present about Heckenburg. He’s going to give us problems, I can sense it already.’

      ‘He won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to it.’

      ‘You used to be his girlfriend, didn’t you?’

      ‘That was a long time ago, sir.’

      ‘Maybe there’s something you can do on that front.’

      She glanced around at him. ‘Excuse me?’

      ‘Throw him a little something. Keep him sweet.’

      Despite all the chauvinism she’d experienced in her eighteen years as a female police officer, this left Gemma virtually gobsmacked. ‘Are you really asking what I think you’re asking?’

      ‘It’s a suggestion, that’s all. Oh Christ … don’t start going all “inappropriate comments” on me, Gemma. Let’s live in the real world for a change, eh? We’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands here. We need to keep the lid on it any way we can.’

      She lowered her voice. ‘If you think I’d stoop to that, you’ve got the wrong person.’

      ‘What’s the matter, don’t you fancy him anymore?’

      Gemma was acutely aware they were out in the corridor and that ears could be waggling in half a dozen adjoining offices. That Tasker wasn’t was perhaps a bit worrying. ‘Maybe we could just get on with what we’re supposed to be doing,’ she hissed. ‘Like you said, Frank, we’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands … if we ignore it much longer, it’s going to burn both our departments to the ground!’

       Chapter 8

      The landlord of The Maypole Tavern was a pain-in-the-arse wanker.

      At least, that was Detective Inspector Jim Laycock’s view. To start with, his first name was Hubert – who the fuck was called ‘Hubert’ in the twenty-first century? – and though he possessed the sort of build that might have been designed for innkeepers in North London – broad, sloping shoulders, brawny, apelike arms and a big square head – this was offset by the immensity of his beer belly, which was so grotesque that it wobbled over the front of his waistband as he walked, and meant he had to lean backwards to effect any measure of decorum. He had a receding hairline, but there was still sufficient left of his greasy, greying mane at the back for him to tie it in a pretentious pigtail. Laycock didn’t know which he found the more revolting, this, or the round, soft, permanently sweat-shiny ‘baby’s arse’ that Hubert had for a face.

      Of course, appearances weren’t everything.

      If they were, Laycock himself – with his handsome looks and impressive physique (though it might be a little flabbier now than it used to be) – wouldn’t be in such a rut as this: disliked by his juniors, mistrusted by his seniors, despised by the villains to a degree where they’d probably kill him if they got half a chance, and more than happy to drown these sorrows each night with as much beer as he could get down himself.

      ‘Kill me, eh?’ he muttered, propping up the Maypole bar. ‘Yeah … let them try!’

      They’d get what was coming. And so would that scrote of a landlord, Hubert Mollop – or whatever his full fucking name was. The bastard thought Laycock didn’t know he allowed rent-boys on the premises. This wasn’t a gay pub, not officially, but Mollop was a shirt-lifter of the first order – Laycock felt certain. He’d had it on good authority there was a private room here, a place unknown to regular patrons, where underage male prostitutes came to entertain their clients, paying the sympathetic landlord a generous cut of their earnings.

      As usual, the problem was proving it.

      The bastard was too clever to leave anything lying around that might incriminate him, or to trust his dirty little secrets to anyone he didn’t know intimately. The local catamites might be able to help – the trouble was that Laycock, though he was now running day-to-day divisional CID operations at Wembley nick, hadn’t been there long enough yet to develop contacts with that particular crowd, which meant he had to rely on the two informers who’d first tipped him off about Mollop, neither of whom was totally reliable due to their both having been banned from The Maypole in the recent past. That was one reason the rest of Laycock’s CID team didn’t feel the info was kosher, and the main reason he hadn’t tried to share what he’d learned with the local vice squad.

      But there was no rush. Laycock wasn’t going anywhere – so he could afford to watch and wait. In any case, this was only one of several pubs on his patch that he increasingly found he had a problem with as he made his nightly rounds of them. There was low-level dealing going on in some of them, not to mention regular underage drinking. In all cases, it stemmed from the uncouth bastards who ran these establishments. They were all either slobs or nonces or druggies themselves. At least, this was the impression Laycock got, and his grasses tended to support this view, even if his team didn’t.

      Not that he cared what those tossers thought.

      It amazed Laycock how the rest of Wembley CID thought he didn’t know about the dissent-filled discussions they held behind his back, how they’d tell any senior guv’nor who’d listen how unimpressed they were by his sour demeanour and vindictive attitude – and all because of that one bad call he’d made. They didn’t know what a sleek, sharp animal he’d been in the days when he was a high-flyer; how much of an achiever he was; how much of a moderniser. Good Christ, there were five women in the Wembley office. What chance would those dozy bints have had making it into CID if it hadn’t been for supervisors like him pulling rank on the old dinosaurs in the job, suppressing the ‘canteen culture’, paving the way for the advancement of minorities?

      Yet it was curious – he finished his tenth pint of the evening in a single swallow and called curtly for another – how right-wing he himself now felt he’d become. It was disturbing how personal disaster, not to mention the ruination of all your dreams and ambitions, could bring out the beast in you.

      The slatternly crowd who filled these problem pubs and bars, who even now were milling around him, binge-drinking, puking, falling on their faces – these drunks, these drug addicts – he’d once felt sorry for them, had only been able to imagine the pain of their abusive upbringings, the desolation of their everyday lives … and yet now he regarded them as vermin wallowing in sewers of self-inflicted degradation.

      Who knew? Maybe he’d always felt that way deep down.

      He quaffed another pint. Perhaps all that politically correct stuff – the diversity seminars he’d made his managers attend, the positive