Strangers (49 page)

Les shouted hoarsely as he lifted the counter hatch, but it was too late.

A gloved finger depressed a trigger, and a fireball exploded outward, immersing Barrie head to foot. As he tottered backward, screeching and burning, it abruptly shut off, swirling oil-black smoke filling the void. The intruder advanced, a second discharge following, the gushing jet of flame expanding across the shop in a ballooning cloud, sweeping sideways as he slowly turned, engulfing everything in its path: the muscle guy with the peg penis; the orderly rows of DVDs, the shelves lined with books and magazines, the displays of skimpy undies. Les flung his cosh, missing by a mile, and then ran across the back of the shop, stumbling for the exit. But the intruder followed, weapon levelled, squirting out a fresh torrent of fire, dousing him thoroughly as he hung helplessly onto the escape bar.

The Christmas tree, already a glowing skeleton, collapsed in the corner. The suspended ceiling crashed downward, its warping tiles exposing hissing pipework and sparking electrics. But the intruder held his ground, a featureless rock-like horror, hulking, gold-faced, armoured against the debris raining down from above, insulated against the heat and flames. Slowly, systematically, he swivelled, pumping out further jets of blazing fuel, bathing everything he saw until the inferno raged wall to wall, until the room was a crematorium, the screaming howl of which drowned out even those shrieks of the two shop-managers as they tottered and wilted and sagged in the heart of it, a pair of melting human candles …

CHAPTER 2

The quarter of Peckham where Fairfax House stood was not the most salubrious. To be fair, this whole district of South London had once been renowned for its desolate tower blocks, maze-like alleys and soaring crime rates. That wasn’t the whole story these days. It was, as so many internet articles liked to boast, ‘looking to the future’, and its various regeneration projects were ‘well under way’. But there were still some pockets here which time had left behind.

Like the Fairfax estate, the centrepiece of which was Fairfax House.

A twelve-storey residential block, a literal edifice of urban decay, it stood amid a confusion of glass-strewn lots and shadowy underpasses. Much was once made in the popular press of the menacing gangs that liked to prowl this neighbourhood, or the lone figures who would loiter on its corners after dark, looking either to mug you or sell you some weed, or maybe both, but the sadder reality was the sense of hopelessness here. Nobody lived here, or even visited here, if they could avoid it. Several entire apartment houses were now hollow ruins, boarded up, vandalised and awaiting demolition.

At least Fairfax House had been spared that indignity. Darkness had now fallen, and various lights showed from its grotty façade, indicating the presence of a few occupants. There were several cars parked on the litter-strewn cul-de-sac out front, and even a small sandpit and a set of swings on the grass nearby, fenced off by the residents to keep it free from condoms and crack phials. Even so, this wasn’t the sort of place one might have expected to find John Sagan.

A high-earning criminal, or so the story went, Sagan would certainly value his anonymity. Unaffiliated to any gang or syndicate, he was the archetypical loner. He wasn’t married as far as the Local Intelligence Unit knew; he didn’t even have a girlfriend, or boyfriend for that matter. In looks – at least, from the photographic evidence provided to the surveillance teams – he was a bespectacled, mousy-looking man who worked by day as an office admin assistant, and as such seemed to lead a conventional nine-’til-five existence. This, presumably, was the main reason he’d flown beneath the police radar for as long as he had. But even so, it was a hell of a place he’d found to bury himself in. It wouldn’t appeal to the average man in the street. But then, contrary to appearances, there was nothing average about John Sagan. At least, not according to the detailed statement Heck had recently taken from a certain Penny Flint, a local streetwalker of his acquaintance.

Heck, as his colleagues knew him – real title Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg – was currently ensconced in Fairfax House himself, though in his case lolling on a damp, badly-sprung sofa on the lower section of a split-level corridor on the third floor. Immediately facing him was the tarnished metal door to a lift that had malfunctioned so long ago even the
Out of Order
notice had fallen off. On his right stood a pair of fire-doors, complete with glass panels so grimy you could barely see through them; on the other side of those was the building’s man stairwell. It was a cold, dank position, only partly lit because most of the bulbs on this level were out. No doubt, the ghastly hunk of furniture Heck was slouched upon would be flea-infested – who knew who’d thrown it out, or why – but it was December now, the barometer hovering just above zero, and most likely every bug in London was frozen to immobility.

Heck certainly was, or near to that.

He’d been here the best part of the afternoon, with only a patched-up jumper, a pair of scruffy jeans, a raggedy old combat jacket and a woolly hat to protect him against the cold. He didn’t even have fingers in his gloves, or socks inside his rotted, toeless trainers. Of course, just in case all that failed to create the impression he was a hopeless wino, he hadn’t shaved for a week or combed his hair in several days, and the half-full bottle of water tinted purple to look like Meths hanging from his pocket wasn’t so wrapped in greasy newspaper that it wouldn’t be spotted.

The guise had worked thus far. Several of the gaunt individuals who inhabited the building had been and gone during the course of the day, and hadn’t given him a second glance. But of John Sagan there’d been no sign. Heck knew that because, from where he was slumped, he had a good vantage along the passage, and number 36, the door to Sagan’s flat, which stood on the right-hand side, hadn’t opened once since he’d come on duty that lunchtime. The team knew he was in there – officers on the previous shift had made casual walk-bys, and had heard him moving around. But he was yet to emerge.

Heck knew he would recognise the guy, having studied the photographs carefully beforehand. Purely in terms of looks, Sagan really was the everyday Joe: somewhere in his mid-forties, about five-eight, of medium build, with a pudgy face and thinning, close-cropped fair hair. He usually wore a pair of round-lensed, gold-rimmed spectacles, but otherwise had no distinguishing features; no tattoos, no scars. And yet, ironically, it was this workaday clothing that was most likely to make him stand out. In his efforts to look the part-time clerk he actually was, Sagan favoured suits, shirts, ties and leather shoes, and if it was cold or raining outside, an overcoat. 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 skill 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 ‘Punishment Room’, 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 Punishment Room – if you could all it surviving; when Heck had gone to see her in her Brixton flat, she’d been on crutches and looked to have aged thirty years. She’d advised him that there were even medical manuals on shelves in the Punishment Room 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 the victim could watch in close detail as they were brutalised.

As he waited there and watched, 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 …

‘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 viable 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 then released 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, Heck supposed that 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 or what would happen to her when she got in there.

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 conscientious torturer. In her case, once he’d got her tied up and helpless, it had been specifically 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 now?” Detective Superintendent Gemma Piper, head of SCU, asked. ‘She must’ve known about this guy for ages.’

‘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 anymore, 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 Punishment Room, 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 had no VRM for the Punishment Room. 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, of course. Despite the medical evidence proving Penny had been severely assaulted, without the Punishment Room there was nothing to physically link this act to John Sagan. It would be her word against his, and on that basis no prosecution would ever proceed.

‘We need that caravan,’ Gemma said. ‘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 Punishment Room.’

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. ‘We still need that caravan.’

Short of putting out public appeals, which was obviously a no-no, they did everything in their power to locate the Punishment Room, but still came up with nothing. However, when Heck went to visit Penny Flint a second time, now in company with Gemma, it was the prostitute herself who made a suggestion.