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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. He 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 which had malfunctioned so long ago that 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 main stairwell. It was a cold, dank position, only partly lit because most of the bulbs on this level were out.

      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 woollen hat to protect him against the March chill. 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 that 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 that was hanging from his pocket was not 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 Sagan 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 was certain he would recognise the guy, having studied the photographs carefully beforehand. Purely in terms of appearance, Sagan really was the everyday Joe: somewhere in his mid-forties, about five-eight, of medium build, with a round 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 image 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. 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 СКАЧАТЬ