The Killing Club. Paul Finch

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter 2

      In a strange way, Greg Matthews looked the way his name seemed to imply he should. Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg, or ‘Heck’, as his colleagues knew him, couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something forceful and energetic about that name – Greg Matthews. As if this was a guy who didn’t waste time dilly-dallying. There was also something ‘Middle England’ about it, something educated, something well-heeled. And these were definitely the combined impressions Heck had of the man himself, as he watched the video-feed from the interview room at Gillbridge Avenue police station in Sunderland.

      Matthews was somewhere in his early thirties, stockily built, with ashen features and wiry, copper-coloured hair. When first arrested he’d been clad in designer ‘urban combat’ gear: a padded green flak-jacket and a grey hoodie, stonewashed jeans and bovver boots, as they’d once been known. All of that had now been taken away from him, of course, as he was clad for custody in clean white paper, though he’d been allowed to retain his round-lensed ‘John Lennon’ spectacles, as apparently he was blind as a mole without them.

      None of this had dampened the prisoner’s passion.

      Three hours into his interview, he was still as full of his own foul-mouthed righteousness as he had been on first getting his collar felt. ‘It’s not my problem if someone thinks they’ve had it up to here with these neo-Nazi pigs!’ he said in a cultured accent, far removed from the distinctive Mackem normally found in these parts. ‘The only thing that actually doesn’t surprise me about this is that another bunch of Nazi pigs, i.e. you people, are in a mad rush to find out who’s responsible.’

      ‘The question stands, Mr Matthews,’ Detective Inspector Jane Higginson replied. She was a smooth, very cool customer. Her dark hair was cut short but neatly styled; her accent was much more local than Matthews’s, betraying solid blue-collar origins. ‘Why aren’t you able to tell us what you were doing on the night of August 15?’

      ‘Because it was five fucking weeks ago! And unlike you and your little wind-up clockwork toy friends, I don’t have to keep a careful account of everything I get up to in an officious little pocket-book. Not that I think you do, by the way. We could look through your notes now, and I doubt we’ll find any reference to harassment of ethnic or sexual minorities, intimidation of protest groups, illegal searches of private premises, brutality against ordinary working-class people, or general, casual misuse of authority in any of the other ways you no doubt indulge in on a daily basis …’

      Matthews was articulate, Heck had to concede that, which was probably par for the course. He was leader of a self-styled ‘action group’ loosely affiliated to various militant student societies. He and his cronies were political firebrands, anarchists by their own admission … but did that make them killers?

      ‘What about August 15?’ Higginson persisted. ‘Let me jog your memory … it was a Saturday. That must help a bit.’

      ‘I do lots of different things on Saturdays.’

      ‘You don’t keep a record or diary? An industrious man like you.’

      That was a sensible question, Heck thought. He’d been present when Matthews was arrested that morning inside his so-called HQ, which was basically a bike shed, though it had been packed with leaflets and pamphlets, and its walls were covered with posters and action-planners. Two state-of-the-art computers had also been seized. Matthews didn’t just talk the talk.

      ‘The only reason you can be refusing to cooperate on this, Mr Matthews, is because you’ve got something to hide,’ the Detective Constable acting as Higginson’s bagman said.

      ‘Or because you’re so deluded that you’re more concerned about your street-cred than your personal liberty,’ Higginson suggested.

      Matthews bared his teeth. ‘You really are a prissy, smarty-pants bitch, aren’t you?’

      ‘Moderate your language and tone, Mr Matthews,’ the DC warned him.

      ‘Or what? You’ll beat me up?’ Matthews laughed. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t already. Go on. There’s nothing to stop you. I think you’ll find I can take it.’

      That depressed Heck, at least with regard to any chance these arrests might lead to a conviction. The guy didn’t even realise the films and tapes made of interviews in custody were carefully audited; they couldn’t just disappear. Along with Matthews’s refusal to ask for legal advice, not to mention the ‘no result’ search they’d placed on him and his group with Special Branch, it all combined to suggest they were dealing with a pretender rather than an actual player.

      ‘If only beating was where you lot drew the line,’ the DC said. ‘When did you decide you were actually going to murder Nathan Crabtree?’

      ‘This is such bollocks.’

      ‘Before or after the twentieth time you threatened to kill him online?’ Higginson asked.

      Matthews feigned amusement. ‘If that’s the best you’ve got, I pity you.’

      Online, Matthews had regularly visited a number of rough and ready social-networking sites, usually hosted overseas, which catered for extremist ideologies. Their stock-in-trade were bitter, rancour-filled exchanges between anonymous individuals with ridiculous monikers. In normal times, any political forum would have been a strange place for an uncouth bunch like Nathan Crabtree and the other two victims, John Selleck and Simon Dean – quasi-political boot-boys with scarcely an educated brain-cell between them – to finish up, but from what Heck could see, the internet was increasingly allowing crazy activists to find an audible voice.

      Heck turned from the video monitor, and ambled across the ‘Operation Bulldog’ Incident Room to the display boards bearing images of the crime scenes. There were three in total, and each one was located in a different corner of Hendon, Sunderland’s old dockland.

      The first, where Selleck had died, was inside a derelict garage; the second, the site of Dean’s death, on a canal bank; and the third – the death-scene of Nathan Crabtree himself – under a railway arch. From the close-up glossies, it ought to have been easy to distinguish the victims as white males in their mid-to-late twenties, but it wasn’t. So much blood had streamed down the faces and upper bodies from the multiple contusions to their crania, and had virtually exploded from the yawning, crimson chasms where their throats had once been, that no facial features were visible. Even distinguishing marks like tattoos, scars and piercings had been obliterated – at least until such time as the medical examiners had been able to move the bodies and wash them down.

      The murders had happened over a three-week period the previous August, and though they’d raised a few eyebrows among the police, that had been more through surprise than dismay – because Crabtree and his crew had been well-known scumbags. Members of a semi-organised group called the National Socialist Elite, they were basically skinheads without the haircuts, but also football hooligans and small-time drug dealers. They’d spent most of the last few years menacing local householders, drinking, brawling and alternately bullying or trying to indoctrinate younger residents with their unique brand of hard-line British ‘patriotism’. They’d been against Muslims, queers, lefties and – taking a break from the political stuff, just to win some brownie points with the common man – nonces. They were believed to be responsible for the brutal beating of an OAP in his own home after the rumour had got around that he was listed on the Sex Offenders’ Register. The rumour had later turned out to СКАЧАТЬ