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The Nice Guys Club.

They were a club?

That was what McCulkin had said.

From Mudchute, Heck had taken the DLR to Canary Wharf, then the Jubilee to London Bridge, where he switched to the Northern Line. He was now riding south back towards Elephant & Castle, and puzzling through this latest revelation.

A club obviously meant more than one or two, which he’d already figured. But it could also mean several more than one or two, maybe many more. In a way, that made sense. Given the complexity that had to be involved in these abductions – ordinary, everyday women snatched from view while doing ordinary, everyday things, and not a trace left behind – it was certainly more than a couple of offenders could manage. And then there was the hit-man factor. This whole thing was getting the whiff of organised crime, yet how did a load of disappeared women who weren’t whores or drug addicts fit into that picture?

Heck was now working on the basis – though he hadn’t told Lauren this yet – that Deke was onto them because, whoever the Nice Guys were, they’d been following the progress of the enquiry, and had ordered the hit-man to intercept as it was getting too close for comfort.

Did that mean there was a leak inside the National Crime Group?

Heck didn’t even like to consider that possibility, though it was difficult to see how it could be otherwise – who else would have known that he’d been pulling files on Shane Klim?

All of this was supposition of course, that police sixth sense that finely tunes itself over the course of hundreds of investigations.

The missing link in all this was the motive. Why would an organised gang abduct ordinary women without making ransom demands? It didn’t compute. Heck remembered rumours he’d heard back in the 1980s about Satanists, and how they were responsible for thousands of disappearances all over Europe and America, the victims having been sacrificed in unspeakable rites. Few detectives at the time had believed it mainly because there was so little physical evidence; for the same reason, he was ready to dismiss similar ideas now. There’d been no hint in recent times that dangerous cultists might be at work in the UK – and yet perhaps the real answer wasn’t a million miles away from that. He thought again about McCulkin’s reaction to the mere mention of the Nice Guys. ‘Unadulterated fear’ was the only way to describe it. It wasn’t as if he’d been asked to grass on gangsters or hoodlums – and Lord knows, they could be dangerous enough – but on something much darker, much more evil. This wasn’t a pleasant line of thought when Heck considered the missing women, many of whom he felt he’d come to know personally thanks to his in-depth analysis of their lives and relationships. One thing seemed certain: the answer – when he found it – was going to be extremely unpalatable.

He returned to Ballamara’s private club before ten o’clock, but found the gangster, Lauren and several ape-like henchmen in a pub just across the road. Aside from these, there were no other patrons. Ballamara himself was standing behind the bar and looking unusually less than dapper, without a tie or jacket and with his shirt open at the collar. The others were around a table, where two or three heavies were mopping up egg and beans with hunks of bread. Lauren, who was crammed into a corner from which there was no easy escape, sat stiffly with her back against the wall. She glared at Heck as he sauntered in, but no more so than Ballamara did.

As always, the gangster’s eyes were flat, grey metal.

‘You little shit,’ he said. ‘We had a deal.’

Heck nodded. ‘We still do. I promised I’d deliver, and I will. But I need a couple of days.’

‘Pity. You haven’t got ’em.’

Ballamara signalled to two of his men who were seated near the door. They closed and locked it, then began to draw blinds on the windows.

‘Neither have you,’ Heck replied.

There was something in the way he said this – something bold, unafraid, which meant it wasn’t just bluff or bravado. The pub fell silent.

‘I’ve been busy this morning,’ Heck said. ‘Among other things, I’ve written and posted a letter to my solicitor, which is only to be opened in the event of me being found dead, or not being found at all within a certain time period. In it, I name you and your firm as my abductors and murderers.’

Ballamara snorted scornfully. ‘Being sniffed at by the filth is not exactly a new experience for us.’

‘They’ll do more than sniff this time. Because guess what, I was busy last night too. And when they come and turn your pad across the road inside out, they’ll find numerous personal items that I secreted, any one of which will serve as proof positive that I was being held there.’

The silence that followed was ear-pummelling. Ballamara’s gaze was so intense that even Lauren, who’d seen the maniacal faces of Taliban killers up close, found she couldn’t look at him.

Heck remained undaunted. ‘Course, you can go over the place with a fine-tooth comb if you want. But you know you’ll have your work cut out. And even if you find some stuff, you’ll never know if you’ve found it all.’

Ballamara’s knuckles turned white as he clenched them on the bar top.

‘That’s called being owned, Mr Ballamara,’ Heck added. ‘And in front of your own team. However, I’m not one to gloat. I’m going to stick to our deal, but the terms have changed. I’ll give you the info I promised as soon as I’ve got it to hand – and hopefully that won’t be long off. But in the meantime, me and Lauren are going to walk out of here unmolested. Not only that, we’re going to walk out with twenty grand of your money in our pocket.’

This was too much for certain members of Ballamara’s crew. Loxton leaped up, his chair flying. ‘You fucking what?’

Heck ignored him, and continued to address Ballamara directly. ‘I’m a fugitive, wanted for murder. That means they’ll be watching my bank accounts. I start making withdrawals around London, and it won’t take them long to join the dots. But I can’t live on air, can I? Don’t worry, you’ll get your cash back – it’s a loan, not a gift. You can even charge me interest.’

‘Can you believe this bastard?’ Loxton shouted.

‘Dale,’ Ballamara said tightly, ‘shut – your – sodding – trap!’

‘I’m not ripping you off, Mr Ballamara,’ Heck added. ‘I guarantee it. I’ve done a lot of spadework on this enquiry, but now at last we’re getting somewhere. This afternoon I’m seeing someone who can finally put me on the right track.’

‘In which case we’re going with you,’ Ballamara replied.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No! Look … the guy I’m seeing is a grass. One of my best. You lot show up, and not only is that relationship fucked, but word’ll get out that I can’t be trusted, and my relationship with every other grass in London will be equally fucked.’

Ballamara did not like to be wrong-footed, but it was plain to him that Heck had covered every corner. He pondered this darkly, his brow furrowed.

‘You won’t be kept out of it,’ Heck assured him. ‘You’ve got my word.’

‘Your word? That’s supposed to make me feel better?’

‘Think about it – I may actually need you. You already know that whoever took your Noreen might have taken a number of other women. I don’t know why, or where. But you’d better prepare yourself for the worst.’

Ballamara’s anger seemed to ebb a little. ‘I’ve already done that some time ago.’

‘Good. But the point is … whoever did it, they’re not going to come without a fight.’

Again Ballamara pondered this.

Heck produced the blue phone. ‘You’ve even got a number you can get me on any time you need an update.’

Fifteen minutes later, Lauren still couldn’t believe that Heck had pulled it off, even as they sat facing each other on a Northern Line train headed north. She watched in bemused admiration as he filched a bundle of crisp new twenty-pound notes from a brown envelope, and began to count them.

‘I just don’t know how you did it,’ she said.

He winked. ‘Seventy per cent of being a good bobby is the ability to bullshit.’

‘So none of that stuff was true?’

‘Not all of it.’

‘I should’ve realised … and I’m totally stunned that Ballamara didn’t.’

‘He probably did. But why take the chance?’ The twenty grand was all there, so Heck pocketed the envelope again. ‘What’s he really got to lose? The only way he’s going to get to whoever nabbed his daughter is if I lead him to them. Now …’ and he checked his watch. ‘You’ve already had breakfast, haven’t you?’

‘Have I?’

‘What were you doing earlier on in the pub?’

‘Sitting watching those lunatics stuff their faces, while my stomach was turning inside out.’

He shook his head. ‘Ballamara’s own boozer, and he didn’t even treat you?’

‘Actually he offered to. But I hardly felt like eating, did I?’ Her voice hardened. ‘Not knowing what was going to happen to me and all that! You are going to keep me a bit more informed from now on, yeah?’

‘Sorry to leave you sleeping, but you had to stay behind as a kind of insurance – to convince them I’d come back.’

‘I wasn’t convinced you’d come back, never mind them.’

‘Then you don’t know me very well, do you?’

‘Anyway, the answers are “no” and “yes”,’ she said sullenly.

‘Uh?’

‘No, I haven’t had any breakfast yet, and yes, I do want some.’

‘Okay.’

They dismounted the train at Bank, and rode into the West End via the Central Line, where they found a small diner. Heck ordered scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. Lauren had pancakes with syrup.

‘The team we’re looking for call themselves the “Nice Guys”,’ he said while they ate. ‘But I don’t know too much more about them.’

Lauren glanced up, her mouth full and cheeks bulging. ‘They’re the kidnappers?’

‘It’s possible. They were mentioned in Deke’s ledger. Whoever they are, it looks like they paid for the job he did on O’Hoorigan. Not to mention a few others.’

‘What did you do with the ledger?’ she asked, suddenly noticing its absence.

‘Parcelled it and posted it.’

‘Where to?’

‘My home address – safest place I could think of.’

‘I thought you said your lot would be sitting on that address?’

‘They’re only looking out for me. I doubt they’ve got a warrant to check the mail yet.’

Before she could ask him anything else, the blue phone rang. Heck glanced at the number on its tiny screen.

‘Ballamara already?’ she wondered.

He shook his head, before answering. The following conversation was mumbled and inaudible to Lauren, even though she was only on the other side of the table. When Heck eventually hung up, he was frowning – partly with concern, but also with puzzlement.

‘It’s a bloody good job we’ve got twenty grand to spend,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a hell of a taxi drive coming up.’