firm’s cash-handling depot at Newark-on-Trent in the East Midlands by taking hostage the depot manager and his wife and children. On successfully entering the depot, four guards and three more members of staff were handcuffed and locked into one of the vault’s cages while the actual blag, which lasted forty minutes, took place. Some £7 million in banknotes was stolen, and the thieves got clean away. It would perhaps have gone down as one of Britain’s most audacious and cleverly planned robberies, had Creeley’s mistreatment of two security guards not left a very sour taste even in the mouths of his underworld backers. The two guards, both ex-military, proved difficult captives, and so to punish and further incapacitate them, Creeley injected them with drain cleaner; one died as a result, while the other was subject to fits and blackouts for the rest of his life.
Disowned by many associates after this, Creeley went to ground for four years, only to re-emerge in 2014, when he and a young accomplice broke into the suburban home of a Lincolnshire bank manager called Brian Kelso. The bank manager was tied up and subjected to hours of fearsome threats, while his wife, Justine, was beaten and repeatedly indecently assaulted. The following morning, the haggard and terrified manager went to work early, and stole £200,000 in cash. He handed it over to Creeley at an agreed rendezvous point and was then shot twice in the chest. He survived by a miracle, recovering later in hospital, but his wife, still at the family home, hadn’t been so lucky. Police officers found her dead; she had been injected with battery acid.
The horrifying and sensational nature of these crimes galvanised the various police forces in the East Midlands into throwing all their resources at the case, and in due course, several men were arrested and charged for the depot robbery, though Creeley wasn’t among them. Yet again, he’d gone on the run, but it wasn’t easy for him. Increasingly seen as a dangerous psychopath, fewer and fewer of his former compatriots wanted to work with him.
It was probably no surprise that sometime in 2015, he dropped out of sight – as in quite literally vanished, never to be seen again even by those who were close to him.
Gail Honeyford breathed out long and slow as she laid the case papers down on the pub table.
‘Well … that’s a life well lived.’
Heck, at the other side of the table, wiped froth from his lip. The Duke of Albion affected the look of an old-fashioned gin palace, but much of that was window-dressing. In truth, it was another large and typically impersonal inner-London pub, but it was close to Staples Corner, so it served. This being a Monday night and now after ten o’clock, it wasn’t especially busy, though there were a few punters dotted about its spacious interior.
‘I wonder where you actually get off causing so much damage to everyone around you,’ Gail said. ‘No wonder even his fellow hoodlums hate him.’
‘He’s obviously got some buddies left … to have disappeared so effectively,’ Heck said.
‘Are we sure he’s even in the country?’ she wondered.
He shrugged. ‘If Interpol have had no leads on him, and Europol have had nothing …’
‘I suppose we should expect a maniac like this to leave some kind of ripple. Unless he’s died, of course.’
‘No death of anyone even closely resembling Eddie Creeley has been reported, but that’s something we may need to look into. Need to cover all bases, as they say.’
‘Looks like we’ve got a lot of legwork ahead of us.’
‘You wanted to be where the action was.’ He half-smiled. ‘You couldn’t have arrived at a better time.’
She nodded thoughtfully.
‘I’m sorry if I wasn’t very welcoming earlier on,’ he said.
She waved it away. ‘I did come at you a bit out of the blue.’
He watched her, genuinely puzzled by the change in her personality since they’d last met. ‘Gail, I don’t know what it is, but you seem more …’
‘Grown-up?’
‘Not necessarily the words I’d have used.’
‘When we worked together in Surrey, Heck, I took issue with the fact that I had a murder enquiry, my very first, which I thought I was on top of … and then you came in, kind of from nowhere, and were given seniority over me.’
‘It’s understandable you were peeved about that.’
‘But I was wrong.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d been listening too much to people like Ron Pavey. Who, as you know, was a dickhead of the first order. Surrey’s own version of Charlie Finnegan.’
Heck sniggered. ‘Good … you’ve already got Charlie’s number.’
‘Ron always said that special squads like SCU, and even National Crime Group itself, were a complete waste of space. A bunch of flash gits hogging all the resources and getting all the headlines but doing police work in name only. But that was typical of him. Total crap from a total gobshite.’
Heck nodded. He’d known Pavey as a divisional DS down in Surrey, and as Gail’s ex-boyfriend, which status he’d only reluctantly relinquished after giving her hell for several years. Of course, being a total gobshite was only one of Pavey’s lesser vices. The more Heck had got to know the guy, the more irritated he’d been by his swaggering style and casual, brutal bullying – so much so that he’d stood and applauded when Gail herself had arrested Pavey and charged him with several career-ending offences. It had been an enormously brave move by the young policewoman, one which, now that Heck recollected it, filled him with a surprising amount of affection for her. There were lots of ingredients in the make-up of an effective police officer, and though it wasn’t fashionable to discuss it in the modern era, raw courage was still one of the most important (and one of the rarest).
‘Course, I didn’t know any of that at the time,’ she said. ‘When you first arrived, I was rude and prickly, and probably came over as very arrogant.’
‘Well … it’s big of you to admit that.’ Heck was so unused to people apologising to him that it made him feel awkward. ‘But we should remember that my style is not to everyone’s taste, either. You heard what Gemma had to say about me. On occasion, I like to cut corners.’
‘Yeah, but it works.’
‘Not always.’ He felt a pang of unease. It was amazing how pertinent Gemma’s warning words of earlier that day now seemed. ‘Perhaps, while we’re working on Sledgehammer together, it should be more a case of do as I say, not do as I do.’
Gail laughed. ‘If only I’d got that on tape. I could have you over a barrel for the rest of your career.’
‘Do you think anyone’d be surprised to hear it?’
‘Possibly not.’ She finished her drink. ‘But it’s something I’m still going to hold you to over the next few weeks. Anyway …’ She checked inside her handbag. ‘We’re in at the crack tomorrow, so I’m off back to Cricklewood for an early night.’
‘Cricklewood?’ Heck was surprised. ‘You’ve got digs up here?’
‘Course. What else was I supposed to do … commute from Guildford every day? You know what the Orbital’s like. It’d be four hours here, four hours back. Anyway, Cricklewood’s not so bad.’
‘You’ve bought a flat, or something?’ he asked.
‘Rented one. I haven’t sold up in Surrey just yet.’
Heck nodded, relieved. That decision had shown prudence and suggested that this wasn’t totally a knee-jerk thing.
‘Anyway, I’ve got to go.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll be in tomorrow morning.’
‘Briefing starts at eight.’
‘I know, don’t worry.’ She slung her bag over her shoulder, tucked the Eddie Creeley paperwork under her arm and pushed her chair backward.