Hunted by Paul Finch

Author:Paul Finch [Finch, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Detective and Mystery Fiction
ISBN: 9780007492343
Google: ib3HAQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2015-05-06T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The Skelton Wood estate comprised six square miles of the grottiest blocks of flats Heck had ever seen, and he’d seen quite a few. Even in the go-ahead twenty-first century, there were blighted corners of Britain’s urban jungle which, in terms of employment, health and general social welfare, seemed to have been forgotten by time, and this was certainly one of them. The entire estate appeared to be made from grey, faceless concrete; not just the buildings, but the underpasses, the walkovers and the occasional rows of caged-off shopfronts. Graffiti ran wild, the usual obscenities intermingling with football slogans, snatches of street poetry, and incomprehensible, cryptic symbols, which almost certainly served as gang tags. There was much dereliction: some entire blocks were closed to access, their doors and windows covered by steel grilles; there were also rows of gutted houses, while stolen and fire-damaged vehicles were regularly dumped here and simply left unclaimed, rotting.

Even on a fine summer’s morning Skelton Wood was a spiritless sprawl; drab, litter-strewn – the monolithic apartment houses didn’t look any less dingy in bright sunlight, the rubbish-clogged wastelands between them still didn’t resemble the restful green spaces they once were intended to be.

Heck had parked his black Mazda, which he’d taken from the CID pool at Reigate Hall, near Brockwell Park, about a mile away. He’d travelled the rest of the distance on foot. It wasn’t eight o’clock in the morning and there were very few people about, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He always brought ‘scruffs’ with him whenever he was working away from the Yard, and so today wore jeans with the knees torn out, a sweat-stained Saxon T-shirt, and an age-old Wrangler jacket thick with motorbike oil. He hadn’t bothered shaving either, and had donned a pair of trainers that had once been white but now were coffee-coloured.

Late the previous night he’d changed his mind about liaising with Brixton, had called Angie Powers again, and had visited her office first thing that morning. He still hadn’t wanted any assistance; this was to be an open-ended recce – infiltration by a single unit who wasn’t well known on this manor – but before going out there he’d mugged Angie and her team for all the info he could. They’d assured him that deadbeats of every sort routinely gathered on the Skelton because the Snake Eyes were always recruiting; anyone could find work with them so long as their background checked out and they didn’t mind getting their hands dirty.

In addition to this, they’d told him about ‘the Roost’.

This was a dilapidated structure at the west end of what had once been an all-weather football pitch. The pitch had originally been constructed by a charitable organisation to give the local youth a focus and outlet that was not concerned with gang violence, but hooligan elements had met there to fight rather than play, an ongoing melee from which the Snake Eyes had eventually risen to prominence. It was still known locally as

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