Kiss of Death

But that didn’t happen.

Was it possible, was it even vaguely conceivable, that he was innocent, just an ordinary guy on his way home after a couple of pints in the pub?

No. How bloody ludicrous are you, woman!

An ordinary man would most likely have shouted after her when she fell over the pram, to enquire if she was OK.

She reached the top of the steps, throat raw with panting. The edifice of Hellington Court loomed on her right, and she scuttled towards it. The first entrance, the one directly facing her, was no longer used by residents; it led into a series of ground-floor utility rooms which were now seen as places to dump rubbish in. Nan took that route anyway, because just entering her own building felt as if it would offer some modicum of protection. As an occupant, she ought to know her way around in there better than he did.

But, of course, it wasn’t that easy.

In the first room, she tripped on a pile of rusty old bicycles, and when she fell on top of them, sharp prongs snagged and cut her again. In the next room, which she entered via an arched brick tunnel that was so dark she had to feel her way, she bounced between abandoned fridges and stacks of mouldy furniture. There was no point looking back to check on his progress now, because he could be right behind her and she wouldn’t even see him.

In the third room, Nan glimpsed what looked like a row of upright bars with light shining down behind them from above. The bars were accessible through another brick passage, but when she got there, they ran floor to ceiling and left to right, seemingly closing off this entire section of the building. The light spilled down an interior set of fire-escape stairs, but there was no way through to them.

From behind – in either the first or second room – there was a clunk of metal.

Frantic, she worked her way along the bars, spying a gate, a steel frame filled with mesh and fitted with what looked like a garden latch – but when she got to it, it was fastened with a padlock. Nan whined aloud, her torn, sweaty hands smearing blood as she yanked futilely on it. From some non-too-distant place, she heard a breaking and splintering of wood.

That mouldy old furniture.

With vision glazed by tears of horror, she fumbled on along the bars. There had to be another way out of here; there simply had to. But this faint hope collapsed as the narrow passage she was following terminated at a bare brick wall.

Nan gazed at it, rocking on aching feet. She went dizzy. The world tilted, and she had to grapple with the bars to support herself. And by a miracle, the one she grabbed dislodged. It wasn’t broken but had come loose from its concrete base. Breathless, she bent and twisted it until she’d created enough space to get past.

Unsure whether it was her imagination that a dark-clad figure advanced along the row of bars towards her – she never even looked to check – she slid her thin body through and ran to the foot of the metal staircase, almost slipping on a tiled floor covered by green scum, before haring up it. At the top, there was a concrete landing she didn’t recognise. Wheezing, drenched with sweat under her ragged, bloodstained clothes, she pivoted in a bewildered circle. A single bulb shed light up here, showing a couple of metal doors leading off in different directions. Nan was perplexed as to which way she should go. But when she heard a heavy tread ascending the stairway, it jolted her forward, propelling her to the nearest door.

On the other side of that, she ran down a corridor with entrances to flats on either side. At the end, she entered another similar corridor, but now she knew where she was.

A few seconds later, she was out on the balcony overlooking the central court.

Her own door, No. 26, was only four along from here.

As she tottered towards it, she fumbled in her handbag for her keys.

Only to find that the bag was empty.

The reality of this only washed over Nan as she came to a halt in front of her flat door, which stood huge and solid and impenetrable.

‘No,’ she moaned. ‘Nooo … ’

She’d been so frightened down in the subway that when she’d fallen over the pram, she’d assumed all she’d dropped was loose change, lipstick, reading glasses – not her house key!

A figure rounded the corner onto the balcony and proceeded towards her.

Nan would never know where it came from: a memory, dredged from nowhere, that before she’d left the Spar that evening, she’d dropped her key from her handbag, and had only spotted it at the last minute, bending down, scooping it up – and putting it in her anorak pocket. With robotic speed and smoothness, all the time aware of that dark shape encroaching from the left, she delved into the pocket, pulled out the key, and jammed it into the lock.

She turned it, and the mechanism disengaged.

Nan tottered inside, banged the door closed behind her, and rammed the bolts home.

Twenty minutes later, when Nan found the courage to unlock the bathroom and re-emerge into her narrow hall, she heard nothing.

But then she wasn’t sure what she’d expected to hear.

Someone trying the front door, or someone simply idling there, muttering to themselves?

Even if this person – whoever it was – had been following her, none of that seemed likely. One thing you had to say about these old run-down blocks of flats, they were fairly secure. The units weren’t easy to force entry to, and with everyone living so close to each other, if someone tried, they’d cause such a racket that the police would inevitably be called.

Even so, it took Nan another five minutes, still damp under her clothes, to actually approach that front door. And she only did so armed with a carving knife she’d brought from the kitchen. Even then, she was tentative. Half a foot short, she waited, listening hard – but still there was no sound.

Neck and shoulders tense, breath tightening in her narrow bird-chest, she considered leaning forward to the spyhole. She’d seen so many horror films where this happened and immediately an ice pick was driven through it from the other side, or a bullet fired into the eye of the person peeking. She didn’t think that was actually possible – how would the madman know when you were looking, and when you weren’t? But it was still a horrific prospect. When she finally steeled herself to do it, the fisheye lens gave its usual restricted, distorted view of the balcony, but showed nobody standing near the door. Despite this, it was another whole minute before she could sum up the extra courage to withdraw bolts and turn the main lock.

She kept the safety chain on, of course, the door opening to four inches maximum.

Now she could see much more of the balcony, and still no one was there. Night sounds reached her: the hum of distant traffic, someone laughing in one of the flats above. Encouraged, Nan loosened the chain, opened the door properly, and with knife levelled like a bayonet, ventured one step outside – just enough so that she could look both right and left.

The balcony trailed harmlessly away in both directions. There was no one there, the only movement a scrap of wastepaper drifting on the summer breeze.

Chapter 7 (#ulink_c502fcad-a385-599a-87b5-b0fea65d44e3)

The life of Eddie Creeley was pretty much a blueprint for the development of a violent criminal. Born into poverty in the Hessle Road district of Hull in 1979, his mother died from a stroke when he was three years old, leaving him in the care of his older sister by ten years and his unemployed ex-trawlerman father, who sought to fill the void in his life with alcohol, and periodically took time off from this to beat his children black and blue.

On one occasion, or so the stories told, young Eddie was battered so savagely by his raging parent that he ‘didn’t know where he was’ for nearly two days.

By the early 1990s, perhaps inevitably, the youngster had become a regular juvenile offender, with form for shoplifting, car theft, burglary and assault. In 1993, he finally dealt with his father, retaliating to yet another unprovoked backhander by breaking a bottle over the old man’s head and dumping his unconscious body in the litter-strewn alley out back, where a freezing rainstorm was almost the death of him. After this incident, there were no further reports of the Creeleys’ father attacking either of his children, though it was noted that he himself often sported black eyes, split lips and missing teeth.

Throughout this period, Eddie Creeley served regular time in juvenile detention, where he became well-known for his violent and troublesome behaviour. One thing he didn’t like were authority figures, though he could extend his brutality to any person at any time. In 1997, for example, he beat his pregnant girlfriend, Gillian, so severely that he caused her to miscarry. On this occasion, he was sent to adult prison, where he was involved in frequent altercations with staff and fellow inmates. Only five months into his four-year stretch, in response to a sexual advance, he ambushed a much older fellow prisoner and smashed his legs with an iron bar. This brought him to the attention of Newcastle gangster, Denny Capstick. Impressed by Creeley’s viciousness, Capstick took him on as muscle, and he spent the next few years, both inside jail and out, attacking and terrorising the rivals of Capstick’s firm and even, or so the rumours held, carrying out several murders on their behalf.

Capstick cut him loose in 2001, when he robbed a mini-market in Sunderland and unnecessarily brutalised a female cashier. Sentenced to ten years, it looked as if Creeley was finally out of circulation, but in the end he only served seven, coming out in 2008 and returning to his native Humberside, where he cheerfully recommenced his criminal career. Using his extensive underworld contacts, he put together a ruthless team, and over the next few years they carried out several raids on banks and post offices, all of which were eye-catching for their levels of violence, with shots fired, and bats and pickaxe handles used on staff, customers and security personnel alike.

In 2010, he hit the big time when, with high-level underworld backing, he pulled off a massive score. In the middle of the night, he and six associates infiltrated a private security 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.