Dead Man Walking

‘Single fracture to the skull …’

‘Small change for letting himself get zapped the moment the bastard showed up.’

‘But there are no complications …’

‘He’d have another one by now if your pic was being added to this gallery.’

She glanced up hard. ‘So he’s going to be alright … I’m sure that’s the answer you were actually looking for.’ She sat back and folded her arms. ‘Let’s cut to the chase, Mark … what’re you really doing here? You don’t think I should have volunteered to be a decoy, do you?’

‘It’s not just that …’

‘Oh, it’s not just that?’

‘Look … I don’t like the way, every time one of these sex maniacs cuts loose, we respond by finding every female detective we’ve got, sticking her in a short skirt and sussies, and sending her out on the streets to see if she can pull him.’

‘I wasn’t wearing sussies. You’d be so lucky.’

‘This isn’t a joke, Gemma!’

‘What … you’re telling me that?’

‘There must have been a dozen other ways you and the rest of the girls could have been more useful in this enquiry.’

‘And do you really believe that, Mark? Or is it actually the case that you mean there were a dozen other ways I could have been more useful?’

He shrugged, awkward. ‘Obviously you mean more to me than the others …’

‘Thirteen victims, Mark. And no main lines of enquiry. And on top of that, a decreasing cooling-off period between each attack. It was needs must.’

In truth, Heck couldn’t dispute that.

‘You didn’t want me to take this Devon and Cornwall attachment in the first place, did you?’ she said. ‘Even before there was any talk of us using decoys.’

‘Because the moment I heard D&C were checking with other forces for female officers who were authorised and experienced with firearms, I knew the long-term plan was to put them out there as bait …’

‘No, you didn’t. You thought it might. But even that was enough to give you the willies.’

‘Am I not supposed to be concerned about you?’ he said. ‘I mean, throw your mind back nine months – when I cornered that nutter who’d been chucking acid in people’s faces. I chased him across the railway bridge at Mile End, remember, even though he’d threatened me with a butcher’s knife as well as the usual jar of concentrated sulphuric. I managed to nab him. And what happened when I got back to the nick? You slapped me across the bloody face!’

‘You saw him and recognised him. We could have picked him up afterwards, team-handed. In perfect safety. He’d have been bang to rights.’

‘He could have gone to ground, he could have stayed on the streets for days. Besides, I was confronted by him in the course of an investigation. A split-second decision, and I had to chase …’

‘Everything okay in here?’ the squat, bull-like shape of DS Harry Jenks wondered from the open doorway.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Heck snapped.

Jenks glared at him, unconvinced.

‘Seriously, Harry,’ Gemma said. ‘Everything’s okay.’

‘Hmmm.’ Unconvinced and clearly unwilling, Jenks withdrew.

‘The point is, Gemma,’ Heck said, ‘you didn’t get this decoy gig thrust on you, you weren’t railroaded into it. You volunteered after careful consideration. You consciously put yourself in extreme danger.’

Gemma heard this out in a growing fury, but by the same token she could tell that Heck was upset; he was pale-cheeked, almost breathless. She’d come close to getting hurt many times in the job; it happened regularly to all of them, but he’d never responded this way before – and now she had an inkling why.

‘Of course I volunteered,’ she said slowly. ‘Would you have expected the married women on the team to step forward? The women with families?’

‘Isn’t that what we were planning?’ he said.

Stoically, she resumed typing.

‘Gemma, seriously … is it so wrong of me not to want my wife-to-be volunteering for this kind of duty again?’

She shook her head. ‘You can’t lay those kinds of stipulations on me, Mark.’

‘I’m not saying I don’t want to be married to a hotshot lady detective. Of course, I do. You’re a force of nature, Gemma. That’s what I love about you. But I don’t want the mother of my kids sitting in anymore cars at midnight, or standing on street corners, providing a honey-trap for homicidal maniacs …’

‘That is so unfair!’ she said, hot-faced. ‘We face risks on a daily basis, but you more than most …’

‘Look, I’m …’

‘Please don’t say it, Mark … that you’re the man and I’m the woman. Or, let’s put it into the correct parlance, you’re the bloke and I’m the bird. I suppose it sounds slightly better that way.’

‘I’m … not saying you can’t make arrests,’ Heck said patiently. ‘Or that you can’t run down violent offenders. I just don’t like what happened last night.’

‘It happens once in a blue moon, and you know it. But you want me inside, don’t you – in a nice warm office, checking process cards all day. Maybe working Area somewhere, showing kids across the road, holding hands with little old ladies.’

‘That isn’t true, Gemma … but we can’t both be buried in this job to the point where our lives and health are on the line. That’s hardly a basis for starting a family.’

‘Good job we’ve got no immediate plans, then, isn’t it?’ When Gemma hit the keyboard this time, it had an air of finality. She didn’t shift her eyes from the screen.

A second passed, then Heck walked to the door. ‘Well done on last night’s takedown,’ he said. ‘An extremely fearless piece of work. You’ve got guts of steel, love.’

‘Careful, Mark … you almost sounded as if you meant that well.’

He turned in the doorway. ‘Look, Gem … there’s a refs room down the corridor. Let’s go and have a coffee.’

‘No.’

‘Just so we can have a quick …’

‘No. I’ve too much work to do. And I’m sure you have too … soon as you get back to Bethnal Green and get on with it.’

That hadn’t been the end of them, Gemma reflected, as she and Hazel trudged on. But it had been the beginning of the end. She’d pondered it long and hard ever since, wondering if she could have handled it differently. Sure, Heck had done his usual thing, come crashing in feet first, leaving wreckage all around, but, though he could have been a lot more considerate given what she’d just been through, his concerns had only been those any genuinely caring partner would have felt. It had continued to enrage her until long after she’d been promoted and thus was raised beyond the reach of such sordid escapades as decoy work, but maybe she ought to have been more touched by his attitude at the time than she actually was.

He’d certainly been right about one thing. If both of them were to run a daily gauntlet of risk, that was hardly the ideal start-point from which to raise a family. But she knew Heck intimately well – better than anyone else in the job – and she was all too aware he’d never be the one to step back from the more menacing demands of his work. His was a positive, pathological need to remain on the front line. He’d turned down an offer of promotion once because he wanted to stay on the streets rather than ‘spend his days administrating’. It was unhealthy, with Heck. It went beyond courage or a sense of duty, into self-destructive obsession. The acid-attacker had been a good case in point. Only someone with no concern for his own safety would have tackled the suspect in that situation – on a narrow footbridge over a railway line, the only angle of approach from directly in front, the madman armed to the teeth with his ‘instruments of vengeance’, as he’d told the press in his rambling, spidery letters. Yet Heck had gone at him full-on, at a hundred miles an hour. And by some miracle had emerged unscathed, with collar in hand.