Hunted
Get hooked on Heck: the maverick detective who knows no boundaries. A grisly whodunit you won’t be able to put down, perfect for fans of Stuart MacBride and TV series ‘Luther’.Heck needs to watch his back. Because someone’s watching him…Across the south of England, a series of bizarre but fatal accidents are taking place. So when a local businessman survives a near-drowning but is found burnt alive in his car just weeks later, DS Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg is brought in to investigate.Soon it appears that other recent deaths might be linked: two thieves that were bitten to death by poisonous spiders, and a driver impaled through the chest with scaffolding.Accidents do happen but as the body count rises it’s clear that something far more sinister is at play, and it’s coming for Heck too…
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Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2015
Copyright © Paul Finch 2015
Cover photographs © Arcangel Images / Trevillion Images
Cover design © Andrew Smith 2015
Paul Finch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007492336
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007492343
Version: 2017-10-25
For my lovely wife, Catherine, whose selfless and unswerving support has been the bedrock on whichIâve built my career.
Table of Contents
Dazzer and Deggsy didnât give a shit about anyone. At least, that was the sort of thing they said if they were bragging to mates at parties, or if the coppers caught them and tried to lay a guilt trip on them.
They did what they did. They didnât go out looking to hurt anyone, but if people got in the way, tough fucking shit. They pinched motors and had a laugh in âem. That was their thing. And they were gonna keep doing it, because it was the best laugh ever. No one was gonna stop them, and if some geezer ever got pissed off because heâd just seen his pride and joy totalled, so what? Dazzer and Deggsy didnât give a shit.
Tonight was a particularly good night for it.
All right, it wasnât perishing cold, which was a shame. Incredible though it seemed to Dazzer and Deggsy, some numbskulls actually came outside, saw a bit of ice and snow and left their motors running for five minutes with the key in the ignition while they went back indoors for a cuppa; all you had to do was jump in the saddle and ride away, whooping. But if nothing else, it was dank and misty, and with it being the tail end of January, it got dark early â so there werenât too many people around to interfere.
Not that folk tended to interfere with Dazzer and Deggsy.
The former was tall for his age; just under six foot, with a broad build and a neatly layered patch of straw-blond hair in the middle of his scalp, the rest of which was shaved to the bristles. If it hadnât been for the acne covering his brutish features, youâd have thought him eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty â instead of sixteen, which was his true age, though of course even a sixteen-year-old might clobber you these days if you had the nerve to look at him the wrong way. The second member of the tag team, Deggsy, though he wasnât by any means the lesser in terms of villainy, looked more his age. He was shorter and thinner, weasel-faced and the proud owner of an unimpressively wispy moustache. His oily black thatch was usually covered by a grimy old baseball cap, the frontal logo of which had been erased long ago and replaced with letters written in Day-Glo orange highlighter, which read: Fuck off.
There was barely thirty years of experience between them, yet they both affected the arrogant swagger and truculent sneer of guys who believed they knew what was what, and were absolutely confident they were owed whatever they took.
It was around nine oâclock that night when they spied their first and most obvious target: a Volkswagen estate hatchback. A-reg and in poor shape generally: grubby, rusted around the arches, occasional dents in the bodywork; but it ticked all the boxes.
Posh motors were almost impossible to steal these days. All that top-of-the-range stuff was the sole province of professional crims who would make a fortune from ringing it and selling it on. No, if you were simply looking for a fun time, you had to settle for this lower quality merchandise â but that could also be an advantage, because when you went and smacked a bit of rubbish around on the streets, the coppers would tow it away afterwards but would rarely investigate. In addition, this oneâs location was good. The old Volkswagen estate was sitting right in the middle of a CCTV black spot that Dazzer and Deggsy had made it their business to know about.
