by Ed James
Dead Man's Shoes
DI Fenchurch 7
Ed James
Contents
Copyright
Other Books By Ed James
Friday 13th
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Afterword
Next book
Copyright © 2020 Ed James
The right of Ed James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or transmitted into any retrieval system, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design copyright © Ed James
Other Books By Ed James
SCOTT CULLEN MYSTERIES SERIES
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
DEVIL IN THE DETAIL
FIRE IN THE BLOOD
STAB IN THE DARK
COPS & ROBBERS
LIARS & THIEVES
COWBOYS & INDIANS
HEROES & VILLAINS
CULLEN & BAIN SERIES
CITY OF THE DEAD
WORLD’S END
HELL’S KITCHEN
GORE GLEN
CRAIG HUNTER SERIES
MISSING
HUNTED
THE BLACK ISLE
DS VICKY DODDS
TOOTH & CLAW
FLESH & BLOOD (July 2020)
DI SIMON FENCHURCH SERIES
THE HOPE THAT KILLS
WORTH KILLING FOR
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU
IN FOR THE KILL
KILL WITH KINDNESS
KILL THE MESSENGER
DEAD MAN’S SHOES
CORCORAN & PALMER
SENSELESS
Friday 13th
Prologue
Maynard Johnson hadn’t heard rain like this in years, not since his college years in Seattle. Sounded like bullets hitting the old tin roof they hadn’t quite got around to replacing yet. Pitch black outside, too, getting close to the shortest day of the year, not that the daylight would stretch down here even at midday. And the thin row of windows at just below street level were leaking.
Oh boy, were they leaking, a river snaking around the edges of the big old room they were in, tracing the building’s settlement lines.
Maynard shivered, the gooseflesh biting its way up his arms. That clanking sound from the ancient boiler wasn’t promising. It would take a good hour before the radiators were in any danger of taking the edge off the temperature, let alone heating the building, but by lunch they’d melt your skin off if you touched them.
‘Look lively, sunshine.’ Neil brushed past him with a clap on the arm. ‘No time for daydreaming.’ He pulled up his chair in front of the selection of cardboard boxes, a few weeks too early for Christmas, but what any man-child wouldn’t give for a vintage copper still. And Neil Harrison was very much that man-child, his skinny face hidden behind a curly beard that sprawled down his chest. His eyes darted around the place with the manic energy of the over-caffeinated barista, even though these days he was just an over-caffeinated brewer. Oh, and an over-caffeinated wannabe spirit distiller too.
Maynard joined him in the cone of light from the vintage overhead lamps that seemed like a cool idea when they were in the store, but were a lot less practical when you were trying to figure out what the hell to do with the various pieces of a still built by a craftsman without instructions a hundred years ago. What went where. What slotted into what. Maynard hoped this wasn’t another of Neil’s flights of fancy.
Neil turned a giant ring of copper on the floor until it was just right. To the untrained eye, it looked like he knew what he was doing. But then, Neil never gave up, no matter how long things were taking, and he reached for his smartphone to consult the instructions again.
Maynard knew it was best to leave him be. Let him make his own mistakes. ‘I’ll take another look through yonder.’
Neil didn’t even glance up.
So Maynard approached the door. The Gateway to Hell, as he put it, but it still had a vintage stamped sign for “Coal Store”, white text stamped into black plastic. Maynard had a collection of these, and this looked like a 1963 effort. He couldn’t bring himself to remove it from the door, instead leaving it as a living museum piece.
The graffiti on the right was bad, he should scrub it away, but the tear along the top of the door was what really got to him. Wood, even particle board, shouldn’t be torn, and not like that. No matter how many times he’d been in the room, his 4am waking dreams had him imagining what kind of monster hid behind it, what kind of monster could do that to wood.
Yeah, no wonder he thought it was the gateway to hell.
And maybe, just maybe, Neil wasn’t the only one with too much caffeine in his bloodstream.
Maynard grabbed the handle, a scratched brass thing attached to a lump of plywood nailed to the door, took a breath, said his prayers and opened it.
The door didn’t shift.
‘Huh.’ Maynard tried again. Same response. Then he put his shoulder into it, trying to push hard. Still nothing. He couldn’t remember locking the door. Actually, he couldn’t remember anyone finding the key. He wheeled round to face Neil, now screwing a giant copper sphere onto a black ring. ‘Hey, bud, you lock this door?’
‘Not me, mate. We never found the key, did we?’
Maynard tried to open the door again, but this time the handle came free in his hand. ‘Oh, just perfect…’ The screws had gouged out big lumps of damp plywood, splintering and fraying them. He tossed the handle onto the damp floor and started exploring the now-exposed hole with his fingers.
Maynard clenched his fist into as long a shape as he could, like he was shaking hands with a ghost, and squeezed his hand through with minimal scratching and scraping. He wriggled his fingers around inside the room, touching the wood on the other side. There was the mechanism, at least. He just had to swivel his hand down to get at the metal and slide the screw and—
Stuck.
His hand was stuck.
Oh shit.
Maynard tried to shift it around, but all he achieved was grinding his bare wrist against splintered wood. It didn’t hurt too bad, but he could feel the fug of a panic attack start to descend. ‘Hey, Neil? Any chance you could help me here, bro?’
‘Mm?’
Maynard knew that sound far too well. His casual “I’m heari
ng you but I’m not really listening” sound. He tried to look around at Neil, but could only catch a glimpse of him staring into his phone. ‘Neil, dude. I’m stuck.’
He looked over at Maynard now, frowning. Took a few seconds to assess the situation and give the appropriate response — a sigh. ‘Dude, quit screwing around, I’m in the mid—’
‘And I’m stuck inside a goddamn door!’ Maynard inched that little bit closer to a panic attack. The pain in his chest. The dots around his vision. ‘Dude, help me here, man!’
‘Keep your wig on.’ Something clanged behind him and footsteps padded across the damp floor. But Neil seemed to stop. ‘Are these your footprints?’
‘Eh?’
‘On the floor. Heading away.’
‘Dude!’
‘Right, right.’ Neil appeared with a blast of acrid coffee breath. ‘Christ, mate, you’re really stuck in there, aren’t you?’
Maynard was breathing fast now. He tried to angle his wrist so he could see his heart rate, but his watch was stuck through the door. Down here, in a room this cold, it should be eighties at best, even if he was jumping rope, but it felt like it was in the hundreds now, felt like it was a hundred and fifty. On top of all this, he was going to have a panic attack! ‘Dude, I need to get out.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Stop! I need to get out!’
‘Hey mate, it’s okay, I’m just going to help you to calm down first, alright?’ Neil crouched and inspected the hole. ‘There’s a lock on the other side, right?’
‘I know that. I was trying to reach it to open the door!’
‘Can you get it to move?’
Maynard didn’t know. He was so lost to his panic that he hadn’t tried. ‘Just a sec.’ He craned his wrist around and touched the tips of his fingers to the metal. ‘Okay. I can see if…’ His voice trailed off with his thoughts as everything went into pushing that strip of metal along to the right.
There!
And, of course, it was the wrong way. The door was still locked. All Maynard had done was get himself trapped in a door!
‘You getting anywhere, me old—’
‘No!’ Maynard tried pushing the bolt back the way, but nothing was happening. ‘God damn it!’
‘Did you put this board up?’
‘What board?’
‘This!’ Neil tapped the plywood surrounding Maynard’s hand hole. It was hanging half off. ‘Could’ve sworn there was a proper lock there yesterday. Hang on.’ And he slipped away from sight, leaving Maynard to try and slide the lock mechanism, desperately trying to ease his hand back out, but every attempt made him wonder how he’d even managed to get it in there in the first place, if this was all some sort of hallucination.
A loud whirring noise jerked him back to full alertness. ‘What the hell?’
Neil held up a jigsaw with the manic grin of a movie serial killer, the blade slashing the air. ‘I’ll cut you out.’
‘Dude!’
‘Maynard, it’s okay. Just stand there and think about baseball.’
‘Right.’ Maynard shut his eyes and tried to ignore the grinding, tearing screech as the blade bit into the wood. It was shaking his bones like they might splinter. He thought back to the summer’s World Series, to the match he’d attended in person. The smell of the hotdogs. How salty the pretzels were. The way Dr Pepper tasted differently back home, actually having a slightly peppery taste as opposed to the cloying marzipan you got over here.
The screeching stopped, but he didn’t dare look up.
A pat on his arm. ‘There you go, mate.’
Maynard looked down. His arm wasn’t so much free from the hole, as the hole had widened into a wide circle, but a disc of wood was wrapped around his wrist. He almost slipped forward and lost his hand back into the coal store, but he caught himself before he succumbed to panic again. He eased himself away from the door, but—
‘Allow me.’ Neil grabbed Maynard’s fingers, tight and like he was taking control again, then Neil cut through the wooden disc from the top, right down to Maynard’s skin, then again from the bottom. The wood clattered to the ground. ‘Et voila.’
‘Cheers, bro.’ Maynard saw stars now and felt that tightness in his chest.
Neil kicked the plywood across the floor. ‘Did you stick that up?’
‘Me?’
‘Who else?’
‘Me and carpentry? Come on, man.’ Maynard shook his head. Part of him was pleased that anger was returning. ‘If it wasn’t you, who was it?’
‘Chill, man. Chill. You need to take a breather.’
Usually the wrong thing to say to anyone, but Maynard was wired a bit differently to most people. He knew that, told everyone to treat him that way. He sucked in the stale air through his nostrils, but alongside the mould and damp, and the underlying reek of old coal dust, he could detect something harsh and acrid. ‘Bit strange, though, isn’t it?’
Neil was nodding, but his focus was on his jigsaw. ‘The battery level on this is a lot lower than it was yesterday.’
‘Huh.’
Neil crouched down and inspected the hole. ‘It’s like someone’s stuck a new bit of plywood here.’ He looked up the wall. ‘That rain’s got at it, got in there. And I don’t think they used the right screws for the job. So, you want to grab a coffee?’
‘Hardly. I need to see what’s in there.’ Maynard saw no other way, so he put his hand back into the hole now he could get at the mechanism. The sound of the bolt sliding away was the sweetest Maynard could remember, even better than the bat striking the ball for the winning run in the World Series.
Still, Neil was right. Someone had changed the lock. Why?
Maynard pushed the door open and the faint light crept into the coal store.
The floor was a lake of dark blood. Two pairs of shoes sat at the outer edge near the door. A body lay in the middle of the room. A man, his fingers clutching his slit throat.
1
Sitting in the worst meeting in Scotland Yard, Detective Chief Inspector Simon Fenchurch now knew what Hell was going to be like for him when he eventually died.
He was going to spend an eternity in budget meetings, like this one, and any number of other wastes of his time. And some days, that fate felt not too far off at all. Some days, he wondered if he was actually in Hell already.
Fenchurch reached over for his cup of tea, the rim stained brown already, and took a sip as he stared out of the window. The latest incarnation of Scotland Yard was on the north bank of the Thames, but this room looked east towards the City’s new towers and the sister buildings over at Canary Wharf, though they were hard to see on such a grey, wet morning. And it was chucking it down.
Maybe Britain leaving the EU would kill the City or Canary Wharf, maybe even both, but maybe not. Maybe they’d come back stronger as a tax haven for rich Russians. Aside from that square mile in the middle that was City territory, it was Fenchurch’s land. Any dead bodies in suspicious circumstances found in those boroughs, and he was most likely on the hook for it.
Senior Investigating Officer.
How had it come to that?
Put that way, no wonder Fenchurch was struggling with it. Previously, he had let others deal with all that crap, while he focused on solving murders, usually on his own. Especially on his own. But his knee throbbed with pain from the many scrapes he had got himself into, but at least with some end product. But not always.
‘…don’t you, Simon?’
Fenchurch poured another cup of tea from the silver pot, that new trick he’d developed to cover his wandering thoughts in tedious sessions like these, and glanced across the table. ‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t catch that?’
Detective Superintendent Julian Loftus perched on his chair at the head of the table, perfectly poised like he was chairing a Pilates class and not a meeting of senior officers. Dressed in full uniform, unlike the other eight officers present, all in their standard issue “CID copper” suits. Loftus. His gleaming head
needed a bit of a tidy-up shave around the sides but there was precious little left on top. Another thing Fenchurch was used to now was the range of smiles Loftus had at his disposal, though this one was sanctimonious. And maybe just a bit too judgmental. ‘I was enquiring as to your rationale for the increase in your headcount post-Brexit.’
Fenchurch tipped the last dribble of milk into his tea, which was beyond stewed. Still, he had committed to drinking another cup in a room full of his supposed peers. They all seemed faceless, even though he could have a beer with some of them, or a coffee with the rest. One he wanted to pour acid down his throat, but that was another matter entirely. ‘My rationale, sir, is the set of planning assumptions made by the City police, pointing to increased movement offshore of financial institutions, mainly to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Dublin and Paris. That, coupled with the expected increase in Extinction Rebellion protests over the next three years, would lead me to assume a greater amount of demonstrations in the next eighteen months.’
Loftus gave his puzzled smile, tinged with a touch of doting uncle. ‘But I still don’t understand why you need that additional headcount?’
Fenchurch wasn’t going to play daft nephew. ‘Currently, sir, you’ve got four MITs in East London. When we work a murder, we pull in resources from uniform. Now, assuming we get two murders in East London on the same day as, say, Canning Town is shut down by climate change protestors, while Bishopsgate is blocked off by bankers who’ve lost their jobs, and their mates are up to the same malarkey out at Canary Wharf. Then there’s an increased risk of assault and other serious offences in our remit. In that situation, we won’t get priority access to those uniformed resources. So, I’m proposing we staff up now, soak up some of the additional skulls we’ve been promised by the new government, and if needs be, we can loan them back to operational policing should the worst happen.’
