by John Dean
THE DCI BLIZZARD
MURDER MYSTERIES
Books 1 to 3
John Dean
Published by
THE BOOK FOLKS
London, 2019
© John Dean
Polite note to the reader
These books are written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents is appropriate.
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We hope you enjoy the books.
This volume includes THE LONG DEAD, the first novel to feature DCI John Blizzard, and the second and third: STRANGE LITTLE GIRL and THE RAILWAY MAN.
The next three books in the series are: THE SECRETS MAN, A BREACH OF TRUST and DEATH LIST. A three-volume edition of these books will be available soon. They are currently available as single titles on Kindle and in paperback.
More details about these books can be found at the end of this one.
Table of Contents
THE LONG DEAD
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Character List
STRANGE LITTLE GIRL
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Epilogue
List of Characters
THE RAILWAY MAN
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
List of Characters
More books featuring DCI Blizzard
Other titles by John Dean
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THE LONG DEAD
John Dean
Chapter one
‘There’s something very badly wrong here,’ said John Blizzard.
Brow furrowed, he looked up from his intense study of the ground and stared through the murk of the late afternoon mist at the bare winter fields stretching away into the distance. The grey shroud that had enveloped the countryside around the city of Hafton for days was thickening rapidly once more as dusk approached and the fog was rolling noiselessly in over copse and hedgerow. As he watched the fields disappear, the detective chief inspector was suddenly struck by how alone he and Detective Sergeant David Colley were as they stood on the edge of the makeshift grave.
Something caught him off-guard. As Blizzard stared into the swirling fog, he felt for a moment, just a fleeting moment, an overwhelming sense of a past long gone. He could feel, almost as if it were physical, the acute pain of loss, the pain of those left to grieve for loved ones long departed. And he saw through the mist the indistinct image of a man’s face; the dark hair cropped short, the smile crooked and knowing, the expression open and care-free, the eyes glinting with the merest hint of mischief, an image locked in memory and frozen in time on a tattered black-and-white photograph.
For a moment, the man’s expression changed and Blizzard was transported to a wild place, the man’s place, and heard the roar and the clatter, felt the panic as the man fought for his life, heard the death rattle of his final breath. Saw in his face the pain, a different pain, the pain that comes with fear and defeat. The defeat of a man who knew he could never go home, would never see his loved ones again, would never feel the warmth of the evening summer sun on his back or feel the trusting embrace of a child. A man alone and unheard, yet not un-mourned. No, not un-mourned. And not forgotten. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. Remember them all. And in that moment, John Blizzard remembered the man. And mourned him.
Then the face was gone, receding into the mist, and with a start, John Blizzard was back in the icy chill of a November afternoon, standing on the fringes of a field and staring into a grave. Startled at what he had seen, or thought he had seen, the chief inspector shook his head to banish the images from his mind, and noticed Colley looking at him oddly.
‘This damned fog,’ said Blizzard gruffly.
A questioning look from the sergeant.
‘Plays tricks,’ said the chief inspector, embarrassed at having let his guard down.
‘Tricks?’
‘Nothing. It’s just…’ Blizzard shrugged. ‘I don’t know, it’s difficult to put into words…’
‘Try,’ said Colley.
‘Like I said, it’s just something’s wrong. Something here. I feel it so strongly, David,’ said Blizzard, surprising himself with the vehemence of his words.
‘Not sure I understand, guv.’
‘Neither do I but this place is speaking to me. It’s quite, I don’t know…’ Blizzard shrugged. ‘Unnerving.’
‘Unnerved? You?’ Colley looked at his colleague in amazement.
Over the years, he and Blizzard had stood and stared down at many a body – too many for their liking – and the sergeant had never heard the chief inspector talk like this, never seen such a strange expression on his face, never. As Blizzard had said many times, with a wry smile, the living might sometimes scare him but the dead sure as hell did not. They could not harm anyone now, so why worry about them? It was one of his favourite sayings and Colley had lost count of the number of times he had heard it. But that was then and this was now – and now the dead had affected Blizzard and made him uneasy. And if John Blizzard was uneasy, that meant David Colley was uneasy as well.
The sergeant was wondering if he had somehow missed something. He looked down again and pondered the skeletons laid out before them. They were in a long line, placed neatly side by side in a large hole in the ground; to call it a grave would be granting it too much dignity. Running parallel with the raggedy hedge and without a headstone to identify the location half way along the field, the hole had been discovered by workmen doing drainage excavation. The bodies, which had been placed on their backs, looked like they were many years old, the flesh long since rotted off bones to which clung obstinate tatters of grubby material. Around their necks were metal tags bearing their names. German names.
Colley looked thoughtfully at the laughing skulls staring up into the gloom of a fading winter’s day. There were sixteen bodies in all. Colley knew that, he had counted them three times. One didn’t normally need to do that with deaths but this case was different. He had not examined them particularly closely. They were long dead, he thought, and no concern of the police. Part of history. Part of military history, indeed. The name tags had confirmed their identities; these were men who rested in cold silence a long way from home, having given their lives for their country. Proud men who, more than fifty years before, had left wives and children, mothers and fathers, and headed to war with such optimism, only to perish on the edge of a bleak northern English city, the rousing patriotic songs of their departures long since choked in throats clogged by the soil of England.
Sad, sure, but for Colley, who had never been fascinated by war, it meant little. To him, it was history and nothing more. Maybe, he mused, reflecting on the chief inspector’s reaction a few seconds before, it was Blizzard’s keen interest in history that imbued the scene with extra significance for him. Thinking of Blizzard brought forth a little involuntary shake of the head from the sergeant. No, he could not see it, this was not evil, this was a routine job and the detectives were simply there to make sure all the rules were followed and that the paperwork could be filled in. A quirky case for the N.F.A file. Something to tell the lads over a pint, then move on. Nothing more. No, definitely nothing more.
The sergeant looked up and morosely surveyed the skeletal hedgerow, the damp and wispy grassy field margins, the black claw-fingered trees and the bare earth with its barren ridges and furrows stretching away into the mist. He shivered, suddenly acutely conscious of how cold he had become in the damp late afternoon chill. Oh, what he would give for a warming cuppa, and he glanced enviously across the fields to the distant farmhouse with its welcoming lights glowing ever brighter in the deepening gloom.
‘Are we done?’ asked the sergeant hopefully, looking at the chief inspector, who was still staring into the grave.
‘No, David, I do not think we are.’
‘But it’s straightforward, guv.’
‘Don’t think so. Something wicked happened here.’
‘Not according to the archaeologists, guv.’
Colley knew the archaeologists were sitting in the farmer’s kitchen and he could almost feel, behind the steamed-up windows, the heat rising from their mugs of tea and hear their laughter and chatter. He glanced at the distant farmhouse wistfully again while Blizzard pondered the comment. It was the archaeologists who called in the police the moment the bodies had been unearthed. The team, seconded from a Midlands university by English Heritage, had been working several hundred yards away from the graves for almost four months, painstakingly exploring the faded green wooden huts arranged in three neat rows that were once Hafton Prisoner-Of-War Camp.
Home at any one time during the 1940s to as many as 600 captured German soldiers, the 24 huts had fallen into disrepair following the camp’s closure when peace returned to Europe. They stood largely unnoticed for the following decades, used to house tractors and store animal feed, and increasingly obscured from sight by the alder trees and scrubby bushes that had grown around them. Their existence was brought to public attention again when it was revealed that the landowner, a farmer called Henderson Ramage, was seeking to sell part of his land for a housing development.
The revelation provoked fury among local people and a protest committee was quickly assembled, villagers voicing their anger at noisy public meetings in nearby Hawkwith village and outside city hall whenever planning councillors debated the issue. Within a month of Ramage’s plans becoming public, a housebuilder expressed an interest in the site, planning applications were submitted, rejected and re-submitted and in the end, after a final refusal by the council, the decision was referred by the city council to a planning inquiry. After a two-week hearing, the government inspector finally recommended approval but the housebuilder went into liquidation before work began and nothing had happened on the site for years. Now the plan had been revived, larger than before and with a new housebuilder.
It was a young council officer on a routine visit to the site who suggested that there was an opportunity to investigate the huts before the work started. Realising the importance of the eight-acre site, the officer informed English Heritage, whose experts announced they were keen to see the camp preserved and were alarmed that the edge of the proposed new extended housing development came perilously close to the huts. Loathe to submit themselves to further delays, Henderson Ramage and the housebuilder initially refused to co-operate with an investigation but faced with a mixture of cajoling and legal threats, they reluctantly relented.
The six-strong university team, including four students, restricted themselves to the camp itself, so it was a digger driver excavating a drainage ditch who stumbled across its secret. To his horror, he unearthed the bodies when he plunged his scoop into the crusty soil to reveal a bony hand clawing the air for the first time in half a century.
‘So, what do we do now?’ asked the sergeant.
‘I think…’ Blizzard paused on hearing a footfall.
They turned to see a man walking across the field, his identity obscured by his anorak hood. As he approached, they could see he was the lead archaeologist, Dr Richard Hamer, a tall, thin and sallow man with a nose that was long and hooked, sunken cheeks, eyes which were dark and strangely lifeless, and teeth that were prominent and jutting out.
‘Marvellous,’ said Colley, ‘here comes Dracula.’
‘Respect. That’s Mr Dracula to the likes of you.’
‘Probably only comes out at night,’ said Colley, glancing up at the darkening sky as the archaeologist neared.
‘So, can we have them back?’ asked Hamer, nodding at the grave.
‘I am afraid not,’ said Blizzard.
‘Why?’
‘I want our forensic team to have a look.’
‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’
‘I’m not satisfied,’ said Blizzard.
‘Oh, come on. This is routine, we all know that.’
‘You may jump to conclusions in your profession but we do not,’ said Blizzard.
‘Uncalled for,’ replied Hamer. ‘We pride ourselves on our thoroughness, but let us be sensible about this, Chief
Inspector. This is an old burial site. There can be no doubt about it. Our research has confirmed that in the winter of 1944-45, there was in influenza epidemic that killed a number of the POWs.’
‘Then why were they buried here?’ asked Blizzard. ‘And not in a local churchyard?’
‘Maybe the churches did not want to take them for fear of spreading the virus.’
‘And why so far outside the camp?’
‘Probably the same reason,’ said Hamer. ‘Anyway, it is not really important.’
‘I think it is,’ said Blizzard.
‘Surely the local constabulary has got better things to do than investigate deaths from natural causes. I mean, isn’t there some poor motorist you should be out hassling?’
Colley watched the chief inspector with anticipation; Blizzard had reduced men to tears for less. This time, however, the reaction was not explosive. The chief inspector considered the comment for a moment then smiled at the archaeologist. Colley knew the smile well. For some reason, it always reminded him of a lion just before it ate its prey.
‘You know, Mr Hamer…’ began Blizzard.
‘Doctor Hamer, it’s Doctor Hamer.’
‘Well whatever you call yourself,’ said Blizzard, starting to walk away across the field. ‘Until I am happy about this, these bodies are mine.’
Gloomily, Hamer watched him go, then glanced at the sergeant with a questioning look on his face.
‘When the man ain’t happy,’ said Colley, ‘the man ain’t happy.’
‘Is he ever?’
‘Oh, yes, back in 2005 I think it was. Christmas-time. Oh, no, hang on, that can’t be right, the guvn’r hates Christmas.’
Chuckling, Colley walked off to organise an all-night guard for the grave, leaving the bemused Doctor Hamer standing alone in the field with only his thoughts and the ghosts of sixteen dead men for company.
Chapter two
‘OK,’ said John Blizzard. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. ‘Tell me there is nothing wrong with that burial site, tell me I haven’t lost control of my senses.’
