by Andrew Lowe
Stronger Than Death
DI Jake Sawyer Book Two
Andrew Lowe
Contents
get a free book
Prologue
Part I
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part II
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Blank
Coming Soon
Glossary
Acknowledgments
get a free book
Please leave a review
Also by Andrew Lowe
Also by Andrew Lowe
Also by Andrew Lowe
Also by Andrew Lowe
Also by Andrew Lowe
About the Author
get a free book
Sign up for the no-spam newsletter and get Andrew’s novel, SAVAGES for free.
Details can be found at the end of this book.
Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Lowe
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Email: [email protected]
Web: andrewlowewriter.com
Twitter: @andylowe99
First published in 2018 by Redpoint Books
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
ISBN: 978-1-9997290-5-9
For Tom and Josh
To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor.
Alexis Carrel
Prologue
‘Adult trauma call!’
The two paramedics hustled the trolley from the back of the ambulance and wheeled it into A&E. Running.
The man at the front glanced back at the unconscious young woman. She had been wedged into a rigid plastic scoop with her head squashed between two stabilising blocks.
The waiting obstetric trauma team swarmed around and escorted them along the corridor.
The paramedic at the far end of the trolley addressed the senior A&E doctor. ‘Unidentified female, involved in a high-speed road traffic collision where she was the restrained driver of a motor vehicle involved in a head-on collision with an HGV. The airway has been secured with an endotracheal tube. She’s not making any respiratory effort, and she’s currently being mechanically ventilated. Oxygenating at ninety-nine per cent, with the ventilation. She currently has a blood pressure of seventy over thirty. Heart rate is one hundred and five.’
They crashed through double doors into the main ward.
The paramedic took a breath, steadied himself. ‘She’s cool to the touch and peripherally shut down. Mottled. There are no external signs of significant haemorrhage. BM is six point seven. GCS of three throughout.’ He paused again, and the doctor caught his eye. ‘She’s sustained significant left-sided head trauma and it appears she is at least thirty weeks pregnant. No information on past medical history or allergies. Unable to verify identity. Her passenger was deceased at the scene.’
The obstetrician stepped forward. ‘Late stage gravid uterus causing IVC compression.’
The A&E doctor conducted his primary survey: a rapid head-to-toe assessment, looking for evidence of airway compromise. ‘We need to maintain cervical spine immobilisation, but I want this woman put into a left lateral position.’ The trauma team—three men, two women—eased the woman over onto her right side. ‘She has a blown left pupil. I’m concerned there might be raised intracranial pressure. Possible haemorrhage.’
The anaesthetist looked round at his colleagues; the fight was fading from their eyes. ‘Still no respiratory effort. I’m using extremely high ventilation pressure.’
The doctor felt around the woman’s neck and shook his head. ‘No carotid pulse. We’ve lost cardiac output. Starting CPR.’
The paramedics wheeled the trolley into a bay.
‘This woman is continuing to deteriorate,’ said the obstetrician. ‘We need to perform a perimortem section before we lose the baby, too.’
The A&E doctor screwed his eyes shut and ran through his final checklist. ‘No circulation. Major head injury. No respiratory effort.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Irretrievable.’
The general surgeon and obstetrician gathered their instruments.
The doctor whipped a curtain around the trolley.
Part I
A Design For Life
1
Jake Sawyer jumped down from the grass verge onto the Tarmac path that ran parallel with the Hope Valley railway line. He bowed his head and drove forward. The soles of his running shoes were cushioned, but his steps fell heavy on the solid ground and the impact rippled through his core.
He sucked in the thin morning air, feeding his scorched lungs. The pain was a pleasure; it was one of the few things he trusted as proof of his existence, his aliveness.
A tremor in the track. Sawyer checked his stopwatch. The Sheffield train would be rounding the corner as it crossed the River Noe, levelling for its approach into Edale, three miles down the line.
He slowed, plugged in his earphones and started the music.
He reached around into the pocket of his backpack, and pulled out a chestnut-brown balaclava. He rolled it over his head. The fabric scratched against his shaven scalp and flattened his week-old beard.
He pocketed the watch, took in another gulp of air, and sprang away, easing into a jog.
Sawyer had been planning the move for weeks. Observing. Rehearsing. Mapping it out. Marking down the stats in a notebook: the average speed of the trains, his running times from this end of the path to the level crossing.
There was a chance he had miscalculated, missed something.
There was a chance he might die.
But, as ever, the idea was detached, abstract, irrelevant.
T
here was only the pain. And the howling guitars, the clobbering drums. He had selected ‘Faster’ by the Manic Street Preachers: a rallying cry for self-empowerment.
He was sprinting now: along the path, in the shadow of the fence that separated the Tarmac from the scrubland at the edge of the railway track. The verge kept him hidden from drivers and walkers over on Edale Road.
Ahead, the level crossing lights flashed to herald the train’s approach. He knew that the red-and-white boom barrier would already be down, and it was unlikely there would be a car waiting to cross. Not this early.
Even if there was a car, he might just do it anyway.
Sawyer turned his head, saw the lights of the train sparkling through the mist.
He forged ahead. Maybe it was his time. Maybe this morning, his measurements wouldn’t apply. A distracted driver. A fresh security protocol.
If it was his time, he couldn’t have picked a more spectacular backdrop for his final view of the world: at the other side of the track, the meadow thinned to an olive green span of eternal moorland, rising to the heather plateau of Kinder Scout: the highest point in Derbyshire. The peak of the Peak District.
He could see the road now, at the level crossing. No cars.
The track popped and creaked. He turned his head again.
The horseshoe of yellow at the front of the driver’s carriage. The lights, close enough to dazzle.
Sawyer ran harder. At the crossing, he vaulted a low dividing fence and snaked around the boom barrier. He was exposed to the train driver now and, as he lunged for the rails, the horn sounded: two tones. More greeting than warning, but still piercing through the music.
He was seconds from the track, from the crossing point. The wool had gathered around the balaclava eyeholes, constricting his peripheral vision. He angled his head to the right and saw the driver leaning out of his cab window, arms waving, shouting.
The horn sounded again.
Sawyer faced forward and sprinted for the track.
He knew the risks. If he was lucky, the train would hit him square on, and it would be an instantaneous shutdown. A millisecond flash of impact, and then emptiness.
If he was unlucky, he would survive.
He knew the risks, and yet felt nothing.
No panic for life. No pain of potential loss.
No fear.
His running shoes crunched into the trackside gravel.
The train rattled and roared, somewhere to the right. Impossibly close.
At the nearside rail, he dug in his foot and launched himself over the sleepers, onto the other side.
He scrambled forward, stumbling into the scrub at the edge of the field. Into safety.
Behind, the train clattered past his crossing point.
He crouched, out of sight, in a shallow ditch rendered boggy by the weekend’s first dousing of autumn rain. He pulled off the balaclava and listened to himself, straining for something deeper than the familiar surface prickles of adrenaline.
But still, there was nothing.
2
Sawyer drove over the private driveway bridge and parked his orange-and-black Mini Convertible at the side of the cottage. He killed the engine and sat there, alone with the silence, gazing out at the single track road separated from the cottage by a thin stream of reservoir run-off. He liked to think of the divide as a moat, but it was barely a ditch, and easily jumpable. A few weeks earlier, the light had been dappled by the dense canopy of birches. But now, the trees were shrinking back from the road, shorn and skeletal, revealing a shallow climb of farmland that blended to a tangerine blush of sphagnum moss on the lower slopes of Kinder Scout.
He had taken the cottage on a long-term rental—annual, rolling—from a sheep farmer who seemed keen to hand off the tourist turnover. It was an old outbuilding, barely converted. No hot tub or underfloor heating, but, miraculously for the area, the phone signal and Wi-Fi were tolerable, and Sawyer had worked fast to carve it into his own corner of the world.
Inside, he closed the blind on the sitting-room window and crouched beside the modest TV. He sifted through his stack of old-school DVDs, acquired in an eBay head rush: Paranormal Activity, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Suspiria, Halloween, Don’t Look Now, The Orphanage, The Strangers. The room was low-beamed and L-shaped: long section with the window, sofa and TV, and, round the corner, a galley kitchen and dining table, with bedroom and en suite bathroom at the back of the house. A side door opened onto a scruffy patio with a wooden picnic bench. When he had first moved in, he had used the bench as an outdoor reading retreat. But the air now carried a wintry sting, and he had hibernated to the overheated interior: one man and his horror.
Sawyer’s phone blipped with a message alert. He ignored it and switched on the PlayStation, settling too close to the screen, cross-legged. As the Japanese logos announced his favourite retro shooter, Bullet Symphony, he saw a flash of the train’s yellow front, heard the two-tone horn. If he had died, the coroner would have probably called it accidental: he was in the running zone, didn’t hear the train over the music. Death by guitar solo.
It would have been an edgy way to go, affording a noble eulogy from his freshly saved father.
He checked his message. Maggie.
Jake. Talk to me. Remember Wild At Heart? Don’t turn away from love? I’ve found someone who can help. But you need to blink first. x
David Lynch had been their thing at university; Sawyer had been drawn to Maggie as the first woman to show an unironic appreciation of Eraserhead. He had wanted more from her, at a time when she wasn’t ready to give it. And when she finally got round to him, he had moved on.
He ground through the first few waves of Bullet Symphony: weaving his insectoid spaceship through the pixel-wide gaps in the geometric downpour of pink and blue pellets. To the uninitiated observer, the game was comically hostile, but for Sawyer it was respite: a chance to divert his churning brain to the sole business of smiting his digital enemies.
He paused the action, opened his message app, and navigated to his chat history with Eva Gregory. He scrolled through the string of blue speech bubbles. The messages were all marked as ‘Read’, but there were no corresponding grey replies. Two signs of madness: talking to yourself, repeating the same thing and expecting different results.
The trimphone ringtone broke through; the screen turned black and switched to a call alert. One-word Caller ID.
Keating.
He could have screened it. He was technically off duty, on holiday.
Sawyer restarted the game and watched, passive, as a phalanx of enemy craft flew in and sprayed a barrage of glowing pellets towards his ship’s position. When the missiles were millimetres away from his ship’s vulnerable core, he paused it again and tapped the ‘Answer’ button.
‘Sir.’
‘It lives!’
‘Technically. Social call?’
‘Whatever gives you that idea?’ Traffic in the background. Birdsong.
‘It’s Saturday.’ Sawyer turned off the PlayStation and took a sip from a glass of tepid Coke, poured yesterday.
‘You’re due back on Monday. We stopped working five-day weeks back in the eighties, DI Sawyer.’ Keating’s Welsh twang broke through when he was joshing.
Sawyer gagged at the Coke. ‘You’ve spoken to Maggie. She’s worried about me. She asked you to check I was okay to come back.’
Keating sighed. ‘Three out of three.’
‘Any movement on Crawley since I’ve been away?’
‘Pre-trial hearings. Psychiatric reports. Insanity plea won’t hold. They rarely do. Too much load on the defence.’
‘He’s nodded for manslaughter?’
‘Yes. Diminished. Abnormality of mind.’
‘Where is he now?’
A pause from Keating. ‘Manchester. Although I still think of it as Strangeways. DI Sawyer. Are we done?’
‘With what?’
‘The pleasantries. Catch-up.’
Sawyer fell ba
ck onto the sofa and rocked forward, reaching for the coffee table. He rummaged in the fruit bowl: Club biscuit wrappers, Haribo, a blackened banana. ‘I was going to ask after the wife and kids.’
Keating scoffed. ‘You need a mission.’
‘Like Apocalypse Now? For my sins?’
‘Never seen it.’
‘It’s a bit of a plunge. Maybe start with Hamburger Hill and work your way up.’
Keating cleared his throat. ‘We have something.’
3
He took the scenic route: through Hayfield and the western moors, weaving along the Snake Road to the alpine lakeland of the Hope Valley. He had thrown on a white T-shirt and black blazer, but hadn’t bothered to shave. As he joined the forest road that led to the Fairholmes Visitor Centre, Sawyer calculated the last time he had spoken to another soul, face to face: almost two weeks.
