by J. D. Weston
The Silent Man
A Harvey Stone Thriller
J.D. Weston
Contents
The Silent Man
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
Part II
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
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
Part III
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
The Spider's Web - Sample Chapter
Also by J.D. Weston
The Silent Man
To find the killer, he must lose his mind…
Part I
Chapter One
His hand slammed down onto the steel-clad table and rocked the polystyrene cup. The tea it contained lapped over the edge and ran down the cup onto the table.
“You’ll talk even if it kills me,” said Detective Inspector Myers. “Where were you last night between the hours of nine and midnight?”
The man just stared at him, expressionless, as if he’d been drugged or was mute.
“I’ll run through the facts for the third time. Feel free to join in.”
Myers glanced at his watch. His time was nearly up. Twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes had passed since they’d brought the man in and they were no further along with the case than they had been twenty-four hours before.
“Forty-eight hours ago, a young teenage girl was reported missing by her mother. Jennifer Standing. She was blonde with blue eyes and she was wearing pyjamas. According to her parents’ statement, she was on her own downstairs while the pair of them were making the beds upstairs. You know, ordinary day-to-day life. When they return, she’s gone. They look in all the usual places, but they soon realise she’s not there. The back door is open and their pride and joy, their only child, has been taken. Finally, they report their child missing.”
He studied the man, searching for any kind of sign that his words were registering, but there was nothing. No empathy. No emotion. Nothing. It was common in Myers’ experience that guilt would creep in when the details were narrated. The suspect would change expression, wipe his or her eyes, offer some kind of involuntary signal.
But there was nothing.
“Units were dispatched, dogs dispersed, a helicopter and a search team were sent to search a nature reserve half a mile away. The nature reserve is large, and they found nothing. So, the search team was increased, and I was assigned to the case. This was no longer a child who might have run away or wandered off. This was now an abduction. Serious stuff.”
Myers paused.
“Local people helped with the search. More dogs were brought in and the area was widened. But still, we couldn’t find her. One hundred and fifty people in total, a helicopter, and six dogs couldn’t find one single girl.”
The man said nothing.
“Fast forward twenty-six hours. Faisal Hussein, a man in his early twenties, leaves his house at nine p.m. We know this to be true because his neighbour saw him leave. He heard the front door close.”
Myers paced the room back and forth with his hands behind his back, unable to stare too long at the man whose eyes followed him like a tiger’s might follow a deer. Myers hated to admit it, but the man gave him the creeps. The whole case was creepy. He’d rather have been dealing with a straightforward murder case than having his name involved in a sordid child abduction case, which were rarely solved after twenty-four hours.
Rarely, but sometimes.
“He walked to the end of his road, turned left, and crossed the street, where he entered the local nature reserve. He wasn’t high, he wasn’t drunk, and he didn’t smoke. In his pockets, he carried nothing at all. Do you see him? Do you see him in your mind?”
There was no response from the man, only a mild curiosity that grew with Myers’ anger.
“From the Standings’ house, he followed a path that dog walkers use. It runs beside a little river for a while then cuts into a forest through a small gap in the bushes. Nobody uses this but him. Nobody even knows it’s there. We checked the footprints in the mud and there was only one set. His.”
Myers stopped pacing and turned to face the man, suffering his gaze for as long as it took to spit out his next words.
“Inside that little secret place in the trees, that place that nobody but Faisal Hussein and that frightened little girl knew existed, he set to work. Even while the helicopter circled overhead and the dogs barked less than a mile away, he did what he set out to do.”
He checked his watch. There were ten minutes left before the man walked.
It was time to get graphic.
“Jennifer was stripped naked. Her clothing was tossed into a small hole in the earth nearby. A hole small enough to be covered with leaves yet deep enough to conceal the body of a child.”
There was no change in the man’s expression. Not even the arrogant, bored sneer that many adopted while they exercised their right to silence.
“Faisal stripped naked too. But his clothes were not tossed into the hole. They were folded and placed in a neat pile on the ground. As yet, we’re unsure of what happened next. Early results indicate that Jennifer was not interfered with. We don’t know what Faisal did with her in the little time he had left, but it would seem that he was interrupted.”
There was a knock at the door and it opened enough for DS Fox to lean into the room and shake her head to signify that the tests from the man’s fingernails and clothing did not place him at the scene of the crime. Myers had asked the lab to expedite the analysis to make sure they found something to hold him.
But they had found nothing.
“Sorry, boss,” said Fox.
The door closed and, once more, Myers checked his watch.
Five minutes.
“Fast forward one hour. The Standing family receive a knock at their door. They answer it, dreading the news that their only child’s body has been found, hoping for the torment to be over, but dreading those words, the finality of it all. But who do they find at their door? Not a female detective and a social worker ready to offer support. No. Somehow, out of the darkness that had become their lives, from the train wreck that was their tormented minds, comes an angel. They find their daughter standing there, dressed in filthy pyjamas with tears running down her face.”
The man said nothing.
“You might th
ink the case would be over. The girl had been found and the searches called off. But no. You see, at about the time that young Jennifer was found on her doorstep and the nightmare of her parents was coming to an end, a new nightmare revealed itself.”
He leaned into the man, keeping his distance, well aware that he was alone in the room with a potential psychopath.
“A police dog found the little place in the trees and wandered inside. His handler followed him and called for backup. Detectives followed the handler. Can you tell me what they found?”
Again, the man said nothing. He maintained his casual stare as if he was waiting for a bus or in the queue at the supermarket.
“Faisal Hussein,” said Myers. “They found Faisal Hussein naked, pinned to a tree with six-inch nails, and his chest sliced open like a Sunday roast.”
He leaned across the table to get close to the man once more, lowering his voice to a growl.
“Tell me. What kind of man does that? What kind of man could have found that girl when the police with all our resources couldn’t? What kind of man can do that to another man, regardless of his crime?”
A single beep from Myers’ watch told him the twenty-four hours was up. He stood back, shaking his head.
“Interview finished. Three-fifty a.m.,” said Myers, holding the man’s stare with disgust.
He hit the stop button on the recording.
“I know it was you. You know it was you. And before long, I’ll find a way to prove it.”
He unlocked the handcuffs that held the man to the table and watched as he stood and made his way to the door.
“You might think that what you did was good. That somehow everyone here regards you as some kind of hero. But trust me, you’re no better than Faisal Hussein, and all you’ve done is give us another headache.”
The man said nothing as he walked toward the door without looking back, until Myers caught him by his jacket sleeve and turned him.
“You haven’t won, sunshine. Not by a long shot. I’ll find a way, and when I do, I’ll break you.”
The man glanced down at Myers’ hand and then back at his face.
Myers released his grip.
“I’m watching you. I know your face,” said Myers. He leaned in close with total disregard for protocol and safety precautions to whisper in his ear so that Fox and the duty officer wouldn’t hear him in the control room. “Your cards are marked.”
The man didn’t reply.
Chapter Two
Warm, yellow hues of the dying summer sun lit the fine edges of long grass that reached Harvey’s waist. His bare feet found soft sand and the ocean breeze carried the taunting laughter of the girl he could never reach. The beach seemed endless. The sea met the sky in blurred watercolour strokes, and every time Harvey reached for the girl, she seemed to pull away and his hand clenched nothing but warm sea air.
Three thuds came rolling over the breaking waters.
But still, Harvey ran, unperturbed.
She turned as she ran, smiling back at him and laughing, giving him the chance to catch her again. Yet as his hand reached once more for the flowing tails of her summer dress, three thuds, louder than before, rolled across the breaking waters.
He slowed just a little as he sought the source of the sound.
And the distance between them grew.
His young legs ached, and the sharp grass had cut the soles of his foot for the sand to sting.
Three thuds came again. They were even louder. Like dull hammer blows.
And the distance between him and his sister grew.
Harvey stopped and turned to face the ocean. The yellow strip of sand reached on as far as the eye could see in either direction; behind him, the long grass blocked his view.
Three more thuds. They were harder and fiercer than ever before, like the beating pulse he sometimes felt in his temple.
But there was nothing. Not a thing moved as far as he could see, save for the long grass that danced in the breeze, the breaking waves, and Hannah, whose diminishing silhouette threatened to vanish at any moment.
But it was another round of hammer-like blows that roused Harvey from the deep slumber. He sat up in bed, feeling his arms slide against his slick, sweat-soaked body, and took in his surroundings.
The morning sun shone through the bedroom window of his small bungalow and Harvey squinted against the light.
Thud, thud, thud.
The dream slipped away, just as it did most times, and Harvey pulled on a t-shirt and grabbed a pair of shorts on his way to the front door.
There was time for one more round of thuds, as Harvey was pulling on his clothes, and he snatched the door open before the third rap of knuckles connected with the wood. The sudden snatch surprised Sergio, whose attention was elsewhere, and his knuckles found thin air.
“Harvey,” he said, and stepped back away from the door. It was when he was scared that his Eastern European accent shone through the most. “I’m sorry, I-”
“I was sleeping, Sergio.”
“It’s John. He said you should come. He said he would like to see you,” said Sergio.
A van trundled past one hundred metres away, but the driver did not see them due to the foliage that had overgrown on Harvey’s porch. Harvey watched the van wind along the long, gravel track toward his foster-father’s house. The house had been built centuries before and stood in the midst of a three-hundred-acre estate. It was where Harvey had grown up, and he had memories tucked away in each and every corner.
The orchard at the highest point of the property was where he and Hannah used to play when they weren’t playing in the stream that ran through the centre of the grounds like a crystal-clear vein. There was a barn in the lower field that his foster-father, John, had converted into a garage and used to store his prized possession: a nineteen-sixties classic E-Type Jaguar. At the front of the property, beside the pair of iron gates and tucked into the trees, was the old groundsman’s cottage. There hadn’t been a groundsman for many years; John had decided to pay a maintenance company for weekly visits. Harvey had moved into the little house as soon as he had started working for his foster-father, when he was just a teenager.
It was his home. His own little pocket of peace.
The view to the great house was unobstructed, as was the view from John’s ground floor study of Harvey’s cottage. Manicured lawns stretched out either side of the gravel track to give Harvey a view of serenity and peace.
But the day that Sergio had banged on his door was different.
The driveway was clogged with vans and small lorries. The centre lawn that overlooked the village of Theydon Bois was filled with white chairs all facing an arch that somebody had built and adorned with white flowers. A small stage was being erected and there was a bandstand, a bar, and an area for children to play.
Still dazed from his dream, Harvey blinked and took in the scene and then stared back at Sergio, who waited with that characteristic fear in his eyes.
“John would like to see you, Harvey. I didn’t know you were sleeping. I-”
“I’m going for a run,” said Harvey. He had little patience for the man John put so much trust in as to call him his adviser. “When I’m done, I’ll go and see John.”
“He told me to say that he would like to see you now and that I should not let you disappoint him.”
Sergio was in an awkward position and his expression was almost pleading Harvey not to make things difficult for him.
Harvey nodded at the commotion on the lawn.
“If John is throwing a party, tell him thanks but no thanks,” said Harvey, and made to shut the door.
But Sergio blocked the door with his foot, a move he regretted as soon as he saw Harvey’s expression.
“Today is a big day, Harvey,” said Sergio. “Today is Donny’s wedding.”
Chapter Three
The sound of the old telephone was shrill and harsh, but DI Matthew Myers lay unmoving in his bed. He outstretched his arm to
the phone on his bedside table and raised the receiver an inch. Recognising the tinny voice even from afar, he let the handset fall back onto its cradle. The memories of the man who hadn’t uttered a single word still rolled around his mind. He hadn’t worn the familiar expression of guilt or shame. He hadn’t even developed a nervous twitch.
The silent man had been calm, as if he was untouchable. As if nothing Myers had said had even penetrated his skull. As if the ticking clock of the law had been the only sound he could hear.
But Myers would never forget his face. Those stone-cold eyes and the way he had carried himself.
Untouchable.
Myers found himself mouthing the word and had to shake himself from falling into some semblance of admiration for the man’s control.
Of all the disturbed, cruel, and heartless men Myers had brought down in his career, whoever that man had been was off the scale. In Myers’ experience, sex offenders carried no physical attributes. He’d seen them as young teenage boys, young men in their twenties and thirties, and, of course, middle-aged to senior men who had begun their sordid, sexual deviations before DNA had been discovered, who had relied on the silence of their ashamed victims. They often masqueraded behind a mask of innocence and do-gooders: politicians, community faces, and even the oh-so-cliched men of god.
