Heat Trap

by JL Merrow

  To say my sister never calls would be—well, not an understatement, obviously, because that’d just be daft. I suppose the word I’m looking for is “accurate”. Until now, that was. I hadn’t even been sure she had my number, but then it wasn’t exactly a state secret. Mum had probably divulged it without any need for excessive fingernail-pulling or waterboarding.

  “Cherry? What is it, love?” I cringed a bit at the endearment that had just slipped out. Put it down to consoling one too many housewives after a domestic disaster.

  “Mrs. Morangie’s died.”

  “Who?” I wasn’t winding her up. I genuinely didn’t have a clue.

  “Don’t be wilfully obtuse. Mrs. Morangie.” She huffed. “Mrs. Next-door.”

  I managed to tamp down my irritation. But seriously, who uses the phrase “wilfully obtuse” on the phone to close family members? “Which one? You mean from Mum and Dad’s, right? Not yours.” I was fairly sure there were people living in the houses either side of Cherry’s, and that they hadn’t all moved out in horror when she’d moved in. Maybe she even cared if they lived or died. But I couldn’t think of a single reason why she’d be calling up to let me know one of them had popped off to the Neighbourhood Watch meeting in the sky.

  Her tsk crackled down the phone line in a burst of static. “Auntie Lol,” she said as if it pained her.

  “Ohhh. Oh. She died? How? I got a card from her at Christmas, same as usual,” I added, feeling a bit lost. That’d only been a few weeks ago. I mean, yeah, people died, but Auntie Lol was well young, relatively speaking. Younger than my mum and dad, anyhow. Although, to be fair, so were most people. “And hang on a mo, since when has she been Mrs. Morangie?” I’d addressed the envelope to Ms. Fernside, same as always.

  “Since she married Mr. Morangie, perhaps? I thought you knew she got married. It was while you were still living at home.”

  Actually, as I recalled, it’d been while I was mostly living in hospital having bits of metal screwed into my pelvis. It was a lot less fun than it sounded. “Yeah, but it’s not like it lasted. Didn’t he die years ago? But what happened, anyway? You never said. To Auntie Lol, I mean. Was it an accident?”

  “If you’d let me get a word in edgewise…” Cherry’s voice trailed off. When she spoke again, it was softer. “Well, she killed herself.”

  “What?” I sat down hard on the sofa. From his position on Phil’s lap, Arthur opened his eyes a crack and flicked his tail at me. No respect for the recently bereaved, our Arthur.

  As Cherry spoke again, I felt a large, warm hand massage my shoulder. Going out on a limb and assuming Arthur hadn’t suddenly acquired opposable thumbs and, more to the point, a heart, I deduced it was Phil’s. “I don’t know all the details, but apparently she had cancer. I suppose she didn’t want to go through chemo or surgery or whatever. At any rate, she’s supposed to have told her doctor she’d had trouble sleeping since the diagnosis, and then sat down one evening with a bottle of sherry and took all the pills he gave her at once.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Charming. Well, anyway, I’m named as executor of her will, so there are some practical things we need to sort out.”

  She’s not actually a heartless bitch, my sister. Well, not totally. She just didn’t know Auntie Lol like I did. Which begged a bit of a question, now I came to think about it. “How come you’re executor, anyway?”

  “The law degree? It was all sorted out years ago. Anyway, we need to meet. Tomorrow morning? Around eleven? You can come to my office.”

  That’d be nice for me. I mentally ran over my schedule while Merlin physically ran over my feet and started clawing his way up my legs. “Can’t. Got a washing machine at ten, and every time I go round to hers, she’s always got another nineteen jobs that’ll only take a minute, honest. I’ll be lucky to get away much before twelve.” I patted a sleek, furry head as Merlin nuzzled into my thigh. I appreciated the affection but not the line of cat snot he’d probably left in his wake.

  “I suppose it’ll have to be lunch, then. One o’clock, Carluccio’s?”

  “Or we could just meet up for a sarnie in the park.”

  “In January?”

  “Okay, so maybe it’s not peak picnic season, but fresh air is fresh air. And dodging those gangs of Canada geese that always try and mug you for your lunch will keep you on your toes. Can’t be good for you, working in an office all day.”

  “Don’t be daft. I’ll see you at Carluccio’s. Oh, and Tom? Don’t say anything to Mum and Dad about this, will you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Mum and Mrs. Morangie were quite close friends at one time. I, well, I haven’t told her she’s dead yet. So don’t say anything. I don’t want Mum upset.”

  I supposed it was good she was worried about someone’s feelings. “Fine. Mum’s the word, that all right?”

  “Very funny.” She hung up.

  “So who’s Auntie Lol?” Phil asked, his hand still on my shoulder. It was nice, but I felt a bit uncomfortable, to be honest. We hadn’t exactly been together all that long—then again, how many dates do you have to go on before you get to the emotional-support part of the relationship?

  Now I came to think about it, I wasn’t really sure how many actual dates we’d been on anyway. Do sneaky house searches and near-death experiences count?

  Probably, if you’re going out with a private investigator.

  Some secrets are better left hidden…

  Pressure Head

  © 2012 JL Merrow

  To most of the world, Tom Paretski is just a plumber with a cheeky attitude and a dodgy hip, souvenir of a schoolboy accident. The local police keep his number on file for a different reason—his sixth sense for finding hidden things.

  When he’s called in to help locate the body of a missing woman up on Nomansland Common, he unexpectedly encounters someone who resurrects a host of complicated emotions. Phil Morrison, Tom’s old school crush, now a private investigator working the same case. And the former bully partly responsible for Tom’s injury.

  The shocks keep coming. Phil is now openly gay, and shows unmistakable signs of interest. Tom’s attraction to the big, blond investigator hasn’t changed—in fact, he’s even more desirable all grown up. But is Phil’s interest genuine, or does he only want to use Tom’s talent?

  As the pile of complicated evidence surrounding the woman’s murder grows higher, so does the heat between Tom and Phil. But opening himself to this degree exposes Tom’s heart in a way he’s not sure he’s ready for…while the murderer’s trigger finger is getting increasingly twitchy.

  Warning: Contains a flirtatious plumber with hidden talents, a cashmere-clad private investigator with hidden depths, and an English village chock full of colourful characters with plenty to hide.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for Pressure Head:

  Whatever it was I was following, it was dead ahead. Calling to me, tugging at my mind. I fought my way through prickly hawthorn and incongruously festive holly, a minor annoyance as it clutched at my padded jacket. When I reached a clearing I broke into a run. Melanie’s face was seared in my mind, and I thought, please, God, let it not be her. Let it be some drunk’s alcohol stash…

  I already knew it wasn’t. There was the stench of guilt about this one, turning my stomach even as it dragged me nearer. Guilt and violence—and death.

  I reached a thicket, dropped to my hands and knees and crawled in. Twigs scratched my face, caught in my hair. Damp soaked through the knees of my jeans, the chill reaching to my bones, numbing my core. There was barely any light to see by, but I didn’t need any, my questing fingers meeting cold, waxy flesh. I fumbled to be certain and found I was holding her hand.

  For a moment, I was six years old again, with the little girl in the park.

  But when you’re twenty-nine and you find a body, you don’t get to g
o blubbing for your mother.

  It started with a phone call, as these things usually do. I haven’t exactly got an office, more like a stack of files in a cardboard box that I hand over to my accountant once a quarter, and the answer phone’s on the blink, so if anyone wants to get in touch with me, they have to call my mobile.

  I was out in one of the villages when he rang. There are a lot of villages around St Albans, most of them filled up with people who commute into London to work and keep the house prices sky-high. In between, you get the green belt made up of pony farms and golf courses, plus the odd actual working farm tucked in, with small herds of placid cows looking like refugees from the nineteenth century as they chomp on the grass and idly wonder what happened to the neighbourhood.

  I was fitting some new kitchen taps for Mrs. B., who made great coffee and liked to chat. I always had to be careful I didn’t go over time there. It wasn’t easy when I knew the next call was to Mrs. L., a sour-faced old biddy who always watched me like a hawk in case I made off with the teaspoons or did something unspeakable to her pet poodle.

  I put down my spanner and dug my mobile out of my pocket. “Paretski Plumbing,” I answered in my jaunty “trade” voice, flashing Mrs. B. an apologetic smile. She dimpled.

  “Tom? Dave Southgate. Got a little job for you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Blocked toilet down at the station? Must be all those doughnuts you lot eat.” I wasn’t talking about the place you catch a train from. Dave Southgate is one of our boys in blue—or he would be, if he still wore a uniform. And when he rang, the job was never all that little, though I lived in hope.

  “I wish. No—young lady by the name of Melanie Porter. Last seen going off to meet person or persons unknown three days ago—if you believe her useless yob of a hoodie boyfriend, who I personally wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw his drugs stash. We’ve received information suggesting we have a look for the young lady in the woods up by Brock’s Hollow.”

  “I do have a proper job to do, you know.” Even I could hear the resignation in my voice.

  “Cheers, Tom, I owe you. We’re up on Nomansland Common. Up past Devil’s Dyke—you know the area? Combing through the woodland, the usual drill. How soon can you get up here?”

  I looked at my watch. “About ten minutes—I’m only down the road, as it happens. Just need to finish up.” And I’d have to ring Mrs. L. and apologise for the no-show, but that’d be more a pleasure than a duty.

  I shoved my phone back in my pocket and finished tightening up the taps. Opened the supply pipes and turned the taps on and off to prove they worked. “There you go,” I said, wiping my hands on an old rag. “All sorted.”

  “That’s lovely. Sure you wouldn’t like to stay for another coffee?” She gave me a winning smile, and the dimples deepened. “I’ve got some Belgian chocolate biccies.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. B.,” I said regretfully. “Duty calls.”

  I first met Dave Southgate around three years ago. A kiddie went missing in Verulamium Park, and they put out an appeal on local radio for help finding the little lad. He was only three. I tracked him down under a bush right next to the main road, crying his little heart out and clutching a half-eaten loaf of bread he’d taken to feed the ducks.

  Obviously, me being a single gay man who’d managed to find a missing toddler, it wasn’t just as simple as handing the kid over and receiving the effusive thanks of a grateful police force. There were a lot of searching questions about just how I’d known where to look. Eventually, I managed to convince Sergeant Southgate, as he then was, I just had this knack of finding stuff. Or people, as it might be. Since then, he’s called me in a few times to look for things—burglars’ loot, hidden drugs—and bodies.

  It’s a bit hard to explain, but I can’t just find any old thing. I’m not some bloody database on the location of everything in the world. It’s only certain types of things. And usually, there has to be some strong emotion involved. So lost things are almost always impossible, because if you’d been feeling that strongly about the thing at the time, chances are you wouldn’t have lost it, would you? Hidden things, on the other hand, call out to me. All the guilt and shame and sneakiness involved in the hiding acts as a kind of beacon. And I can often tell from the feeling just what sort of thing it is that’s hidden.

  I mean, say you buried a suitcase in your garden. I’d have a pretty good idea before I dug it up whether it’d contain your collection of hard-core porn, letters from a lover, or the body of your dead baby.

  Bodies, actually, are the classic one. I have to be close enough physically—although there’s tricks I can do to help, I’ll get on to those later—but once I’m there, it’s like they’re howling at me.

  The first one I found, I thought she really was howling.

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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  11821 Mason Montgomery Road Suite 4B

  Cincinnati OH 45249

  Heat Trap

  Copyright © 2015 by JL Merrow

  ISBN: 978-1-61922-229-8

  Edited by Linda Ingmanson

  Cover by Kanaxa

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: March 2015

  www.samhainpublishing.com