Dark Winter Series (Book 1): Dark Winter

by Fernfield, Rebecca

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Snow from the street outside helped brighten the shop’s interior, as veteran Jez Gallagher swept glass from the display area at the front of the shop. A blast of cold air blew in from the street, helping to cool him down a little; he’d worked up quite a sweat tidying up the mess the explosions had made. The blasts at the mall earlier in the afternoon had shattered both shop windows spraying glass across the space. Despite the explosion, the pane in the door had remained intact and Jez’s plan was to board up the windows and open as normal as soon as the power came back on. When the first blast occurred, the windows had blown, and glass had sprayed across the room. He was only thankful that he had just gone out back to make himself a well-deserved cup of coffee. Some of the stock had been ruined, but he was most annoyed that several of the high-end, polar-exploration standard jackets had been showered with shards of glass. There was no way of ensuring that the tiny splinters of glass weren’t embedded in their fur-lined hoods.

  He, and his wife Fauzia, had chosen top of the range items to sell in the shop and it was already attracting the kind of clientele they had hoped for; the middle-aged adventurer with money to spare, the ones craving excitement and escape, in denial that their nine-to-five lives with two kids at the nursery was anything but boring and humdrum. Apart from this temporary setback, business was good, and that morning Fauzia had taken two calls from customers booking onto the survival course he was running in the Peak District next summer. All courses during spring were fully booked, and he had spent hours devising a new, improved course that he planned to deliver to his more adventurous clients. Many of his returning customers wanted tougher courses with access to the next level of survival skills and Jez was happy to oblige.

  From the get-go, Jez had realised that they couldn’t rely on footfall in this type of town. With Fauzia’s head for business, and connections with the monied set, they had rented the shop with its live-in apartment above. It sat in the posher part of town down a quirkily narrow street with expensive boutiques, an appointment-only wedding dress designer, a shop that sold French copper pans, a gentleman’s outfitters that sold wax jackets and riding boots, and a bespoke tailor’s with a reputation for making suits not only for the local landed gentry, but wealthy businessmen, and celebrities who had also been known to helicopter in to the nearby four-starred Michelin restaurant. The gamble had paid off, and Jez’s not particularly generous pay-out from the army after his injury had not been wasted.

  Unaware of the cause of the explosions, although with worrying suspicions, he crouched to sweep the glass into the dustpan. Forced into an awkward angle as the prosthetic limb below his right knee refused to co-operate, he muttered, ‘Damned leg!’, re-positioned himself, and continued to sweep. It was a real pain in the neck that the electrics were out too, hoovering the mess would be so much easier!

  Several hours later, with the windows boarded up, and the shop lit only by torchlight, Jez lowered himself to the leather sofa beside the small changing room. Pain was driving down his leg, and he massaged his thigh with long strokes, his fingers pressing into the muscle to compete with the pain. Knitted together over many months, the torn muscles were sore, tight after a day of walking, standing, and bending. Rolling up the right leg of his trousers, he removed the prosthetic leg, and massaged his knee and the stump below it. A small groan of relief passed his lips as the pressure from the prosthetic subsided. Even after all these months, his missing leg still ached, and the pain at the knee was a daily reminder of the agonies he had suffered. The pressure was a constant irritant that he prayed would soon be gone.

  A noise outside made his relief short lived, and he quickly replaced the prosthetic, clicking it back into place, rolling his trouser leg down to cover the carbon fibre/titanium shin, calf, and articulated ankle to the shoe. Complete again, he made his way to the door. Unlit by the moon and the billion stars brightening the sky, the shop was darker than the street, and Jez peered through the door’s window, scanning the space for signs of activity. Nothing moved. Unlocking the door, he stepped outside to check the shutters pulled down over the boarded-up windows were padlocked. Satisfied that the shop was secure, despite the continuing blackout which had rendered the alarm and CCTV cameras useless, he made his way upstairs to the apartment he shared with Fauzia.

  After fifteen years in the army, most of them spent as a bachelor, meeting Fauzia had been a revelation. A refugee from the Ayatollah’s revolution in 1979 Fauzia’s parents had settled in London, moving north to the city of York after the birth of their first daughter in 1984. Her father, a talented physicist, had found work at the university and the family had relaxed into an idyllic life free from persecution by the tyrannical religious zealots that had oppressed Iran since that time.

  The shop’s door rattled in its frame as Jez took the first riser up to the apartment. He stiffened, listening to the noise. When it didn’t repeat, he took a second, slow step and then a third. Stopping again, he tuned into the front of the building and, when assured that whoever had twisted the door’s handle had gone, he made his way to the top of the stairs.

  Warm candlelight glowed from the landing where Fauzia had placed a decorative hurricane lamp to light the way. Opening the door, the room was pleasantly warm in comparison to the shop downstairs. When the power had cut, so had the boiler and the temperature in the Edwardian building had quickly dropped. The flat, insulated over the summer at Fauzia’s insistence - ‘old is cold Jez, that’s what my dad always says’ - had retained some of its heat and that, combined with the small gas stove that Fauzia had requisitioned from the store’s camping section as soon as it was obvious that a catastrophic failure of the electricity supply had occurred, was helping to heat their one bedroom flat nicely. The scent of the re-heated lamb and aubergine stew she had cooked yesterday was delicious, and his belly gurgled in response to the smell, his mouth watering in memory of its succulent slow-cooked flavours. Fauzia often joked that this dish, one of her mother’s special recipes, was her secret power over him, his kryptonite. He knew that she was right.

  “It’s nearly ready, honey,” Fauzia called as he closed the door. She moved out of the kitchen, wiping hands against her apron, and greeted him with a kiss. It happened every time—the kiss. She would stop whatever she was doing when he returned to the apartment after working downstairs, or in the garage in the yard, and particularly after a weekend away, and greet him with that kiss. He returned her love with passion of his own and gave her softly rounded buttock a gentle squeeze. “It smells awesome, Zee!” he said with enthusiasm as they broke their embrace, his belly now giving some serious growls.

  “Ten minutes, hun,” she said with a smile and returned to the small gas stove. “Just waiting on the rice.”

  Minutes passed and Fauzia was busy straining steaming rice above the sink when a loud thud came from downstairs. This time the noise came from the back of the building. Fauzia froze, the rice pan held aloft. “What was that?”

  “I think someone is trying to get in.”

  “A customer at this time of night?”

  The thud returned.

  “I don’t think that’s a customer, Zee.”

  “Is someone trying to break in?” The pan was placed on the counter, the meal forgotten as she grabbed a large kitchen knife.

  “Put that down, Zee!”

  Another thud was accompanied by the noise of splintering wood.

  “They are! They’re trying to break in!”

  “Stay calm, Zee. I’ll sort it,” Jez soothed.

  A large walk-in cupboard had been specially built when the couple moved into the apartment, and Jez took purposeful strides towards it. Two locks and a large bolt at the top of the frame secured the heavy door. He opened it to reveal a space kitted out with deep wall-to-wall shelving filled with containers and bags. At one end was another door, and behind that his gun locker. He retrieved a padded vest from the hook behind the door, then took his rifle from the locker.

>   “Jez! You can’t be serious!”

  “Of course I’m serious.” After loading the rifle, he relocked the cupboard, placing the key in its hiding place, and returned to the room. “Lock the cupboard, Zee,” he said handing her the keys.

  “You can’t go down there.”

  “Of course I can, Zee. I have to-”

  “You don’t. We’re covered by the insurance. Let them take what they want.”

  “Are you joking?” He said opening the apartment’s door.

  From downstairs a man shouted, and the shop rang with the noise of crashing.

  “They’re wrecking the place!” Fauzia hissed.

  “They’re looters, Zee. Scumbag chancers,” Jez explained. “Come on, girl!” he urged with a whisper. “Get out of my way.”

  Fauzia held up the knife between them. “No, Jez,” she hissed. “What if you get hurt?”

  He motioned to the gun. “I won’t.”

  “What if you kill one of them?”

  “I won’t. I’ll shoot to injure, not to kill. I probably won’t even have to make a single shot. As soon as they see the gun, they’ll run off. If this blackout is what I think it is, then we have to show them how tough we are from the beginning, or they’ll just keep coming back.”

  “What you ‘think the blackout is’?”

  He ignored her question as another crash came from downstairs. “Come on Zee! I can’t stay up here like a crippled and snivelling coward.” Pity flickered in Fauzia’s eyes and he regretted his words; pulling on his disability to manipulate her was a cheap shot, but it worked, and she stepped aside. “Lock the door after me.”

  Grabbing his sleeve, she said. “You come back to me alive, Jez!”

  A heavily accented voice growled from downstairs. “Take everything you can carry. I want cooker and gas. I want warm fleece and hunting knives. Here ...” The man’s words were accompanied by the noise of metal hooks being ripped from the bespoke wall racks Jez had only made the final payment on last month. “Fill these bags with gas bottles.”

  “We can’t take it all, Gregor!” Another man said. “It’s too heavy.”

  “We take everything and leave it outside. We collect later.”

  The grunts of effort continued as Jez took a step onto the landing, grimacing as the wooden floorboards creaked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Callum didn’t notice the man standing at the shop’s rear door until he heard the click of a shotgun being locked into place. Gregor twisted to the noise at the same moment, and both men turned to stare down the long barrel of a hunting rifle.

  An implacable face underlit by their torchlight stared back. “Hands up!” the man commanded without emotion. His voice remained steady as he repeated his command and Callum raised his hands in surrender.

  “Make me,” Gregor countered making no effort to move and directed the torchlight into the man’s eyes. In the next second he leapt sideways and disappeared into the shadows. The gun shifted, following Gregor but, in the next moment, the man lost his balance and toppled to the floor. The gun fired. A woman screamed from above.

  Torchlight lit the scene as the man scrambled to regain his balance, one of his lower legs sitting at a horribly broken angle. Gregor had bowled into him, rolling across the floor in the dark, and knocking into his legs. Bile rose in Callum’s gut as he imagined the broken leg, but his heart pounded harder as a struggle for the rifle followed. The man put up a strong fight, but Gregor had the advantage and eventually straddled him. Unable to see clearly as the torch rolled away, Callum could only listen to the grunts and thuds of the fight. After several minutes, Gregor made a familiar satisfying grunt and rose, grasping the torchlight and the rifle.

  Chest heaving, Gregor pumped the rifle into the air as though holding a trophy. “Look!”

  Shit! Gregor with a rifle was not a good development.

  “Stay here,” Gregor commanded, catching at his breath.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Didn’t you hear the woman scream. They have apartment upstairs.”

  “No!”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got enough. The girls are waiting for us.”

  Ignoring him, and making a derisory grunt, Gregor stepped over the man’s body and made his way upstairs.

  “Gregor!” Callum hissed. “It’s not worth it. Let’s go back.”

  Moments later, Gregor grunted, then began to topple down the stairs, and the rifle clattered on the wooden steps as it angled downwards. Another grunt followed. He buckled, staggered further down the steps then turned to run. The torch began a freefall down the stairs, coming to a rolling stop and illuminating the hallway. Scrabbling noises came from the shop as the owner began to recover and Callum stood in frozen awe as he watched Gregor stumble along the hall. Two spikes of metal protruded from his body: one stuck out from his shoulder, the other from his thigh.

  A woman’s figure appeared at the top of the stairs and took several steps down. “Get out!” she shouted. Her command was followed by the scrape of metal as she reloaded a crossbow.

  Thwack!

  A bolt of silver slammed into the doorframe only inches from Callum’s head.

  “Jesus!”

  “Get out!” The woman shouted. “Or next time I’ll actually aim for your head.”

  Without waiting another second, Callum sprinted down the hallway and jumped through the door into the night. Ahead, Gregor limped out of sight with Jake by his side.

  HEART POUNDING, FAUZIA took silent steps down the stairs, grabbing the fallen torch, and then ran to close the back door before securing it with the chair from the back room. In the shop. Jez lay crumpled with his prosthetic leg kicked beneath a hanging rack of men’s polar fleeces. He groaned. Fauzia dropped to one knee, scanning the torch over his body, checking for any wounds.

  “Jez!”

  Another groan. Taking his pulse showed it to be a little low but no cause for concern. Used to caring for him after his injury, she remained calm, covered him with a polar fleece, and waited for him to come round.

  Minutes later, he was sitting, then attempting to stand.

  “Hang on, love!” she cautioned. “Take it steady.” Offering him the prosthetic limb, he clicked it into place before allowing her to help him stand.

  Back in their apartment, he sat in silence as she boiled water for a cup of tea. The silence was awkward, and she realised he was churning about the break-in.

  “There was nothing you could do,” she said, holding out the mug of sweetened tea. He grunted in return but took the mug. She held back the need to express her anger at his bruised face and bloodied nose. “It’s true.”

  “I should have stopped them,” he said grudgingly. “Just stop fussing, alright!”

  Hurt by the irritation in his voice, she resisted the urge to snap back. Jez was a proud man and helping him recover from the blast that took his leg and ended his career, had shown her exactly how stubborn he could be, but also how vulnerable. It was this side of her husband, the one who withdrew into himself, loathed himself for not being whole, ‘for being only half a man’ as he put it, that she wanted to keep under control. He had made so much progress in the last months, recovered some of his pride, some of that warrior strength she had fallen in love with. He had found purpose again in running the survival school and managing the shop. More than that, he had hope and his ambitious plans for the next stage in their lives excited them both. The shop was only the start, he had said, a way of keeping a foot – ha, ha! – in the military camp as he recuperated, but once he was back to full strength, he wanted to make a deeper move into the exploration and survival business, and maybe even into personal protection.

  “That Serbian bastard shone a torch into my eyes and blindsided me! I should have known he would try a trick like that.”

  “But it’s not your-”

  “Not my fault? Of course it’s my fault.” His voice hardened. “This damned leg-”

  “Stop ri
ght there, Jez. You can quit your pity party right now. The way that man behaved, even I could tell this wasn’t his first rodeo. He was harsh too, hard as nails.”

  “And I’m not?”

  Her frustration peaked. “I’m not listening, Jez. You’re as hard as they come, but you’re not brutal, there was something brutal about that man.

  Jez made another dissatisfied grunt and took another sip of tea.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  After waking to a head filled with images of Anna and Jemima Crofton shackled to iron bedsteads, arms tracked with puncture wounds, Vicky threw off her bedcovers determined to find the girls. If they were still with Callum Frost, they were in serious danger, particularly if the hard-faced man Callum had arrived with that morning was Gregor Zekovic, a man their intel confirmed was an Albanian national with links to mafioso-style drug and human trafficking cartels and a long history of violence reaching back to the Balkan region’s brutal and genocidal conflicts.

  With the power still out, she opened the curtains allowing the moon’s light to flood the small bedroom. Her breath billowed white, the room already uncomfortably cool, the temperature having dropped steadily during the day. Snow had fallen throughout the afternoon and lay as a white and hardening crust over every surface. Dressed in layers of t-shirt, two jumpers, jeans, walking jacket and waterproof boots, the chill finally left Vicky’s skin. She grabbed a pair of gloves and a woollen beanie from the basket on the hall table, then stalled at the door; she didn’t have a weapon, no way of protecting herself if she had to confront the gang, and no way of calling for backup. All police issue firearms were kept under lock and key at the station and without electricity there was no way of using the radio. Mulholland had made it clear that tracking the gang was no longer a priority, and that finding the girls would have to wait until the ‘crisis’ was over, so she had no hope of help from the force. Vicky knew in her gut that by the time the crisis was over, it would be too late to save the girls, at least too late to stop whatever abuse the gang had in mind; they would be trafficked out of town as soon as possible and perhaps sold on as part of the darker trade the gang had recently become involved in. That was a fate she absolutely could not allow the girls to suffer. If she could rescue them, then she would, whatever department policy had to say about it.