by Jack Gatland
Copyright © 2021 by Jack Gatland / Tony Lee
All rights reserved.
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This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the author, unless for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, places of learning, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Hooded Man Publishing
DI Declan Walsh Books
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LETTER FROM THE DEAD
MURDER OF ANGELS
HUNTER HUNTED
WHISPER FOR THE REAPER
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TO HUNT A MAGPIE
(Coming June 2021)
BEHIND THE WIRE
(Coming August 2021)
A RITUAL FOR THE DYING
(Coming October 2021)
For Mum, who inspired me to write.
* * *
For Tracy, who inspires me to write.
Contents
Prologue
1. Kidnapped
2. Cold Red Cases
3. Disciplinary Dates
4. The Thin Blue Line
5. Rural Crime
6. The Game Is Afoot
7. Functioning Room
8. Organised For Crime
9. First Briefing
10. Par Three
11. Moving Pictures
12. Adding Up
13. Family Feuds
14. Wheeler Stealer
15. Underground, Overground
16. New Leads
17. Dark Before Dawn
18. Berlin Station
19. Female of the Species
20. Javert / Valjean
21. Loose Ends
22. Old Soldiers
23. Glitch In The Coding
24. I Can See Clearer Now
25. Inter-Viewed
26. Change Of Plans
27. Two Minutes To Midnight
28. Midnight
29. Heads Or Tails
Epilogue
Prologue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Prologue
Craig Randall led a double life.
That’s what he told everyone that he spoke to; it made him sound like a secret agent, some kind of exciting, enigmatic hero rather than what he really was; a fifteen-year-old bully with a Walter Mitty fantasy.
Craig’s double life wasn’t fake though; it just wasn’t what you’d expect to see when asking someone about it. During the week, Craig was just a Year 10 loser, picked upon by the bigger, stupider kids in his year because he wasn’t a fan of the same football teams, a teenager who spent a lot of time on his own, and who didn’t have that many friends. He wasn’t that academic; he wasn’t that sporty. In fact, he wasn’t that… anything. If you looked up the words academically average in a school guidebook, you’d probably find a photo of Craig Randall smiling out at you. Or, at least scowling, annoyed that he was being made fun of again.
But on the weekends, oh yes the weekends, he was a God.
For Craig Randall spent his weekends somewhere else. Not in South East London like the other losers in his class, no; Craig and his family would spend every weekend from Easter until October at a camping and caravan park in Hurley Upon Thames.
It’d started when he was eight. His parents, sick of the estate they lived in and desperate to escape from the city, if only for a day or so borrowed a frame tent from a friend, and, with a minimum of camping equipment and experience had muddled their way to Hurley after seeing it mentioned in the back of Camping and Caravanning magazine. They’d arrived late on a Friday evening in May and, as Craig and his dad wrestled with the tent, realising very early in the process that they didn’t have a manual explaining which pole went where, Craig’s mum and his sister Ellie went to visit the camp shop, and picked up some fish and chips from a van that had arrived just outside it.
They’d been cramped back then; eight-year-old Craig and five-year-old Ellie had to share one of the two ‘bedrooms’, nothing more than a cloth divider between their manky sleeping bags on cheap air beds, and their parents’ double air bed, with equally battered sleeping bags.
They’d had a BBQ on the Saturday and cooked from a single camp stove the other days. They’d played football. Although they had a small TV to watch things on, they didn’t really bother. There was a small boat ramp that led into the Thames, which you could get to by following a path from the first field, or by making your way across a rickety, home made bridge created from wooden pallets over a stream beside the third, furthest away field, and then following the Thames back to it.
He played there a lot. And he built the bridge, too.
It had been a break in every sense of the word; a break from the artificial normality of the world, and a return to an easier time. From that day onwards, the Randalls were born again weekend campers, updating their equipment piece by piece while travelling down every Friday evening, often from the moment Craig left school, and returning mid afternoon on the Sunday, just in time for him to prepare for school the following day.
They weren’t the only people who did this and over the weeks and months that they lived this double life, Craig had recognised other people, other families, other children who also travelled to Hurley on the weekends. And, they met new families who were just starting the journeys.
Families and children who didn’t know Craig, and had no context of what he was truly like.
And thus the second Craig Randall was born.
This Craig was a cool one. He was captain of his school’s football team, had a girlfriend who was super hot and two years older than him, and he was doing these new visiting children a favour by hanging out with them. He was the experienced one, the veteran of the camp; he knew the coolest places to play in the woods that surrounded the campsite, the best places to swim, and he always had a story of something amazing that’d happened in the past which was always a story that made him look as equally brilliant. In fact, as the years went on and Craig reached his teenage years, he’d spend the weeks waiting for the weekends, when he could go back to Hurley and gain adoration from the smaller kids there, annoyed when the camping season ended in October and he had to wait almost half the year to return.
He didn’t explain what he did while camping to his weekday friends. They weren’t that important to him. They didn’t see him in the same way.
They’d gotten a spaniel named Scamper, named after some book dog his dad had loved as a kid a couple of years into this. Craig wasn’t a fan of the spaniel, mainly because he ended up as the de facto dog walker, but that said, it seemed to attract girls to him, all wanting to stroke Scamper; and Craig had by then reached an age where girls were very interesting.
And then it’d all gone wrong. His parents now had a caravan, and although Ellie still slept with them inside it, they allowed Craig his own three-person tent, which he’d had to save up for. It was like having his own place; he had a double mattress inside it, even if his sleeping bag fitted one person, and a small radio that played CDs. But for the fifteen-year-old Cra
ig, this was a bachelor pad. He was finally becoming a man.
And his attitude to the other kids on the site changed.
He wasn’t bothered about playing in the woods like he was five years earlier. He wanted to kiss girls and look cool. He’d just finished his Year 10 mock GCSE exams. You were effectively a grown up when you did that.
He bullied the smaller kids in the campsite, mainly because he could. That, and it was revenge for the bullies who still attacked him at his own school. He’d also realised that he was no longer the ‘veteran’ who could show the coolest places to other kids; that was now a position given to his sister, or even other younger children who, arriving years after he had claimed the role were now looking at him as some kind of weird hanger on. And this had angered him.
He’d acted out by hurting the smaller kids; not physically, but mentally.
He’d take things of theirs, left outside the tents at night and throw them into the Thames or break them, leaving them back outside the tents for the owners to find the following morning.
He’d tell stories of the Grey Lady, a ghostly woman who hanged herself in Medmenham Abbey, a stately home across the Thames and historically infamous as the location of Sir Francis Dashwood’s The Hellfire Club, who used it for "obscene parodies of religious rites" in the mid-1700s, her ghost walking the banks of the Thames late at night, stealing children’s souls.
He’d even pretended to become possessed by Dashwood, terrifying the younger children until they cried, now and then finding an intrigued teenage girl who wanted to know more.
He’d never gone too far with that, except for that one time.
But now it was summer, school was over, and the Hurley campsite had become a prison for Craig. After seven years there, he had built a reputation; one that his parents had often argued with him about. They were one strike away from being banned because of his antics, they’d say. He’d laugh and tell them that the ghost of Francis Dashwood had done the terrible things, not him, and then walk out before they could reply. In fact, he’d just done that, walking with Scamper eastwards along the Thames, towards Hurley Lock, a mile or so away.
The Thames was to his left, strangely quiet for the time of day; nobody was fishing, there weren’t even any kids playing in the water. It felt wrong, odd, somehow. The bank of the river became an open field to his right, and about fifty yards away a bank of trees showed the woodland copse that bordered the campsite. This was where Scamper was running to, as Craig tried to get his battered old iPod Nano to work. If he’d charged it earlier, he wouldn’t have heard the barking.
And that would have changed everything.
As it was, he hadn’t charged the iPod, and therefore it wasn’t playing music and he heard Scamper barking at something somewhere near the edge of the woods. The bloody dog wouldn’t come back after being called, and Craig almost continued on, convinced that Scamper would just follow him, or just do him a favour and leave forever, when he heard the barking cut off abruptly with a yelp.
Turning back to the trees, Craig could see that Scamper had run over to the rickety bridge. And, walking towards it, frustrated that Scamper had most likely run into the trees, he stopped about twenty feet away from it, as a man appeared the other side, emerging from the woods.
He was old, maybe in his fifties. He was slim, had short brown hair in a buzz cut, and wore a green Barbour jacket. His face was pale, like he didn’t get out into the sun that much. And he was smiling.
‘Have you lost your dog?’ he asked, his voice showing the slightest hint of a European accent. ‘He is right here. Come and get him.’
‘Nah, it’s okay,’ Craig said. There was something about this old man that unnerved him. ‘I’ll just wait.’
‘I think he is tangled in nettles,’ the man replied. ‘You must come and help him.’
‘It’s cool, I’ll wait until you’ve moved on,’ Craig tried to smile, but it came out as a leer. The man however nodded at this.
‘Understandable,’ he agreed. ‘I am a stranger. You are right to be wary. But we are not strangers, are we Craig?’
At the sound of his own name, Craig felt an icy wind blowing down his spine. He’d never seen this man before, and he’d sure as hell not given his name away.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘How do you know who I am?’
‘I know everything about you,’ the man continued to smile as he spoke, and Craig found himself irrationally angry at this. ‘I know you have been coming here for years. I know you are a bully. I know what you did to that girl.’
‘I didn’t assault her,’ Craig snapped back. ‘She came on to me. I didn’t do anything.’
‘I’m sure you did not,’ the man replied, stepping back from the bridge, beckoning Craig in. ‘But perhaps we should talk more about this together, rather than shouting it loudly across a stream?’ The old man watched Craig, still not moving.
‘Your dog is in pain,’ he said. ‘You will not save him?’
Now terrified, Craig shook his head. The man thought about this for a moment and then pulled something out of his jacket pocket, tossing it over the stream, the item landing at Craig’s feet. As Craig bent down to look at it, he could see it was an ivory handle. Picking it up, he realised it was a wickedly sharp cut-throat razor.
‘See?’ The man smiled. ‘Now you have a weapon. If I attacked, you could hurt me. Please, come in, Craig. Come and play a game with me.’ And as Craig watched, the man walked back into the woods.
With the blade now in his hand, Craig felt more in control of the situation. The man was right; he could hurt him and hurt him badly if he tried anything. And, as he crossed the rickety bridge and entered the wooded copse, he saw Scamper, a rope loosely tied to his collar and secured to a tree, wagging his tail with delight at this strange game they were playing. The dog wasn’t in pain or in distress at all. Craig looked to the man, angry that he had lied to him, and found him sitting on a fallen tree trunk, with another fallen trunk facing him.
‘Sit, please,’ the man indicated the other trunk. ‘We have much to talk about.’
Now more curious than scared, Craig ignored the dog and walked to the tree, sitting down on it, blade still in his hand, ready to defend himself. Noting this, the man reached into a pocket and pulled out a hip flask with two small metal cups, made of metal bands that clicked into shape when flicked. Into these, he poured a liquid, offering one to Craig, who shook his head.
‘And I thought you were almost an adult,’ the man sighed, drinking one cup. ‘See? Not poisoned. But you will need to drink this, Craig Randall of Gleeson Road.’ He held the offered one up again. ‘Drink.’
Craig didn’t mean to, but the man’s voice was so commanding that he couldn’t help himself, taking the metal cup and downing the liquid with a cough. It was a sweet, strong taste, like apples.
‘Good, yes?’ The man smiled. ‘Schnapps. With a little benzocaine added to numb the pain.’
Craig coughed as the man pulled out a small, silver coin.
‘You know what this is?’ the man asked, not waiting for an answer as he explained. ‘This is a solid silver East-German Mark.’ He twirled it in his fingers. ‘See? A number one is on this side, that is heads, while on the other side is a compass and a hammer; tails. I have had this for many years now.’ He looked up from the coin now, staring intently at Craig.
‘We play a game now,’ he explained as he reached into his pocket again, pulling out another cut-throat razor. ‘I will flip it. If it lands heads, I will take this razor, this very sharp blade and slash my throat open. If it shows tails, however, you will do this instead, yes?’
‘No!’ Craig rose now, angry. ‘You’re mad! I—‘ he stopped as a heaviness overcame his legs, sending him back to the tree trunk. ‘What did you do?’
‘I told you,’ the man replied. ‘Schnapps. With a little benzocaine.’
‘I don’t want to play,’ Craig whined, realising that this was a terrible place to be right now.
�
�I understand, it is scary,’ the man nodded sympathetically. ‘But you have been a wicked man, Craig. As have I. And as such we must face repercussions.’ He rolled the coin over his fingers. ‘And you might not get tails. I might lose.’
‘I’ll scream,’ Craig insisted. ‘I’ll call for help.’
‘And that is your right,’ the man nodded calmly. ‘But know that if you do, I will be gone before anyone arrives. And then, at some point very soon, I will enter your house while your mother, father and dear little sister Ellie are asleep and I will slowly and painfully skin them all alive. And then I will find you and make you watch as I slice pieces off you with this straight razor.’
Craig was crying. ‘Please, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to die.’
The old man smiled.
‘Maybe you will not,’ he said as he flicked the coin into the air, watching it lazily flip before landing on the back of his hand. ‘Let us see, shall we?’
DI Freeman climbed out of his BMW and looked around the campsite. It was right after the school holidays had started, and there were families and children everywhere. A nightmare to keep a crime scene contained.
There was a perimeter already placed around the entrance to the copse; a couple of police officers ensuring that the small crowd of onlookers couldn’t enter.
This was good. They really didn’t want to see this.
