Blood Rites: A Detective Inspector Paul Snow thriller
Page 20
Snow’s body shuddered for a while as though caught in a ferocious fit while his legs flexed outwards, twitching violently. Then suddenly all movement stopped.
The eyes closed for the last time.
Father Vincent dipped the blood-stained knife in the snow and wiped it on Snow’s jacket.
‘Sweet dreams… may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,’ he said softly, kindly with a gentle smile.
Then, with a sigh of relief, Father Vincent made his way to the park gates and the long trudge home in the snow.
He entered the darkened house and shivered, kicking the damp snow from his shoes. Damn, he thought. He had forgotten to put the central heating on timer. Now it would be an hour before the property was reasonably warm. He grimaced and slammed the door shut. Oh, well, such is life, he mused as he clicked the kitchen switch, filling the room with harsh fluorescent light. After seeing to the central heating boiler, and plugging in the kettle, he went to the sink and extracted the polythene bag from his overcoat pocket. From this he unsheathed the long knife. Despite the fact that he’d wiped it earlier, the blade still retained traces of blood. He dropped it into the sink and turned on the tap. The water gushed over the knife, the blood reluctantly diluting and then spiralling away. He watched fascinated as the red turned to pink and then slid from view down the plughole crater.
Well, he supposed, the evening had been successful – after a fashion. He wasn’t happy that he’d had to deviate from his plan and kill for no other reason than to protect himself. He knew that this had been essential, but it was essentially the waste of a body. However, the killing did provide him with the opportunity to resume his planned course, his blood rites, and take many more unworthy lives.
He dried the knife on a tea towel and returned it to the kitchen drawer where it belonged. Everything in its place; a place for everything. Sloughing off his wet coat and draping it over a dining chair, he made a cup of tea and, grabbing a couple of digestive biscuits, he wandered into the sitting room. After turning on the television, he slumped in a chair. He took a slurp of tea and sighed. He hoped there was something relaxing and entertaining on television he could watch. He’d had rather a tiring evening.
Why not explore another of David’s recent thriller titles,
The Scarlet Coven.
New York 1936. Leading New York detective Simon Finch has received an unexpected inheritance and left the force to pursue his dream of becoming a writer.
But a true detective is never far from finding trouble…or trouble finding him…
A stranger approaches Finch in the Algonquin Hotel, asking him to help find his sister who has disappeared. When he later visits the man’s hotel room he discovers that he has been murdered - stabbed with a dagger decorated with strange markings. As Finch investigates further he discovers recently acquitted crime boss Fats Molloy is mixed up with the man’s murder and the missing sister.
The trail leads him to an occult bookshop …has the missing woman been kidnapped by a group of Satanists, The Scarlet Coven?
Joining forces with a black private eye, Patrick Murphy, who is also investigating the cult, they endure a series of wild adventures and close calls with demonic forces as they seek the truth about the mysterious leader of the Coven…and the nefarious plans for death and mayhem…
David Stuart Davies is an author, playwright and editor. His fiction includes six novels featuring his wartime detective Johnny Hawke, Victorian puzzle solver artist Luther Darke, and seven Sherlock Holmes novels, the latest being Sherlock Holmes and the Ripper Legacy (2016). His non-fiction work includes Starring Sherlock Holmes, detailing the film career of the Baker Street sleuth. David is regarded as an authority on Sherlock Holmes and is the author of two Holmes plays, Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act and Sherlock Holmes: The Death and Life, which are available on audio CD. He has written the Afterwords for all the Collector’s Library Holmes volumes, as well as those for many of their other titles. David has also penned three dark, gritty crime novels set in Yorkshire in the 1980s: Brothers in Blood, Innocent Blood and Blood Rites. He is a committee member of the Crime Writers Association and edits their monthly publication Red Herrings. His collection of ghost and horror stories appeared in 2015, championed by Mark Gatiss who said they were ‘pleasingly nasty’. David is General Editor of Wordsworth’s Mystery & Supernatural series and a past Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. He has appeared at many literary festivals and the Edinburgh Fringe performing his one-man presentation The Game’s Afoot: an evening with Sherlock Holmes & Arthur Conan Doyle. He was recently made a member of The Detection Club.
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