Never Say Goodbye: An edge of your seat thriller with gripping suspense (Detective Tom Fabian Book 1)

by Richard Parker

  Never Say Goodbye

  An edge-of-your-seat thriller with gripping suspense

  Richard Parker

  Contents

  Also by Richard Parker

  Murder Map

  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

  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

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Epilogue

  Follow You

  Hear More From Richard

  Also by Richard Parker

  A letter from Richard

  Hide and Seek

  Keep Her Safe

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Richard Parker

  Never Say Goodbye

  Keep Her Safe

  Hide and Seek

  Follow You

  Scare Me

  Stop Me

  Stalk Me

  To my very good friend, David Tomlinson. Keep on writing, Mr Wisley!

  Murder Map

  The image depicts the route described in the book

  Chapter One

  May the nineteenth 1968 had been an average day for Janet Wells. Unbeknownst to her, it was the day her murderer was born.

  She was twenty-two at the time and had been fast asleep with her new husband when the person bringing the end of her life had started theirs. Over fifty years later she awoke to find him in her room.

  Janet knew there was somebody there before she opened her eyes. Should she leap from her bed and charge to the door? But in the split second she hesitated his weight was pressing down on her.

  Janet didn’t see his face but if she had she would have realised she’d never met him before. They had no connection to each other, and her killer went about the business of stifling her exclamation and thrusting his blade into her chest without any sense of pleasure. One of the main reasons he’d chosen Janet was because she lived alone. Why make the job more risky than it already was?

  As the force of the third blade strike pushed the last air out of her lungs Janet’s brain shut down before it could speculate about who he was and why he’d targeted her.

  He made sure her chest was still before standing back and slowly filling his. The room smelt of Deep Heat and Steradent. It was the fourth time he’d killed and the experience wasn’t necessarily becoming any easier, but he knew the days that followed would be less paralysed by recrimination than previously.

  He put his boot against the side of the mattress and shoved it a few times. Janet’s head lolled back and forth and a last hiss escaped her. He waited and listened for sounds outside her retirement flat. But her death had been quick, and he’d suffocated her cry. Nobody would have heard and by the time anyone checked on her he’d be long gone.

  He gripped the handles of the butterfly blade tight. The only sound in the room now was the squeal of the air from his nose. Just one more thing to do but it was the hardest part. Janet Wells was gone now though. She wouldn’t feel any pain.

  He leaned forward and stabbed her four times in the face.

  Chapter Two

  In the stark lights of Horseferry Police Station bathroom, Detective Inspector Tom Fabian’s hands caught him off guard. They looked old. He always studiously avoided the mirror over the sink. Whatever time of the day it was, his creased features looked like he’d just been dug up. He still had a full head of hair but it was unblemished white. It had been that way since his late twenties, but back then he’d used it to his advantage. People had credited him with experience beyond his years but now the rest of his gaunt appearance had not only caught up but overtaken it.

  When he’d hit forty the detective chief inspector at the time had half-filled a paper cup with lukewarm spumante and joked that Fabian’s body would start to fall apart. Four years later it wasn’t such a joke. He didn’t really care about getting old but the wrinkles on the backs of his hands didn’t help the feeling that he was edging closer to a conversation he dreaded. He’d spent the last three years anticipating it as keenly as the younger, aggressive talent around him.

  He’d spent most of his career in Greater London’s Metropolitan Police Service working his way towards detective inspector. When he’d attained the position Fabian had swiftly realised the main requirement of the appointment was to ignore the justified sensation that everyone else in the department was now waiting for him to fail. Not if but when. After four years, detective chief inspector felt like an abstract concept and now he was just grateful for every day he didn’t get the summons to the office at the end of the corridor.

  After making DI in 2014, Fabian had been significantly instrumental in apprehending infamous serial killer, Christopher Wisher. So instrumental, in fact, he’d been the media face of the case before and after Wisher’s incarceration in October 2015. But even by the end of that year the department had shifted beyond recognition. The faces he knew had moved on or been relocated and now he only had two people under him that he knew and trusted.

  The division seemed to be increasingly focussed on internal politics but, like anyone past forty, Fabian felt as if his retirement lay too far away to be able to treat every new departmental review, reassessment and realignment with the disdain it deserved. With resources shrinking every day and the spectre of redundancy ever present, it seemed only the overpaid middle management were safe and deferring to them the single key to survival. But Fabian knew that, whatever he did, his service stood for nothing and that if push came to shove they’d close the door on him without a moment’s thought.

  Somebody bulldozed through the bathroom door behind him and he looked up to identify them. He couldn’t but nodded. The young redheaded guy made eye contact but he looked away. There seemed to be a vague trace of amusement there though. Fabian shifted to wash his hands under the weak trickle from the tap while his companion unzipped an
d urinated loudly.

  First pissing contest of the day. Made a change to have it in the bathroom. That’s whom he was up against – guys who still had a couple of decades to realise there were more important things in the world than their careers. Just like Fabian when he was their age. The irony was that when family finally became priority, your home life was probably already a casualty and your professional performance quickly followed.

  He put his palms under the drier and examined them again. His knuckles looked like an elephant’s kneecaps. The young guy finished and immediately left. Not even time for hygiene. Fabian’s hands were still wet when the machine cut out, so he moved them under the sensor again and massaged them until they were dry.

  When Fabian walked into the third floor, open-plan office the heating was still broken. It was October, freezing outside and probably a degree colder in the room.

  Detective Sergeant Natasha Banner was huddled at her desk in her claret-coloured, fur-lined parka. ‘I should have brought the windscreen scraper in for my laptop.’ She clutched a steaming cup of black coffee in her hand and blew away the steam.

  ‘Frostbite doesn’t excuse you from finishing that report. As long as you’ve got one finger…’ Fabian noticed his words formed a vague cloud.

  ‘They said it would be repaired by yesterday afternoon. Maybe they’ll come running if I burn some furniture to keep warm.’ She hunched herself around the cup, took a sip and grimaced as it scalded her lips.

  Fabian took off his coat, arranged it over the back of his chair but kept his striped scarf on. Banner had been with Fabian for nearly three years. She was Sri Lankan and had had a much harder climb than he had. A handsome woman with jet-black tight curls, she’d endured chauvinism, as well as hostility from her female colleagues. But she was a pathologically methodical officer with impeccable instincts and had been fiercely loyal to Fabian during the Wisher case.

  In her late thirties she had an academic husband and a son in secondary school. She was pointedly private about anything outside the office. They’d never socialised and although he often wondered how she struggled with her own family and work commitments he didn’t want to upset the professional relationship she clearly wanted to maintain.

  ‘Can’t you requisition the conference room?’ Fabian knew the one and only portable heater was in there.

  ‘Whiting is hogging it.’ She nodded behind him.

  Fabian turned and saw DI Whiting was briefing his people in the glass walled office.

  ‘Number four yesterday evening,’ she added.

  Fabian watched the young DI, his arms folded tightly across his chest as he spoke. ‘Same blade?’

  ‘Same mutilation to the face. Victim was a woman in her seventies. Somebody broke into her retirement flat in Pimlico.’ Banner slurped her coffee again.

  Fabian had envied Whiting when he’d been given the case but now there were four victims, no suspects and the investigation had conspicuously stalled. Whiting had been ‘thrashing about like a shark in a pisspot’, as one officer he’d overheard had tactfully put it.

  At that moment the fire exit door opened and Detective Constable Finch emerged looking furtive.

  ‘What are you doing lurking out there?’ Banner asked.

  ‘Have they started?’ He shot a glance at the conference room.

  Fabian frowned but saw what Finch was dragging behind him. It was the portable heater.

  ‘I appropriated it before Whiting got in there.’

  ‘Highly irregular but good work.’ Fabian watched him wheel it over. ‘Defrost my colleague first. Her need is greater.’

  Finch plugged it in next to Banner’s desk. The thirty-three year old was only wearing a thin powder blue shirt and he seemed unconcerned by the temperature in the office. Stocky and sporting his usual dark disorder of just-out-of-bed hair, Finch went about the task with his usual vigour and tenacity. Everyone, including Finch, knew he would never make detective inspector. Instead, he not only recognised his own strengths as a coordinator, communicator and fixer-upper but revelled in them. Better still, his lack of ego made him more than comfortable with the situation.

  Finch switched on the dilapidated heater and it vibrated alarmingly.

  ‘I don’t know which one’ll give out first, the heater or Banner.’ Fabian dropped into his chair. The back kept him uncomfortably tipped forward and he’d never worked out how to adjust it. He didn’t turn it to his desk though. Couldn’t face the mountain of documents waiting for him on the computer until he’d acclimatised himself and, this morning, that was clearly going to take much longer.

  ‘Whiting looks stressed.’ Banner gripped her cup tightly with both hands and monitored the briefing.

  ‘Haven’t seen him in the gym for the past few weeks.’ Finch examined the heater dial. ‘That’s on max.’

  Fabian knew Finch disliked Whiting’s arrogance. As was usually the case, the management had heralded the young DI the saviour of the department and he’d acted the part. For the first week anyway. Fabian felt sorry for him. After being shunted up the ladder with little experience, the scrutiny he was under wouldn’t allow him any latitude to learn from his mistakes. Maybe that was unfair, but the first victim had been murdered a month previously and, from what Banner had told him, Whiting had already run out of euphemisms for his lack of progress. ‘Where’s our witness?’

  ‘Issues with childcare. Says she might not be able to make it in.’ Banner shifted her chair closer to the heater.

  Margaret Springer was the only woman from the Doddington Estate in Battersea who was willing to talk to them about an arson attack on one of the flats that had left a family of three dead. The local drug pushers were suspected but nobody but her had come forward. It was the third day she’d been scheduled to talk to them and had made an excuse.

  That meant virtual paperwork beckoned. ‘If she’s not here by this afternoon, I’ll go and interview her myself,’ Fabian threatened.

  ‘I’ll call her.’ Finch sat on his desk and picked up the phone.

  Chapter Three

  Fabian struggled with three bags of heavy shopping up the pathway. Harriet was always amused by how he would only ever make one trip from the car with the groceries, even if it meant he almost cut his hands in half. He transferred all the bags to his right hand and reached into his left pocket for door keys, only to find they were on the other side. Why couldn’t he always slip them in one particular side? The ground was wet and he didn’t want to put the bags down, so transferred all three bags to his left hand, his wrist shaking as he fumbled out the keys awkwardly.

  Once inside he dumped the bags on the rug of the long hallway.

  ‘That you?’ Harriet called from the back lounge.

  ‘Yes.’ He flexed his fingers to get the blood back into them, shut the door and picked up the bags again.

  Despite the large lounge at the front, Harriet and Tilly always stayed in the tiny dining room at the rear of the house in the winter. He thumped down the hall and opened the door.

  It was lovely and warm inside. Tilly was on her laptop at the table in the little bay window and Harriet was in the kitchen beyond.

  ‘Are you a home delivery man now?’ Tilly smiled at the bags in his hands.

  He stepped to the table and kissed the top of her head. It smelt of her coconut shampoo, and he knew he wouldn’t be inhaling it again for a good long while. She’d cut short her straight, henna-dyed hair for university and he wasn’t sure he liked it.

  She opened her mouth to tease him further but seemed to think better of it.

  Maybe she was cutting him some slack because she knew her parents would both be feeling sensitive. She smiled at him, like she had thousands of times since she’d been born, one eye closed slightly more than the other which made her look slightly conspiratorial, and returned her attention to her laptop screen.

  He struggled the bags through to the kitchen and dumped them on the breakfast bar.

  Harriet’s face glistened wi
th tears. ‘What’s all this?’

  Fabian made sure the bags weren’t about to topple. ‘Just some staples for Till.’ He took out an empty glass from the cupboard, quickly filled it with water and put it beside the board where she was chopping an onion. ‘Fumes will go to the nearest liquid. Better the water than your eyes.’

  She nodded, as if he’d told her before. Had he? Despite her blurry regard, however, he registered she was wearing eye make-up. That was unusual. And he could see her apron covered a smart suit.

  She used the side of her thumb to wipe her eye. ‘When you say staples…’

  ‘All the things she’ll forget.’ Fabian realised that sounded like you’ll forget. ‘So she doesn’t have to buy them when she gets there,’ he mitigated.

  ‘Bleach?’ Tilly was at the breakfast bar and had taken a plastic bottle out of the bag.