Broken Silence

by Danielle Ramsay

  Brady turned to face Gates.

  Gates waited, forcing his hand.

  ‘All right. Just give me a minute to clear my head.’

  ‘As soon as you can, Jack. This is your shit, you clear it up.’

  ‘I know it is. But it doesn’t end here. I owe it to Matthews to do what I can to substantiate his allegations.’

  ‘What? Against Madley?’

  Brady looked Gates straight in the eye. He knew Madley too well. Enough to know he wouldn’t dirty his hands with anything to do with sex trafficking. Drugs, maybe. But sex trafficking was a different league.

  ‘Macmillan, sir. Mayor Macmillan. And if that means upsetting a few people, then that’s what I’ll have to do. After all, isn’t that what I’m good at? ‘

  Part One

  Read on for an exclusive extract from Danielle Ramsay’s next novel Broken Bodies, coming in 2011.

  Chapter One

  Saturday: 3am

  ‘Nachui! Nachui!‘

  ‘Kales vaikas!’ Irritably replied another man.

  ‘Oh God … no …’ she desperately panted, too scared to look behind her.

  Exhausted, she started running again. She didn’t hear the foghorn forlornly bleating in the distance, or feel the wet sea fret as it wrapped itself around her painfully thin body. All she heard was the threatening footsteps of her pursuers.

  Somewhere down by the promenade muffled, drunken shouts were followed by the roar of a car’s engine. Seconds later a hazy orange glow appeared at the bottom of the dark street as a car turned up from the promenade. Shallowly panting, she ran as fast as she could towards the glare of the oncoming car, grazing her bare feet against the jagged, uneven pavements. Her long, dark hair clung to her waxen, ghostly face as she ran out into the middle of the road.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ She shouted frantically waving her bare white arms at the approaching headlights.

  The car suddenly slammed its brakes on barely avoiding hitting her.

  ‘Help me, please … help …’ She gasped in short breaths.

  She hunched over, gulping in air as the driver aggressively punched his horn to make her move out of the way.

  She straightened up, wildly shaking her head.

  ‘No! You’ve got to help me!’ She implored as the driver banged his fist on the horn again.

  Desperate, she ran round to the driver’s door and frantically tried to open it.

  The doors were locked. She hysterically started pounding at the window.

  The driver, a dark-haired man in his late twenties looked at her with contempt.

  ‘Please …’ she stuttered, panicking. ‘You’ve got to help me … please …’ She begged. ‘These men … they’re trying to take me … they want to …’

  ‘Piss off you drunken cow!’ He spat in disgust as he scowled at her dishevelled appearance.

  Her face was covered in a sheen of cold sweat as smudged, black eye-liner and mascara trailed down her cheeks. Her short, strapless black dress was ripped halfway down the side, immodestly showing her naked body underneath.

  ‘No, you can’t leave me here! You don’t understand! They’ll kill me!’ She screamed, banging furiously on the window.

  ‘Fucking right I can, you slapper!’ He answered before revving the engine and then screeching off up the street.

  ‘No!’ She yelled, feeling physically sick as the car disappeared.

  She stood alone, feeling utterly helpless.

  Panicking, she looked at the Victorian terraced row of houses on either side of her.

  Realising that there was a light coming from the secondfloor of a three storey house further down the street, she ran as fast as she could towards it. She pushed the ornate cast iron gate open and ran up the pathway towards the heavy, red panelled door. She repeatedly pressed the old fashioned doorbell. There was no answer. She then started to bang furiously on the door.

  ‘Please … Anyone … Help me!’ She desperately called out.

  She waited a moment, but nothing happened.

  ‘Come on! Someone! You’ve got to hear me! Please … anyone …’ She shouted.

  ‘Kikite su manimi shliundra! Ordered a deep, guttural voice.

  She froze, recognising the voice. She knew it was over. She had tried her best to outrun them, but they wouldn’t give up, not until they had her.

  Trembling, she slowly turned around. His six foot two, threatening body was stood by the gate. The shorter one was stood behind him, waiting with his muscular arms folded.

  ‘No …’ She whispered.

  Seconds later a car idled down the street, coming to a stop behind the two men.

  ‘Ateiti cia kale!’ The taller man ordered as he stared straight at her, ignoring the car.

  ‘No … please …’ She begged.

  ‘As tai dabar apskretele! He barked, gesturing for her to come to him.

  She shook her head as tears started to trickle down her face.

  ‘No … no …’ She muttered.

  ‘Fucking bitch!’ He cursed in a thick accent as he strode over to her.

  She turned and started pounding hysterically on the door.

  ‘Help me! Someone! Help me!’ She screamed as loud as she could.

  He brutally grabbed her from behind. She attempted to struggle, but it was pointless.

  He covered her mouth with a leather-gloved hand and dragged her backwards down the path. Her heels scraped, ripping the skin as she tried her best to resist.

  Still with his hand over her mouth, he took her to the idling silver Mercedes. The passenger window buzzed down and a heavily set man in his late forties looked at her.

  He roughly tilted her face towards the passenger window.

  Tears trailed down her cheeks as she realised that the drunken voices on the promenade had faded into the blackness of the night. She was completely alone with them.

  She waited, hardly daring to breathe as the man in the car decided what to do.

  Seconds later he nodded at the man holding her. Then, without a word the electric window buzzed shut.

  She was unsure of what it meant.

  ‘Please … please … let me go … I promise I won’t talk …’ She begged.

  Her captor seemed to relax his grip on her.

  ‘I promise I won’t say anything.’ She continued, hoping that he would let her go.

  ‘Nusishypsosi shaltais dantimis shliundra! He hoarsely whispered, brushing his lips against her cold, glistening cheek.

  The pungent smell of strong, stale tobacco lingered on his sour breath.

  His hands gently encircled her throat and slowly started to squeeze.

  ‘No … no … please?’ She begged as her fingers tried to prise his hands from her neck.

  She questioningly looked towards the dark tainted glass of the Mercedes’ passenger window. But she couldn’t see anything. She then looked at the other man who was silently stood by the car with his arms folded, impassively watching.

  She caught his eye, but he looked past her, as if she didn’t exist.

  Terrified, she struggled, clawing and scratching at the hands around her throat.

  But he pressed deeper into her malleable flesh.

  ‘I … I … can’t breathe …’ she gasped, suddenly realising what was about to happen.

  He grunted with satisfaction.

  She frantically tore with bloodied, broken nails at his unrelenting hands as her lungs began to burn. As the exploding pain became unbearable she suddenly thought of her sister and her mother, realising that she would never see them again.

  Ten seconds later she felt the fight leave her body.

  ‘Kekshe … ‘ He softly grunted as her body began to spasm.

  Chapter Two

  Shivering, a woman in her late-thirties hid behind the heavy curtains as she tentatively looked out of the bedroom window. It was eerily quiet now. She had been startled awake by someone banging on the front door. Followed by hysterical, drunken screaming.

  She w
atched, relieved as a car disappeared down the road and presumed that the girl who had been drunkenly screaming a few minutes earlier had been picked up. She looked down at the street below. It was empty. She thought about calling the police again and thought better of it. Whoever it was had gone now. And what could she say? That some drunken girl had been banging on her door at 3AM, ranting and raving? To the police that was a normal occurrence in Whitley Bay on a Friday or Saturday night.

  And sadly for her, and the other residents in the street, this was becoming a regular problem. The street had set up a resident’s association to combat the drunken intimidation they encountered at weekends and in particular, Bank Holidays. But the association had hit a brick wall with the council. It was simple; the councillors didn’t live there, so consequently it wasn’t high on their agenda. That, and thefact that the pubs and clubs in Whitley Bay brought in easy revenue.

  Every weekend she was guaranteed to be woken by some disturbance caused by the pubs in South Parade. Either taxi cars speeding up and down the street, or police helicopters hovering overhead as they tried to catch some drunk who’d gone too far. And then there were the revellers, too high and too smashed to make their way home quietly.

  The amount of times she would wake up to vomit outside her gate, empty, smashed vodka bottles or beer cans indiscriminately left behind. And then there were the half-eaten Indian’s or pizzas’ from the restaurants lining the promenade at the bottom of the street, all dumped outside.

  She yawned, and decided to go back to bed. Whoever it was had gone.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’ Sleepily muttered her husband as she climbed into bed.

  ‘Nothing,’ She answered.

  Not that he cared, she thought. He somehow blocked all the noise out. Even when someone was banging and screaming at their front door he never budged.

  ‘Just a drunk,’ he had flatly stated when she had woken him.

  And as soon as he had said it the commotion had stopped.

  ‘See? What did I tell you?’ He had groaned as he turned and buried his face into his pillow.

  Resentful, she watched him now as he rolled over and fell immediately into a deep slumber. It would take her hours to get back to sleep, she bitterly thought. She could still feel the adrenalin and anger coursing through her tense body. She hated hearing drunks in the early hours of the morning, shouting and cursing outside. But that girl’s screaming had really gotten to her. She felt on edge, fearful that something wasn’t quite right. Maybe she should have done something. Frustrated, she turned and stared at the orange glow of the street lamp as it shone through the window, wishing that the house wasn’t in negative equity so they could get as far away from Whitley Bay as possible.

  Chapter Three

  Sunday: 5am

  Jack Brady turned over and groaned. His head was thumping and the relentless buzzing wasn’t helping.

  ‘Buggering bugger!’ He cursed.

  He blindly stretched his hand out and reached for his BlackBerry.

  ‘What?’ He irritably demanded, wincing with pain at the exertion.

  He listened to the caller between the pulsating thumping.

  ‘Conrad? What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ Grunted Brady, affecting a rough, hard-edged Geordie accent for Conrad’s benefit. ‘It’s Sunday for bloody hell’s sake!’

  Conrad’s words always had the uncanny knack of sobering him up.

  Brady slowly sat up and ran a shaking hand over his narrowed bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Run that by me again!’ He huskily ordered.

  He looked over at the alarm clock and cursed when he saw that it was only five am.

  ‘Yeah … yes, I hear you Conrad. Yeah … I’ll be ready … No … you’re not interrupting anything …’ said Brady before cutting Conrad off.

  Not a lot had happened to him in the last six months. He still had the same hard-nosed boss, Detective Chief Inspector Gates and the same obtuse, career chasing sidekick – Detective Sergeant Harry Conrad. And he still had the same old job as Detective Inspector. Simply put, he wasn’t the kind to get promoted.

  But he was still a hell of a lot better off than his long-standing friend and now ex-colleague, Detective Inspector Jimmy Matthews. He had found himself inside Durham Prison, slumming it with the very scum he had risked his neck, and at times career, to put away. Matthews had ended up doing time for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Instead of acting as a copper, he used everything he had ever gleaned from the job to fool the investigative team. And it worked, right up to the point that Brady couldn’t accept that her teacher, who had been charged with the murder, had actually killed her. Brady had no doubts over the fact that the teacher had had sex with his fifteen year old pupil; repeatedly and in every way imaginable. But a hunch had led to him digging up more than he had bargained for. While the rest of the investigative team celebrated in the Fat Ox, he had followed a trail that led him led circuitously back to Jimmy Matthews.

  Brady had tried to go and see Matthews in Durham prison, but Matthews had refused to see him. Not that Brady could blame him.

  Brady bent over the bathroom sink threw cold water over his face. He had no choice but to get himself straightened out, and fast. Conrad was already at the crime scene, as was half the force by the sounds of it. And given the crap Gates had been doling out to him recently, who was he to argue about it being his day off? Brady smacked of the old school, which meant he didn’t fit in any more. Coppers like Brady were being squeezed out, replaced by the likes of Conrad; graduate material whose eye was on fast-tracking his way to the top. No getting their hands dirty, no bending the rules and definitely no going out on a limb because of gut feeling.

  Brady stared hard at the dark, heavily-hooded eyes reflected back in the mirror. He still looked the same; handsomely rugged with a permanent five o’clock shadow and long dark brown hair that he still hadn’t gotten round to getting cut.

  It had been eight months since Claudia, now officially his ex-wife had left him. He’d be the first to admit that both his personal and professional life was shot to hell, which included the bullet in his thigh. He was still single, living in the hope that Claudia would want him back. But he still had a long way to go to convince her he was worth the risk. She was still of the opinion that he was a cheating son of a bitch. Not that he could disagree. But things had changed since he’d screwed up big time. Whether she had noticed was another matter. At least she had stayed around which was more than he had expected. She had taken up the job offered by Chief Superintendent O’Donnell and was now heading the North East’s first Sex Trafficking centre. Not that Brady ever got to see her, either professionally or personally. She claimed she was too busy and kept him hanging by promising that she would get together with him soon. Whether soon would ever come was questionable.

  And as for Amelia Jenkins, the police psychologist, Brady hadn’t seen her since she had worked alongside him six months ago on the Sophie Washington case. He had often thought about contacting her, but realised it wasn’t a good idea. First, he had to figure out exactly what was going on between him and Claudia.

  He ran a long slender, olive-skinned hand over his stubble as he stared hard at his reflection, wondering exactly what had washed up onto the shores of Whitley Bay beach. Or to be more precise, exactly who had floated to the surface of the cold, grey murky waters of the North Sea.

  Chapter Four

  Police cars, vans and tape blocked off a good stretch of the promenade. Brady pulled up and nodded at the two uniformed officers who automatically let him through. As he slowly drove along the sea front he couldn’t help noticing the countless boarded up, dilapidated Victorian buildings that had become the scourge of the seaside resort.

  He parked up by the old Avenue pub; yet another abandoned eyesore. Originally built as a hotel, it was a dominating three-storey building dating back to a Victorian era of afternoon teas and brass bands. Decades later, when the holidaymakers opted for the sunshine in Majorca i
nstead of the drizzle and biting winds of Whitley Bay, the hotel had been turned into a pub for the locals. Eventually, even the locals stopped coming, driven away by the heavy influx of weekend and Bank Holiday binge drinkers who travelled from Glasgow and Newcastle for a couple of nights of debauchery in Whitley Bay’s nirvana of pubs and clubs. Now the old, sprawling building stood abandoned and in disarray with its state of the art security steel sheets covering the windows and doors while its sign creaked and moaned in protest at the bitter, North East winds.

  Noise drifted up from the beach, distracting Brady fromhis morose brooding about what a shit hole Whitley Bay had become. Soon enough the scavengers would be here, Brady mused, pointing their microphones and cameras, trying to get an inside story. Rubenfeld, a hard-nosed local hack, would be one of the first of the many rats scrambling over whatever sordid scraps they could find. Sick, twisted murders sold newspapers and increased circulation figures big-time.

  He limped along the bleak, rubbish-strewn promenade. His leg was playing up; some days it was fine, at other times like this morning, it would give him jip. It was clear enough where he was heading; it wasn’t difficult to spot uniform on the sectioned off beach below him. They were stood around trying to look official while head to foot white-clad SOCOs diligently moved in and out of a large white forensics tent.

  Brady kicked a broken vodka bottle out of the way, scattering the screeching seagulls from their fight over dumped curried chips. Beside it a deflated, limp condom lay abandoned. Both a testament that despite the credit crunch scum always found money from somewhere to get trashed and then shag and gorge on whatever; regardless. Whitley Bay hadn’t suffered because of the global economic crisis; at least the owners of the pubs and clubs hadn’t, unlike the residents. Property prices had crashed, but unlike the rest of Britain, it wasn’t the global recession that had sunk prices to an all-time low, it was the scum that travelled from miles around to get off their face and into someone else’s knickers just to briefly forget how pointless their lives were.