NEARLY DEAD: the prequel to The Child Taker (Detective Alec Ramsay Series Book 0)

by Conrad Jones

  Voices brought him back to reality. They were talking about him. His injuries were severe, the pain was unbearable. He felt another injection being administered. A feeling of warmth spread through his veins. The pain faded and he drifted off like a helium filled balloon on the breeze. He felt the trolley being pushed, turned, reversed, and finally lifted. The wind touched his face for a few moments. He knew he was outside. Suddenly, the wind was gone and he heard doors being slammed. An engine started and sirens blared. The motion of the vehicle calmed him. He wasn’t sure if it was because it was taking him away from prison. Maybe that was a psychological lift. Or maybe it was the drugs in his bloodstream.

  He drifted away and only became aware when a doctor was moving his injured leg. Despite the drugs, he nearly jumped off the trolley. Voices told him to relax. He wanted to tell the voices to fuck off and stop twisting his leg but his motor functions were disabled. One voice stood out from the others. He wasn’t sure why but it triggered some far away memory in his mind. It was a good memory but it wouldn’t come into focus. His eyes flickered. There were glimpses of faces, nurses, doctors, a G4S guard. Someone was directing the process; his clothes were being removed. There was pain when he was moved, shooting pain that felt like it would make his brain explode. He felt his muscles spasm involuntarily. The cramps made his body twitch. He opened his eyes for a second and looked at the faces above him. A nurse saw him looking and smiled. Her lips moved but he didn’t hear what she said. He was listening to the voice, trying to remember. He knew that voice but couldn’t place it.

  ‘I need these handcuffs removed.’ The voice ordered. It wasn’t a request.

  ‘I’m not supposed to do that. I …’

  ‘Take them off or take him back to your prison hospital. This man need surgery and I’m not operating on a man wearing handcuffs. Take the fucking things off or get out of my hospital!’

  The voice held authority in it. He wasn’t messing about. There was a job to be done and it needed to be done urgently. Take the fucking things off or get out …

  The memory was there again like a phantom in the corner of his eye, when he turned to look at it, it was gone. Jack felt the cuffs being removed. It felt nice to be free of them. His eyes flickered open again for a second and he looked into the doctor’s eyes. Then he remembered where he knew that voice from. He felt an injection in the back of his hand and drifted away once more.

  chapter 36

  Matt walked into the visiting room and looked across the lines of tables. Sandra was sitting alone waiting at one of them. She looked as gorgeous as ever. Her hair was down and her top was tight beneath a black leather jacket. There was no sign of the kids. She half smiled and waved her hand, nervously. He wasn’t sure how he would feel when he saw her. She had sent several letters which were banal at best. There had been no apologies in them and that had pissed him off. He sort of understood why she had caved into the pressure from the police. The threat of losing their home had been too much for her to take. She had turned him and while he understood, he thought that he deserved an apology. He swallowed hard and walked across the room towards her. She didn’t stand up when he leaned across the table to kiss her. The smell of her perfume filled his senses and he could feel himself growing hard. He had missed her touch at night. She turned her cheek away. It wasn’t a warm reception, more like kissing a distant aunt. He was surprised and disappointed by her reaction. They had always been physically attracted to each other, no matter what but now she was cold to touch.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you think I am?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Matt said, begrudgingly. ‘Silly question. How are the kids?’

  ‘Fabulous,’ Sandra said, sarcastically. ‘Shelby wakes up crying every night and Lucas hasn’t come out of his room for days, except to go to school. He hasn’t spoken to me since you were arrested.’ She paused, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I think he blames me for you being in here.’

  ‘I can’t understand that, can you?’ Matt said, dryly.

  ‘Fuck you, Matt!’ she hissed. She stood up and her chair scraped on the floor. The PO’s looked on, concerned. ‘Don’t you fucking blame me for being in here! You’re in here because you were working for a drug dealer.’ She jabbed at the air with her index finger. ‘That’s nothing to do with me. That is on you and Charlie fucking McGee. Lucas thinks the sun shines out of your arsehole and I’m the bitch who turned you in, well let me tell you, Matt, he’ll find out one day exactly who you are and what you did. I won’t be able to keep it from him, his mates at school are asking questions already. My mum and dad are asking questions and what am I supposed to tell them?’

  ‘Tell them that you grassed me up and that’s why I’m banged up.’

  ‘How dare you blame this on me!’ she shouted. All the heads in the room were looking at them.

  ‘Sit down and calm down, San,’ Matt said, calmly. ‘I’m sorry, okay. Let’s start this all over again.’ He tried to smile and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not blaming you. It was my own fault. I knew the consequences if we got caught and I chose to take the gamble.’ She sat down in a huff and folded her arms. He reached across to touch her hand but she pulled it away. That hurt. He needed a demonstration of emotion, no matter how small. Just something to make him feel human again.

  ‘Did you really know the consequences, Matt?’ she scowled. ‘Did you really know the consequences?’ she sniffled. He didn’t answer, just looked her in the eyes and shrugged. ‘Do you think that this is it? Do you think that this is all it is?’

  ‘What do you mean, San?’ he sighed.

  ‘This,’ she waved her arms. ‘Prison. Did you think that this was the only consequence because this is fuck all to what I’m putting up with on the outside? It’s me that must deal with our kids. It’s me who must deal with our family. It’s me who must deal with the sly looks at the school gate, listening to people gossiping about me. There she is, the gangster’s wife. No wonder she had such a nice car. I bet she has Botox, be nice to be able to afford it. I feel sorry for her kids. I’ve told mine not to talk to them. I don’t want my kids near druggies!’ She exaggerated their accents. ‘It goes on and on and never stops!’

  ‘I’m sorry, San.’

  ‘Jacob Graff thinks that they might freeze our bank accounts while they investigate you,’ she lowered her voice and leaned forward. ‘How the fucking hell am I going to pay the mortgage if they do that?’

  ‘I’m sorry, San.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. What more can I say?’

  ‘Try and think of something else to say except you’re sorry.’ She wiped tears from her cheeks. Mascara was smudged at the corners. ‘I know you’re fucking sorry but it doesn’t help me, does it?’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  ‘Why won’t it? What if it does?’

  ‘Your mum and dad will look after you and the kids,’ Matt tried to calm her. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Mum and Dad are pensioners living in a terraced house that they have re-mortgaged twice to bail out my twat of a brother!’ she hissed. ‘How the fucking hell are they going to be able to help me and the kids? There’s enough money in the bank to pay the mortgage for the next nine months and then what am I going to do, Matt?’

  ‘I’ll sort something out, don’t worry.’

  ‘Erm, hello!’ she said, sarcastically. ‘Earth to Matt, Earth to Matt. Are you receiving me?’ she frowned. ‘You’re in fucking prison, Matt and from what that useless wanker, Jacob Graff has told me, you will be for the next ten years.’ She shrugged and looked into his eyes. ‘The money will last nine months. Ten years minus nine months is a lot of fucking mortgage payments.’ She stifled a sob. ‘What the fuck am I going to do?’

  ‘I’ll have a word with some friends,’ Matt said, quietly.

  ‘Friends?’ Sandra repeated. ‘What kind of friends will you have a word with?’

  ‘Just friends.’

&nb
sp; ‘Drug dealing friends?’ she snapped. ‘The kind of friends that could get me and the kids thrown out of the house for associating with them? Do you know that they think I’m complicit in all this? They will be watching me and if I make one wrong move, I’ll be in here and our kids will be in care. I can’t take a single penny from your friends, Matt.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘That is the problem. You don’t think. You didn’t think about any of this shit while you were running around thinking you were El fucking Chapo did you?’ She paused for a breath and rubbed the corner of her eyes again. ‘I’m not sure if I can do this, Matt.’ She stood up and walked away quickly without looking back.

  ‘San!’ Matt called after her. All eyes in the room stared at him again. ‘San!’ She didn’t stop. She reached the door and officer Clough let her out with a sly smile on his face. ‘Sandra!’ he shouted, but she was gone.

  chapter 37

  The body dogs jumped out of the van and sat down, excitedly, their tails wagging. Their handlers were talking to Will Naylor, who gestured with his hands where they should begin. Alec didn’t think that it mattered where they started. He knew that there were bodies on the farm. There had to be. The video library went back decades. If the youngsters in the videos were alive, they would have grown up and complained to the police. At least some of them would. Moving a dead body is a risky business and no sensible criminal would take the chance unless there was no other option. Burying the victims on the farm would be the easy option. They were nearby and he knew it.

  The handlers started their sweep of the area. Alec had ruled out the outbuildings for now. The smell of decomposition would make its way to the surface eventually. There was plenty of land to bury bodies where no one would ever smell decay. No human anyway, but the body dogs could. He watched them sniffing at the ground excitedly. Their handlers seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as their dogs. Will was on his mobile chasing up any new information that had come in. Alec liked him. He was keen and eager to learn. He didn’t know it all and he didn’t pretend to. It was easy to mould a detective like that. He didn’t want a team full of yes-men. That would stifle their development. He just wanted to make them the best that they could be.

  Alec pushed his hands into his raincoat pockets and walked towards the outbuildings. From their shape, he assumed that there had been a barn, some stables and maybe a machine shed for storing tractors and the like. The fields beyond were a mixture of cattle grazing and rapeseed[EM28]. In the far distance, flaming chimneys glowed from Ellesmere Port oil refinery. He reckoned the land around the farm was about twenty-acres. It was being farmed. Only the land immediately around the farmhouse was untended. He made a note to find out who farmed the land in the close vicinity. They may have seen people coming and going. It narrowed the search area. A farmer would notice straightaway if the land he tended had been disturbed. The sudden appearance of broken earth would be spotted, whether it was in a cow field or amongst the crops. They had buried the bodies close to the farm; he was positive. He walked around the old stables and stopped at the edge of an untended field. The grasses were knee high and he stopped to take in the scene. Four white vans were abandoned in a line, almost hidden by grass and bushes. They had been parked many years ago, stripped and left to rot. The wheels were gone, doors and seats salvaged. Vegetation had grown through the space where the windscreens had been. To his right an old plough was rusting away next to an equally decayed tractor. They had been there for decades, just like the men[EM29] they were looking for. Alec guessed the farm equipment belonged to whoever had worked there before it became a paedophile nightmare. He envisaged an elderly couple who had worked the farm all their lives, grown old there, died there, and left it to their children who had no desire to be farmers; children who worked and lived in the city and had rented the farmhouse out to long term tenants, splitting up and selling the land to neighbouring farmers. It had happened all over the country. The last generation of farmers was literally that, the last generation. Rising at stupid-o’clock to milk cattle seven days a week for a few pennies on a pint was not what the younger generations wanted. It didn’t have the appeal of high paid jobs in the cities. He thought that whoever had rented or bought the farmhouse had done so with the specific intent to use it as a porn factory. They had spent weeks and months if not years searching for the perfect venue, isolated yet well positioned for the road networks. The only piece of the puzzle that he hadn’t worked out yet, was why they had left it in such a hurry. Prison or death were the most obvious.

  He walked through the grass towards the vans and studied them. They were all Ford Transit models from the seventies onwards. The early model had round headlights, the later square. He moved closer to look at the number plates, only one remained. It was fixed to the latest model, probably from the late nineties, he thought. The engine was exposed but it was still in place. All the other vehicles had been stripped by scavengers. He walked towards the van and leaned over the engine bay and looked inside. Rust had eaten most of the hull and the gearbox was clearly visible. The others were in a similar state apart from the nineties model. He looked inside the engine bay and saw what he was looking for. Reaching in, he rubbed oil and dirt from a silver plate that was riveted to the hull. The VIN-number was still there.

  Two ducks flapped overhead noisily and he looked to see where they had come from. A hundred yards away to his right, hidden from the farm by a slope, he noticed that a clump of trees occupied a dip between two fields. A stone wall ran north into the distance and a barbed wire fence ran south towards the city. He walked towards the trees and neared the rotting tractor, stopping to look at it. The huge rear tyres were flat and torn, holes the size of a fist had appeared. There was no cab and he wondered how cold and uncomfortable it would have been, driving it through the winter.

  ‘Guv!’ Alec heard Will calling him from the farmyard. Another brace of ducks took to the air. He looked down at the coppice and saw water glimmering at the centre. There was a pond there. Alec decided that Will could wait and walked down the hill towards the trees. The lay of the land meant that the pond had been formed by surface water running from the gradients surrounding it. Long grass and shrubbery covered the slopes and barbed wire separated farmland from the coppice. Farmers didn’t want their animals getting stuck in the trees and stumbling into the water. He walked further and reached the barbed wire fence. Touching it with his hand, he used a fencepost to support his weight as he climbed between the wire. A barb caught his trousers, ripped the material, and scratched the skin. He swore beneath his breath as he stood up on the other side. The ground beneath his feet became spongy, decomposing leaves and twigs had formed a layer above the soil. The undergrowth became thicker as he neared the water’s edge. He pushed a sapling to the side to take a better look. Across the pond, Alec could see a scar on the land, an overgrown gulley that ran from the water through the trees. ‘Guv!’

  ‘On my way,’ Alec muttered. He took another look around and then turned and walked back up the hill, glancing at the Transits briefly. His brain was churning like a washing machine as he made his way around the stables. When he turned the corner, Will was on the phone. Alec’s mobile began to ring. ‘Are you calling me?’ Alec said, looking at his screen. The screen said, DC Naylor.

  ‘I was shouting you,’ Will said, ending the call. ‘I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘What is it?’ Alec asked.

  ‘The dogs have swept the farmyard, nothing yet, guv.’ Will tiptoed through a muddy patch to reach Alec. ‘And Google called.’

  ‘What has he got?’

  ‘The farm was owned by a family called Critchley as far back as he can go. The surviving relatives were Mary and Dennis Critchley, both are in their seventies. They’re brother and sister and both are in nursing homes with advanced dementia. They sold off the workable land in the eighties but still own the farmhouse. The house was leased out to a local doctor, named Thomas from
1989 onwards until he died in July two years ago.’ Alec nodded. He didn’t think that they would just stumble across the name they wanted. [EM30]It was never that simple but if the doctor had rented the farm for the best part of twenty-years, then he had something to do with it. ‘The place had stood empty until a development company called Henderson’s Homes bought it. If the doctor is our man, then it looks like a dead end.’

  ‘He didn’t do this alone.’ Alec walked back towards the stables. He gestured for Will to follow him. ‘Whoever organised this operation was a clever man and clever men aren’t easy to catch. They think of everything that can go wrong, plan for the worst but hope for the best.’

  ‘I’m not following you,’ Will said, stumbling over a discarded brick.

  ‘Has Google looked into Dr Thomas?’

  ‘Yes. He was a consultant at the Royal for twenty years and then he set up his own practice as a GP in Halewood. He ran it until he died.’

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘His death certificate says swine-flu apparently.’

  ‘That’s the downside of being GP. Contagious diseases. They can’t avoid them.’ Alec frowned.

  ‘What’s up, guv?’

  ‘That doesn’t fit the puzzle. Swine flu,’ he said rubbing the dimple on his chin with his index finger. ‘He would have been very ill but he had [EM31]time to arrange for someone to clean up, get rid of the evidence, get rid of the girls.’ He put his hands in his pockets and walked towards the rusting vans. ‘Follow me and bring your phone.’ Will followed, picking his footing carefully. Alec made for the nineties vehicle. ‘See these vans, same make, different models, different years.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘That is a seventies model, that one is early eighties, that one is late eighties and that is nineties.’