HE WILL FIND YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist

by Charlie Gallagher

  HE WILL

  FIND YOU

  An absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist

  CHARLIE GALLAGHER

  First published 2019

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.

  ©Charlie Gallagher

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  THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH AND POLICE SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  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

  OTHER BOOKS BY CHARLIE GALLAGHER

  FROM CHARLIE GALLAGHER

  VOCABULARY

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  Author’s Note

  I am inspired by what I do and see in my day job as a front-line police detective, though my books are entirely fictional. I am aware that the police officers in my novels are not always shown positively. They are human and they make mistakes. This is sometimes the case in real life too, but the vast majority of officers are honest and do a good job in trying circumstances. From what I see on a daily basis, the men and women who wear the uniform are among the very finest, and I am proud to be part of one of the best police forces in the world.

  Charlie Gallagher

  Chapter 1

  Sunday

  Diane Cummings heard the brakes squeal and felt the car lurch at the same time. It rocked her forwards gently. Her head had been back against the headrest, her eyelids fluttering closed. The early morning daze still hadn’t worn off.

  ‘What the hell . . .’ her husband muttered next to her. She opened her eyes. They were just a few metres from the entrance to the car park where John would drop her off. She was due at work, already running late. Her eyes were dragged to movement across the front of their car — a small boy, ten or eleven years old maybe. He looked slight, his walk more of a stumble. He was in a grey top with a purple hood, his hair a dirty brown. She could make out freckles on a filthy face. His bottoms matched his top, they were grey too, but the purple detail was ad-hoc, like a splatter pattern. As he moved to the other side she could see he was barefooted.

  ‘Jesus, John, that’s blood!’ She pushed open her door. The crossing in front of their car was raised and she stumbled a little as she made her way around. Light raindrops combined with a chilly breeze snapped her fully awake. ‘Hey! You okay?’ she called out. The face that turned to her was wide-eyed and terrified. She raised her hands, palms out and slowed her walk. He looked like he was poised to run. ‘Are you hurt?’

  Her husband’s door popped open. ‘He okay, Di?’

  She ignored him. The boy had stopped but he had only half turned. He looked like he was waiting for a starting gun to sprint away. She had edged a little further along the front of the car and could feel the heat from the idling engine. The blood on the boy was thick, she could see that now, but it was dry too. The staining was darkest on his head. It looked as if someone had tipped up a bucket of the stuff and it had splashed down his body, flattening his hair against his head. She could see dried streaks where he had swept it off his forehead and his hands were stained too. His hood was one big stain and even his feet had smatterings of the stuff.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ she said again. She smiled and nodded, as if it was okay for him to tell her. He looked at her, his eyes still wide but it wasn’t fear that filled them now; they seemed to well up with moisture. His lips quivered. Maybe he was trying to form words? Di was patient, still standing in front of the car as the fan clicked on to cool the engine. The boy’s eyes snapped towards the sound. It was the starting signal he had been waiting for. He darted away and broke into a sprint.

  ‘John, call the police!’ she called out. She took off after the boy. There was the shriek of brakes and a beeping horn as cars pulled up behind theirs. This was Canterbury’s central shopping district, but it was early on a Sunday morning and the impatience was likely to be from shop staff running late. Diane pursued the boy along a route that led to the High Street. The main bus station was immediately on their right, the rear entrance to some shops on their left. The path was sheltered by a roof, held up by concrete pillars. At its end, the pavement turned sharp right where it met with a window display then cut back left. The boy was nearly at this point. She slowed to a walk as she struggled to get her breath back. The boy had stopped too at a window into Fenwick’s department store. The display featured a male mannequin embracing a female version in a glitzy dress. Now there was a little boy sat in front of them, squatting on his heels. He looked even smaller than he had just a few moments before. He lifted his head as she approached. She hung back.

  ‘Hey! You don’t have to run from me, lad. I’m not going to hurt you, okay?’ She was still trying to catch her breath. ‘You’re a lot faster!’ she breathed, ‘I’m no threat to you.’

  The boy looked up at her but said nothing.

  ‘Are you English? Do you speak English?’ she asked. A bus pulled into the station and its doors hissed open. A couple of bored-looking passengers stepped out onto the pavement. They wore headphones and their faces were down. They split and filed away without casting her or the boy a glance. Diane looked back towards John and the car. It was closer; he had pulled it forward and parked in an area marked for taxis and set the hazard lights flashing. He was out on the pavement with his phone against his head. She could see that he was talking into it.

  She turned back to the boy squatting with his back against the window. His legs were bent, stretching the fabric of his clothes over bony knees that pointed towards her. She was certain the staining was blood; nothing else looked like it — wet or dry. She’d seen enough of it as a retired midwife now happy to top up her pension with a simple retail job. She didn’t think the blood was his, though. There was too much of it and it didn’t seem to be leaking from any wound that she could see. The boy’s expression was a rigid mask of fear that didn’t look like it was going to drop away any time soon. His chest rose and fell fast enough for her to know that he was panicking, clutching for breath. His muscles would be saturated in oxygen, ready to propel him away at any moment. She didn’t
move any closer. She would wait for the police to arrive. There wasn’t much else she could do.

  A loud thud snatched her attention towards a black wooden pod that had blended into the early morning shadows. The boy noticed it, too, and his eyes sprung even wider. A man walked calmly around to where the front of the kiosk had fallen open to form a serving hatch. On the side was daubed Lost Sheep Coffee. He wore a fleece with a matching slogan and he sent her a smile that dropped away quickly. He looked from her to the little boy squatted against the window and frowned.

  ‘He okay?’ The man walked over. He never took his eyes off the boy.

  ‘He won’t speak. I’ve asked him. I just found him like this, he walked from Dane John Gardens, just crossed the road in front of us.’

  ‘That’s blood though, right?’ The man moved beyond her, closer to the boy, who now stood up, his hands reached back to lie flat against the window, like he was ready to use it to push off and away. He stared at the man, every inch of him tense. The man must have sensed the latent panic and took a step back. ‘You okay little mate? That blood yours? We just want to know you’re okay.’ The boy bit down on his bottom lip. His head snatched to the noise of another bus that settled like a spitting cat. ‘Just stay there, okay? You hungry?’

  The boy’s eyes followed the man as he walked back to his pod. He was back just a few seconds later, unwrapping a muffin and with a bottle of water tucked under his arm. He put the items on the pavement a few metres from where frightened eyes still followed his every movement. Then he backed away and he stopped next to Diane. The boy’s focus flicked from the food and drink to the two adults. He scurried forward and snatched the items before backing up again to the window so sharply that it flexed as he bumped off it. He tore at the remainder of the packet like something feral and then froze as the window behind him pulsed suddenly to reflect the blue strobe lights of an arriving police car.

  Diane breathed a sigh of relief.

  Chapter 2

  Detective Sergeant Maddie Ives had decided that walking from Canterbury Police Station was by far the quicker way to get to the location of the call. Much quicker than trying to take a car out in the traffic, something she had come to detest even in her short time working the area. It was before 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning and the cars were already at a crawl between the roundabouts at the top of the town. The medieval city had hardly been designed with modern-day traffic in mind.

  Maddie walked through a damp subway that led under the bumper-to-bumper traffic. The draught seemed stronger down here, colder too. She pulled her jacket in closer and lifted the collar. Halfway along the tunnel was a bundle of homelessness with a cup next to it. Someone was wrapped in tight. She dropped a couple of coins into the cup and a dog’s head lifted from under part of the cover. She met its bright eyes. ‘You’re welcome,’ she smiled.

  Her feet scuffed, as the walkway became an incline and the sound echoed off the tiled walls. Once she emerged back into the early morning light she discovered that although her method might be the quickest, it would not be the driest. Winter was dragging its heels. The emergence of spring was only hinted at in a subtle changing of colour and the appearance of some hardy shoots in Dane John Gardens that she now passed to her right. The rain was sudden and the freezing wind behind it enough to fool anyone into thinking it was still mid-winter, not the middle of March.

  She turned left into the bus station to find a parked police car and a gaggle of people at the far end. She’d taken a short phone call to summon her to this point, the sort of call that started with a uniform sergeant apologising for making it in the first place and then saying that he didn’t know if he should have called at all. Since her move to Major Crime, she had quickly become used to taking calls from sergeants who were at something they didn’t like the feel of and had no idea what to do next. This particular incident concerned a young boy. He was barefoot, mute, and covered in blood. She could understand why it had immediately felt wrong. It being a Sunday, she was the most senior officer for the east side of the county and had been asked to attend in the first instance. The Duty Inspector was not yet summoned. For that to happen would typically involve a dead body, or at least a good likelihood of one, and nobody could guarantee that yet. Today she just happened to have been in a police station that was hardly five hundred metres from the boy in question; she could hardly complain, and the description had certainly piqued her interest.

  She recognised the same uniform sergeant who had handed over a rape case a few weeks before. ‘Hey, Joe.’ She proffered her hand. Joe’s handshake was firm but freezing cold.

  ‘Morning, Maddie. Again, sorry to call you lot out on a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Don’t be. What have you got?’

  ‘Pretty much as I said on the phone. A shop worker saw a boy covered in blood, walking barefoot towards the town. He came from the Dane John Gardens area. He hasn’t said a word to anyone. He was hungry, though. Some fella runs a coffee pod over there and he’s given him something to eat and drink. I’ve tried to talk to our boy but he’s not having any of it. He looks terrified.

  ‘Covered in blood?’

  ‘It certainly looks like blood. A lot of it, too — like the kid’s been bathing in the stuff. I don’t think it’s his. He won’t let me get close enough to see if he’s injured, but if it were his I don’t reckon he’d be standing. It looks dry, too.’

  ‘Okay. Did you get the actions done we talked about on the phone?’

  ‘Yeah. The park’s taped off best we can, it’s not an easy scene to hold though — it’s massive. I called CSI and they’re on their way. I also spoke to the FCR and we’ve got no child mispers in the county at all at the moment. They did say they’d check further afield for us. With regard to violent disturbances, we had two in the city overnight involving blood, both night-time economy calls. Both at pubs. No kids involved as you would expect and not enough claret to be linked to our boy.’

  ‘And RTCs?’

  ‘A fatal on the A2. A long way from here. Car versus motorway bridge. All passengers have been accounted for. Did you want us to consider a media appeal?’

  Maddie looked beyond the sergeant to where the group of people at the far end of the pavement had already swelled in number. ‘No. Let’s see if we can get him to give us a clue first. Contact the inspector at the FCR though, make sure he has every detail so he can let us know if anything comes in that might be linked.’

  Joe nodded.

  ‘In the meantime, I’ll go and introduce myself.’

  The group of people included a couple of women in the uniform of a chain of chemists. Their place of work had a rear entrance that Maddie could see as she approached. They had been so desperate to come out for a look they had left their coats, but still stayed to gawp at the small boy, scared that they might miss something in the thirty seconds it would take to go back and get them. Instead they shivered as they talked among themselves, their attention flicking between the uniform cops and the small boy backed against a glass window.

  ‘We need everyone to back off,’ Maddie announced. ‘He’s scared enough, don’t you think?’ She was careful not to raise her voice beyond the level necessary to address them all. All eyes turned to her. There was hesitation and some dirty looks, but she stared right back until they got the message. They did move back, some as far as the chemist’s rear door. One disappeared only to come back with a handful of coats. Maddie turned back to the boy. The two uniform officers stepped back too. She wiped the rain from her brow. Her hair was tied up but she could feel the water running down the back of her neck. It was uncomfortable and it was cold. She noted the boy’s bare feet sticking out from under him as he squatted against the window. He had to be freezing.

  Maddie squatted down herself, close enough not to have to raise her voice but not so close for him to fear she might reach out and grab him.

  ‘I’m a police officer. My name’s Maddie.’ She made a show of looking around. ‘It’s cold out here. Wet to
o. I’ve asked someone to get you some new clothes. Is that okay?’

  The boy stared back. The rain seemed heavier and dripped from the overhang just a few steps behind. She heard a bus pull up, sloshing through standing water as it came to a halt. The boy still didn’t react. Maddie studied the blood for herself. It looked like it was centred on his hair, as if a bowlful had been tipped on him from above and it had cascaded down, splashing on his clothes and feet. He had been bare foot when it had happened, she could see that. He was slight in build and he held himself like a boy rather than a young man. On the phone, the sergeant had guessed him at ten to twelve years old. She felt that was about right. On first impressions she fancied him as a witness rather than an offender, but she was keeping an open mind.

  ‘Can you understand me okay? We’re here to help you. That’s what we do. That’s why I’m here. I’d like to make you warm and to take you somewhere safe. Will you come with me?’ Maddie was still squatting. She wrung her hands, careful not to reach out towards him. Her thighs were starting to burn a little but she wanted to stay low and in the least threatening posture she could manage. The boy tried to back away a little further. Maddie thought he had understood her. She assumed he didn’t want to go anywhere with her. For now, at least.

  ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to talk to me. I have an idea . . . you see that bottle?’ She gestured at the empty water bottle beside him. The boy looked down at it. ‘I’m going to ask you a question. If you touch that bottle then I’ll take it you are saying yes. If you want to say no to me, you push that bottle right over, okay? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not here to hurt you.’ She did her best to give a reassuring smile. The boy looked down at the bottle again. He reached out and pulled it closer and more central so it sat on the floor in front of him. Maddie could see a food wrapper there too.

  ‘Can I get you some more water? And maybe something more to eat?’ The boy’s eyes dropped to the bottle. They lifted back to Maddie. He looked to be chewing on his lip. Maddie nodded. ‘I’ll take that as a yes! Give me one second, okay?’