COLD KILL

Neil White

Cold Kill

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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COLD KILL. Copyright © Neil White 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

Neil White asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847561299

Ebook Edition © MAY 2011 ISBN: 9780007435906

Version 2018-07-19

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

The evening was bright and warm, the sun dipping behind…

Chapter Two

It was a few days later when Jack Garrett got…

Chapter Three

It was just after nine-thirty as Laura McGanity looked around…

Chapter Four

Jack put his camera away as he watched the activity…

Chapter Five

Laura leaned against her car and peeled off her forensic…

Chapter Six

Jack was smiling by the time he reached the court,…

Chapter Seven

Laura chewed her lip as Carson approached the home of…

Chapter Eight

Laura tapped her pen against her hand as she sat…

Chapter Nine

Laura was in Carson’s slipstream as he rushed into the…

Chapter Ten

Jack strode into the offices of the Blackley Telegraph, a…

Chapter Eleven

Jack had to park some distance from the police station…

Chapter Twelve

Carson waited until they were clear of the journalists before…

Chapter Thirteen

Jack was sitting in his car, writing the story on…

Chapter Fourteen

Jack checked the clock. Just gone nine. Bobby was playing…

Chapter Fifteen

He rewound the footage again, as he had done for…

Chapter Sixteen

Jack’s movements felt sluggish as he read the words on…

Chapter Seventeen

Light streamed through the open curtain, making Jack groan. He…

Chapter Eighteen

Jack threw his car keys onto the table. Bobby was…

Chapter Nineteen

Carson was first into the mortuary, pushing the door open…

Chapter Twenty

Jack went to the Blackley Telegraph office first. Dolby was…

Chapter Twenty-One

Laura checked her notes, just to make sure that she…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Jack was outside the court when he managed to speak…

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jack had texted Laura to let her know that he’d…

Chapter Twenty-Four

Laura sat at the back of the Incident Room as…

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Incident Room was still busy from the lecture Carson…

Chapter Twenty-Six

Laura glanced out of the car window and felt a…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jack was at the table, hunched over his laptop, writing…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Laura was looking down as she started the jog up…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Nothing was clear anymore. He drove quickly in the van,…

Chapter Thirty

Jack had finished the article for Dolby and was drinking…

Chapter Thirty-One

Jack looked out of the window. He was standing a…

Chapter Thirty-Two

The morning arrived as a stream of sunlight through the…

Chapter Thirty-Three

Jack had been distracted by the emails, because the first…

Chapter Thirty-Four

Rupert glanced towards the building that had been his practice…

Chapter Thirty-Five

Jack trotted across the road to the court building. He…

Chapter Thirty-Six

Rupert checked his watch, nearly eleven-thirty, and looked up at…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Some kids looked at Jack’s car as he drove onto…

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The noise in his head was like a drum-roll as…

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Laura checked her watch as Joe drove along the Cleveleys…

Chapter Forty

As Jack arrived home, he saw that there was someone…

Chapter Forty-One

Adam Carter glanced around the house when he went inside,…

Chapter Forty-Two

Joe was on the phone to Carson, updating him, when…

Chapter Forty-Three

As the sound of Adam’s car disappeared into the hills,…

Chapter Forty-Four

The streets of Whitcroft seemed quiet as Jack drove onto…

Chapter Forty-Five

Jack continued to drive around the estate, looking for something…

Chapter Forty-Six

Jack drove around the estate, feeling better about his article.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Jack held up the wine bottle to the light. Probably…

Chapter Forty-Eight

The morning had been a long time coming.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Jack woke up filled with determination, the emails fresh in…

Chapter Fifty

Laura leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes.

Chapter Fifty-One

Jack paced up and down outside the entrance to the…

Chapter Fifty-Two

Jack was still outside the police station, sitting in his…

Chapter Fifty-Three

Emma’s gate didn’t offer much security, Jack thought. Old wood,…

Chapter Fifty-Four

As Laura and Joe approached David Hoyle’s home, Laura shook…

Chapter Fifty-Five

Jack was spotted as soon as he approached Mike Corley’s…

Chapter Fifty-Six

When they arrived at the police station, Laura didn’t head…

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Jack ran into the Blackley Telegraph office, setting off the…

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Laura dropped Ida and her daughter at the rest home…

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Laura lifted her head off the floor and tried to…

Chapter Sixty

Jack was outside the bar that had once been called…

Chapter Sixty-One

Jack went for a drive.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Emma was sitting on her doorstep when Jack got there,…

Chapter Sixty-Three

Carson drove quickly away from the station.

Chapter Sixty-Four

‘Don Roberts has got him,’ Jack said, as he drove…

Chapter Sixty-Five

It was dark, almost pitch black, as Jack approached the…

Chapter Sixty-Six

Carson banged on Don’s door.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Strong hands gripped Jack’s shoulders and pushed him against the…

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Carson waited outside Don’s house, looking down the road. Laura…

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Carson had called up more marked cars and they were…

Chapter Seventy

Jack waited for the swing, for the drop, his nails…

Chapter Seventy-One

Laura ran for the front door. Carson and a uniformed…

Chapter Seventy-Two

The next few days seemed to pass in a blur…

Read on for In Conversation with Neil White

Dead Silent

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by the Same Author

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The evening was bright and warm, the sun dipping behind the trees that lined the small copse between the houses, so that the light was filtered, the strips of brightness catching the loop and dance of midges that flitted between the leaves.

He looked at his watch. Nearly time. He knew her routine. Saturday night. A walk to the bus stop on the main road and then into town. She always passed the copse on her route, her head down, rushing to start her evening.

He paced, just out of view, his breaths fast, his chest tight with excitement. Thoughts of her came to him like whispers, so quiet that he could hardly hear them, but with each night they got stronger, so that the whispers became louder, like white noise, a rush, pressing him on.

He fought the urges sometimes, when his drive was low, but those moments were rare, and it was the images of her that drove him. Her hair, blonde and over her shoulders, gleaming against her pale skin. Her small upturned nose. Teeth bright and straight. He smiled to himself when he thought of her skin. Soft skin. Taut. Now that it was time, the noises pulled back, as if they were watching from the wings, breaths held in anticipation.

He knew this one would be different. It would be the strongest buzz of all. No buried body. No burnt out car. No trips to the lake, bound up in chains. This was going to be the best, because he knew it had always been leading to this.

He could almost hear her. The flick of her hair in the breeze, the rustle of her clothes as she walked. Then he realised that the tap-taps he could hear were not the fast drums of his heartbeat or the hum of his pulse. They were the click of her heels, fast steps that seemed to echo along the quiet suburban street. His breaths became deeper through his nose, his chest rising and falling, and he felt himself grow hard. He checked his gloves. No rips. No tears. Nowhere for any trace evidence to escape. He thought about his movements one last time. He had thought of little else all week.

It was time.

He started walking as the clicks got louder, so that he would be on the same side of the street as her when she appeared. As she came into view, she gave him a nervous look, but then she noticed the polo shirt, the police crest on his breast, and the black-and-white ribbon around his cap, a black soft-top.

He smiled, a quick flash of his teeth, and stepped on to the road, so that she stayed on the pavement, the copse to her side. ‘Evening,’ he said, as she got closer. His words almost caught in his throat as her perfume drifted towards him. The scent of flowers, light on the breeze. He had to stop himself from reaching out to run a finger along her neck. Don’t go too soon.

She flickered a smile at him but then looked down again. He followed her gaze. Short black skirt. Legs shaved smooth, tapered into silver heels. He had to swallow, his heartbeat fast, his mouth dry.

His hands were on his belt, fingering for the release of his cuffs. He had practised the move until it was perfect. Speed was key. He had to cut down on the noise.

She was alongside him now. He looked quickly along the street. There was no one around. There were houses, but why would anyone be looking out? If he was quick, they wouldn’t suspect anything.

He ran at her, his shoulder ramming into hers, knocking her off balance. His hand clamped around her mouth and he kept his legs moving, pushing her along the path that ran between the trees, her feet pedalling in the air. He pulled his cuffs free and clicked one loop onto her left wrist, loving the click as it went tight around the bone. She was starting to fight now, her head thrashing against his glove. He couldn’t release his hand, she would scream, and so all he could do was keep his legs pumping, lifting her along, waiting until the path disappeared into the shadows, where the trees grew thicker.

One of her shoes came off. He would have to get it afterwards.

He was in the trees now. There was a small stream that ran at the bottom of a slope, and he knew that he was well hidden down here. He was close to the path, but he would be quick, he knew that.

The thump of his boots on the path changed into the soft sweep of his feet as he made his way further through the undergrowth. When he got far enough away from the path, he threw her onto the floor, his gloved hand still over her mouth.

She started to fight, flailing with the cuff, the loose metal nearly catching him in the face. He pushed her face down and gripped the cuff, yanking both her arms behind her back. A quick throw of the metal and he heard the clicks again as it locked.

He pushed her onto her back, her arms cuffed beneath her, and his free hand began to scrabble around for dirt and leaves. She had her teeth clenched, but he pulled down on her jaw and pushed some in, before reaching down for more, jamming it in as far as it would go, her eyes getting wider, her chest bucking as she coughed and choked.

His hand did the same between her legs, pushing in dirt, stones, pieces of shrubbery.

Then he started to pull at his belt, his other hand still over her mouth. He groaned as he gripped himself.

He moved his other hand from her mouth to her neck and began to press. As tears rolled down her cheeks, as her legs kicked, as he pressed down harder, his moans became louder.

Chapter Two

It was a few days later when Jack Garrett got the call.

He was on the Whitcroft estate, for an assignment for the local paper’s newest editor, Dolby Wilkins, who had been brought in to cut costs and increase circulation. Dolby was all shiny good looks and old money confidence, always in jeans and a casual linen jacket, and his mantra was that two types of stories sold newspapers: sex and prejudice. The local paper left the sex to the red top nationals, so all Dolby had left was prejudice. So he went for the social divide, the quick fix, shock stories over good copy. Immigrants breaking laws, or people on benefits making a decent life for themselves. The first thing he did was to have his business cards printed. That told Jack all he needed to know.

Jack had been staring through his windscreen, uncomfortable with the assignment. He knew that repackaging poverty as idleness got the tills ticking, but Dolby was new to Blackley and he didn’t understand the place. He hadn’t seen how a tough old cotton town had been stripped of its industry, with nothing to replace it, just traces of its past lying around the town, dismembered, like body parts; huge brick mill buildings, some converted into retail units that held craft fairs on summer weekends, while others had been left to crumble, stripped of their lead, the wire and cables ripped out of the walls, cashed in for cigarette money, the light spilling in through partial roof collapses. The stories were more about no prospects in hard times, but sympathy for the unlucky didn’t sell as many papers.

Jack understood that the Blackley Telegraph was a business, but he was a freelance journalist, not a businessman, the court stories his thing, with the occasional crime angle as a feature. But the paper bought his stories, shedding staff writers and using freelancers to take up the slack, some of them just kids fresh out of college or unpublished writers looking to build a CV. So Jack had agreed to write the story of the estate, bashed out on an old laptop in his cottage in Turners Fold, a small forgotten place nestled in the Lancashire hills, a few miles from Blackley.

The Whitcroft estate was on the edge of Blackley, the first blight on the drive in. Built on seven hills that were once green and rolling, Blackley seemed like the ugly big brother to Turners Fold. Traces of former wealth could still be seen in the Victorian town centre though, where three-storey fume-blackened shop buildings were filled by small town jewellers and century-old outfitters that competed with the glass and steel frames of the high street. The wide stone steps and Roman portico of the town hall overlooked the main shopping street and boasted of grander times, when men in long waistcoats and extravagant sideburns twirled gold watches from their pockets.

The Whitcroft estate had been built in the good times, an escape from the grid-like strips of terraced housing that existed elsewhere in the town. Here, it was all cul-de-sacs and crescents, sweeps of privet, indoor toilets, but it had divided the town, had become the escape route for the whites after the Asian influx in the sixties. Mosques and minarets were sprinkled amongst the warehouses and wharf buildings now, the call to prayer the new church bells, and so the Whitcroft estate had become white-flight for those who couldn’t afford the countryside.

Jack pondered all of this as he sat in his car, a 1973 Triumph Stag in Calypso Red. Young mothers walked their prams on a road that circled the estate. The morning sun gave the place a glow and highlighted the deep green of the hedges, the gleam of the brickwork, and brought out the vivid violets and pinks and reds of the flower baskets. He could hear laughs and screams from the local school, which he could see through some blue railings on the curve of the road.

But that was just gloss.

The entrance to the estate was marked by two rows of shops that faced each other across gum-peppered paving stones, making a funnel for the cold winds that blew in from the moors that the estate overlooked. A Chinese takeaway and a grocer occupied three units, along with a bookmaker’s and a post office. On the otherside, a launderette and a chemist. There were grilles on the windows and the doors looked old and dirty.

Behind the shops were blocks of housing, four houses to each small row, with pebble-dashed first floors and England stickers in the windows. Some had paint on the walls or wooden boards over the windows. They formed cul-de-sacs that were connected by privet-lined ginnels, so that the quick routes were the most dangerous. Crisp packets and old beer cans lodged themselves in the hedges.

There were small signs of affluence though. The streets were busy with workmen in overalls and young office girls heading out to work, calling in for newspapers or cigarettes at the grocer’s. There were porch extensions, gleaming double-glazing, new garden walls. The estate wasn’t just for lost causes. A private security van patrolled every thirty minutes, with bald men in black jackets who stared at Jack as they went past. Maybe Dolby wasn’t going to get the article he wanted.

Jack climbed out of his car and wandered towards the shop, looking for some local views. Outside the shop, a young mother stood over her pram with a cigarette in her hand, cheap gold flashing on each finger, her hair pulled back tightly.

Jack gave the door of the shop a push. It let out a tinkle as he went in, and he pretended to browse through the magazines until the shop became empty. He went to the counter.

The man behind it barely looked up. Middle-aged and with a cigarette-stained moustache, he was flicking through a newspaper and only stopped reading when Jack coughed.

‘Jack Garrett,’ he said, and tried a smile. ‘I’m a reporter, writing about the estate.’ He pointed towards the windows. ‘What’s it like for you, with the grilles and the bars?’

He stared at Jack, weighing up whether to answer or not. ‘The council ruined this place,’ he said, eventually.

‘How so?’

‘Because they turned it into a dumping ground,’ he said. ‘Have everyone in one place, so they said.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘More than twenty years,’ he said. ‘I inherited it from my father, back when this was a decent place to live.’

‘What went wrong?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like people want to work anymore. The young girls get a house when they get pregnant, but the father never moves in. Or, at least, that’s what they tell everyone, but I see them leaving in the morning.’

‘I see people heading out to work,’ Jack said. ‘It doesn’t seem that destitute.’

‘There are still some people left that make me proud to live here, but it’s getting harder every day.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The kids,’ he said. ‘They hang around here all evening, circling customers on their bikes, asking people to buy their booze and fags for them, because I know most are too young. If I try and get rid of them, I get abuse. All my customers want is to come in and buy some milk or something, maybe some cans for later, but the kids put them off.’

‘Have you spoken to their parents?’ Jack said.

The shopkeeper gave a wry smile. ‘Drunk most of the time.’

Jack returned the smile and guessed his predicament. ‘You sell them the booze,’ he said.

‘They’d only go somewhere else for it. And they do mostly, stocking up on the three-for-two offers. They come here when they run out, or when they want to start early and don’t want to drive to the supermarket.’

‘Do the police come round much?’ Jack said.

The shopkeeper scoffed. ‘Hardly ever, and when they do, the kids treat it like a game, looking for a chase. They shout abuse and then starburst whenever the van doors open. Sometimes one of them trips and the police catch them, but nothing ever happens.’

‘Is that why the estate has private security?’ Jack said.

‘It makes people feel safer.’

‘Who pays for it?’

‘Whoever wants it.’

‘What about drugs?’ Jack said. ‘Could the police be doing more about that around here?’

‘No, not drugs around here,’ he said. ‘Maybe some weed, but it’s booze mainly. Always has been. I’m not saying that no one round here does drugs, but the kids that cycle around causing trouble aren’t on drugs. They’re pissed.’

‘You don’t paint a glowing picture,’ Jack said.

He nodded to the voice recorder in Jack’s hand. ‘And I bet you won’t either, by the time it makes the paper.’

When Jack started to protest, the shopkeeper jabbed his finger at the paper. ‘I read them as well as sell them, and I’ve seen the way the Telegraph has gone.’ Then he returned to whatever had occupied his attention before.

Jack turned away, frustrated, and left the shop. He watched the cars heading in and out of the estate. They were mainly old Vauxhalls and Fords, most driven by young men who didn’t look like they could afford the insurance. His phone buzzed in his pocket. When he checked the screen and saw that it was Dolby, he thought about not answering, but he knew he needed to keep on Dolby’s good side.

He pressed the button. ‘Dolby, what can I do for you?’

‘There’s been another murder,’ he said, his voice a little breathless. ‘A young woman.’

Jack paused as he tried to work out what he meant, but then his mind flashed back to the young woman found in a pipe by the reservoir on the edge of town a few weeks earlier, a gruesome find for a father and son on an angling trip.

‘Whereabouts?’

Dolby told him, and Jack realised that he was only half a mile away.

‘Do you want me to cover it?’ Jack said.

‘I’m not calling to spread the gossip,’ Dolby said, some irritation in his voice.

‘On my way,’ Jack said, and jabbed at the off button.

He gave the shopkeeper a smile, but there was no response.

Chapter Three

It was just after nine-thirty as Laura McGanity looked around at the scene in front of her and tried to shake away the nerves. Someone had died, and now it was for her to show that she deserved her sergeant stripes. Nine months in uniform, working in the community, but now she was back where she wanted to be, on the murder squad. And even though this was a tragedy, she felt a familiar excitement as she took in the blue-and-white police tape stretched tight around the trees and the huddle of police in boiler suits holding sticks, ready for the slow crawl through the undergrowth, looking for scraps of evidence – a footprint, a dropped piece of paper, maybe a snag of cloth on the thorns and branches. This was it, the start of the investigation, the human drama yet to unfold.