No Way Home

A dead body. A mysterious murder. A serial killer on the loose.

A taxi driver is found murdered in a remote part of Exeter. He is a family man, no enemies to be found. There is no physical evidence, except for dozens of fingerprints inside the cab. How will DS Peter Gayle ever track down his killer?

Then another cab driver is murdered. Now this isn’t just a case of one murder but a serial killer on the loose, once again…

DS Peter Gayle is back! Don’t miss the thrilling next book in Jack Slater’s brilliant crime series, perfect for fans of Angela Marsons and Rachel Abbott.

No Way Home

Jack Slater

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Also by Jack Slater

Nowhere to Run

No Place to Hide

JACK SLATER

Raised in a farming family in Northamptonshire, England, the author had a varied career before settling in biomedical science. He has worked in farming, forestry, factories and shops as well as spending five years as a service engineer.

Widowed by cancer at 33, he recently remarried in the Channel Islands, where he worked for several months through the summer of 2012.

He has been writing since childhood, in both fiction and non-fiction. No Way Home is his third crime novel in the DS Peter Gayle mystery series.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Book List

Author Bio

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Endpages

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Thanks once again to former Thames Valley Police Officer Rick Ell and his wife Christine for their invaluable advice on technical matters and to my wife Pru for…too much to list here.

Also to Charlotte Mursell and everyone else at HQ Digital for their hard work and insight and to Kathy Gale, who suggested I step onto this road in the first place. Although it’s a detour from the direction I was going in, it has been a joy getting to know Pete Gayle and his team and sharing their adventures and adversities.

Which brings me to you – the readers who have come along for the ride. Without you, there would be no point to this journey, so thank you for the interest you have taken in my work and all the messages of support I’ve received. I really appreciate you all. This last year has been a hell of a ride - long may it continue.

Dedication

For Kathy Gale with thanks for leading me, finally, in the right direction.

CHAPTER ONE

Lights glowed through the Yorkshire boarding of the big barn in front of them, gleaming on the cars, pickups and four-by-fours lined up on the wide expanse of the concrete cattle yard.

Detective Sergeant Pete Gayle, crouching in the shadows at the inner end of the short driveway that led to the yard, held up an open hand then closed all but one finger and waved towards the left. He held up the open hand again, then waved two fingers to the right. Eyes roaming the parked vehicles, he waited for the two flanking teams to report.

‘Bravo two, in position,’ came quietly through his earpiece..

‘Bravo three in position.’

‘Bravo one, received,’ he muttered into his radio. ‘Alpha. Sit rep?’

‘Give us forty seconds,’ DS Jim Hancock said quietly from the far side of the big barn, where he and his crew were approaching up an open field that sloped down steeply into the valley beyond.

‘Roger. Beta teams, close in.’ He raised himself up so he could see into the surrounding vehicles and began to move cautiously forward between them, his two PCs, Ben Myers and Jill Evans, pacing him on the other sides of the vehicles he was moving between.

Behind him, the two police Range Rovers he and his team had arrived in were parked nose to tail across the closed metal gates. There had been two heavily built men in waxed jackets and beanie hats guarding the gates, but they had been taken by surprise by another team emerging from a house across the road and arrested before they had a chance to warn the people in the barn.

Pete’s eyes were constantly on the move as he advanced slowly between the parked cars. Anyone who had stayed behind in one of them, or anyone stepping out of the barn, could raise the alarm in an instant, ruining the element of surprise they were relying on to minimise the possible response of the people inside.

He could hear the murmur of a crowd grow in volume. Male and female voices were raised in excitement. The barking of dogs cut abruptly through the noise. It turned quickly to growling and snarling as the enraged animals saw each other. Pete didn’t need to see what was going on in there. He could easily imagine it. Metal sheep hurdles locked together in the middle of the big space, people crowding around, excited, anticipation reaching a peak as the two dogs were led on short leashes from their cages. Muzzles removed, they had seen each other and reacted exactly as they had been raised to since they were pups.

Cash would be changing hands as bets were hurriedly placed before it was too late.

The excited shouting got louder as the hurdles were locked together, the two dogs held at opposite sides of the ring prior to being released.

Pete paused between two expensive four-by-fours in the front row of parked vehicles. He poked his head forward and peered left and right. His carefully raised hand was answered by others at either end of the row. He keyed the radio again.

‘Jim?’

‘In position.’

‘Roger.’

Inside, the two dogs were released. Their snarls changed tone as they met in the middle of the ring. The shouts from the onlookers reached a crescendo.

‘Go, go, go,’ Pete said into his radio, then ran for the big steel doors.

They were closed with a simple bolt that was accessed from inside and out through a square hole in the right-hand door. Pete flipped the handle and pulled it back, cracking the door open just enough. Ben and Jill preceded him through as the other two teams, having checked for possible exit points along the sides of the barn, closed in. Pete entered, followed by two more uniformed officers who had been chosen for their size. Looking past the crowd, he saw the door at the far side of the barn being closed behind Jim Hancock and his team.

They still hadn’t been spotted in the excitement of the crowd.

He raised an air horn in his right hand and pressed the button. A blast of noise erupted, instantly quelling the crowd, though the dogs were still snarling and yelping in the ring.

‘Police,’ Pete shouted. ‘Stay where you are. You’re under arrest.’

‘Back door,’ someone yelled in the crowd.

‘No, you don’t,’ Jim shouted.

‘Swamp them,’ another voice bellowed as people began running everywhere. A large part of the crowd came at Pete and his team. He snapped out his extendable baton just as a woman in a short black dress squealed and fell towards him, clearly pushed from behind. His instinct told him to save her, but training and practice stopped him. He stepped aside. She screamed, grabbing for his coat as she stumbled, falling, and the man behind her, dressed in a waxed jacket that looked brand new, tried to dodge past Pete on his other side. Pete lifted his baton slightly and pushed it forward between the man’s legs. He yelled as his own momentum took him down. With no time for niceties, people going every which way, Pete stamped on the man’s crotch and turned, baton raised.

‘Hold the doors,’ he shouted as his baton impacted with an older woman’s arm and chest, almost snatching it from his hand.

‘Whoah.’

He allowed the baton to swing and grabbed the back of her coat. She planted her front foot and spun towards him, fist swinging. Pete met her forearm with his baton, hearing the snap of bone, and she screamed, rage switching to agony on her weathered face. He used his foot to sweep her legs out from under her and she fell across the already downed man.

The girl in the short dress was scrabbling to rise at his other side. He swung the baton hard at the tendon just above her right knee. She screamed and fell flat on her face again. He used the baton to deaden her left arm as someone barrelled into him from the side. He tripped over the downed young woman, twisting as he fell and raising the baton. A heavy-set man in a leather jacket and jeans, head shaved but a bushy beard on his lower face and neck, was standing over him, legs spread, fist drawn back and about to swing.

From this angle, there was only one target. Pete raised the baton as hard as he could. The man’s eyes widened and he froze for a moment, then puked violently over Pete’s jacket and trousers. Pete sat up, the baton held two-handed now as he raised it like a bar, meeting the man’s throat and using it to push him across to the side, where he collapsed in a foetal position.

Another man tried to leap over Pete, but he reached up, catching his foot and using his whole torso to yank it backwards. The man yelled and came down hard on his face across the young woman’s back, pinning her to the swept concrete floor as Pete gained his feet.

A woman dodged around him and he glanced that way. Saw Jill, tiny though she was, extend her arm, catching the woman across the top of her chest with a forearm block that took her down as if she’d run into a steel bar. He heard the crack of her head hitting the concrete and hoped she wasn’t going to be seriously injured by the impact. It was her own fault, but it could ruin Jill’s career, justified or not.

He turned his head just in time. Two men were running at him, heads down, arms interlocked in a joint rugby tackle. There was nowhere to go, no time to step aside. He did the only thing he could: dove forward, going up and over them, hoping there would be something other than concrete to land on.

There wasn’t.

He twisted in the air, taking the impact on his shoulder. Even though he rolled into it, pain seared through the joint, spreading across his chest and back. Combined with the stench of sick on his clothes, it made his stomach heave, but he held it back and gained his feet again. A punch that had been aimed for his head caught him in the side instead and, despite the stab vest, agony lanced through him. He went to raise his baton, but his shoulder flashed agony. He bellowed, swapped the baton to his left hand and used the handle end as a ram, driving it sideways into his attacker’s stomach. The man doubled over and Pete met his face with a raised knee, left hand driving him down harder on it, but the man shook off the impact as if it was nothing.

Whistles and air horns blasting around them, the man reared up and grabbed Pete in a bear hug. He was three inches taller than Pete’s six feet and almost twice as wide, and it felt like his whole bulk was muscle and bone. With his right arm trapped inside the bear hug, Pete’s shoulder screamed its agony again as his feet left the floor.

One hand trapped, the other holding the baton and his feet dangling useless, Pete brought his knees up around the guy and tried kicking at the backs of his legs, but it was useless. Instinct urged him to grab the back of the guy’s head and pull back, but he knew what the reaction to that would be. A headbutt. Instead, he brought the baton down between them, placed it under the man’s nose and pushed back hard. The man growled like a big dog as his head was forced back, but his arms didn’t give at all. Then he turned his head, but the steel baton lodged under his cheekbone. He turned further and it was across his ear. Pete saw a chance, took a breath that was limited by the pressure on his ribcage, and bellowed in the man’s ear as loudly as he could. ‘Let go. Now.’

It had the opposite effect.

He felt himself jerked tighter into the crushing embrace. Twisting in the man’s grip, he tried to get a knee between his legs, but the big man anticipated the move and blocked it.

Which left only one option.

Pete dropped the baton and clawed his left hand, going for the face. His first and third fingers found the man’s eyes while his thumb and little finger gripped the sides of his face. The man tried to twist away, wrenching his head around to the side, but Pete held on. He tried the other way and, despite the pain in his wrist, Pete still held the grip, pressing the two fingers into his eye-sockets. With his eyes squeezed shut, the man wrenched his head this way and that, tightening his grip on Pete’s torso even further, but there was no escape. Pete felt the eyeballs give a little under the pressure of his fingers. With a roar, the big man lifted him higher, then slammed him down onto the floor, letting go as he did so and twisting away, body bent as his hands went to his eyes.

Pete took the fall, neck bent to hold his head up off the concrete. Pain lanced through his shoulder again. A quick glance told him he couldn’t see his baton, so he rolled to the side, away from the man, in case he recovered more quickly than expected, then gained his feet. He saw the baton on the floor three feet to his left, reached for it, but was beaten by the older woman he’d taken down earlier. She snatched it back away from him, her face twisting into a hate-filled grin.

‘Now, Mr Piggy…’

Her broad local accent was somehow unexpected, but Pete didn’t allow it to affect his reaction. He lunged forward, ducking his head as he grabbed for the wider end of the baton. Felt the top of his head impact her face as his hand closed around the coated steel. The woman screamed, falling backwards as he snatched the baton backwards out of her hand. He opened his eyes to a horrific image. Her hate-filled eyes blazed over a lower face that was slick and red with blood, the mouth open in a snarl of bloody teeth. He caught her still-extended arm and snapped a handcuff onto the wrist, twisting it hard to turn her around and connecting her hands behind her with the cuffs, then shoving her forward so she fell with a scream onto her face.

Pete turned fast, baton raised and brought it down hard across the back of the big man’s neck, flooring him. Used a second pair of cuffs to bind his wrists around the top of his leg, then looked up and around.

The fight was over.

The one in the ring, too, he saw. A white bull terrier was snarling quietly as it mauled and shook the body of a brindle dog that was covered in blood.

And beyond, the back doors of the barn stood ajar.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. They’d hoped for a clean sweep, but it looked like someone, at least, had got away.

He searched the figures in the barn. Couldn’t see either Jim or Mick Douglas, one of the city PCs who had accompanied them on the raid. A quick count told him that two other members of the crew were missing too. With the gate blocked off, they must be in the fields and woods between here and the university. He lifted his radio. ‘DS Gayle for DS Hancock, over.’

*

‘Oh, come on. Nobody doesn’t like fairgrounds.’ PC Qadir Hussain waved his hand expansively. ‘Look around you. The lights, the smells, the sounds, the excitement: what’s not to like?’

His patrol partner, PC Karen Upton, kept resolutely walking. ‘The lights, the smells, the sounds,’ she said. ‘The crowds, the pickpockets, the cons. The whole thing makes me sick.’

Qadir laughed as one overloud pop song gave way to another, the smell of diesel fumes wafting between the brightly lit stalls to briefly overlay the sweetness of candyfloss, the salt of the ocean and the sourness of cooked onions. ‘Killjoy was here, eh? Down on Plymouth Hoe.’

‘I’ve got nothing against people having fun. I just don’t see it in these places. They’re nothing but a legalised excuse for petty crime.’

‘Who tipped your pram over tonight?’ He glanced across at her as they approached a particularly dense knot of people between a hot-dog stand and a confectionary trailer.

Karen shot him a sour look, her dark eyes fiery in the flickering light of the densely packed seafront fair. ‘Nobody. I just don’t happen to agree with you. It happens sometimes. Get over it.’

They eased through the densely packed throng and suddenly were in the open. He nodded to the dodgems stand to her left. ‘You can’t tell me you don’t enjoy them, at least.’

She turned. ‘OK. There’s an exception to every rule.’

‘Says the woman who’s here to enforce them.’

‘What – you’re a Muslim in a navy town and you don’t appreciate irony?’

Something in her voice as she ended the comment made him glance at her. She was frowning, staring at the expansive ride. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘The kid on the back of that yellow car over at the far side. There’s something…’

He saw the youth she was talking about. He might have been in his early teens. As he watched, the kid jumped off the back of the yellow car, ran a few steps and hopped onto the back of another, one hand to the upright pole that drew power from the overhead grid to drive the little vehicle. Two girls were in the seat, long hair flying as they laughed, one steering while the other glanced up at their new rider. The kid grinned down at her then dropped into a crouch.

Qadir shook his head. ‘He doesn’t look familiar.’

‘I’m sure I’ve… Got it. He’s on the mispers list. Comes from Exeter, I think.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘There was something about his background.’

‘He’s coming around.’

The young girl was steering the car around the sheet-rubber arena, going with the flow of the multicoloured mass of cars with their laughing and shrieking occupants. They rounded the last corner, heading towards the two uniformed patrol officers. Qadir raised a hand to wave.

‘Hey, kid.’

The youth spotted them. His expression changed. He reached through between the girls, grabbed the steering wheel and shoved it over to the side. The car suddenly angled across the centre of the arena, away from Qadir and Karen.

‘Shit,’ Karen shouted. ‘Go that way.’ She pointed to the right and set off to the left, jumping up onto the wide metal edge of the ride and running along it as Qadir headed the other way. A family group was standing right in his way. He swung around them, started to run, but the crowd was too tightly packed. He pushed through to the edge of the ride, jumped up and started around it in the opposite direction to his partner. Glancing across, he saw the kid jump free of the car an instant before it hit another one at an acute angle. The girls screamed as the kid jumped over the nose of an oncoming red dodgem car, stepped between two others as they passed and reached the far side. Qadir swung around a group of young guys who were standing in his way and ran on. He made the corner, glanced across again, but the kid had gone from sight.

‘Crap,’ he muttered. What chance did they stand now, in this crowd?

But the kid had seen them and run. There had to be a reason for that. He couldn’t give up now.

The crowd on this side of the ride was a lot thinner. A few long strides and he reached the far corner. He stopped, one hand to the brightly painted corner post as he stared out into the crowded and noisy night, searching for movement amid the milling sea of constantly shifting figures. Something caught his attention at the edge of his vision. His head snapped towards it. A small figure darted into sight and then was gone again, several yards away to his right. He waited. There, dodging through the crowd. He lifted a hand to his radio.

*

Emma Radcliffe stepped out into the warm April night to the gentle sound of the river at the far side of the pub car park. Minutes ago, that sound would have been torture, but now it was soothing. Restful.

She checked her watch.

Still only twelve minutes since she’d left her broken-down car on the side of the road. She’d wondered if she was going to make it back out of the big pub in time. When she’d got here, she had barely been able to walk without wetting herself. Then, when she sat down and let the flow commence, she’d wondered if it would ever stop. But it had, with three minutes to spare. She shook her sleeve back down over her watch and glanced down the road.

And here it was.

A good thing she was early, she thought, as she stepped forward to the kerb and raised her hand. She had called the cab company as she was stepping away from the bloody useless car, which had just lost power and died on her, out of the blue, and refused to start again. When she said she’d be here, at the Old Mill Carvery, the woman had said fifteen minutes.

The cab drew up beside her, light shining orange on its roof. The passenger window buzzed down as she leaned down to it.

‘Pennsylvania?’ she asked.

‘Hop in.’

Of course, she should have expected him to be Indian. Ninety-five per cent of the taxi drivers in the city were. She opened the back door of the cab and climbed in.

‘Buckle up, please.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ She’d forgotten the need for that in the back seat, these days. She drew the seatbelt across and clipped it in.

‘Right-o.’ He slipped the handbrake and eased the car into motion up the long hill out of the city. ‘Did you have a good evening?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was working late, then my bloody car broke down.’

They passed the little Nissan on the side of the road where she’d left it, but she decided not to comment.

‘Sorry. I thought, seeing where I picked you up…’

She let the comment go without reply. Silence settled in the car until he flicked on the indicator and it began its rhythmic click. He turned off the main road, heading up the tree-lined lane she’d been dreading.

Emma saw his eyes on her in the driving mirror. In his mid-forties, she guessed, he was stocky and round-faced with lush, wavy hair and designer stubble. He was wearing a denim shirt, but she imagined him in a suit and tie as a bouncer on a night-club door. And his eyes… There was something in the way they shone that sent a shiver down her spine. Instinctively, her knees clamped together, her legs turning slightly away from him.

‘So, what do you do, to be working so late?’ She detected just a slight hint of Devon in his accent and felt somehow reassured by it.

‘I was finishing the preparations for a big court case that starts tomorrow.’

‘You look too young to be a lawyer.’

She caught his gaze in the mirror again, saw the twinkle in his dark eyes. ‘I’m not. I just work for one.’