Mark Pearson - The Killing Season

A figure stepped out from the shadows and Holdsworth blinked, surprised for a moment. But before he had a chance to voice that surprise a fist slammed into his stomach and the air exploded from him as he collapsed backwards in a gurgling heap. He tried to suck in air but found that he couldn’t, the pain scaring him more than he had ever been scared in his life. His eyes watered and finally, thankfully, he was able to draw air into his tortured lungs. The tears springing from his eyes were as much from relief as from the agony in his stomach muscles. But he was to get a lot more scared — and soon.

The man leaned down and clapped a hand over his mouth. Then, holding him tight against a fence, he wound silver duct tape around Holdsworth’s mouth. The priest’s eyes flickered left and right. And then the man punched him on the side of his head and he fell to the ground like a sack of coal. The man lifted him over his shoulder as though he were more like a sack of feathers and headed back into the darkness of the alleyway towards his parked van, its back door open like a waiting mouth.

The priest opened his eyes slowly, closing them again as the pain in his head kicked in like a jolt of electricity.

He was bent over a church pew, he had seen that much. His mouth was taped tightly shut and he had to choke back the urge to vomit. His arms had been tied in front of him, and the cold draught told him that his trousers and underpants had been removed. God, no! He wanted to scream it out loud. He opened his eyes a crack — it was dark but the moon had sailed clear of the night clouds and shone pale through the coloured glass. He knew where he was. Tears pricked his eyes as a long thin blade was held against his neck.

The blade was removed and he hoped that his friend had forgiven him. It was only a shag, after all. Christ knew they had both shagged enough women. Had shared them. So she was getting married to him. It had just been a last farewell.

He felt large hands on his backside and tried to move his legs, but they had been tied too. He felt his buttocks being pulled apart. He looked up at the church’s large crucifix, at the face of his saviour, cold now in the chill of night, and prayed to him as he had never prayed before. Not even forming words, just a desperate, agonised, silent pleading.

And then the man entered him and the Reverend Nigel Holdsworth let the tears stream down. From the pain, the searing brutal agony of it. And from the humiliation. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

The man behind him grunted, slamming into him, pushing him hard against the pew, grunted as he himself had done some short while earlier as he had entered his best friend’s wife-to-be.

One final grunt and the man pulled back. The priest’s face purpled with pain, remorse and disgust.

He would never talk of it. That much was certain. The horror was over now and he would never speak of it to a living soul.

Except the horror wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

Morning, and I was sitting at my desk, reading through the autopsy report.

Kate and I had gone through it the night before. She was handy that way — translating the scientific blah-blah-blah into comprehensible English. She made herself amenable in other ways, too. Of course, her enthusiasm the night before might have had something to do with her persuading me to stay in Norfolk and buy her cousin’s house. Call me Mister Cynical. Either way, like the man who didn’t care about the weatherman’s forecast, you didn’t hear me complaining.

Still, the report didn’t add much to what we already knew. I flicked through the photos, looking at a close-up of the label that was in the man’s suit. Sergeant Coker had told me that they had sent it off to be processed, to see if they could get the image any clearer, but it could take quite a while to get the info back.

I picked the photo up, slid it into a Manila envelope and put my coat on.

Ten minutes later Amy Leigh looked up in surprise as Laura Gomez showed me into her office.

‘Jack, just the man I want to talk to.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Helen Middleton informs me that your builder friend turned up to finish the job on her kitchen.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Moreover, he says he doesn’t need any further payment from her as you settled the bill.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Is this “manner of speaking” something I shouldn’t know about again?’

‘I think discretion is often the better part of valour, don’t you?’ I replied, fairly certain that she wouldn’t wish to know that the costs were being offset by the sale of a Lexus car that was already probably somewhere in Europe.

‘Least said, soonest mended,’ she replied.

‘Silence is golden,’ chipped in Laura Gomez.

‘As Thumper once famously remarked: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all,’ I said, but not doing the full impersonation. A man has his dignity.

Amy Leigh held her hands up. ‘OK, we’ve got the idea. Just so long as it doesn’t come back and bite us.’

‘I am pretty sure it won’t,’ I said.

‘So what can we do for you, handsome?’ said Laura, giving her eyebrows a touch of the gothic-vamp wiggle.

I pulled out the photo of the inside of the dead man’s jacket. ‘I need this scanning into a computer and e-mailing PDQ.’

‘What’s a PDQ? I know what a PDF is,’ asked Laura.

‘He means pretty damn quickly!’ said Amy.

Laura gave me an exaggerated salute and took the picture. ‘Yes, sir! Mister Detective, sir! I is right on it.’

She left the room.

‘So you haven’t got a scanner in that high-tech office of yours, Jack?’

‘I’ve got a printer but the scanner bit doesn’t want to scan.’

‘The room at the end here is available for rent. Just been speaking to Jane downstairs. Want to take it on?’

I considered it for a moment or two. A caravan in a farmyard, near the cliffs in the bleak midwinter. There was a view, certainly, and I wasn’t just thinking of the stable girl. But then again an office in a warm brick-and-flint building, in the heart of town, with facilities on hand and a phone signal was pretty tempting.

‘When can I move in?’

‘Soon as you like.’

‘I’ll get my stuff.’ Such as it was: files, a laptop, not much else. I figured I might leave the printer.

Amy looked at me, and there was amusement dancing in her eyes.

‘Kate will be pleased,’ she said.

‘Oh?’

‘Saw her last night at the hen do.’

‘Did you now?’

‘Oh, yes. We had a lovely chat.’

Women.

Sergeant Harry Coker was manning the reception desk of the police station. He was contemplating strolling over the road and getting a bacon sandwich.

He had missed breakfast that morning, and breakfast to Harry Coker was like the wind unto a mariner stuck in the doldrums. He found it hard to get going without it. He sighed as the door opened and a woman entered. A woman he recognised.

Emily Skipton. Spinster of some fifty-five years, general busybody and a continuing source of discomfort in the fundament of Harry Coker and others of the parish.

‘Good morning, Miss Skipton,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ she replied with a disdainful sniff and walked up to the counter, laying her neatly rolled brolly on the counter much as a judge might have laid down his gavel. If judges in this country still had gavels. Which they didn’t.

‘I certainly don’t think it’s going to rain.’

‘I am not here to talk about the weather, young man.’

Harry Coker sighed inwardly once more. The woman was not much more than a decade older than him but talked to him as if he was a truculent fourth-former or whatever they were called nowadays in the high schools.