Contents
Prologue
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
Lee Riley’s Story - Part One
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lee Riley’s Story - Part Two
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Lee Riley’s Story - Part Three
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Lee Riley’s Story – Part Four
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Epilogue
A short note from the author…
Nothing to Lose
Copyright © Steven Suttie 2019
Published by Steven Suttie 2019
Steven Suttie has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover design by Steven Suttie
Image used under license from Getty Images
Font type Calibri Light
P/B 1st Edition – published 4th January 2019
Kindle 1st Edition – published 4th January 2019
I’d like to thank my loyal readers for buying this, the seventh DCI Miller story. I really appreciate your support and your positive reviews on Amazon, as well as your endless likes and shares on social media. It really means a great deal.
I hope you enjoy the latest Miller adventure. And please, if you do like it, bob off to Amazon and bung a review on if you can.
If you don’t like it, I promise to try harder next time!
If your name appears at some point in the following pages, or it has done in any of the previous Miller stories; that’s my small way of saying thank you for your support.
Cheers
Steve
Prologue
Will Clarke was 24 years old when he took his own life, by driving his little Ford Fiesta off the edge of a cliff.
At first, it looked like a tragic accident. But in the months that followed, a very different picture began emerging.
Widely acknowledged as “the life and soul of the party,” Will was the last person that his family and friends would expect to commit suicide. He had always been such good fun, he was happy-go-lucky and very kind-hearted.
In the weeks and months following the “accident” a completely different and unrecognisable version of Will Clarke’s life began to emerge. A version that nobody close to him could comprehend.
The coroner’s report into his death was initially dismissed by his parents. Joe and Margaret Clarke, who had already trying to cope with the devastating grief of losing a child, were now being presented with a file at the inquest and the details within it made them believe that there had been a monumental mix-up.
The file in question was essentially a list of debts, bank transactions and most surprisingly of all, a police charge sheet in relation to the theft of a watch from a friend’s house. Will owed more than £60,000 to pay-day loan companies, credit card providers and banks. In a further troubling twist, it transpired that Will had taken over £1,000 from the butcher’s shop he worked at on the day that he died.
Every penny of the money that he owed had been spent on gambling.
The Coroner had concluded that these factors, coupled with the details of a very dark Facebook message to his former girlfriend, as well as the forensic examinations of the crash scene, was strong enough evidence to determine that Will’s death was no accident.
Although there was no suicide note, the Coroner was satisfied that the crash was deliberate and that Will Clarke had intentionally killed himself. It concluded that his gambling problem was “most likely the reason.”
Until the inquest into their son’s death, Joe and Margaret Clarke had no idea that Will had any problems at all, which made these shocking revelations even harder to accept.
Chapter One
“Emergency Service. Which service do you require?”
“Fire brigade, shit, quick…” the young man on the phone sounded shocked, scared and out-of-breath.
“Putting you through now.”
“Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service.” Said a different voice on the line.
“Yeah, there’s a fire, it’s proper bad, a shop on Windmill Lane, Denton.” His voice was unclear, it sounded as though he was struggling to catch his breath.
“Do you have a postcode for that location please?”
“No, no, it’s… top end of Windmill Lane, motorway end, it’s called Bet-a-days bookies. Denton end, you need to hurry up. Seriously, it’s bad. People are trapped upstairs. They’re screaming.”
“Okay, I’m organising a response now, I just need…”
The caller was making a strange noise and it took a few seconds for the emergency call handler to realise that he was retching. He gasped, before speaking again.
“You’ll need an ambulance, you’ll need a few ambulances… aw fucking hell, this is so bad…”
“Are you at the location now, Sir?”
“No, no… I’ve, I’m not…”
The call ended. The call handler tried to reconnect with the public phone-box, but it rang out. Whoever had made the call had gone. The fire service operator logged the call time and saved the audio file. Just as the recording was being locked in the system, several other calls began coming in, reporting the same fire and all of the callers were in a distressed state, making the conversation extremely difficult. The people inside the burning building could be heard down the line, screaming for help.
It was becoming clear to the staff in the control room that this one was a very nasty shout.
Chapter Two
DCI Andrew Miller was fast asleep, snoring loudly as his phone began vibrating on the bedside table. His wife, Clare shoved his shoulder.
“Eh? What’s…” He quickly realised that his phone was ringing, the glow from the screen was lighting up the bedroom ceiling.
“Time is it?” he asked.
“Shut up Andy and answer your phone.”
Miller answered the call. His eyes began focusing a little better and he noted the time. 3.
14 a.m. The call was coming in from his deputy, DI Keith Saunders.
“What’s up?” he asked into the phone, as quietly as he could.
“Hi Sir. Got a horrible job on, arson, young family. The mum’s managed to get out with the daughter but neither of them are in a good way. The dad and his little lad are dead, fire brigade found them cuddled up in the bottom of the lad’s wardrobe. It sounds very grim this one, boss.”
“Where?”
“Denton. Windmill Lane.”
“When?”
“It was reported a couple of hours since.”
“Why have we got it?” asked Miller as he pulled himself up on the bed, making a loud groaning noise as he did so.
“Andy!” said Clare. The tone that the DCI’s wife used conveyed so much more. By simply saying ‘Andy,’ she had also managed to say “get up and get out of here right now, you annoying bastard!”
Miller understood his wife’s message loud and clear, and scrambled out of the bed. “Soz, just a sec,” he whispered into the phone which he started using as a torch as he found his clothes and some underwear, before heading out of the bedroom. He closed the door quietly behind himself.
“Sorry, where were we?”
“I was just…”
“Oh aye. Why has it been handed to us?” asked Miller, still whispering.
“Tameside CID have escalated it, as soon as they arrived. The entire building’s been destroyed apparently.”
Miller’s team, the SCIU were responsible for investigating the most serious crimes in the Greater Manchester area. It was extremely unusual to have a case handed up to them right from the very start. The vast majority of cases that they dealt with had been thoroughly investigated and exhausted by the city’s local CID teams before being handed up to the SCIU. It was usually during this “dying” stage in an investigation that the SCIU were mobilised and asked to scrutinise the case and look for additional information with fresh eyes and their “neutral” standpoint.
“Jesus. Are you there now?”
“No, I’m on my way there, about ten minutes away.”
“Right, well, I’ll just have a quick piss and I’ll be on my way. Cheers.”
Chapter Three
“Good morning, Happy Monday, everybody,” said DS Jo Rudovsky as the rest of the Serious Crimes Investigation Unit officers took their seats before her.
“I want to appeal against your decision that it’s Monday already!” said DC Peter Kenyon.
“Morning!” DC Helen Grant was the only cheerful voice.
“Ma’am!” said DC Bill Chapman, aware how much the name Ma’am grated on the young DS.
“Now, I’ve been asked to take this morning’s team brief as our superiors, DI Saunders and DCI Miller have been called out on an urgent job.”
“What’s the job?” asked DC Mike Worthington.
“That fatal fire last night in Denton. It was arson. They’ve been at the scene since half-three this morning.”
“What, are we taking that on as well?” asked Kenyon. He didn’t seem pleased at the prospect.
“I’m not sure yet Pete, it’ll all become clearer later. But in the meantime, we’re not making great progress with the Graham Hartley case, so let’s crack on with that eh, and see what Miller and Saunders say when they get back?”
Each member of team nodded and the newly promoted DS was pleased to see that there was a collective sense of positive energy amongst the DCs. The case that Rudovsky was talking about had been an intense investigation involving every member of the small, tight-knit team of detectives who investigate Manchester’s most serious and problematic cases.
And the murder of Graham Hartley had indeed proved to be a problematic investigation. Graham had been beaten to death three weeks earlier, whilst jogging in countryside between Swinton and Eccles. The area, known locally as Eccles Field, stretches out over a two-mile area in between the two major towns within the City of Salford. Eccles Field is extremely popular with dog walkers, a fact made clear by the amount of dog turds which decorated each side of the tarmac pathway which runs the entire length of the area.
Graham had been discovered lying in a pool of blood soon after the attack. The dog walker who had contacted the emergency services had been talked through CPR by the call handler and was still working on Graham when the police arrived, followed several minutes later by an ambulance crew. The paramedics worked relentlessly for half an hour on trying to save the 40-year-old’s life. But sadly, it was to no avail and they pronounced him dead at the scene, after finally accepting that his injuries were not consistent with life.
The crime scene was a complete disaster, from a forensics point of view. The dog walker who had discovered Graham had been shouting so loudly that he had managed to raise the alarm on the nearby housing estate where he lived, which backed onto the field. Alerted by the commotion, dozens of local people had come out with torches to see what was happening, several of them dropping to their knees to assist with the resuscitation efforts.
Whilst this was an excellent example of a community coming together to help somebody in need, it had completely devastated the crime scene in terms of cross-contamination of any evidence which may have been left at the site.
Graham Hartley had been attacked with a golf club. The initial blow had been to the back of his skull and had shattered his cranium. There followed a sustained and savage attack in which thirty-eight devastating blows from the golf club had shattered bones in almost every part of Graham Hartley’s body. The attack was so brutal, several police officers in attendance had been seen to vomit near the crime scene.
This horrific attack had taken place shortly after 7pm on a cold November evening, close to the village of Monton which sits around halfway between Swinton in the north, and Eccles to its south. There were street lights all along the path way, they’d been erected to prevent anti-social behaviour close to the houses, but the light that they gave off had not been sufficient enough to alert Graham Hartley of the danger that he had been jogging towards. This appalling crime had left the local community in a state of panic and terror since it had happened. It was so serious that it had topped the list of the most serious crimes in Greater Manchester, and as such, it was handed over very quickly to the SCIU department, mainly because DCI Andrew Miller, who runs the unit, is widely-regarded as Manchester’s top detective and therefore, the safest pair-of-hands to take control of an investigation of this nature.
“We’ve been making slow progress, as you all know,” said Rudovsky to the team. Her DCs, Helen Grant, Bill Chapman, Mike Worthington and Peter Kenyon all had their own aspects of the investigation to work on and were helping to make several question marks disappear with each passing day. But they weren’t getting any closer to the killer, or a motive.
“So, let’s recap. We know that the attacker is a male, stocky build, escaped in a northerly direction, heading away from the area towards Swinton. We know that a bike was used, as several witnesses at various points along the path saw him riding towards them in the moments following the attack. We have also established that there is no operational CCTV at any point along that path, or at any of the pathway’s junctions into Swinton. However, we do have the CCTV footage of a cyclist riding across the East Lancs Road not long after the attack was phoned in. Those images have been circulated to the press, but as we all know, the images were recorded in the dark and don’t really tell us very much at all. But just to keep it all fresh in our minds, he is of a stocky build, quite a big lad, it’s hard to put a height on him but we’re thinking six foot. He was wearing a dark coloured hoody and the bike turns out to be a very common model, a Carrera, a mass-market bike manufactured by Halfords.”
Rudovsky was standing by the investigation wall, which was filled with photographs, maps and important details and calculations. She was pointing at the picture on the wall, it was a grainy, almost black and white image which didn’t offer very much information about the cyclist other than what Rudovsky had men
tioned.
“He just looks like any other scrote on a bike. But as we all know, he isn’t, he is a very evil man. To commit a crime of such sickening violence, and then ride off calmly, letting on to passers-by as he rode past, tells us that he is a very dangerous individual. So, let me throw it out to you guys. What do we know about the victim, Graham Hartley?”
Rudovsky stepped across towards the window and grabbed a hold of the giant A1 notepad stand, before shuffling back into the centre of the room with it. The height of the A-Frame really exaggerated how short Rudovsky stood at 5 feet 5. She folded the last page over the top of the stand and started a fresh sheet, writing HARTLEY at the top. When she turned around to face the detectives, she was glad to see that they all had a hand raised in the air.
“Go on Helen, ladies first.” Rudovsky pointed at DC Helen Grant, the partner of DI Keith Saunders, both professionally and domestically.
“Positive discrimination!” shouted Kenyon with a wide smile on his face.
“Shut up Pete. Go on, Helen.”
“Lots of interesting intelligence is coming to light on Hartley, boss. The most common theme that is consistently coming back from his family and friends is that he was a very insular person, kept himself to himself. He was financially secure, owned his own property and drove a tidy car, but there seems to be a glaring lack of a significant other. He’s never had a long-term relationship, no kids or anything. He was seen as a keen ladies man, but he never seemed keen to settle.”
Rudovsky was making notes on the board as Grant continued.
“Professionally, he was described as very popular. He worked in retail management, so that in itself is quite rare.” The comment received a laugh from everybody. Behind the humour lay a pretty universal truth, most managers are disliked – rarely are they described as very popular.
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