The Anglesey Murders Box Set

by Conrad Jones

  ‘Look, it’s complicated,’ I stressed ‘There’s more to it than just one policeman going off on one. There are thousands of them and they’re everywhere.’ I was trying to communicate my point without sounding like a fruitcake, but I must have sounded pathetic.

  ‘Thousands of who, Conrad?’ she snapped. ‘I hope you’re not rattling on about those satanic cults or whatever it was you were looking at with Peter. It’s one thing writing a storybook about them, but you’re beginning to sound deranged.’

  ‘Why won’t you listen to me?’ I shouted this time, which just made matters worse. ‘Peter is dead and so is the girl we interviewed. She told me that they were coming after us and now they’re dead. I’m not the one who is deranged.’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice to me.’

  ‘Well, you’re not listening to me.’

  ‘I’m at work and you’re talking rubbish. Have you been drinking?’

  ‘No. I haven’t had a drink.’

  ‘I need to go.’

  ‘Do you think the world of burgers, milkshakes and chips could survive without you for a few hours while we talk about this and sort out what we are going to do?’ I was angry now. What did I have to do to convince people?

  ‘Sort what out?’ she scoffed. ‘What do you think we’re going to do?’

  ‘We need to get away from here until everything is out in the open. They know who I am, and they know where I live. We need to get away today.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked again, ignoring my rant. ‘I’m going to stay at my mum’s tonight. I’ll call and grab some things tomorrow. I can’t deal with you right now. We need some time apart.’ The call ended, but I held the phone next to my ear for a while before I put it down on the kitchen worktop. Evie Jones tilted her head and looked at me. She sensed that I was upset, and she licked my fingers to let me know that she wasn’t leaving.

  I felt drained by it all, but I was almost relieved that my partner wasn’t coming home. I wouldn’t have to explain it all to her while she looked at me as if I was bonkers. She would be safe at her mother’s for now. I had to make sure that Evie and I were safe, too. By the time the kettle had boiled again, I was packed and ready to go. I could see Snowdonia through the kitchen window; it was a thirty-minute drive away and there are plenty of campsites and guesthouses to stay in. Whichever direction I chose, I knew that I could become anonymous within a few hours.

  I dressed in my camping gear, water resistant cargo pants with large pockets on the sides and a Gore-Tex jacket. They were green and brown, which wouldn’t catch the eye, especially up on a mountain. I had bought a neck knife and a belt knife a few years earlier from the Internet while researching a book about drug dealers and concealed weapons. The neck knife consisted of a black cord that looped over my head like a pendant chain and dangling from it was a stainless-steel scorpion pendent about four inches long. It looked innocent enough at first glance, until you pulled the tail of the scorpion and a four-inch stiletto blade slides out of the body. It cost me nine-pounds including postage and packing, and for an extra five pounds they included the belt knife as a bonus buy. It was an experiment to see how easy it was to buy lethal weapons on the Net. I never thought I would wear them, let alone need them for protection. I’ve always been a keen clay-pigeon shooter and I owned a Remington pump-action shotgun and a Mossberg, which I took from the lockbox and cleaned. Taking the shotgun in a case was perfectly legal as long as I had my licence on me and I wasn’t walking into a bank with it. There were plenty of farms who allow licence-holders and shotgun-owners to hunt rabbits on their land at night. I knew that I could take it with me without breaking any firearms laws.

  I was nearly ready to go when my partner walked in through the front door. She hated guns in the house, despite the lockbox. When she saw me sitting on the bedroom floor next to a rucksack, with a loaded shotgun next to me, she thought I had lost the plot. Can you imagine the conversation we had? It was surreal. I was explaining to my partner of eight years that a satanic cult was trying to kill me. I had interviewed a murder suspect who was psychic and had been sectioned into the local asylum. It was research for my new book, and now everyone involved was dead and I was next. It didn’t go down well at all; I remember the look of disbelief in her eyes and it cut me to the bone.

  She offered to call me an ambulance as she packed her bags. There was no way she was staying in the house while I had a loaded shotgun; especially when I was talking gobbledygook. The more I tried to convince her, the madder I sounded. How could I possibly convince anyone of sound mind that I was telling the truth? She left in a rush and I haven’t seen her since. I miss her terribly, but I don’t blame her for leaving me, how can I? Put yourself in her shoes, what would you think? She lived in the real world where percentages and profits were kings; I was in a world of demons and death where nothing made sense. She was right to go even though it broke me inside.

  As she walked out of the door, I felt numb, but I was resigned to the fact that no one would listen to me until the police realised the deaths were linked to the Holmes and Stokes murders. I decided to take the Staffie and the truck and head for the hills, although I hadn’t decided which hills at this point. There is a Tesco garage a few miles away in Holyhead and I needed to fill the truck with diesel. I didn’t want to stop on the way. I took the gamble to fuel the truck up first and then come back for the gun and the dog. It was daylight and I didn’t think they would try anything in the open.

  I fed Evie Jones and then walked out of the front door while she was distracted with her food, locking both doors behind me. The roads were busy, which gave me some comfort, but the thought of police cars arriving spurred me to hurry. The Navara started first time and I drove as calmly as I could to the garage, although my nerves were at snapping point. I pulled in and waited for a pump to come free. The Tesco garage is a nightmare, as people fuel up and then go shopping for their tea while you wait for them to move their vehicles from the pump. It can be frustrating at the best of times, and today was not the best of times. I’d been waiting an age and I was tetchy. I wanted to honk the horn, but I didn’t want to attract attention to myself. It seemed like forever until the owner returned with his shopping and a stupid grin on his face.

  ‘Sorry.’ He waved, as he put the bags into the boot of his car. ‘I won’t be a second,’ he said. He closed the boot and jogged back to the shop. I couldn’t believe my luck. It seemed like an age before he came back holding a loaf of bread. ‘I’d be in trouble if I’d forgotten the bread.’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t forgotten anything?’ I called out of the window. He looked at me confused.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said.

  ‘I said have you forgotten anything? I wouldn’t want you to get home and realise you’ve forgotten the milk or teabags. Feel free to nip back inside and browse the magazine rack, or better still, move your car so I can get some diesel.’

  ‘Charming,’ he muttered, as he got in his car.

  ‘Just move, please.’ I was losing it. The Navara is a big truck and I felt like driving over his car to the next pump. After arsing about with his seat belt for another few long seconds, he pulled away and I jumped out and waited a few minutes for the attendant behind the counter to activate the pump. I filled up the tank, locked the cap and walked to the cash point. It was busy and I was paranoid. Everyone was a threat. Every glance was an assassin coming for me. I slid my card into the machine and entered my PIN. The screen informed me the number was incorrect. I was stressed and, in a rush, so I tried it again, slowly this time. The same message appeared on the screen: incorrect number. I’ve used the same number for decades. I tried it again with the same result.

  Someone had blocked my account. I knew without trying again that they’d done it. They were trying to stop me running. They were more powerful than I imagined, and I was blown away. I hadn’t seen anything yet.

  CHAPTER 17

  That Night

  I knew that if I was go
ing to run, I needed money. I went home after pleading with the Tesco garage employees to take my name and address, and I promised to return with the money as soon as possible. Of course, I never did. Serves them right for making me wait at the pump. After everything that had happened, I was in a paranoia bubble. I drove past the side of my flat where I’ve parked my car for the last fifteen years and pulled into a caravan site a few hundred yards up the road. I turned it around so that it was facing the exit, anticipating that I may need to make a quick getaway. My imagination was running wild, but what was the alternative? Act normally and wait for someone to take me out? I couldn’t do that.

  I had to look out for me and the Staffie; it was us against the world now. When we first brought Evie Jones home and realised that she was a danger to passing dogs we secured the balcony, making sure that there were no gaps in the fence where she could wriggle out and down the stairs to attack a poor, defenceless Labrador. The only breach in the fence was a weak panel. The panel separated our balcony from the next flat behind us, and I wedged an old sun lounger against it and then heaved the wheelie bin back so that she couldn’t fit behind it. As I walked home, the weak panel became our escape route in my mind. If danger came to our door, we could leave through the back, push the bin a few inches, move the sun lounger and slip onto our neighbour’s balcony without being seen from the main road. Part of me was impressed with my ability to plan with such detail and another part of me questioned my sanity. If you could have heard the conversations going on in my mind that day, you would have too.

  The coast road at the front of the flat was busy when I walked up the side path to the front door. Knowing that dozens of normal human beings drove by every hour gave me some comfort. It would be a different story once the teatime traffic faded. The population of Trearddur Bay goes through the roof during the daytime as visitors take the coast road to enjoy the views, but by eight o’clock it turns back into the sleepy village it really is; in the holidays, all the properties are full but by October, it’s a ghost town with no lights on anywhere at nigh time until the weekends when the tourists come back again.

  I locked both doors while the Staffie whirled around my feet. There is no command that you can give to an excited dog welcoming you home. You have to face the barrage in the knowledge that it will eventually subside. I checked all the doors and windows, knowing that they were secure, but paranoia forced me to check them anyway. My mind is so full of imaginary goings-on when I’m writing a book that I forget whether I’ve left the iron on, if the front door is locked and where I’m supposed to be going in the first place. I had to check them a second time just to be sure.

  With the Staffie settled and the kettle on, I called the Santander customer service line. A very helpful lady with a Scottish accent looked into my account and informed me that a petrol station close to Birmingham had reported that someone had tried to use several debit cards in different names to pay for a tank of fuel, and that one of the names was mine. The bank quite rightly put a block on my card until I contacted them. It sounded like a perfectly believable scenario which could happen to anyone at any time, but in my mind, it was them. The Niners had done it to stop me running. I had to make a contingency plan to stop them from doing it again. I needed more than one way to access money and it needed to be as anonymous as possible. I logged in online and pulled up a prepaid MasterCard site, which I had used for a while when travelling abroad. I used the card to buy stuff online, and for travelling, they’re perfect. I swapped my payment details from my Amazon account so that my e-book money went direct to the prepaid card rather than my bank account.

  At the time, we both had a personal drawer in the kitchen units, and I rifled through them, my brains running at warp speed. My partner had left a Barclaycard which I was authorised to use. I didn’t know it was there and she must have kept it from me in case I used it to fund my crazy marketing ideas. She was very frugal with money but I’m the opposite. I’d give my last pound away without thinking about it so, she didn’t trust me with money and looking back she was spot on. She’d forgotten all about the card in her rush to pack, so I activated it online and took that too. For a moment, I felt like I had one over on the Niners. I was wrong, as usual.

  The sun was going down and I wasn’t finished swapping money from my accounts yet, so I logged onto a We Buy Any Car website and asked for a cash price for the truck. There are too many cameras on our roads to hide for long. If they had access to police cameras, and I believed they did, then it wouldn’t take long for them to track me down. With all that organised, I tried to think how else they could find me. The obvious way was my mobile phone. I printed off all my numbers from my Samsung, put them in my laptop bag and then stashed all my notes on Fabienne into a small safe, which we kept in the loft. I planned to buy a number of prepaid SIM cards from the shops the next day. They would keep me in touch with the people I trusted, though God only knows who I could trust.

  It took me the best part of three hours to sort everything out and the sun was gone from the sky. I began to think that I’d missed my window of opportunity to travel in daylight. I watched the roads around the flat through the kitchen window, looking for any suspicious vehicles approaching. When you’re in that frame of mind, they’re all suspicious. I decided that it was safer to stay at the house for the night and leave in the morning when there was more traffic on the roads. There was more chance of them ramming me off the road in the dark. My run-in with Officer Knowles was still on my mind too. It would be easy for a rogue officer to pull me over at night. I had to start thinking like a man on the run.

  I locked all the doors and closed all the curtains, setting the burglar alarm to hallway so that I could move from bedroom to bedroom at will. All the windows and doors were renewed fairly recently, and they had good locks fitted. If anyone tried to break in, they would have to smash a window. I felt as secure as I could be under the circumstances. As well as all those locks, I had the shotgun and the Staffie. At the time, I fancied my chances to get through the night safely.

  I resisted the urge to drink myself to sleep despite being home alone, although I took the liberty of smoking my head off. My eyes were burning, and eventually I nodded off into a dream-filled slumber. I didn’t sleep long. Evie Jones woke me. It was three o’clock in the morning when she started barking. I was tired and my head was aching. There was a rattle from the backyard, and I rushed into the back bedroom to investigate. I was amazed to see a figure struggling over the back-fence panels. They’re six feet high and the intruder was considerably shorter than that. A layer of gravel covers the backyard and they landed with a crunch on my side of the fence.

  My heart was in my mouth. Although I knew I was in danger, I was still shocked to see an intruder climbing the fence. Evie Jones kicked off and she was bouncing off the window, her snot and saliva smearing the double-glazed panel as she tried repeatedly to charge through the glass. The figure heard the Staffie and looked up at the window and smiled. It was an evil sneer and I recognised her immediately. It was the beach warden.

  The light from the bedroom illuminated the yard to a degree. I couldn’t believe her nerve, but I was almost relieved to see that it was her. If that was the best that the Niners could send, then I would live forever. Once again, I was wrong.

  As I watched her to see what she was planning to do, she took a small haversack from her back and quickly removed a glass bottle. She fumbled in her jacket pocket and then stuffed a rag into the neck, tilting it so that the flammable liquid soaked into it. The flat below mine was a holiday home and rarely occupied. I realised then she was going to firebomb the building. I had double-locked the doors and none of the windows opened wide enough to climb out. If she threw the petrol bomb through the window downstairs, then we would never make it out of the front door. A judge may see it another way, but I had no choice but to do what I did. Honestly, I didn’t.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Niners

  I understood the consequences
of what I was about to do, but it didn’t matter. It was me and Evie Jones or her. I grabbed the Staffie and pushed her out of the bedroom onto the landing. She was snarling and scratching at the door, but it would hold her long enough. Closing the door so that she couldn’t get in, I turned the butt of the shotgun and smashed the bedroom window with it. The double-glazed unit exploded into tiny pieces. If the Staffie had been in the room, she would have jumped through the opening and broken her bones in the fall. Time slowed right down as the beach warden held the petrol bomb away from her body and lit the rag. I held my breath as I pulled the stock into my shoulder and aimed the shotgun. It was a stance that I had taken a thousand times before, except that this time my target was not a clay disc; this time it was a human.

  Without a second thought about the implications of my actions or where I would end up, I squeezed the trigger and the Remington kicked in my hands. The lead shot smashed her wrist bones to pulp and shredded the flesh around them. Only a few strings of sinew attached the hand to her arm. She looked shocked. She stared at the ruined appendage and looked around for the culprit. ‘Where had the gunshot come from?’ was written all over her face.

  ‘You never expected that, did you?’ I muttered under my breath as I squeezed the trigger again. The second blast ripped a massive chunk of her bicep from the bone in the upper arm and blood splattered across her neck and chest. A plume of white gravel shot skywards as the pellets smashed through her flesh into the yard.

  Her evil smile was gone, replaced by a ‘little lost girl’ expression. She looked scared for a moment as the burning bottle fell from her ruined hand. Her fingers could no longer grip, and it smashed onto the floor at her feet. The burning rag ignited the petrol and the flames engulfed her in seconds. I felt no remorse as I watched her knees buckle and her clothes melt around her body. The blackened material mingled with her burning flesh as she turned into a human bonfire. I could hear her hair crackling as it burned and the skin on her face seemed to blister before it blackened and burned. She stared at me with accusing eyes. The Remington had another shell available and I could have put her out of her misery with a shot to the head, but part of me wanted her to suffer. I wanted to watch her die in agony. If you think that that’s sick, then so be it but the feeling didn’t last for more than a few seconds. I couldn’t watch her suffer. The shape of her skull replaced her facial features as the flames devoured her. She screamed like a banshee until I fired again and put her out of her misery; her body finally toppled over, and she twitched for a long few seconds before she was finally still.