Country Lines (A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller Book 8)

by Oliver Davies

  Country Lines

  A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller

  Oliver Davies

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  A Message from the Author

  Prologue

  Spring was rolling in, slow but indefatigable, the green shoots relentlessly pushing the old, dead matter of winter aside. My wife and I took a leisurely stroll around the local streets, appreciating the sunny warmth and the mild air.

  “We’d better hurry up,” my wife said, glancing down at her watch. The sun caught the glass surface, and the reflected light flashed across the front of my jacket like a tiny torch-beam.

  “Oh, damn. Liam’s coming by later, isn’t he?”

  “If by later, you mean any minute now, then yes,” she said with a wry smile.

  I couldn’t stride along like I used to, and there was certainly no running, but we made tracks as best we could and ended up getting back home only a few minutes late.

  Liam and his father were already at the door, their car parked up in front of the house. Liam was scuffing the floor with his shoe between jigging about impatiently, whilst Douglas tapped away on his phone, no doubt sending us a message to ask where we were.

  “Douglas! Liam!” I called as we came up the pavement.

  The Perry’s turned around with identical expressions of surprise, and I chuckled. Liam gave me a wave, and I raised a hand in return. Liam seemed to have shot up another few inches since the last time we’d seen him, but then he was growing up fast in more ways than one, I thought a little sadly. He was certainly starting to look even more similar to his father, both with their red hair, slightly upturned noses and lanky frames.

  I’d met Liam’s mum only once and been surprised to find that she was a black-haired, petite woman of Pakistani origin, hugely friendly and imminently likeable. Liam really took almost completely after his dad in looks, except perhaps for his dark eyes. Douglas had told me that Liam’s little sister took much more after his wife, but I’d not met the lass and now probably never would.

  My wife heard me sigh and patted my arm. “It’s not for forever, love. I’m sure they’ll be back to visit.”

  “Aye. I’ll just miss the lad.”

  “We both will,” she agreed, squeezing my elbow.

  I stepped over to greet Douglas and Liam before we all headed into the house. I fixed a couple of coffees for Douglas and me while my wife made herself a tea and a hot chocolate for Liam. It was getting too warm for hot chocolates, but we’d bought in some mini-marshmallows and sprinkles for old time’s sake.

  “That looks amazing,” Douglas said when we brought the tray in. I’d baked some shortbread yesterday and plated that up too. Liam had eyes only for his hot chocolate, and my wife chuckled quietly as she handed it over.

  They got settled on the settee, and I eased myself into my favourite armchair. My wife had decided to join us today, and she settled in with her latest embroidery kit on the chair across the room from me.

  “How’s packing up the house going?” I asked.

  I dipped a chunk of shortbread into my coffee and bit off the soft sweetness. Previous attempts at baking the stuff had more often than not led to a pile of pleasant-tasting crumbs, the shortbread disintegrating when you so much as looked at it. I reckoned I had about nailed it this time, though, and it was soft and buttery.

  “Not too bad, not too bad. Mustn’t grumble, right?” Douglas said with a slightly weary smile.

  “My room’s all empty,” Liam chipped in.

  “Have you seen your new room yet?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s much bigger. I can get dual monitors for gaming and maybe even a treadmill for training. It’d fit!”

  I sent a glance Douglas’s way, and he shook his head at me with an exasperated expression.

  “We’ll see when your birthday comes round,” he told Liam, who looked unimpressed.

  “Y’know, I always liked running outdoors best,” I told the lad.

  He’d started his running with the intention of winning his event on sports day. I had no doubt at all that he’d win with flying colours with all the training he’d been putting in, and he’d set his sights on doing a 10k race once sports day was over.

  “It’s better on a treadmill. You can record your progress much better, and you can’t trip over. Dad took me to the gym one time, and I loved it.”

  “Maybe you can get a gym membership then?”

  “The gym’s so busy, though. People are always hogging the machines!”

  “Plus, he needs to be over sixteen to go to the gym alone,” Douglas told me.

  “Ah. Well, you’re not far off sixteen now, are you, lad? You could see about getting a job and saving up for the gym.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. A job would take so much time out of my training schedule,” Liam huffed.

  “Not if it was a physical sort of job, like delivering pizzas on your bike or something like that.”

  Liam seemed to like that idea and nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe I’d even get free pizza,” he exclaimed before he disappeared off to the loo.

  “Sorry about that. He’s a bit overly keen on it all,” Douglas said.

  “He’s a fine lad.” I smiled. “It’s good he’s interested in running rather than the sort of things I was up to at that age.”

  “You? Really?” Douglas looked genuinely surprised, and I had to laugh. My wife was smiling, too, her head still bent over her embroidery.

  “He’s no saint, this one,” she teased.

  “I don’t believe it.” Douglas shook his head. “Don’t go telling Liam that you were a troublemaker, now. The job is a damn good idea, we’ve been trying to nudge him towards getting a paper round or something, and I think you just about convinced him.”

  “Good. I won’t mention my ill-spent youth, then,” I promised with a small laugh.

  I could laugh about it now, but I’d been ashamed of it when I was younger, and it’d taken a long while for me to accept that it’d been a part of my past, and I couldn’t change it.

  Liam came back into the sitting room and started getting his laptop all set up. I watched as he fastidiously got his notes in order and felt another pang of sadness that I wouldn’t be seeing the lad for a long while. He’d probably be taller than I was by the next time I saw him if he continued growing like he was now.

  “Do you know if your new school has a newspaper?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s not very good,” Liam said matter-of-factly. I hid a smile.

  “Liam,” Douglas said, casting his son an unimpressed look.

  “It’s true,” Liam grumbled. “But it doesn’t matter. I’ll make sure it’s up to scratch by the end of the year. There’ll probably be nothing interesting to report on, though, seeing as it’s Devon. Nothing happens in Devon.”

  “Son, you know I have to go there for my job,” Douglas said, looking a little hurt.

  Before I could say anything, my wife looked u
p from her embroidery. “I bet there’s more going on in Devon than you’d think, Liam. And anyway, from what my husband’s been telling me if anyone can dig up something interesting for the paper, you can, dear.”

  Liam flushed at that, ducking his head. He couldn’t seem to find anything to say, and Douglas gave my wife a nod of thanks.

  “It’ll surely be more interesting than listening to me prattle on, anyway,” I joked lightly.

  Liam frowned at that. “Not true!” he protested. “Loads of people like reading your stories. Mr Gowland, the music teacher, told me that your story is the first bit he reads!”

  “Oh, well, that’s very kind of him,” I said, flattered and a touch flustered.

  “Maybe you can find another old fogie to talk to in Devon,” my wife said, sending me a smile to show she was joking.

  “Aye, I can’t imagine there’s a shortage of folks wanting to tell their war stories, so to speak, to an interested audience.”

  Liam took another piece of shortbread and bit into it with a somewhat sullen expression. “It won’t be the same,” he grumbled.

  “No, not the same. Maybe some bits will be worse, but some bits will be better too. You’ll see, lad. It’ll work out.”

  “Maybe,” he sighed. He finished off the last of his hot chocolate, licking the remnants from his upper lip before giving me an expectant look.

  I knew what that meant and got comfortable in my seat, my coffee cup in hand.

  “What do you want to hear about today, then?” I asked. It went unspoken that this would be the last story for a while, and there was some invisible pressure to make it a good one.

  “A big case. The biggest,” Liam said, clearly having already given it some thought.

  “Biggest how? A case with the widest media coverage, or the severity of the crime, or-”

  “All of it!”

  I huffed a laugh and ran a hand over my face as I thought about it. I’d already told Liam many of the standout cases in my career, ones that stayed most firmly in my memory because they had an emotional impact for whatever reason, but there were still a few I hadn’t relayed. There was one case that’d certainly been big in terms of the scale of the operation and the amount of money involved. I hadn’t told it to Liam previously because I’d feared that it was a bit adult for him, but he was fast growing up now, and his dad was here to stop me if he felt that Liam was uncomfortable for any reason.

  “Alright then. How do a kidnapping and a couple of house raids sound to you?”

  “Perfect,” Liam said with a broad smile.

  He stuffed another piece of shortbread into his mouth before focusing on his laptop, his fingers poised above the keys. My wife was smiling slightly at me, her embroidery briefly paused as she waited for me to start, and Douglas was similarly watching me attentively. I took a sip of coffee and tried to remember how it all kicked off.

  “In policing, there are cases where it’s immediately obvious that they’re going to be important. I’d attend a crime scene for a case like that and already know that I’d be working overtime for a few weeks, at least. Then there were cases that snuck up on me. They didn’t seem that significant to start off with, and then they’d explode into something big and serious practically overnight. This was one of the latter cases, and it certainly caught me off guard.”

  I gave Liam a solemn look. “Just like in journalism, lad, there’s almost always more than meets the eye. Your job as an investigator is to dig the truth up, no matter how deeply it’s hidden.”

  One

  “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” Lucy chanted under her breath.

  She was pacing the living room, which was small enough that she had to turn around every three steps. Children’s toys haphazardly littered the floor, but she paid them no mind, completely focused on the tinny ringing of the phone in her ear.

  Her little sister, a doll-like blond girl of six, was sitting watching the nearly silent TV, the cartoon characters jumping about on the screen. Lucy had turned the noise right down for the phone call, and all her sister, Eva, had done was scoot close enough to the screen that she was practically nose to nose with it. She was supposed to be in bed right now, but she’d kept coming downstairs, and Lucy didn’t have the energy to fight her.

  The phone continued to ring, and her boyfriend still didn’t pick up. On and on it rang until it finally conceded that Jackson’s phone wasn’t available, and Lucy irritably tossed her phone at the sofa, where it landed with a soft thump. She collapsed down beside it, half-shaking with the tension and worry of it all. She’d been so focused on her own worries that she didn’t even notice that Eva had moved until the girl’s chin was practically on her knee. Lucy sighed and scooped her up.

  “What’s wrong?” Eva asked quietly, looking at Lucy with those big eyes.

  “I’m trying to call Jackson, honey. Did he say anything to you?”

  Eva shook her head, her fine corkscrew curls bouncing. They fell in her face, getting in the way when she ate and tangling into an awful mess on any day with even a slight breeze, but Eva refused to have her hair tied up, and Lucy didn’t have it in her to force it. She kept it cropped short instead, attacking the curls with the stiff pair of kitchen scissors every month but otherwise let it run wild. Much like Eva herself, really.

  “He didn’t tell you that he was going anywhere?” Lucy pressed, but Eva just shook her head again. She wriggled off Lucy’s lap, wanting to go back to the TV, and Lucy let her.

  Jackson had gone out with his mates and his younger cousin, whose name Lucy was forever forgetting. It wasn’t like it was unusual for him to go out on a Friday night, or a Saturday, or any day of the week ending in ‘y’, but it was one o’clock in the morning now, and he should’ve been back. Normally, he staggered in the door at four or five am, catching a couple of hours of sleep before he dragged himself out of bed and demanded coffee. But he’d sworn that tonight would only be a couple of drinks before he’d be home, well in time to meet the guy that would be arriving at the house any minute now. Lucy never would’ve thought she’d miss how he was after a night out, often incoherent, irritable, and reeking of sweat, but she did.

  She dug her phone out from between the sofa cushions and checked the time for the dozenth time. There were still no texts or missed calls from Jackson, and she had no damn idea where he was.

  “Go on upstairs, Evie,” she urged as the clock ticked towards half-one.

  It was Lucy who’d pushed for Jackson to meet this bloke at nighttime in the hopes that Eva would be fast asleep and never know a thing about it. But some of Lucy’s anxiety about Jackson’s absence must have rubbed off on Eva because the little miss was stubborn as hell tonight.

  Jackson didn’t know how much Lucy knew of his dealings, and he tried to keep these things from her. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a subtle bone in his body, and Lucy knew more than she wanted to.

  “I wanna stay here with you,” Eva protested.

  “I need you upstairs, baby. C’mon, let’s go find your teddies to play with. You must be getting sleepy by now, huh?”

  Getting Eva settled took her mind off things for a couple of minutes before she was back downstairs and pacing again. She headed through to the kitchen to fix herself some tea, hoping that a hot drink would calm her down. The post from this morning was still on the kitchen table; bills from the bank, from the council, and a notice from HMRC about tax. She sighed. Jackson would tell her he’d paid them, that he’d sorted it so that she’d stop getting on his case, but the letters kept coming through the door. She knew how much he earned, better than he did probably, so why the hell didn’t he just pay the bills?

  Lucy hissed a breath through her teeth, pacing back and forth across the kitchen. She needed him to come back, needed him badly. She needed him to face the man who was coming to the door, needed him to pay the bills so she could buy a new school uniform for Eva, and she needed him to give her a fix.

  She swore under her breath at him, resisting the
urge to kick the kitchen cupboards. There was no point in scaring Eva. The kid heard enough unexplained yelling and throwing things when Jackson was around. And she didn’t need it from Lucy, too, even if she did feel like throwing a fit. She’d put up with so much from Jackson, and he couldn’t even have the decency to crawl home in time? This wasn’t her problem. Goddammit, she didn’t sign up for this.

  She kept pacing until the sweating and the shakes got too intense, and she flopped down on the sofa, breathing uneasily. The kettle had boiled, but she didn’t want the tea anymore, nausea squirming in her stomach. She picked up her phone from where she’d abandoned it on the sofa and glowered at it when it didn’t offer up any news from Jackson.

  As she was holding it, a call came through, ringing shrilly and making her startle so badly she almost dropped the ruddy thing. She fumbled to accept the call, pausing briefly in disappointment when she saw that the call was from Max, Jackson’s teenage cousin, and not Jackson himself. Still, they’d gone out together, so maybe Max would know where Jackson was and could tell him to get himself home ASAP.

  “Max?” she said, her clammy hands slick against the phone.

  “Hey,” Max slurred, drawing the word out like he was chewing on toffee. Lucy frowned, irritated that Max didn’t sound sober enough to give her the answers she wanted. She tried anyway.

  “Max? Is Jackson with you? Where are you?”

  Max mumbled something garbled and difficult to make out. There were cars going by in the background, and the wind buffeted against the phone speaker erratically.

  “I can’t hear you,” she snapped.

  “Jay’s… he’s down, Luce. He’s- I dunno where t’others are. I dunno.”