Gareth Dawson Series Box Set

by Nathan Burrows

  ‘I know everything,’ Jimmy replied, looking over at the bed with the cameras. Hollister tilted his head back and laughed.

  ‘Oh, I doubt that very much,’ he said, looking at Max. Carlos had moved to stand next to him.

  ‘Tina, Ellie, Nikki,’ Jimmy replied before watching with satisfaction as the colour drained from Hollister’s face. ‘There’s Beth, and a few others, but I’m most interested in those three. Tina, Ellie, and Nikki.’ Jimmy raised his hand—slowly—and ran it around the back of his neck. The pain had almost gone completely, but the liquid sensation was getting worse. ‘I’ve got his hard drive.’

  ‘You fucking idiot,’ Hollister barked, snapping his head round to stare at Max.

  ‘It’s okay, Mr Hollister,’ Max replied. ‘It’s encrypted. There’s no way he could get into it. No-one can.’

  ‘Your girlfriend…’ Jimmy paused. What was her name again? ‘Your girlfriend gave me the password.’ He stared at the men. Something wasn’t right. The edges of Jimmy’s vision were going grey, almost as if he was looking through a tunnel.

  ‘Bitch,’ Max said. ‘Fucking bitch.’

  ‘Shut up Maxwell. I’ll deal with you later. What do you want?’ Hollister asked, glaring at Jimmy. He was trying to sound confident, but his voice was trembling. ‘Money?’ Jimmy shook his head, and the agonising pain returned, shooting through his skull like a bullet.

  ‘No, not money.’ He closed his eyes against the pain and saw Tina’s face on his laptop screen from the day before. In his mind’s eye, he re-watched Hollister’s hands snaking around her neck, his signet ring visible. Squeezing. Gently at first, then harder. ‘I don’t want money.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ Hollister responded. ‘Everyone does. How much are you looking for?’

  Behind Jimmy’s closed eyes, Hollister’s knuckles whitened around Tina’s neck.

  ‘I don’t want money,’ Jimmy whispered while Max’s camera recorded Tina’s last frantic gasps. ‘I want to know what you did with them?’ Her eyes glazed as she took her final, desperate breath.

  ‘Where’s the drive?’ It was Carlos, still snarling. Jimmy opened his eyes. Hollister was standing in front of him. Jimmy blinked to try to sharpen his focus. Even though Carlos’s outline was blurred, Jimmy could see the silhouette of the gun in his hand. He was holding it loosely down by his hip, but as Jimmy’s vision cleared for a second, he saw Carlos passing the gun to Hollister.

  ‘What did you do with them?’ Jimmy repeated his question, speaking as clearly as he could. The slurring was getting worse. Hollister looked down at the gun and then at Jimmy. He laughed. A short bark of a laugh.

  ‘We put them out with the rubbish, which is where they belong.’ He raised the gun, pointed it at Jimmy for a few seconds, and then lowered it. ‘I’ve just remembered where we’ve met. You’re the bin man. How ironic, don’t you think?’

  Jimmy closed his eyes again, thinking about the dates scribbled in his work notebook where he recorded the weight of the bins they emptied. He’d checked them the previous day. The date he was most interested in was three days before they paid Max twenty-five grand. The day after Milly disappeared. When Jimmy had realised the previous evening that the reason the bin was so heavy on that particular day was because—almost certainly—Milly’s body was inside it, the aneurysm might as well have taken him there and then.

  Just before he had left for the hotel, he’d written an e-mail to Detective Superintendent Griffiths and set his e-mail software to send it tomorrow morning. Jimmy hadn’t put everything into the e-mail, but enough to get the police to look at the final destination of the bin lorries that he’d spent his working life driving.

  He put his hands into his pockets, staring at the gun in Hollister’s hand.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Last cigarette, and all that?’

  ‘Which one was yours?’ Hollister replied, looking again at the gun. Jimmy reached into his pocket for his lighter.

  ‘Milly,’ Jimmy said, turning the lighter over in his hand. ‘Her name was Milly.’ With his other hand, still deep in his trouser pocket, he pulled the plastic pin from the smoke grenade before pulling his hand out of his pocket and rolling it across the floor.

  ‘What the fuck!’ Hollister shouted, lifting the gun and pointing it in Jimmy’s direction. Clouds of smoke started billowing from the small canister on the floor. ‘What the fuck is that?’

  The pain in Jimmy’s head was crescendoing into nothing like he’d ever known before. It was worse than all the hangovers he’d ever had rolled into one. Jimmy watched through half-closed eyes as the smoke curled up toward the ceiling and drifted toward the smoke detectors in the ceiling. A few seconds later, there was a “click” and the fire suppression system started. It should have been the fire alarms sounding, but Jimmy had rewired the system in the plant room and connected the alarms directly to the fire suppression system. His time at college all those years ago hadn’t been completely wasted.

  Jimmy shut his eyes again, pressing them tightly together to ward off the pain. He only needed a few more seconds. He heard Carlos sniffing again and then shouting something. The noise all started to recede into the background, and Jimmy felt himself slump over in the chair. His head throbbed, but the pain was fading. Everything was fading.

  He flicked the lid on the Zippo that Milly had given him and ran his thumb over the well-worn wheel. Jimmy could smell the petrol now, squirting out of the fire suppression system into a fine mist above their heads. The petrol from the barrels in the plant room. Jimmy had been right. They were exactly the same size as the ones for his fish tank, and it hadn’t taken him long to change them over after he’d filled them up from various petrol stations around Norwich. The mist coming down from the fittings in the ceiling would not put any fires out. Far from it.

  ‘Her name,’ Jimmy said as he jerked his finger on the wheel, feeling the friction against the flint and hearing the familiar whoosh as a flame shot from the small gold lighter.

  ‘Her name was Milly.’

  Chapter 49

  Laura had tears streaming down her cheeks as she sat next to Gareth on the sofa. He put an arm around her, pulling her tightly into his side, as they watched the television in front of them. On the screen, a male reporter was standing in front of the Royal Hotel. Behind him, bright blue and white police tape was fluttering in the breeze.

  ‘Police have confirmed that six bodies have now been recovered following the huge explosion last night in the basement of the Royal Hotel in the centre of Norwich. The identities of the bodies are yet to be confirmed, but local reports suggest that one of them was the hotel’s owner, the local philanthropist Martin Hollister.’

  Laura glanced at Gareth’s coffee table, and the external hard drive that had been delivered to Gareth’s flat that morning. It had come with detailed notes from Jimmy for Dave. About how the drive was to be destroyed so that no-one could ever look at the photos or videos on it. Under no circumstances, Jimmy had said, was anyone to look at what was on there. Whatever Dave did to the drive, it had to be absolutely final.

  Jimmy had also included an amendment to his will that left everything he had to a student nurse called Angela. Everything except generous payments for a small group of people that included Laura and Gareth. Big Joe, and Robbie. Even Dave and Charlotte were also on that list. The final piece of paperwork with the drive were the deeds for a plot in the local cemetery. It was for another grave next to Hannah Tucker’s. Three graves, together.

  On the screen, the picture changed to the studio. The female anchor put a solemn expression on her face and behind her, there was a photograph of the local rubbish dump.

  ‘In other news,’ the woman said in a voice that matched her expression, ‘police have confirmed that the body found at Norwich’s main landfill site just outside Rackheath is thought to be that of missing local girl, Milly Tucker. Scores of policemen continue to scour the site after an anonymous tip-off led them to the site, but a police spok
esperson declined to comment on whether they were looking for more evidence, or more bodies.’ Her voice brightened and the image behind her changed to a map of East Anglia. ‘And now, over to Monique for the weather.’

  Single Handed

  1

  If John Bywater had known that it would be his last ever day out on the water, he would have stayed in bed and not bothered getting up.

  Every morning for the last forty years, he’d risen before any of the other residents of Cley-next-the-Sea on the North Norfolk coast. He’d been doing it for so long that he didn’t even need an alarm clock. If he overslept, or was sick, then he didn’t get any money that day unless one of the other fishermen hauled his pots for him. They all looked after each other that way, but every year there were fewer and fewer of them.

  When John had started out, leaving school at fifteen to work the pots, there had been over seventy fishing boats of all shapes and sizes all the way from Sheringham to Cromer. Now, four decades later, there were perhaps fifteen to twenty. Most of them were small inshore single handed boats like his, but there were some larger multi-crew boats about and a couple of catamarans. John had never fancied working with other fishermen. One of the things he appreciated about the job was the solitude.

  Not for the first time, John wondered if anyone would replace him when he eventually retired. The consensus among the fishermen was that they were the last generation, and when they went, so would the traditions they carried on. Their demise wouldn’t even be noticed, apart from perhaps by the crabs and lobsters they fished.

  It was the middle of May, and a glorious spring morning on the coast. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east, and John was looking forward to watching the sun rise over the water. He walked from the village to the car-park where his small fishing boat sat on a trailer. No matter how tired John was or how awful the weather was, the daily twenty-minute walk never failed to invigorate him.

  Around him, the world was starting to come to life. Above his head in the vast open sky, swifts were darting about above the reed beds, and John could hear the familiar chatter of a warbler in the distance. A low fog hung over the top of the flat land, and John knew that the sea would be like a millpond.

  Bernie—the tractor driver who manoeuvred the boats into the water for the fishermen—was his usual dour self, barely saying two words to John even though they saw each other every day. John pushed his boat out into deeper water, his clothes protected by the waist-high bright yellow waders he wore, and he winced at the pain in his back as he swung himself into the boat. A moment later, the small inboard engine was chugging as it took him to his pots.

  The tide was low, and a few hundred yards to his starboard side, John could see the rusted masts of a shipwreck. It was the SS Rosalie, sunk by a German torpedo on a summer’s day in 1915, fortunately with no casualties. Every time John saw the wreck, it reminded him of how capricious the sea could be, and how cruel, even though the sea itself had nothing to do with the SS Rosalie’s demise.

  Twenty minutes later, with the sun just about to emerge above the eastern horizon, John had hauled the first of his pots. They were marked with coloured buoys which floated on the surface, depending on which fisherman had placed them. As one of the younger fishermen working the beds in the area, John had ended up with dark purple buoys.

  He grunted as he pulled the heavy pot over the side and laid it flat side down on the bottom of his boat. John was wearing a pair of thick blue rubber gloves to protect his hands from the rough rope and barnacled pots.

  The first pot was perhaps half full, which pleased John. It was an excellent start, and with another fourteen pots to empty, the chances were he would head back to shore with a full load. He reached into the pot and started pulling the crabs out, throwing the smaller ones back overboard to live for another day. He had a measuring gauge somewhere in the boat that he could use to make sure all the crabs were large enough to be caught, but John didn’t need it.

  John tipped the rest of the crabs out into the large rectangular plastic tubs that he had half filled with seawater. He looked into the tubs, happy that his haul was all the right sort of crab. There had been an influx of velvet crabs a few years ago, larger and more predatory than the local Cromer crabs, but a frigid blast nicknamed The Beast from the East had pushed them back to warmer waters the previous year.

  The second pot didn’t have as many crabs in, but it did have a couple of lobsters courtesy of the salted dogfish that John had baited the pot with. With a grin, John wrapped elastic bands around their pincers and placed them into a separate tub. That would be an easy twenty or thirty quid right there, plus a free pint for John from the chef at the Blakeney Hotel. It was the chef’s way of making sure that he got first dibs on the best of the catch, and it was an arrangement that John had enjoyed for years.

  John hauled up the third and final pot of the batch in this section. He had baited this one with mackerel, so was expecting crabs. When he tipped it into the tub, though, he saw that he had netted some rubbish. At the bottom of the tub, with several small crabs scuttling over it, was a glove. John tutted, annoyed at what people would throw overboard. He couldn’t remember the last time he didn’t catch some sort of crap in one of the pots.

  He made his way aft in his boat to grab a bin liner that he kept for rubbish. Once he had finished this pot, he thought as he struggled to open it with his thick gloves on, he would stop for a smoke and cup of tea from his flask to watch the sunrise. Then he would move to the next batch of pots a few hundred metres further out over the chalk beds.

  When he picked up the glove, it was heavier than he was expecting, and a small crab was clinging onto the open end for dear life. John dislodged the crab, flicking it back into the sea. That was when he saw the grey flesh and bone inside the glove. It wasn’t rubbish. It was a hand.

  John barely made it to the side of the boat before he vomited. He threw the glove into an empty tub and watched the remains of his breakfast floating away. Fingers trembling, he eased his hands out of his gloves and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  “Police, please?” John said to the woman who asked him which emergency service he required.

  2

  Gareth Dawson swore as he looked at his watch realising that, although it was first thing in the morning, he was already running late.

  It was just after seven in the morning. He hated Mondays at the best of times but, as he crammed a slice of toast liberally spread with Marmite into his mouth, this one was already shaping up to be a bad one. He had just been watching the morning news on the television when his mobile phone started buzzing. It was Laura, and her car wouldn’t start. The taxis were all caught up in the school runs, even at that early hour. Would he be able to give her a lift into Norwich city centre before he went to work?

  Gareth didn’t mind being asked for the favour. On the contrary, he was quite pleased to be asked. Laura knew that, as the boss of his own company, he could go to work whenever he liked. He swung the door of his flat closed behind him, double checking to make sure the lock had engaged properly. Gareth ran a security consultancy business on the outskirts of the city, advising businesses on how to prevent their premises from being turned over by local scallys. It wasn’t a bad line of work for an ex-burglar but, at the same time, he would be left with egg all over his face if he left his own front door wide open because he was in a hurry to rescue a damsel in distress.

  A moment later, he was sitting in his truck on the way to Laura’s flat. Any other time of day, it would be a ten-minute drive, but the rush hours were starting earlier and earlier as the population on the outskirts of Norwich grew—unlike the roads or the public transport system.

  “Morning, Tommy,” Gareth shouted into his car’s bluetooth system. Tommy was his second in command and had been since the days they’d both been part-time burglars together. There was no reply, and Gareth risked a quick glance at his phone’s screen to see if that call had connected. It had. Tommy was just bei
ng his usual self.

  “Morning, boss,” his gruff voice came through the speakers a moment later. “Thanks for waking me up. I was in the middle of a lovely dream, I was. You know that blonde woman off of Britain’s Got Talent? The one with the dogs. Well, she was–”

  “Thanks, Tommy,” Gareth said with a laugh, “but I’d rather not know if it’s all the same to you.” Tommy laughed as well, a deep throaty chuckle that soon turned into a phlegmy cough. Gareth heard the unmistakable sound of a lighter, followed by a deep inhalation that exacerbated the coughing. “Jesus wept,” Gareth said to himself, turning the volume on his stereo down until Tommy had finished hacking up part of his lung. “You need to quit, mate.”

  “What?” Tommy’s voice came through the speakers, and Gareth turned the volume back up.

  “I said, you need to quit.”

  “Why? It’s my only vice left.”

  “My arse, it is. Apart from the drinking and women.” He paused for a second before continuing. “Well, the drinking anyway.”

  “Hilarious, boss,” Tommy replied gruffly. Gareth could hear the smile in his voice, though. “So, what can I do for you this fine morning?”

  “Laura’s car’s broken down. I need to give her a lift to the courtroom. She’s got a case at ten.”

  “Okay, so you need me to open up?”

  “Please, Tommy,” Gareth said. “I’m not sure what’s in the diary for this morning, though.”

  “I don’t think there’s much, Gareth. Dave was whinging about something when he left last night, so he’s out and about somewhere.” Dave was the third of their small crew, and his girlfriend Charlotte made up the fourth and final member. Dave was an IT whizkid, while Charlotte kept them all organised.