Gareth Dawson Series Box Set

by Nathan Burrows

  “Can’t they wait, Detective Constable Hunter?” Laura asked. “You can see she’s upset.”

  “Annette?” Kate said, ignoring Laura completely. “It won’t take long.”

  “Do I have to?” Annette replied, looking at Laura. “I’d rather not, to be honest.”

  “I think it’s probably time for you to go,” Laura said firmly, getting to her feet. “I’ll show you to the door.”

  “I know where the door is, Miss Flynn,” Kate replied through gritted teeth. Her eyes flicked from Annette to Laura and back to Annette. Sighing, Kate got to her feet and swept past Laura, muttering something under her breath as she did so. Laura didn’t catch what the policewoman said, but didn’t need to know that it was aimed at her and wasn’t complementary. As she reached the door of the lounge, Kate stopped and turned around. The look she gave Laura was fierce, but when she looked at Annette, her face softened slightly.

  “I’ll be in touch, Annette,” Kate said. “We’ll organise another time to have a chat.” She looked pointedly at Laura as if to say when we’re alone.

  Laura waited until the front door had closed behind Kate. A few seconds later, she heard the gate being opened and closed.

  “What on earth was all that about?” Laura muttered to herself as she made her way back into the lounge.

  “I think she knows, Laura,” Annette whispered. She was still staring at the transparent bag with the wedding ring in it.

  “Knows what?” Laura asked. Annette looked up at her with scared eyes.

  “About Philip.”

  13

  Annette stood in her dressing gown, waiting for the kettle to boil. The previous day, she had told Laura everything about Philip. About what a control freak he was. About the beatings. What he did to her in bed, and what he made her do—whether she wanted to or not. About the fact she was glad he was gone.

  She hadn’t wanted to tell Laura everything, but once she’d started, she’d not been able to stop. Annette had told her more than she’d even told Gareth, after swearing her to secrecy. Laura being such a good listener hadn’t helped the situation, and by the time Annette was finished, it was all out in the open.

  On the table in the kitchen was a letter that had arrived earlier that morning. The postmark on the brown envelope read Norfolk Police, and inside was a report that would mean she could get started on the necessary arrangements while waiting for a death certificate. Annette wondered if Kate had completed it the previous day after she had stormed out of the house. That had been weird, the whole exchange. The policewoman knew something wasn’t right, that much was obvious. While Annette was grateful to Laura for making the woman go away, she knew that at some point everything would come out. Maybe she should talk to Laura? Or maybe she should ask Gareth to talk to her on her behalf. The more Annette thought about it, the more this seemed like the best thing to do.

  There wasn’t much in the report. Just that human remains had been found in the sea near Cley and had been identified as belonging to Mr Philip McGuire of 249 Ipswich Road. He was, according to the scant report, presumed dead. It didn’t make sense to Annette. How could he be presumed dead when they had found his body? She picked up her phone and crossed to the mantelpiece to retrieve the business card that the policeman had given her.

  “Detective Superintendent Griffiths,” the voice at the other end of the line said a moment later.

  “Hello, Malcolm. It’s Annette.” There was a pause. “Annette McGuire?”

  “Mrs McGuire,” Malcolm replied a few seconds later. “How can I help?”

  “Well, I’ve got the report, but it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Okay, which part doesn’t make sense? Let me just bring it up on my screen.” Annette could hear a mouse being clicked in the background.

  “It says he’s presumed dead?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But you’ve found his body. So how can he be presumed dead when you’ve got his body?” There was a silence on the other end of the line that seemed to Annette to last for ages. “Malcolm?”

  “Are you available later on today, Annette?” the policeman said, eventually. “I’ll pop round for a quick chat and explain everything, if that’s okay?”

  “Er, yes. I’ll be in.”

  “Just after lunch?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  After ending the call, Annette frowned. She picked up the report, putting it together with the paperwork that Laura had completed for her yesterday. Annette was half-way through texting Gareth to see if he could be free later when the doorbell rang. Jumping, Annette looked through the window to see a delivery driver standing on the path. Behind him, parked on the road, was a large white van with a FedEx logo on the side.

  “Got a delivery for you,” the driver explained when she opened the door. He had a large envelope in one hand and an electronic device in the other. Annette used a stylette attached to the device to scrawl something that looked nothing like her signature before thanking the delivery driver.

  She made her way into the kitchen, examining the envelope as she did so. There was a round postmark in the top right-hand corner with the word Denpasar in block capitals, and a date. Apart from her name and address, and a customs sticker in a strange alphabet that she didn’t recognise, there was nothing to show who or where the envelope was from.

  Annette tore the envelope open and peered inside. There were some photographs and a piece of paper, but nothing else that she could see. She tipped the envelope up to let the piece of paper flutter out, but the photographs remained where they were.

  On the piece of paper, which looked like it had been torn from a notebook, were three words. Check your e-mail. Frowning, she reached inside the envelope to retrieve the photographs, turning them over so she could put them down on the kitchen table and look at them.

  When she saw what was in the photographs, Annette only just made it to the sink before she vomited, the remains of her toast and jam from breakfast clogging up the plug. She cried out as she retched again, and she closed her eyes tightly, desperate to un-see what she had just seen.

  Annette’s hand scrabbled on the kitchen table as she swept the photographs back into the envelope, managing to do it without actually looking at them again. Wiping the back of her mouth on the sleeve of her dressing gown, she opened the back door to head into the garage.

  At least Philip hadn’t scrimped like he normally did when he bought the shredder that was in there. Annette fed the envelope and its contents into the mouth and watched, tears streaming down her face, as the metal teeth sliced through them like butter.

  14

  Ronnie Phelps lay back on the bed, exhausted, and watched the fan on the ceiling of his apartment spinning lazily round. He loved the Bali weather in May. It was warm, but not stifling, and the dry season was about to start properly. At least he could go about his business without risking being drenched in an instant.

  In the compact kitchen of the apartment, a young Balinese woman was humming a tune of some sort while she made them both an icy drink. They had earned it. She certainly had, but then again, that was exactly what he was paying her for.

  According to the website he had booked her through, her name was Clara. That wasn’t her actual name, although in Indonesia people weren’t as strung up about prostitution as they were in other parts of the world. It didn’t matter anyway, as Ronnie couldn’t care less what she was called. All that he cared about was how old she looked. Or more specifically, how young. Clara claimed to be eighteen, but could have easily passed for much younger. Which was just how Ronnie liked them.

  He lifted his head as she padded back into the bedroom, a large glass of iced water in each hand.

  “Here, Mister Ronnie,” Clara said as she put the glasses down on a rickety table next to the bed. “I make cold drink for us.”

  “Thank you,” Ronnie replied, admiring her body as she lay back down on the bed next to him and snuggle
d her head into the crook of his neck. With her fingernail, she traced a path through the hair on his chest.

  “You want me to stay?” she asked, looking at him with deep brown eyes. “I stay with you all night, no problem?”

  Ronnie considered it for a few moments. She had been fun, and he would probably see her again. There were one or two things that he’d not tried with Clara. The only problem was that once he had tried them, she would probably never come back, and he would have to find another agency.

  “No, not this evening,” Ronnie replied. “I have things to do.” He felt himself stirring as her fingernails trailed down toward his groin.

  Clara looked at him, smiling. Her white teeth contrasted against her olive skin. She shifted on the bed, moving toward the foot.

  “You have drink, Mister Ronnie,” she said as she made herself comfortable. “I have thing to do as well.”

  When Clara left thirty minutes later, complete with a tip that would feed her and her family for a week, Ronnie showered. He cursed at the ineffective shower head as it dribbled tepid water down his body. He needed more money so he could afford an upgrade to his accommodation. Maybe he could buy a beach house in Kuta and have somewhere nicer than this hovel to bring women to? They would want to charge more than the seventy quid he’d just given Clara for a couple of hours of her time, but that would also mean he could do more with them.

  As he dried himself down, Ronnie calculated the time difference between Bali and the United Kingdom. Outside his window the sun was just beginning to set, so with England being eight hours behind, it would be late morning there. He’d paid for delivery before ten o’clock in the morning, so his package should have arrived by now. He grinned as he thought about the little blonde slut opening the envelope and seeing what was inside.

  Ronnie dressed in a pair of light grey slacks and open-neck shirt and crossed to his laptop. He raised the screen of the MacBook Air and waited for a second until the password field appeared. A few seconds after that, he logged into the FedEx website.

  According to the tracking facility on the site, his package had been delivered about an hour ago while he and Clara were in full flow. This brought a smile to his face, the thought of the photographs being looked at just while he was otherwise engaged. Ronnie moved the mouse and brought up a photograph of the slut. In it, she and her perverted husband were standing on a beach. Her perverted and now dead husband.

  Ronnie kept a close eye on all of his targets, and the fate of Philip McGuire was something that he was very interested in. There was a journalist he followed on Twitter who covered the North Norfolk coast. According to his feed, earlier in the week the police had discovered something off the coast. There was a photograph of a policeman carrying a container up the beach, but at the time the journalist hadn’t been able to uncover what it was. It had taken a couple of days, but eventually the Eastern Daily News had announced that human remains had been discovered in Cley-next-the-Sea. A few days after that, there had been a picture of Philip McGuire staring out at Ronnie from the newspaper’s website.

  He had kept all the reports in a folder, and he opened one of them at random now and scanned through the text.

  Believed to be that of missing scuba diver, Philip McGuire.

  A fisherman’s gruesome find.

  Police investigation ongoing.

  Ronnie closed down the window and resisted the temptation to open his Protonmail account from his laptop. It was supposed to be completely secure and anonymous, but Ronnie didn’t trust anyone, and the last thing he wanted was for anyone to trace his IP address. In his mind, eyes were everywhere.

  He closed down the laptop and put his shoes on. It was almost seven, and downtown Bali would be coming to life. When he stepped out of the door of his apartment, the humidity hit him like a wall of moist heat. Despite the state of the rest of his apartment, one thing that did function well was the air conditioning. Ronnie walked to the end of the road to where a green and white taxi was waiting.

  “Bajra Sandhi Monument, please,” Ronnie said to the elderly man behind the wheel.

  “No problem, sir,” the driver replied with a yellow-toothed grin.

  Ronnie sat back in the comfortable rear seat of the taxi. The monument wasn’t his ultimate destination, but it was close enough to the Internet cafe that he had been using.

  It was time to see if the slut had done as she was told.

  15

  Gareth sat in his truck and yawned. It had been a long day. His first job had been earlier than usual—a pensioner on one of the local estates was having problems with some of the local youngsters, and he wanted Gareth’s company to install some discrete cameras for evidence. Gareth would rather have found out on the sly who was bothering the old man and gone round their houses to give them the good news that he was off limits. Seeing the pensioner’s impressive array of military medals only made this more tempting, but that wasn’t how Gareth behaved any more. Plus, although that course of action would be more satisfying, it wouldn’t pay the bills.

  In the end, Gareth had installed a high-end motion activated camera rig with its own SIM card and 4G connection. He didn’t charge the veteran the full amount for even a basic system and conveniently forgot to tell him that the camera system automatically uploaded the footage to a server to which Gareth had access. That way, if the police wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything with the footage, it gave Gareth some options. Sometimes, the old ways were the best ways.

  Gareth looked at his watch before deciding to pop round to his sister’s house on the way home. The risk if he went straight back to his flat was that he would lie down for a quick power nap, and then not wake until the small hours. He’d done that before on more than one occasion and knew it was a simple way to ruin the next day as well. He would go round to Annette’s, he decided, and then pop into the Heartsease for a quick bite to eat and a few pints with Tommy. Then he would go to bed.

  It took Gareth a while to fight his way through the traffic on the inner ring road to the estate where she lived. The worst traffic was near one of the independent schools just near her house, where the roads were clogged with a variety of 4x4s that probably only got used for the school run. Gareth knew he was a bit of a hypocrite, driving a Hilux truck himself, but he needed it for work.

  When he pulled up outside Annette’s house, he couldn’t see any signs of life inside. Normally when she heard his truck pull up the curtains would twitch, and she would be standing by the door to greet him. After knocking on the door a couple of times, he stood back and looked up at the house. There was an acrid smell in the air, like one of the neighbours was burning plastic. Gareth tried to locate the source of the smell, quickly realising that it was coming from her back garden.

  He made his way to the gate by the side of the house and used a supermarket loyalty card from his wallet to jimmy the latch on the other side. He’d given up telling her to replace it with a proper lock a long time ago. To his surprise, Annette was in her small back garden, looking morosely at a garden incinerator with wisps of black smoke coming out of it.

  “Hey, sis,” Gareth called out as he walked towards her.

  “Bloody hell, Gareth,” Annette replied, jumping at the sound of his voice. “How did you get in? The gate was locked.”

  “No, it wasn’t, Annette. It was on the latch.” He crossed to stand next to her and looked down at the rusting incinerator. “What you up to? Spot of gardening?”

  “No, just burning some stuff,” she replied. “Photographs, mostly. Ones I don’t need any more.”

  Gareth looked at his little sister curiously. “Why not just stick them in the bin?”

  “They’re personal.”

  “So shred them first.”

  “I did,” Annette replied, “but they won’t catch.”

  Gareth frowned, wondering why she would go to the trouble of trying to burn something that she’d already shredded. He was about to ask her, but thought better of it.

  “I�
�ve got some lighter fluid in the truck,” he said. “Do you want me to get it?”

  “Would you mind?” she replied, not even looking at him.

  He walked back to his truck to get the small bottle of lighter fluid. Gareth had been given a Zippo lighter by a friend a while ago who had asked him to look after it. The lighter was battered, tarnished by fire, and had a well-worn inscription on the side. But knowing how important it had been to his friend, Gareth took excellent care of it. The only problem was that it leaked like a sieve—hence the bottle of lighter fluid in his truck. By the time he got back to the incinerator, Annette was poking the remnants of paper in the base with a bamboo stick.

  “Stand back a bit,” Gareth said, taking the stick off her and using it to lift the metal lid of the incinerator. He directed a jet of the lighter fuel onto the smouldering embers, but they didn’t catch.

  “See, they won’t catch,” Annette said, staring at him with her I told you so look on her face that he knew so well.

  “Shut up, Annette,” Gareth replied with a broad grin, pouring more fluid in, “and give me those matches.”

  A few seconds later, after an initial whoosh that made them both take a step back, they were looking at bright orange flames leaping from the incinerator.

  “There we go,” Gareth said, putting the lid back on top to intensify the heat inside. He lowered his voice and frowned deeply. “Me make fire for you.”

  Ten minutes later, after watching Annette use the bamboo stick to make sure that every last piece of shredded paper had been incinerated, he was sitting in her lounge with a can of cold beer in his hand.

  “Cheers,” Gareth said, raising his can in her direction. She responded by raising a glass of wine at him.

  “Cheers,” she replied before draining half the glass in one large mouthful. Gareth paused, the can halfway to his lips, but decided against telling her to ease up. After Jennifer had died, he’d sunk to the bottom pretty hard, helped by the booze, but he’d pulled himself back up again. She didn’t need him on her back so soon, but he knew he would have to keep an eye on her.