DON'T SCREAM an absolutely gripping killer thriller with a huge twist (Detective Jeff Rickman Book 3)

by MARGARET MURPHY

  Someone gave a snort of laughter and Cass shot him a furious look. Without the smile, his true nature could be read in the lines etched on his face: the natural downturn of his mouth, the petulant furrow of his brow, the chilly humourlessness of his eyes.

  ‘I thought you had ambition.’

  ‘I do,’ Hart confided. ‘Just not in the direction you think.’

  He shrugged, managing a smile that treated Hart to another flash of his small, coffee-stained teeth. ‘Your loss.’ He left the room at the same slow saunter, but something in the way he held himself betrayed his humiliation at being turned down.

  A female officer drifted past her desk and smiled, closing her right fist in a covert gesture of solidarity. Hart smiled and nodded but didn’t feel the sense of triumph was justified. Cass might be a sleaze, but he had influence, at least among the ground troops, and a woman on the force needed all the friends she could get.

  Chapter 3

  Mark Davis checks both ways before stepping out of the hotel. He’d chosen it carefully: away from the main drag, where a chance sighting might happen, avoiding the copping zones and crack spots he knew of, where dealers and users alike knew his face.

  By the time he’d found his way out of the tunnel, his clothes were rank with sewer slime. He’d chucked his jacket into a dumpster and washed the worst of the crap off his trousers and sweatshirt in the fountain at the back of Fenwick Street. He stank of chlorine from the fountain, and the night porter wasn’t keen — until Mark made his apologies for the late hour with a backhander of fifty quid. He knew how he must look. Tall and skinny, hair a shade of black that could only come out of a bottle, addict-pale skin — he looked like trouble.

  He’d grinned, hoping it made him look less like a ghoul. ‘Stag night prank,’ he said. ‘She’ll kill me if I turn up at the registry office looking like this.’ He didn’t need to name the vengeful ‘she’ — any decent Scouser feared his woman as much as he respected her.

  The night porter mellowed, even smiled a bit as he showed Mark to his room. He paid another hundred in cash up front, knowing it would never go through the books. He had an alias ready, but the guy never even asked him to sign in.

  He slept well, quelling the shakes by dipping lightly into the contents of the black bag, taking care, because this stuff was pure uncut heaven. Straight into town at nine a.m., back before ten, showered, shaved, wearing a dab of cologne and feeling damn near irresistible in his new slim-fit shirt from River Island and proper trousers instead of his usual trackie bottoms.

  Only the night porter would remember him. The chambermaid would find a shirt wrapper in the bin, a price label from the trousers, toiletries and a razor by the sink — nothing else, not even a fingerprint.

  Now he’s on his way to see Jasmine, pain in his arse, light of his life, mother of his darling child. The ‘she’ he fears as much as he respects, and he intends to make a proposal, of sorts.

  A thin layer of cloud turns the sky milk-white, and Mark shivers as the wind sweeps up from the Mersey. He turns his back on the city centre and walks up the hill towards the university. He has parked two miles away. If he’s followed, he’ll notice — plenty of time to spot a shadow during a thirty-minute walk.

  Mark doesn’t know the meaning of the word symbolism but, brought up in the Catholic tradition, he has a residual faith in the power of belief. Belief can make things happen. He believes he can get clean of the drug addiction, he believes he can make Jasmine happy, and he believes he can be a good father. He believes as fervently as he believes in the trinity of God and Family and Football they will get away, start a new life.

  He looks for a sign from God. He has always confused faith with the magic of omens — as a child, he believed in fairies and Father Christmas long after other children rejected them as babyish nonsense. The intrusion into his life of a flesh-and-blood ogre in the shape of his stepfather coincided with his loss of innocence, but Mark prefers to avoid thinking of his childhood.

  When he grew out of fairy tales and churchgoing required more discipline of him than he possessed, he simply shifted his beliefs to his house parents, Ed and Hilary, building elaborate fantasies around adoption. Those fantasies sustained him through the years in care, and his mother’s rejection.

  Technically, the care system continued supporting him until he was eighteen, but he was effectively dumped on the streets at sixteen, ill-equipped for life. Ed and Hilary continued to help him — even got him the job at the garage, though Ed would never admit it, kidding him that Mark had got the job on merit. Yeah, right, with six failed GCSEs and a borderline NVQ in Motor Mechanics. Though Mark believed in magic, miracles were harder to accept.

  When the garage business failed, Mark believed he had jinxed it.

  He lost faith for a while after that, which was when he found cocaine and heroin, and for a few short weeks, it was beautiful. Of course, it didn’t last and, strung out and desperate, he sought out a new talisman. This time, it was Jasmine. She demanded that he get himself straight, and he believed that he could. In fact, every time he got himself straight for a few weeks he truly believed with the faith of a convert.

  Then a new consignment of heroin would arrive, packed in cling film like sweet brown sugar. He’d start to salivate. Embarrassing, to be weighing out batches drooling like a dog. At first he could handle it. They had taught him about psychological withdrawal in rehab. If you ignored the symptoms, did something to distract yourself, they would ease off.

  The drugs counsellors were right — you could put off the cravings, but they didn’t stop. Every day, he’d be sitting at the kitchen scales, cutting the mix, fighting the cravings. Coke was the worst. He cut it with sodium bicarb or icing sugar. God, he loved the brief cold fizz of icing sugar in his nasal passages. No — ‘loved’ was too weak a word — it was like an orgasm. But that was wrong, too. It was better than sex, better almost than the hit of cocaine that came after.

  Mark stayed off the stuff through all of this, but eventually the drooling stopped, his mouth dried and his stomach cramped. When the cold sweats started, he would have to take a small thumbnail of something just to take the edge off.

  And it would work. He didn’t get high. Not much, anyway — he’d only take enough to stop the pain. But slowly, with a sneaky insistence, the psychological withdrawal would melt away and the physical symptoms would reassert themselves. He would have to score a bit more and a bit more, his impulsive nature denying him the insight that it wasn’t one single moment, but a series of small increments that turned want into need.

  ‘You know I’m trying to stay straight,’ Jasmine told him. ‘But you bring that shit home and shoot up right in front of me. Don’t you think I need it, too?’

  He thought she meant that she needed to score, but when he offered her some of his stash, she snatched it out of his hand it, ran to the bathroom and flushed it. God, he came close to hitting her then. And she knew it, like she always knew everything he was thinking. Threw him out.

  He stayed clean for six weeks, so she would let him see the baby. They named her together: Bryony. He stayed clean two weeks more. But he took a snort of coke after a sleepless night. The baby had kept them both awake with her crying, and he needed to be up and working, cutting and weighing, shifting baggies to Mr Maitland’s street dealers.

  It never occurred to Mark that his addiction was permanent, that it took only a single lapse to begin the slide from craving to skin-crawling, shivering, snot-nosed dependence. Nor did he realise that he was as much addicted to seeing the dragon’s breath of heroin curling from hot foil as he was to the endorphin rush of the drug.

  He turns right, cutting though one of the university car parks and keeps pace with a gang of students hurrying to a lecture. One of the girls looks up at him and smiles. It’s a good sign. He makes a pact with himself: if the sun breaks through the cloud, if he feels its warmth, if he believes enough in its warmth, everything will happen as he wants it, if not as a consequence, t
hen as part of the strange parallel patterns that exist in his world.

  He moves on, listening to the rhythm of his footsteps and the push of air from his lungs and as he walks. The heat of exertion becomes an external heat, his imagination transforms it so that to Mark it feels like the sun, warm on his face. The omens are good. Jasmine will see that he means it this time — things will come right for them. This time, she will understand. He’ll explain calmly, tell her everything: he’s done things, been things he isn’t proud of, but now he will be different. Baby Bryony is the miracle that changed him. She is fresh and new and perfect.

  The sun bursts through the high mist for real, and he nods, smiling to himself — everything will be fine. He is so eager to be there, he’s almost running, forgetting to search the shadows for hints of threat, neglecting to listen for the echo of his footfalls. He has taken another small hit, just enough to steady his nerves and stem the cravings, and this too dulls his anxieties and heightens the fantasy that all will be well.

  The sun is golden and warm, and the clouds are high and white, like cotton wool. Like sterile swabs. There’s a smell in the air. Mark can’t separate scents — his nasal lining has been cooked by years of mind-altering inhalation — but this smell is good, wholesome, it fires synapses in a part of his brain that is closed off to him, the happy moments of childhood before his father died. The smell triggers an emotional response he does not understand: excitement, a tickle of glee. He attributes the feeling to the fact that he is alive and rich and he is about to perform a noble act, an act of heroism. A rescue.

  By the time he reaches his car, the sun feels warm and soft as cat’s fur on his skin. He has willed the warmth into it, just as he’ll will the warmth into Jasmine, convince her that he can save her and Bryony. In his heart, he knows that this one unselfish act will lead to more, and he will save himself.

  He has enough money to give them all a proper start, to get away from Maitland, buy a nice place, maybe in the countryside. He tells himself that a lot of the lapses were about availability — in the city it’s just too easy to get the gear when you have a craving. Might as well be a diabetic and live above a sweet shop. The thought seems profound, as if behind it lies a deeper truth.

  The car door feels heavier than usual. He doesn’t open it wide enough, ends up barging the steering wheel with his hip as he gets in. He tells himself he hasn’t eaten since last night. Or maybe the small hit he’d taken was more generous than he intended. He pushes this thought away. He’s entitled to take something to steady his nerves. He’s doing the right thing, and Jasmine won’t make it easy. She’ll give him stick, and he needs to keep cool. No point getting into a row with Jasmine — she’ll win any argument.

  So he practises the moment of his arrival as he drives: Jasmine is nursing Bryony when she opens the front door, cradling the baby in her arms, a shawl hiding the fullness of her breast. She eyes him with resentment. ‘I told you, we’re finished.’ She begins to close the door, but he stops her, opens his jacket and slides a bundle of notes from his inside pocket, just high enough so she can see it’s not fake and it’s more than a win at the bookies.

  Her eyes widen. ‘What have you done, Mark?’

  ‘You heard the news today?’

  She backs away. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.’

  He moves a little way into the house. ‘It’s Maitland’s, and if I know Rob Maitland, he’s already looking for me.’

  ‘Give him his money back,’ she pleads. ‘Give it back for my sake.’

  ‘You know Maitland — he’ll take it and kill me anyway.’ He takes her by the shoulders, makes her look at him.

  No. Stop, rewind. If Jasmine’s holding the baby, she’ll only get pissed with him for waking her up. Better if the baby’s upstairs when he gets there. That way, he can take Jasmine in his arms when he finally gets through to her.

  He restarts the narrative, but this time, she’s alone.

  ‘Go away, Mark. I can’t help you.’

  This is the good part: he puts his hands on her shoulders, says, ‘You need to listen to me, Jaz.’ And she looks at him with wary respect, ’cos he’s never spoken to her this way, before. ‘When Maitland doesn’t find me, he’ll come after you.’

  Her hand flies to her mouth. ‘Oh, Mark!’

  ‘I had to warn you.’

  Her blue eyes are shining as she stares into his. ‘Why didn’t you just run? You could’ve been halfway across the world by now.’

  ‘Because I want to give you a better life — Bryony deserves better than this.’ He looks around at the narrow hall, the steep climb of stairs to the two small bedrooms. ‘So do you.’

  She bites her lower lip, seeing the little house from his viewpoint, noting its deficiencies for the first time.

  ‘I’ve come to rescue you, Jaz.’

  Her forehead crinkles. ‘But I was so cruel. The things I said . . .’

  ‘I let you down before’ — it’s pointless denying that — ‘and I hurt you,’ he says. ‘But I’m going to make it up to you.’

  She looks up to him, her eyes filled with uncertainty. ‘You mean it? You still want me to go with you?’

  ‘I couldn’t leave without you. You and Bryony.’ He reaches out a hand and brushes his fingertips against the softness of her cheek. As the tears come, he knows she has been waiting for this moment.

  Yeah, Mark thinks. That’s how it’s gonna be. He won’t tell Jaz about the drugs — she’ll only flip if he does. When they’re back together, he won’t need them. He’ll sell them, make even more money. It doesn’t occur to Mark that selling the heroin will attract attention, that Jasmine, an ex-user herself, will see the signs, will know that he’s high. Just as she will know for certain that Maitland won’t stop until he finds Mark, the money and the drugs. When Mark practises in his head, everything always comes out right, Jasmine always gives the right answers so he knows what to say next. Mark Davis, master of self-delusion, has a short memory for the many verbal thrashings Jasmine has given him. And anyway, he’s got money — who’s gonna argue with that?

  He parks the car at an angle to the kerb, anxious to see Jasmine again, to sculpt the reality from the clay of his dream. She will come with him.

  Chapter 4

  Autumn was gathering pace, hurtling through time and space into winter like a meteor catching its first combustive gasp of air. The trees had smouldered for a couple of weeks, colour singeing only the margins of the leaves, but now they burst into flickering tongues of red, orange and gold. Detective Chief Inspector Jeff Rickman jogged under a stand of beeches in Sefton Park, crunching over beech masts while a steady patter of coppery leaves drifted around him. He felt good, strong emotionally and physically. He was fighting-weight and fit, ready to take on the world again.

  In a year he had lost everything and gained so much: his partner — the woman who had given his life meaning — was dead, murdered. But just at the moment it seemed his life was over, his brother Simon had returned after a twenty-five-year absence. With Simon’s return, Rickman had learned that he was an uncle to two teenage boys. But Simon had suffered a catastrophic brain injury in a car accident and had almost no memory of the intervening years, and Tanya, his brother’s wife, had turned to Rickman for help. And in helping them to face up to Simon’s altered personality, Rickman was able to see beyond his own pain. He was healing.

  Today, he would see Tanya again, and he was looking forward to it more than he dared admit. Rickman’s heart rate picked up, and not from the exercise.

  Footsteps pounded behind him and Rickman moved over to make way, but the runner kept pace, his shoes cracking the beech masts underfoot like peanut shells. He glanced right. It was Detective Sergeant Lee Foster.

  Rickman kept going.

  ‘What?’ Foster said. ‘Not even a “good morning”?’ Foster spoke with a broad Liverpool accent, running the words together.

  ‘I was hoping that if I ignored you, you might go away.�
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  ‘And I thought you knew me.’

  ‘I’m on leave, Lee.’

  ‘Yeah, well, wait till you hear this—’

  Foster’s explanation for this interruption of Rickman’s holiday was delayed by the appearance of a comely brunette at the bend of the path.

  ‘I never really liked the idea of pounding the pavement,’ Foster said, with a winning smile for the approaching jogger. ‘Had enough of that when I was a plod. But now I’m beginning to see the attraction.’ He turned one-eighty and ran backwards a few steps, the better to eye the retreating figure of the woman.

  Rickman stood six inches taller than his friend and was powerfully built. He bore a few scars, and his hair, chestnut brown and tending to wayward curls, generally looked like it needed the pass of a comb. Foster’s, by contrast, was always as neat as his person, gleaming and carefully styled. Yet it was Rickman who drew appreciative glances as they ran.

  He had taken the shorter loop, cutting his normal circuit by a couple of miles, and now he headed up the long slope towards Carnatic Road and home. Foster matched him stride for stride.

  Rickman gave him a sideways glance. ‘Well, what’s the bad news?’

  ‘That fiasco with the drugs thing last night has hoovered up half the manpower in the city,’ Foster said. ‘And we’ve got a major incident. The super wants you, pronto.’

  Rickman sighed. ‘You can tell me all about it on the way in.’

  * * *

  Jeff Rickman, freshly showered and sober-suited, eased his fleet Hyundai i30 in to the kerb, fifty yards up the road from the crime scene. A white SSU van was double-parked next to a marked police unit and an ambulance. The terrace of narrow redbrick Victorian properties was silent except for the insistent one-note chirrup of a sparrow. It was also unusually empty — murder scenes generally drew a crowd. But the far end of the road ended in a high railway wall, and the first-attenders at the scene had done a good job of blocking access.