BLACKDOWN (a thriller and murder mystery)

by D. M. Mitchell

  BLACKDOWN

  ____________________

  A novel by D. M. Mitchell

  BLACKDOWN

  Copyright © D. M. Mitchell 2013

  The right of Daniel M. Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, organisations, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Agamemnon Independent Publishing

  By D. M. Mitchell

  Novels:

  Max

  Silent

  Mouse

  Blackdown

  After the Fall

  The Soul Fixer

  Flinder’s Field

  Pressure Cooker

  Latimer’s Demon

  The Domino Boys

  The King of Terrors

  Armageddon Heights

  Archangel Hawthorne

  The Ashenby Incident

  The House of the Wicked

  The Woman from the Blue Lias

  The First D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus

  The Second D. M. Mitchell Thriller Omnibus

  The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double Bill

  Short Stories:

  Rabbits

  Mulligan’s Map

  The Pen of Manderby Pincher

  Visit the official D. M. Mitchell website at www.dm-mitchell.com for more information on books, blogs and author biographies

  You can also join D. M. Mitchell on Facebook, and on Twitter at D M Mitchell @dmtheauthor for details of his latest releases and free book offers

  Prologue

  A Monstrous Face from Hell

  1 The Lions’ Den

  2 A Stranger in a Strange Land

  3 The Work of a Man?

  4 The Voice of the People

  5 Demons

  6 The Devil in Chains

  7 How Like His Father

  8 A Gruesome Pillow

  9 The Exchanging of Feathers

  10 A Dark Mantle

  11 The Prize

  12 Birds of a Feather

  13 The Eyes of the Devil

  14 The Wrong Man

  15 Ever the Stubborn Mule

  16 A Serious Charge

  17 A Damn Puzzle

  18 Primitive Fury

  19 Choices

  20 The Chamber

  21 A Soiled, Silken Surface

  22 All Hell Breaks Loose

  23 An Angry Wolf

  24 To Blame a Ghost

  25 As Sure as the Sun Comes Up Tomorrow

  26 Magic

  27 The Ministry of Shadows

  Prologue

  A Monstrous Face from Hell

  His terror had reached such a pitch that he would have screamed out loud; screamed till his lungs burst with the effort. But he could not. They had cut out his tongue.

  All that issued from his fiery throat was a muffled, helpless groan.

  He stopped, breathless, his lungs afire, his legs beginning to buckle beneath him. He grasped at the gnarled trunk of a tree, his head bowed as he sucked in painful breaths over a severed tongue that still bled into his throat and threatened to choke him. He tried to control his breathing, slow it down, to create as little noise as possible.

  The moonlight filtered down through the lofty trees. Ancient trees that appeared to look down from their great height with sorrow, the breeze shifting their dying leaves sounding like mournful sighs. He had lost all sense of direction a while ago, had no idea if he had gone back on himself, was blundering into the path of…

  He dare not think about it. It was too terrifying for the human brain to comprehend. For to think about what lay out there in the dense undergrowth, to dwell upon the creature from hell that stalked him, caused his entire frame to fill with the numbing, clouding poison of abject terror.

  Fear. He swore he could smell it.

  He had often heard it said that dogs, wild animals, could detect fear in a man. As a child he remembered finding himself confronted by a savage, barking hound. His father chastised him sternly – do not show fear to the beast, for the animal would turn on him, sensing his weakness; but he remembered growing even more afraid lest the hound saw him for the coward that he felt he was. But that was in childhood, and children believe all they are told. When he grew older he dismissed the notion, thought it an old wives’ tale, because as an adult we are able to peel back the veil of mystery to see such a thing for what it really is – an ironic absurdity intended to instil the very fear in the child that the animals are purported to detect. Life’s early lessons, he thought, are mostly built upon fear. Fear of falling, fear of illness, fear of strangers, fear of choking, fear of drowning. So many more stacked up behind them waiting to terrify the child.

  But the story of the animal that can smell and taste fear…

  Now, as he raced for his life, he knew his father’s words to be true, for fear came off his sweat-drenched body in nauseous waves, sat in his mouth like the foul aftertaste of blood. In his flight he had himself become little more than an animal fighting to survive, and with that transformation those deep-rooted primitive senses, honed to detect something as intangible as a base emotion, surged up from within him, senses that behave like a prism splitting light into its basic colors.

  He didn’t want the beast to smell his fear too. If it did then he knew he was a dead man.

  So in spite of the pain engulfing his body like he was in the midst of a blazing inferno, in spite of the agony of his barbed thoughts, he forced himself to keep calm, ignored the shame of his tears which streamed uncontrollably down his cheeks, or the humiliation at the loosening of his bowels that had caused him to soil his breeches. His brain was a bubbling pot of prayer and hope, desperation and horror, and he felt he had lost control over it a long time ago. Now he was determined to retrieve it, for the sake of his sanity.

  His dirtied face steeled, his eyes narrowing, searching, searching, searching; his mind racing. The leaves of the thick undergrowth shimmered under the light of the Moon. The barbs from a bramble tugged at his sleeve. All was quiet in the wood. Disturbingly so.

  At his feet, he saw a thick branch, and he slowly bent down to pick it up. The rustle as it came away from its bindings of weed and grass inordinately loud to him. He put it protectively across his chest, his fingers digging into the soft wood of the branch and revealing to him it was rotten and no use as a weapon. But he held onto it just the same.

  The sound of his beating heart, the rush of blood pounding like a regular bass drum in his ears, now filled the silence of the wood. So loud he swore the beast would be able to hear it, and his fear began to rise again, along with the acid burning of bile in his throat and mouth. He bent his head and was desperately sick on the ground, the vomit passing over the wound of his severed tongue and causing it to sting.

  He attempted to stifle the sounds, but he could not do so entirely and groaned at his own body’s treachery as the involuntary heaving of his stomach abated. He was relieved when it was over and he could hold his breath again, listening to the humming silence all around him. All was still, not a single sound out of the ordinary, no soft cracking of stems, no screech of a disturbed night creature. Perhaps he had managed to shake it off. Perhaps he had reached safety, eluded the nightmarish creature that stalked him.

  With renewed confidence he set off at a crouch, moving as stealthily as he could through the undergrowth. But his heart sank when he parted the bushes in front of him and c
ame upon the clearing lit by a single lantern.

  He felt the hot sting of tears glaze his eyes as he stared upon the distressing scene, his sudden infusion of hope having drained away like water through fingers.

  In the centre of the clearing – the cold night sky above stripped of cloud, a bloated full moon sitting in a peppering of bright stars that, together with the solitary lantern hanging from a wooden pole, bathed the clearing in a lurid, ghostly light – was a round, black pool of still water. He moaned at seeing it. He had gone round in a circle. He’d come across it once before, had stared at the long silk neckerchief that hung enticingly from the branch, and now he was back to stare at it again, looking upon the mocking marble-like surface of the water and the gently swinging finger of silk. He could dash into the clearing and snatch the silk, for that’s what was expected of him, but he knew that to do so would be inviting death. He preferred the dubious confines and shelter of the dark.

  A fresh wave of terror engulfed him, and he tore away from the place as fast as he could, caring not whether he made a noise. He had to get away from there. He had to escape the light, escape the silken neckerchief, escape the beast.

  But the growl brought him up short.

  It was low, deep, guttural. It was the sound of a nightmare given voice.

  And he did not know from which direction it had come.

  He didn’t know which way to run. Was it in front, behind, to the side?

  The sound of bushes being parted. Something moving swiftly through the undergrowth to his left.

  He ran headlong in the opposite direction, his mouth so dry he could hardly croak, his legs so weak as to threaten to topple him.

  A roar, up ahead.

  How had it gotten in front so fast? He turned and ran back again, but the sound of something keeping pace with him caused him to turn around to glance over his shoulder, and he hit the unseen trailing root of a tree and fell to the soft earth. He rolled over twice, crashing his shoulder painfully against a trunk before scrabbling wildly to his feet, his breathing pumping out in short, sharp blasts. His eyes glared, disorientated. But the fear would not let him stop and it compelled him to leap forward.

  Straight into a monstrous face from hell.

  He did not have time to even attempt a scream, for claws slashed at his cheeks and opened them up, blood gushing hot and sticky, sending his head darting sideways with the impact. Before the pain hit him the creature lunged forward, sinking its teeth into his neck and driving him down under its huge bulk, till he was covered entirely by its muscular, furry bulk.

  The man’s arms flailed uselessly for a second or two, fingers scraping at the matted hair of his attacker, but they quickly fell limp as his life was ripped violently from him and the beast tore into his exposed flesh.

  1

  1817

  The Lions’ Den

  The tang of the sea hung in the morning air. It was carried on a freshening breeze that whipped across the churning waters off the whaling town of Whitby in North Yorkshire and ran up the steep headland to wash over Thomas Blackdown as he hovered impatiently amongst the aged headstones, his keen eyes looking earnestly for any signs of life among the thin, spiky grass and the remains of the dead. Behind him, the old abbey loomed spectral and dark against the lead-grey of the dawn. Thin tendrils of mist from the sea fret crept languidly about his boots but were swiftly being ripped to shreds by the strengthening wind. Soon the sun would be up, and this strange, ephemeral netherworld, neither night nor day, would disappear till sister dusk took its place.

  Dawn was a curious time, he thought bleakly. It was a time traditionally set aside for executions. What perverse pleasure do we take by teasing the condemned with the sight of a day they will not see?

  And dawn was also a time for duels…

  His mind raced back to that fateful morning, similar to this in all but location, when he stood in a mist-shrouded field and took hold of the pistol from a box presented to him by a man in a severe looking long black coat. The man whom Blackdown had accused of wronging him took up the second weapon and they marched through the dew-wet grass till they were the regulation distance from each other, and each turned slowly round, cocking their pistols.

  Thomas Blackdown – then a captain in the guards – could still hear that distinct click as the hammer was drawn back; an ominous sound that seemed to shatter the quiet of this peaceful and secluded Belgian field surrounded by broccoli-like florets of trees in autumnal leaf. He remembered staring down the short barrel at the figure in front of him. A senior officer. An officer who thought he could say what he liked without consequence. But Blackdown had always been hot-blooded. His rash challenge to a duel to satisfy his late mother’s name and family’s honour was accepted and so there he stood, implacable and caring not whether he lived or died.

  The officer’s pistol exploded and a cluster of pigeons took to the wing, the noise like the rippling of applause. Blackdown did not flinch. The bullet whined harmlessly past his right shoulder, close enough for his flesh to sense its passage through the material of his coat.

  Now it was his turn. He could purposely miss, but honour would not be restored by his cowardice. He could aim to wound. But that would not satisfy the anger he felt as he pictured his dead mother’s face. So he pulled the trigger and shot the man dead.

  He was brought out of his reverie by a light flurry of sounds. Footsteps tramping meaningfully through the grass. He knew by the footfalls that there were three men. And sure enough three figures emerged through the mist and into the gloom of dawn, the ruins of the old abbey as their backdrop.

  ‘Are you alone?’ said a voice that carried with it great authority. The voice of a man used to getting what he wanted and didn’t care how he got it.

  ‘Creevy?’ asked Blackdown.

  ‘Mr Creevy to you,’ he replied striding up to him. He stood and regarded Blackdown closely. The other two men took up a position on either side of Blackdown, their closeness intimidating. ‘I asked you a question. I don’t like it when people don’t answer my questions. That right, lads?’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Creevy,’ one of his companions said.

  Alex Creevy was aged about forty-five or so, a weather-beaten face that hadn’t been blessed with good looks, though curiously, thought Blackdown, he had the delicate, enticing pale blue eyes of a woman. That was the only delicate thing about him. His dark hair was cropped short and his chin was in need of a shave. He wore clothes that must have cost a pretty packet and he looked ill-at-ease in them.

  ‘I came alone. You instructed me so,’ said Blackdown.

  Creevy’s left eye flickered as if operated by a thought that seemed to bother him. ‘Your name?’

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘Your name?’ he demanded again.

  ‘Ferguson,’ he lied.

  ‘Ferguson,’ Creevy echoed. He strode around Blackdown, looking him up and down. ‘Well, Ferguson, I don’t trust you; I have never heard of you and I have never heard of the man you say you work for.’

  ‘Until recently I had never heard of you, so the feeling is mutual,’ said Blackdown, the man now at his back. He felt unsettled not being able to see him. ‘Do you have the shipment?’

  Creevy came back to Blackdown’s front again. ‘I ask the questions,’ he said shortly. ‘You never heard of me?’ he said. ‘You never heard of Alex Creevy?’

  Blackdown shook his head slowly. ‘I know of you now.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Creevy.

  Yes I do, thought Blackdown. Alex Creevy was a smuggler, and a pretty successful one at that. He operated a number of boats, plying between the many quiet inlets of the North Yorkshire coast and France. In this part of the country, smugglers were held in high regard by most of the local people, heroes pitted against the law, and if you didn’t hold with their ways then you didn’t say anything bad about them, least of all Alex Creevy. He ruled the roost amongst the smuggling fraternity, and ruled it with a hard, violent hand. Bla
ckdown knew only too well Creevy’s propensity for violence.

  A local man, an aggrieved merchant who had been forced to pay protection money to Creevy, had confessed to an excise man he was willing to give evidence on Creevy and his activities. As the excise man was escorting the merchant to court they were both waylaid by Creevy and his men – though none afterwards could prove it was them. They broke every bone in the officer’s body, tortured him for twelve hours before cutting off his private parts and stuffing them in his mouth, and finally slitting his throat. The unfortunate merchant was beaten up and thrown into a well and left for dead. They came back two days later and were surprised to hear his weak, pitiful cries for help. They threw large rocks down the well and killed him.

  Creevy was not a man to take lightly.

  ‘Search him for weapons,’ said Creevy, and one of the men gave Blackdown a rough frisk.

  ‘He’s not carrying anything, Mr Creevy,’ the man said at length.

  Creevy nodded. ‘No gun? You come to see me unarmed?’

  ‘I have no need of one.’

  ‘No? That’s very trusting of you. I have the power to have you killed, right here, right now.’

  ‘I have heard.’

  ‘And no one will think ought of it.’

  ‘I’m pleased for you, but we must attend to business.’

  Creevy was trying to work out whether the man standing impassively before him was very brave or very foolish. In the end he shrugged, none the wiser.