by Joel Hames
Praise for
DEAD NORTH
“In Dead North, Hames’ lawyer turned accidental sleuth, Sam Williams, finds himself far from home and neck deep in Manchester’s seamy gangster scene. But what stands out in this intelligent, intricately woven crime procedural - with a plot to make your brain hurt - is the undercurrent of slick and highly enjoyable humour reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, updated for the twenty-first century. Loved it.”
S.E. Lynes, author of Mother, Valentina, and The Pact
“I really enjoyed it. The characters spring off the page with such natural ease. I was gripped by the story – I love a book that takes turns where you least expect. It's going to leave me with a thriller hangover for some time.”
John Marrs, author of The One, The Good Samaritan and When You Disappeared
“Hames is such a talent that he has created a white-knuckle, breathlessly-paced read that also has heart. Beautifully written and thrilling, Dead North deserves to go to the top of any chart.”
Louise Beech, author of Maria in the Moon, How To Be Brave and The Mountain in my Shoe
“A pacy thriller, rich in voice and with a gratifying degree of complexity. Hames knows how to deliver.”
John Bowen, author of Where the Dead Walk, Vessel and Death Stalks Kettle Street
About the Author
A Londoner in exile, Joel Hames lives in rural Lancashire with his wife and two daughters.
His works of fiction include the novels Bankers Town and The Art of Staying Dead, as well as the novellas Brexecution, Victims and Caged.
When not writing or spending time with his family, Joel likes to eat, drink, cook, and make up excuses to avoid walking the dog.
You can find out more about Joel and sign up to his mailing list through social media or his very own website:
Facebook: facebook.com/joelhamesauthor
Twitter: @joel_hames
Website: http://www.joelhamesauthor.com
Also by Joel Hames
Bankers Town
Brexecution
The Art of Staying Dead
Victims
Caged
DEAD
NORTH
BY
JOEL HAMES
First published in 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Joel Hames
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover art by John Bowen
For My Parents
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART 1
1: Glutes
2: Guns and Gangs
3: Little Dead People
4: Through the Window
5: Into the Forest
6: Half a Million Ifs
7: Tarmac
8: Dead Man’s Name
9: Shogun
10: Fake
11: No More Than a Flicker
PART 2
12: Get a Grip
13: Chicken Jalfrezi
14: Initiative
15: Violence In The Air
16: Nose
17: Solid Smoke
18: Dead Teeth
19: Across the Line
20: Where Falcons Nest
21: The Killings
22: A Terrible Mistake
23: On The Road Again
24: The Jar
25: Into the Darkness
PART 3
26: Chiara
27: Good Vibrations
28: Falling Into Place
29: Blue Sky, White Sky
PART 4
30: Release
31: Hindsight
PROLOGUE
THE DEAD
I DIDN’T WANT to get out of the car, but Gaddesdon wasn’t keen on me bleeding all over the upholstery again while he stood shivering outside. I told him my nose hadn’t bled since the last time someone had hit it, which was nearly two days ago now, but that cut no ice. So I stood there at the back of the cemetery and watched the gaps between the black-coated mourners as a box with a dead woman in it dropped into a hole in the earth.
There were words, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of other things, of glaciers and mobile phones, hidden pasts and broken bones. I corrected myself. Almost broken. I’d assumed half Folgate Police Station would be there, and they probably were, but apart from Gaddesdon, and Roarkes, standing there right in the middle and looking nearly as awkward as I felt, I didn’t recognise a soul. I took a step back and out of sight. I didn’t want Roarkes seeing me. He might ask some awkward questions.
Gaddesdon I could still see. He’d found himself a spot near the front, head bowed, shoulders hunched against the cold, a giant frozen penguin. A whole gang of frozen fucking penguins praying to their penguin god, I thought, and checked the smile before it formed.
I hadn’t known Fiona Milton. I’d never met Fiona Milton. I wasn’t a police officer, and I wasn’t from Manchester or Lancashire or wherever the hell we were. I wanted to know why she’d died, sure, but seeing her corpse buried wasn’t going to help me. I cursed Gaddesdon silently. I’d have been better off waiting in the car.
The minister had finished talking and someone else had taken his place, Fiona's superintendent, a fierce-looking man with tiny eyes and a few strands of lank brown hair that flapped idly in the wind as he recalled her bravery, her integrity, her smile, her spirit. I wondered if he’d ever actually met her. I wondered if he’d even known who she was, before someone had come running into his office and told him she’d been gunned down on some godforsaken country lane in the middle of nowhere.
I wondered if I could slip away now, go back and sit in the car, which Gaddesdon hadn’t bothered to lock, figuring if it wasn’t safe at a police funeral it wouldn’t be safe anywhere. I glanced around, searching out eyes. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Bloody Londoner. Bloody lawyer. Sneaking off. No respect. It wouldn’t look good.
And then I heard it.
It shouldn’t really have been out of place, not at a funeral, the sound of a sniff, a prelude to tears. But this was a different kind of funeral, a defiant, stiff-backed, fist-shaking funeral. A funeral of suits and uniforms and frozen penguins, legacy and courage and all that bullshit. Not real people. Not tears.
A fat penguin shifted a few inches to the right and I saw the source of the noise. A child. Six or seven years old, I thought, a little boy in a suit that made him look even smaller than he was, his face screwed up to fight off the tears. The tears were winning. There was a girl beside him, a year or two older, holding his hand, turning to whisper in his ear. And behind them both a man, about my own age, one arm on each of their shoulders, staring fixedly ahead, as though he could see something there the rest of us couldn’t, lips pressed tightly together. Jaw trembling.
The other victim had already been buried. I remembered what Gaddesdon had told me about Naz Ahmet, Fiona Milton’s colleague. Same uniform. Same car. Same death. Another funeral, another superintendent, or maybe the same one, a wife and a child to mourn him long after all the penguins had gone home. I’d been on the case six days and all I’d got out of it were a handful of trips to the hospital and a bunch of leads that took me back where I’d started. I’d been close to giving up a dozen times already. Two people had died, and that was sad, sure, but sad was as far as it went. Finding out who’d killed them mi
ght just breathe some life into my dying career, so I had an interest in the whole thing. Beyond that, I hadn’t really cared.
The child was still crying, quietly now, hunched into himself, shoulders shaking. I blinked and burned the image into my brain.
Whoever had done this, the bastards would pay.
PART 1
INTO EACH LIFE, SOME RAIN MUST FALL
1: Glutes
“GET YOUR FAT arse out of bed!”
There are nicer ways to wake up in the morning. My bladder was calling out for attention. My bones were aching, with that deep November ache that means you’ve got a cold coming if you’re lucky, and worse if you’re not. And now Claire was shouting at me.
I lay there for a moment, trying to figure out which of Claire and my bladder was the more pressing problem. I sneezed. The bladder won. I stood, swayed a little, and made it halfway out of the room and within sight of the bathroom before she spotted me.
“Watch this, Sam.”
When I came out of the bathroom she was standing in front of me with one hand on her hip and even at that time in the morning I knew she meant business.
“Look at this.”
The TV was on. It was a fifty-five inch flatscreen that took up too much wall and had cost us more than a month’s rent, but we’d been on a high when we bought it. We’d just moved in together, and I had a decent case, finally, with proper clients who would pay me and get my name out there. For the first few weeks I’d been unable to suppress a grin every time I walked past those fifty-five glorious inches. One whole month on that high, a hot lawyer with a hot case, reputation restored, a great girlfriend, a big new flat, a big new TV.
I wasn’t grinning any more.
Already the TV belonged to a different life, and now when I saw it, it taunted me.
How’s work, Sam? it asked me, as clearly as the words bursting out of the eight strategically-positioned surround sound speakers.
What’s that? it continued. Just the one client, Sam?
I didn’t like the way it addressed me by name.
You can’t afford the rent, your girlfriend’s covered your share for the last two months while you mumble quiet evasions about a ‘temporary cashflow problem’, Sam.
If you can’t see the end of a temporary problem, how long can you go on pretending it’s not permanent, Sam?
And all that, past and present, washing through me in the half second it took to focus on the screen.
There wasn’t much to focus on. The picture was grainy, but I could see there was a car on it, shaking around, and for a moment I thought I was looking at some eighties disaster movie and wondered why Claire had woken me. Then I realised it wasn’t the car that was shaking, it was the screen, the camera, someone’s phone, probably, because every time the shot moved to track the car the image went blurry for a moment before finding its target and refocusing.
I sneezed, again, and felt the ache dig itself a little deeper. A thought suddenly hit me.
“Fat arse?” I protested. Maybe a few months ago, sure, but I’d been working on that. I’d joined a local martial arts class. I wasn’t exactly Ultimate Fighting material, not yet, not with two decades of beer and kebabs behind me, but I’d learned to punch, roll and kick with a pack of lean and hungry bankers and insurance salesmen. More hungry than lean, most of them. I’d cancelled my membership in the light of that temporary cashflow problem, but not before I’d learned the names of all the muscles and tightened some of them up a little. I reckoned my glutes were in decent shape.
She wasn’t biting. “They’ve got him,” she said, eyes on the screen, and that was when I noticed the words across the bottom.
“POLICE CLOSE IN ON SUSPECTED COP-KILLER” blared the scrolling yellow banner. At least they’d got suspected in there this time. Poor bastard didn’t have a chance, not without the right lawyer, and I didn’t think he’d be knocking on my door any time soon.
Which was a shame, because I reckoned I could do a pretty good job for Thomas Carson.
Thomas Carson had been the country’s number one news story for the last two days. There was a refugee crisis in Europe and the usual tally of wars on its fringes, but nobody was talking about anything but Thomas Carson. We’d been out the night before, pub, one of Claire’s friends and her fiancé, nice enough people, I’d thought. Claire had been working too hard and getting too intense about her work, and that was understandable, given the subject matter was five brutally murdered girls. But two years on one big, horrible story couldn’t be healthy, however dedicated the journalist, and I thought maybe a drink would do her good. Me, I didn’t need an excuse for a drink. So we’d had the one, and then a few more, and at some point in the evening I’d joked that Carson should get himself sponsored. Thirty-six hours on the run, with every police force in the country on alert and his face on every TV channel and every front page, and they still hadn’t got him. Duracell, I thought. Or Nike. Claire had laughed, her friend had laughed, the fiancé had looked at me like I’d just defaced someone’s grave and told me I should have a little more respect for the police officers he’d killed.
“Allegedly,” I’d said.
“I beg your pardon,” said fiancé, whose name was actually Andrew and who I was starting to think wasn’t such a nice guy after all.
“I said allegedly. You know, he might not have done it. It’s the way the law works.”
I knew I was speaking to him the way I’d speak to a child, and I knew we’d all had a few drinks and he wouldn’t take kindly to it, but by now I’d decided I didn’t like him and I didn’t really give a damn.
The evening at the pub had ended shortly after that, and I’d guessed Claire would be after my blood the moment we were alone, but instead she’d opened a bottle of wine, poured us a glass each, and told me she’d never liked that jumped-up little prick anyway.
The thing was, I was only half-joking about Carson and the sponsorship and, most importantly, the “allegedly”. Two police officers had been killed, there was no dispute about that, two unarmed officers shot dead on a little country road in the back-end of nowhere. Thomas Carson had been named as the suspect a couple of hours later, and as far as I could tell he’d been named solely because his car had been identified by witnesses near the scene. Not exactly a cast-iron case, but that hadn’t stopped the media from labelling him cop-killer and shoving his face front and centre twice an hour ever since. Not the way this kind of thing was usually done, not before a trial and a guilty verdict, at least. But with an armed maniac on the loose it was in the public interest to keep the public informed, apparently.
That was probably true. But the guy wasn’t going to be on the loose forever, and when it came to the trial, I couldn’t imagine where they’d find twelve people who hadn’t seen those “COP KILLER” headlines beneath the guy’s face and who could swear they wouldn’t be influenced by them. Still, I’d thought, I’d give my left arm to be Thomas Carson’s lawyer. My left arm was the weaker one, with a jab like a kitten’s handshake, so that wasn’t quite the sacrifice it might sound, but you get the idea.
The image had stopped shaking and the car had stopped moving. There were a couple of big buildings in the background, warehouses or factories, some hills behind the buildings, that slanted blur you get when it’s raining so hard you can’t even see the rain. The image changed, abruptly: four more cars, police, moving slowly forwards. Then back to Carson’s little Ford Fiesta, the car he’d been in for the last two days and somehow kept hidden from every cop and every nosy bastard in the country.
Claire had turned the volume up, so now we could hear the girl in the studio describing the scene. It was unfolding just outside Manchester, apparently. There were officers present from the Greater Manchester Police and helicopters on their way, and someone who just happened to be driving home after a nightshift had seen what was about to happen and had the brains and the bandwidth to get hold of Sky News and send them live images at the same time he was filming them. They di
dn’t have the sound from the scene to go with those live images, though, and by the fifth minute of nothing happening the poor girl was starting to get desperate. So it was probably a good thing for her that something finally did happen.
A door started to open.
It was the driver’s door on the Ford Fiesta and it opened so slightly and so slowly that if it hadn’t been for the anchor gasping, a little, and announcing it like the guy was actually there in the room with her, armed and dangerous and fed up with looking at pictures of a car in the rain, I wouldn’t have noticed at all. But that would have been OK, because a moment later the scrolling yellow news feed changed to “Carson manhunt: vehicle cornered, door opening”, and a few seconds after that all the excitement over the door was forgotten in the sight of a leg emerging from the car, followed by another leg, followed by the rest of a human being who might well have been Thomas Carson but was so blurred and distant he could equally have been Dolly Parton.
The figure that might or might not have been Thomas Carson threw itself to the ground, presumably in response to something shouted from one of the police vehicles. I glanced down, half-expecting the yellow banner to tell me this, too, but it still hadn’t got past “door opening”.
The rain had intensified, by the look of it, and the picture was grainier and blurrier than ever. Other figures now appeared in the shot, three of them, walking slowly towards the figure on the ground and waving their arms around. With sound from the scene, no doubt it would all have made sense. Without that sound, it all looked faintly ridiculous.