by Joe McNally
The Eddie Malloy Series
joe mcnally
Contents
Book 1 Warned Off
Copyright
The Eddie Malloy series
Authors’ note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Book 2 Hunted
Hunted
Copyright
Authors’ note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Book 3 Blood Ties
Blood Ties
Copyright
Authors’ note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Thank you
Book 1 Warned Off
Copyright © 2015 by Joe McNally and Richard Pitman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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The Eddie Malloy series
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Authors’ note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a work of the imagination of the authors or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
1
This was the earliest severe winter I could recall, albeit I was only twenty-seven. That put me about a third of the way through my life, I reckoned, and it was one of the things that made me decide to try to find my sister.
Of those twenty-seven years, a third had been miserable and the last five the worst. Whichever way I looked, I could see no improvement on the horizon, so I’d taken to booze to put some nice colour into my vision, and I was pleasantly drunk when I set off hitch-hiking to Newmarket.
It was good to walk away for a while from that old draughty caravan I’d lived in these past two years.
Christmas wasn’t far off, and I longed for one evening by a warm hearth. My alcohol fuelled optimism had formed a rosy life for my sister, Marie. I pictured her in a thatched cottage in Newmarket with a big log fire. I hadn’t seen her since I’d left school. She wasn’t in the phone book. Address unknown, but Newmarket isn’t that big. That’s what I kept telling myself, when I hit the road, collar up, thumb out, plodding through grey slush: Newmarket isn’t that big. Boy, would she be shocked to see me.
A truck thundered
past, ignoring my silent plea for a lift and if the driver had looked in the mirror he’d have been surprised to see me smiling…it was at the thought of my return to the family fold.
Sheep came no blacker than me. Twice I’d shamed them. But fair play to their consistency. Even when I’d been right at the top, earning loads, my picture in the papers, the great boy wonder, they’d never come out of hiding.
I’d heard that my mother and father were somewhere in Newmarket, but, drunk or sober, I wouldn’t have crossed the road to find them. Marie was different. She would probably have suffered as much as I did after they threw me out. I was sixteen then. Marie was eleven. Had I abandoned her? Is that the way she’d see it when she answered my knock on the door?
I never got to find out. When a van driver dropped me in Newmarket in the gathering dusk, my optimism was badly in need of a top up.
I stopped in the first pub I came across, and left at midnight with some old floozy who offered me a bed and the illusion of affection.
Come morning, a dull hangover and empty pockets stripped away my happy family yuletide ambitions. I left the sleeping beauty snoring and decided the solitary life of the caravan-by-the-dung-heap dweller was about as much as I deserved.
I quickened through the frosty air, trying to keep warm, heading south along the High Street away from the town. The cold worked on my bladder; I needed to pee. Fifty yards ahead I saw the entrance to the golf course, and I jogged along and hurried through the gate onto the deserted acres to duck into the bushes.
I sighed as I drew a yellow piss flower in the frosted grass, remembering, as I zipped up, forbidden childhood antics, happy rebellion…I smiled.
As I turned to walk back to the road, I saw a man’s leg on the ground, sticking out from below a rhododendron bush, the rimed corduroy of his trousers clean above a bloodied brown shoe.
The body lay face down, left leg bent at the knee as though he’d been felled mid-run. The cold white layers on his clothes would have taken more than one night to thicken so much. I went to the far side of the bush and parted the foliage. His eyes were frozen shut. A crust of blood-tinted frost sealed a long deep wound on his throat. I recoiled, the stiff leaves closing with a rattle and a shower of tiny white particles.
I lurched forward onto my knees. The stale booze rose in my gullet and bubbled there, its foul taste making me scrabble for a handful of snow to eat to try to force it back down.
I hunkered for a while, frosty hands on my face, covering my eyes, trying to massage some sense into my head. This had to be something like the DTs or whatever they called them, hadn’t it? I’d give up drinking now. Right here. No waiting for New Year resolutions.
Eventually I straightened until my hands were on my wet knees. I couldn’t make myself turn around to check again if it had been some crazy white mirage.
I bent my head and looked between my legs. The foot was still there.
A tiny sound escaped my throat, surprising me. It was like a child’s cry. How could this happen? It was Christmas. I turned full circle, looking for something to cover him with, then I realized that it probably would not be a good idea. I noticed then the mess I’d made, finger scores and footprints and knee holes. The cops would not be pleased. I took one long last look at that bent and frozen leg, then headed wearily back into town.
2
They put me in the back of a squad car with one constable. Another was in the front passenger seat. The sergeant drove us to the golf course.
Walking across the grass I harboured the strange hope that I had indeed been hallucinating and they would find nothing but my freezing piss flower and an undisturbed rhododendron bush.
But the sergeant saw the leg before I did, and he stopped, ‘Right, get Soco on the radio. Start taping this off.’ The constables hurried back to the car. The sergeant approached the corpse. I stayed where I was and watched the sergeant bend and part the bush. I wondered if it would make him sick. He turned and walked back toward me, pulling a handkerchief from his sleeve and blowing his nose.
He looked shocked and didn’t try to hide it. ‘As bad as you’ve seen?’ I asked.
He turned on me, offended. ‘What do you think?’
I shrugged. ‘Apologies. Stupid question.’
‘I know his wife well,’ he said. ‘Used to go out with her. They’ve got three kids.’
I felt useless, worn out and somehow guilty. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. He left the young cops in place and took me back to the police station, gave me coffee and asked questions. Shifts changed. They fed me soup and chicken sandwiches and lemonade. It was late afternoon before they decided to let me go, by which time I’d learned the dead man was Danny Gordon and that he’d worked at the Horseracing Forensic Laboratory.
The sergeant double checked he had the right details for me, ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said and went and sat at his desk.
My feet were cold and wet. I was unshaven and dirty and still hungover. ‘Any chance you can organize me a lift home?’
He didn’t bother looking up. ‘Nope.’
He hunted with one finger above his keyboard. I said, ‘Remind me next time I get the urge to be a good citizen to walk on by.’
He ignored me. I said, ‘In fact, come court day, count me out.’
‘You’ll be there,’ he said quietly.
I headed for the door. ‘Here,’ he said. I looked round. He was offering me a banknote. ‘That should get you home.’
Twenty quid. ‘Thanks. Want me to sign something?’
‘There’s nothing to sign.’
‘You’re lending me this then?’
‘No. Keep it. Happy Christmas.’
‘I’ll send you a cheque. What’s your name?’
He concentrated on his keyboard, ‘Santa Claus. Make a donation at midnight Mass.’
I pocketed the cash, ‘Thanks. It’s a sign of the staff shortages in the force when you have to play the bad cop and the good cop. See you sometime.’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
Halfway to the door I turned and went back, ‘Will you tell his wife I’m sorry for her troubles?’
He stopped trying to type and looked at me, ‘I will. Now go home. It’s been a long day.’
I went out into the deep dusk and the Christmas lights and the hurrying shoppers who exchanged greetings in this tight-knit little racing community. And I wondered how Danny Gordon’s wife had felt when she’d opened the door to a couple of grim-faced cops with no tidings of comfort and joy.
I shook my head, shoved the banknote deep in my pocket and hit the road, hoping a dose of Christmas charity had seeped into some driver in a big warm Mercedes with a mini-bar in the back.
3
Nine weeks after I’d found the body, McCarthy came calling. I didn’t recognize him when I opened the caravan door; the only light was from a weak gas lamp hanging behind me, and though he looked up when he spoke he remained in shadow.
I stepped to one side. The lamp swung and flickered in the wind but lit his face enough for me to identify him as Peter McCarthy, Racecourse Security Services investigator.
‘Hello, Eddie.’
The surprise at seeing him kept me silent.
‘You remember me, don’t you?’
I nodded. ‘What do you want?’
‘Just to talk.’
‘The last time we talked it cost me my licence and eighteen months in jail.’
We stared at each other. The rain blew into his back and pattered in bursts on his Trilby. ‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘If you’re not interested in what I’ve got to say after that you can throw me out.’ I moved aside.
‘Hell of a night, eh?’ he said.
I didn’t reply. Wriggling his long coat off, he looked around.
‘There’s a hook behind the door,’ I said. I slid a plastic chair from under the fixed table and left it for him, and went to sit on my bed in the corner. McCarthy fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.
> He held it up to the light. Smears and blotches stained it and he tried to find a clean patch. He noticed me watching. ‘Nosebleeds,’ he said. He'd got even fatter since I’d last seen him. About six feet two and forty pounds overweight, his face and dark untidy curly hair had a greasy sheen even after he’d wiped away the rain. Finally, he sat down, rested his arms on the table, clasped his hands and looked straight at me like I was a camera and he was about to start reading the news.
‘Your ban expired yesterday,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I wondered what your plans were.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged, ‘Maybe I can help you out.’
‘What makes you think I need help?’
He looked around the caravan; damp, dirty, full of holes, which I’d plugged, though the winds coming off the fields still found their way in. God knows how many stablehands and labourers had used it before me.
‘Not what champion jockeys are accustomed to,’ McCarthy said.
‘Ex-champion…I get by.’
‘Come on, Eddie, how much longer do you want to be stuck in this box out in the wilds?’
‘I’ll move on when I’m ready, without any help from you.’
‘You’re bearing old grudges.’
‘Damn right I am.’ I got up to get a drink. I had a third of a bottle of whiskey in a cupboard under the sink. I filled a glass, feeling no more hospitable toward McCarthy than when I’d opened the door, but I offered him a drink.
‘Coffee, if you’ve got some. Milk and two sugars.’
Lighting the single gas ring, I tried to figure McCarthy’s angle.
I had last met him when he’d been investigating my ‘involvement’ in a racehorse-doping ring. I’d had nothing to do with it, but they didn’t believe me. They took away my jockey’s licence for life and ‘warned me off the turf’ for five years.
The kettle bubbled and I sloshed some boiling water into a mug and left McCarthy to stir it.
I took the whiskey to my bunk. He looked at me and raised his mug slowly. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
He sipped coffee before taking up his newsreader’s pose again. ‘How close a touch have you kept with racing in the last five years?’
‘None. I’ve no reason to.’
‘Miss it?’
Racing had been my life. I’d been careful never to let them see that, “the authorities”. The injustice hurt bad enough, I didn’t want them knowing their “punishment” had ripped out my heart.