The Ring of Death Read online

  Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  THE BUTCHER BEYOND

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  THE DARK LADY

  THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

  DEAD ON CUE

  DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  A DEATH LEFT HANGING

  DEATH WATCH

  DYING IN THE DARK

  A DYING FALL

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  FATAL QUEST

  GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

  A LONG TIME DEAD

  MURDER AT SWANN’S LAKE

  THE PARADISE JOB

  THE RED HERRING

  THE RING OF DEATH

  THE SALTON KILLINGS

  SINS OF THE FATHERS

  STONE KILLER

  THE WITCH MAKER

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2010

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2010 by Alan Rustage.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Spencer, Sally.

  The Ring of Death.

  1. Police – England – Yorkshire – Fiction. 2. Serial murder investigation – Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9′14-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-042-5 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6868-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-218-5 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  For most men, suddenly finding themselves in this position would be a terrifying experience, Andy Adair thought.

  As their minds slowly came back to life – as they began to hazily remember the blow to the back of the head which had robbed them of their consciousness – they would already be finding it hard to breathe.

  And then – as they realized they were tied securely to a chair, and had a hood over their heads – they’d crap their pants.

  But not him!

  He was not that run-of-the-mill kind of man.

  He was a hard man.

  He didn’t focus on the pain from his head-wound, because he had been trained to ignore pain.

  He didn’t waste his time wondering how he’d got into this situation.

  None of that mattered.

  What was important now was what happened next.

  And the simple truth was that – in a hard man sort of way – he found the whole situation amusing.

  The Enemy – and he was sure it was a single enemy – had put the sack over his head in an attempt to induce what Adair’s instructors had called sensory deprivation.

  And certainly that would work with some men.

  It had worked with the wogs he himself had interrogated in the Middle East, during the Aden crisis, for example.

  It had worked with the Catholic scum he had helped break down in the Northern Ireland conflict.

  But it was not about to work with him.

  And it was from that knowledge of his own sense of control over the situation that the amusement stemmed.

  Because, even now, that invisible Enemy was probably studying him for signs of growing fear – and was being sadly disappointed.

  He could hear the Enemy breathing, short, shallow breaths designed to conceal his presence.

  But that wouldn’t work, either.

  Not with a man who’d been trained to listen.

  Not with a man who’d spent so much time on the other side of the sack.

  Slowly and silently, Adair started to count.

  One hundred . . . two hundred . . . three hundred . . .

  This was another technique he’d been taught in the army, and it had two purposes. The first was to enable him to calculate how long he had been held – which might come in useful later. The second was keep his mind occupied, so that no unnecessary thoughts came into it.

  He had reached six thousand, seven hundred and twenty-six when the Enemy – admitting defeat, even if he didn’t yet realize it himself – finally broke the silence.

  ‘Don’t you want to know where you are?’ the man asked.

  ‘Bloody amateur!’ Adair thought, in disgust.

  ‘Don’t you want to know why you’re here?’ the Enemy continued.

  Pathetic! This feller wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in the hands of the Ulster Proddies.

  ‘I want some information,’ the Enemy said.

  ‘Is that right?’ Adair asked.

  His captor spoke with a convincing Lancashire accent, he noted, but that proved nothing.

  A lot of Irishmen who’d spent a few years in the area could put on the local accent when they needed to. And when you were working for the Irish Republican cause – when you were the enemy within on the English mainland – you did need to put it on, because you knew that sounding like a local was one of the best disguises you could adopt.

  ‘I want some information, and you’re going to give it to me,’ the Enemy said.

  And now there was a hard edge – an almost iron-clad certainty – to his voice, which, despite everything, made his captive start to feel perhaps just slightly unnerved.

  ‘I’ll give you some information, Paddy,’ Adair said.

  He spoke harshly, perhaps to show the Enemy he was not to be intimidated, and perhaps, also, to bolster up his own courage a little.

  ‘And that information,’ he continued, ‘is that when I get out of here, your life won’t be worth living.’

  ‘I want to know exactly what went on at Moors’ Edge Farm,’ the Enemy said. ‘And I want the names of the men who organized it.’

  ‘Wrong question!’ Adair thought, slightly knocked off balance.

  Or, at least, he corrected himself, not one of the questions he’d been expecting.

  ‘You can get stuffed,’ the hooded man said.

  He concentrated on his breathing, forcing it to be regular and calm, knowing that would help steady his pulse and his heart-beat.

  The threats would come soon, he told himself.

  ‘I can hurt you, you know. I can hurt you in ways you could never even imagine.’

  That was what he would have said in this situation. That was what he had said, in situations just like it.

  But there were no threats. Instead, all he heard was a match being struck, followed by a roaring sound.

  And then he felt the pain in his arm – an agonizing pain as the flesh was burnt away.

  He screamed, and the immediate pain stopped, though a secondary pain – less intense but no less horrendous – continued.

  ‘In case you’re wondering what I’m using, it’s a blow-lamp,’ the Enemy said casually. ‘Nasty things, blow-lamps. They can burn their way through a solid oak door in less than a minute – so just imagine what this one could do to you.’

  Adair let his head slump to one side, as if he’d lost consciousness, though it was a hard act to maintain when all he really wanted to do was scream again.

&n
bsp; ‘If you’re faking it, you’re just wasting your time and mine,’ he heard the Enemy say. ‘If you’re not faking it, I’ll just wait until you come round, and then start again. Because I will have the information I require.’

  Adair could still hear the blow-lamp spitting out its flame in the background. Nothing he’d ever been taught – nothing he’d ever had to endure – had prepared him for this.

  He remembered something else his instructor had said.

  ‘In general, you need to dominate the Enemy, even when he seems to have the upper hand but there are a few occasions when it might serve you best to put on a show of cooperating.’

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you what you want to know,’ Adair said, pretending to be panicked, yet not really having to pretend any more.

  ‘Start with the names,’ the Enemy ordered him.

  ‘There’s a man called Wally, who I met in a pub called the Flying Horse,’ Adair began. ‘I don’t know his other name, but he’s about thirty-five and—’

  As the flame brushed against his arm, he stopped speaking and started to scream again.

  ‘Do you think I’m a complete bloody fool?’ the Enemy asked, contemptuously. ‘Wally, who you met in the Flying Horse! That won’t do at all. I know who all your friends and acquaintances are. What I don’t know is which of them are involved in what’s been going on at Moors’ Edge Farm.’

  It was hard to think with the pain, Adair thought.

  So very, very hard.

  But he had to try. He had to find some way to get through to this Paddy – to reach some sort of temporary compromise. Then, later – when this was all over – he’d track him down. And that would be when the bastard would learn what real pain was.

  ‘I . . . I . . . could give you a couple of names, and you could get more names from them,’ he said.

  ‘I want the names of everybody involved,’ the Enemy said unrelentingly. ‘And I want them from you!’

  ‘Be reasonable,’ Adair said, aware that his tone had become a whine – and no longer caring. ‘If I give you all the names, I’ll have no future in this town.’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ the Enemy asked.

  ‘Get what?’ Adair asked tremulously.

  ‘It’s no longer a question of you having a future in this town. You have no future anywhere. And why do you think that is?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Adair croaked.

  ‘You have no future because when you’ve told me all I need to know, I’m going to kill you.’

  He had never really been a hard man, Adair realized – not in the way that this man was hard. He felt tears forming in his eyes and snot start to trickle over his upper lip.

  ‘Please!’ he sobbed.

  ‘After what you’ve done, there can be no pity and no mercy,’ the Enemy said coldly. ‘The best you can hope for now is a quick death. And that’s what you’ll get, once you’ve given me the information. It won’t be a gentle death – you’ve lost the right to that – but at least it will soon be over.’

  The threats could still be no more than part of the interrogation technique, Adair told himself.

  They could be no more than part of the interrogation technique . . . they could be no more than part of the interrogation technique . . . they could be no more . . .

  ‘I’m waiting,’ the Enemy said.

  ‘Tom Harding,’ Adair gasped.

  ‘That would be Thomas W. Harding, who lives at 93 India Road, Whitebridge?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know if that’s his exact address, but, yes, he does live in India Road.’

  ‘Good,’ the Enemy said approvingly, as if, despite his initial reservations, he was now starting to consider Adair a promising pupil after all. ‘Next name?’

  ‘John Bygraves.’

  ‘John Bygraves of Waverley Avenue?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adair sobbed. ‘It might be Waverley Avenue, but I just don’t know.’

  ‘It’s Waverley Avenue,’ the Enemy said. ‘Next?’

  Adair spilled out another twenty names before he finally said, ‘That’s it. I swear to you, that’s all of them.’

  And even then, the Enemy was not satisfied.

  ‘Describe exactly what went on,’ he said. ‘Paint a picture for me.’

  ‘Paint a . . . paint a picture?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  Adair did his best. As the details – some he had all but forgotten – spilled out of his mouth, there was a corner of his brain which was reciting a babbled prayer that this might be enough – that despite what he had said earlier, the Enemy might find it in his heart to show a little mercy.

  ‘Is that all?’ the other man asked, when the chronicle came to end.

  ‘That’s all,’ Adair promised.

  A slight pause.

  ‘Are you sure?’ the Enemy asked. ‘Because if you can remember something more, it will keep you alive just a little while longer.’

  ‘Look, you don’t have to . . .’ Adair began.

  And then, as the metal claw ripped across his throat, tearing away the flesh and lacerating his windpipe, he said no more.

  ONE

  The pub landlords of Whitebridge feared the clever young men from the brewery’s planning and design department in much the same way as landlords in former times must have feared a visitation by the plague. Daily, they lived in trepidation of the knock on the door which would announce the arrival of these callow youths, whose eyes gleamed – like vultures swooping down on a particularly juicy prey – and whose imaginations were positively exploding with exciting ideas for improving the place. For the landlords knew – as did their customers – that once these fashionably suited vandals had crossed the threshold, the boozer they had known and loved was all but doomed.

  Walls would be torn down, in order to open the place up. Windows would be enlarged, letting in more of the outside world which the drinkers had come to the pub precisely to forget. But worse, even, than this destruction, was the reconstruction which followed it.

  The pub needed a theme, explained these smart-arsed designers who did most of their own drinking in cocktail bars. It needed an image. And so it was that pubs built in the age of Victoria suddenly found themselves lumbered (and that was the right word, in every sense) with mock – and totally structurally unnecessary – seventeenth-century oak beams. So it was that pubs which had never had any connection with the coaching inns of earlier times had their walls festooned with horse brasses, harnesses, and long thin coaching horns.

  The Drum and Monkey, having so far been spared this fate, was, to its regular customers, an island of placid stability in a world of frantic change. They liked the idea that the landlord felt that his main task in life was to sell beer. They felt comfortable with the fact that there was a best room there for those who wanted it, and a public bar for those who didn’t. And some of them took an almost guilty pleasure in knowing that when a serious crime had occurred, the corner table in that public bar would invariably be occupied by a team of detectives which had once been led by DCI Charlie Woodend and was now headed by DCI Monika Paniatowski.

  Though no serious crime was yet known to have occurred, two of Paniatowski’s team were sitting at their customary table that lunchtime.

  The elder of the pair, Detective Inspector Colin Beresford, was in his early thirties. From a distance, he managed to maintain the fresh-faced appearance of a much younger man. Closer up, it was his eyes you noticed – eyes which showed the strain of having carried a heavy responsibility, and a concern that he had somehow failed to carry it as well as he might have done. The eyes did not actually tell an observer that after years of struggling to take care of a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease he had reluctantly decided to put her in a nursing home, but the observer would not have been the least surprised to learn that this was, in fact, the case.

  The younger man was in his early twenties. His slim aesthetic features seemed as if they should belong to a high-flyin
g college lecturer rather than a detective constable, and, in fact, Jack Crane, with his 1st Class Honours degree in English Literature, could easily have been a university lecturer had he decided to follow that particular path. But he had instead chosen the grimy streets over the dreaming spires – and it was a rare day on which he regretted his choice more than once.

  The third member of the team was in the ladies’ toilets, examining herself in the mirror. What she saw reflected back at her was a face which it would have pleased most women to possess, and which – on a good day – she even found perfectly acceptable herself.

  Her hair was blonde and silky, her eyes blue, intelligent and penetrating. Her nose, reflecting her Central European background, was a little larger than those normally handed out in Lancashire, but it was strong rather than dominating, and the men in her life – not that there had been any of them recently – had often admitted to finding it very sexy. Her lips were wide and inviting, her chin was resolute without being square.

  She stepped back from the mirror, lit up a cigarette, and stood perfectly still as the acrid smoke curled its way around her lungs.

  ‘Yes, not bad,’ she told the reflection in the mirror. ‘Not bad at all.’

  And then – realizing she’d actually spoken the words out loud – she quickly glanced around to see if there was anybody there to hear her.

  Colin Beresford watched his old colleague (and new boss) emerge from the toilets and walk towards him.

  It hadn’t been easy for Monika, taking over from the legendary Charlie Woodend, he thought. In fact, he amended mentally, it had been bloody hard.

  Stepping into Charlie’s shoes would have been a formidable task for any man. For a woman – the very first woman DCI in the division – it had been an ever greater obstacle. And the transition hadn’t exactly been helped by the rumours buzzing around Whitebridge Police HQ that Paniatowski owed her promotion less to her own ability than to her previous relationship with the chief constable.

  All of which meant that, even though Paniatowski had handled her first major investigation with a flair and intuition which would have made Charlie Woodend proud of her, most of the bobbies in Whitebridge HQ were still unconvinced she’d been the right choice for the job.