Dead End Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Hidden Grave

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: The Hanging

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three: The French Connection

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  DEATH’S DARK SHADOW

  SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL

  BEST SERVED COLD

  THICKER THAN WATER

  DEATH IN DISGUISE

  THE HIDDEN

  DEAD END

  The Jennie Redhead Mysteries

  THE SHIVERING TURN

  DRY BONES

  The Inspector Woodend Mysteries

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  The Inspector Sam Blackstone Series

  BLACKSTONE AND THE NEW WORLD

  BLACKSTONE AND THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

  BLACKSTONE AND THE GREAT WAR

  BLACKSTONE AND THE ENDGAME

  DEAD END

  Sally Spencer

  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.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by Alan Rustage.

  The right of Alan Rustage to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8874-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-999-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0212-3 (e-book)

  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.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  ‘The body’s a dead end,’ Crane said. He gave the

  others a weak grin. ‘No pun intended.’

  ‘Good, because if there had been, I’d probably have

  had to kill you,’ Meadows said.

  PART ONE

  The Hidden Grave

  September 1978

  ONE

  It was a dull, dark morning and heavy clouds rumbled ominously over the whole of Whitebridge and the surrounding valley.

  Archie Eccleston climbed stiffly out of the ex-army cot which occupied over a quarter of the floor space in his potting shed. He felt a little giddy, perhaps because he had left the paraffin heater burning all night. He knew he shouldn’t have done that – the safety instructions on the heater were quite explicit – but there had been an unseasonable chill in the air, and even with all his clothes on, he had been cold.

  Yes, he admitted it, he had gone to bed with all his clothes on, but at least he’d taken his boots off (and that had to count for something!).

  He slipped the boots on now, and, without lacing them, stepped outside. Once in the open air, he pulled an old flat tin out of his pocket, and extracted one of the cigarettes he’d rolled the previous evening. He lit it, and inhaled deeply.

  Was it really only a few months earlier that all this had started, he asked himself, as his lungs wheezed in protest at the arrival of the grey, twisting snake of poisonous chemicals.

  Yes, it was – and he could pin down exactly the point at which everything had changed.

  3rd March!

  Before then, everything had been perfect. The allotment had seemed just like a mini Garden of Eden to Archie – well, maybe not quite just like that, he admitted to himself, because if the real garden had been located in Lancashire, it would have been far too nippy for Adam and Eve to walk around bollock-naked, even in the summer. At any rate, it had been close enough to paradise for him.

  His immediate neighbours had experimented on their allotments with celeriac and sweetcorn, but Archie was a traditionalist and stuck to potatoes, carrots, broad beans, onions, winter cabbages, summer cabbages, marrows and Brussels sprouts – vegetables which had been good enough for his dad, and were good enough for him.

  But it wasn’t just the growing things that mattered. True, there was great pride to be had from looking at your Sunday dinner plate and seeing the roast beef surrounded by vegetables that had been grown by you, but there was more to it than that – a whole process to be considered. For a start, the feller working on the next allotment wasn’t just any old bod, he was your comrade. You did his weeding for him when he was sick, he shared with you that bottle of malt whisky he kept hidden behind his fertilizer bags – and when an unexpected frost got his parsnips, you felt the loss almost as much as he did.

  And then, of course, there was the fact that little Patrick had loved this allotment, though there was no point in dwelling on that now.

  There was no point in dwelling on that ever – though Archie knew he always would.

  He remembered the day the letter from the council had arrived. It had been waiting for him on the doormat, in a buff envelope which proclaimed that it was official.

  Inside, the letter addressed him as Mr Eccleston, perhaps to make it seem more personal, but his name had been typed by a different machine to the rest of the letter and was slightly unaligned.

  This is to inform you that within the next few months the county council will be taking back the allotment (TCA 123-2) that it rents to you on Old Mill Road. This has become necessary in order to facilitate an extension of the ring road. We apologise for the inconvenience, and wish to assure you that for the time period between you losing this allotment and being allotted another one, no rent will be charged. We are also willing to bear the cost of transporting whatever structures and equipment you have from one site to the other.

  They couldn’t just take his allotment away, Archie had told himself. He didn’t want a new one
– he wanted the one he had lavished love and attention on for over twenty years. And the conversations he’d had in the Bird in the Hand pub that lunchtime had been enough to show him that he was not alone in these feelings.

  They would fight the council, the allotment holders decided. They would occupy the allotments that they … well, that they occupied now. They couldn’t live there – that much was obvious – but by careful planning they could ensure that the site was never left unoccupied, thus preventing the council from sneaking in and bulldozing it flat. It was also agreed that though their cause was just, and they couldn’t possibly lose, it might be wisest not to leave any valuable tools at the allotments until matters had been resolved.

  And so it was that the nightshift men were there in the daytime, the dayshift men were there at night, and the retired filled in whenever necessary.

  Some wives objected, some wives were pleased to have their husbands out of the way, but most just shrugged their shoulders and said men had this unfathomable attachment to their allotments, and it was best just to let them get on with it.

  And that was how it had been for the last six months – the allotment holders had protected their little kingdoms, while their backers (the National Association of Allotment Holders) had fought it out with the council in the courts.

  The black van was parked just out of sight of the allotments. Sitting in the back of it, along with seven experienced bobbies, was Police Cadet L Rutter (better known to her friends as Louisa Paniatowski) who was feeling what could only be described as a mixture of excitement and terror. This, she kept reminding herself, was an actual policing operation, and she was part of it. True, as had been made clear to her by the desk sergeant, she was only there as an observer, with strict instructions not to participate in the action, but maybe circumstances would dictate that she had no choice but to intervene.

  Idiot! she told herself. Intervention was not a good thing – a glamorous thing – it was a clear indication that something had gone seriously wrong, and the whole essence of policing was ensuring that nothing did go wrong. In fact, the essence of successful policing was to make policing unnecessary, and with the mum she had, she should know that better than anybody.

  Her thoughts turned to her mother, who had been viciously attacked in Backend Woods earlier in the summer, and was still in a coma.

  Would she ever come out of it? Her team – Colin Beresford, Kate Meadows and Jack Crane – all had a fierce belief that she would, and Louisa drew her own strength from them.

  The back door of the van was opened from outside, and Louisa saw a uniformed inspector standing there. He was not alone. Standing next to him was a middle-aged civilian in a brown suit, who Louisa thought looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘We’ll be going in in exactly five minutes from now,’ the inspector said. ‘We’re not anticipating trouble, but if we get it, I’d ask you to remember that these are not out-of-town football hooligans, they’re your dad’s cousin and your wife’s uncle. If you’ve got any questions, now’s the time to ask them.’

  From their silence, it appeared that none of the occupants of the van did have any questions, and the inspector and the civilian turned and walked away.

  ‘Who’s he, Tony?’ Louisa whispered to the constable sitting shoulder-to shoulder with her.

  ‘That,’ replied the constable gravely, ‘is Inspector Metcalfe.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ Louisa replied, giving the constable a playful poke in the ribs, and wondering – even as her fingers made contact – if she hadn’t perhaps gone a little too far. ‘What I meant,’ she continued, speaking hastily to cover her confusion, ‘is who the other feller is.’

  ‘That’s Roderick Hardcastle, member of parliament for the fair borough of Whitebridge,’ Tony said.

  Her mum had really fancied the previous MP, Louisa remembered, and she herself had played around with the idea of him becoming her stepfather, and decided she rather liked it.

  But then her mum had gone and spoiled it all by arresting him for murder!

  The bulldozer and three JCB diggers stood in a line, and watching them, from behind the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle, was a man who sometimes went by the name of Forsyth.

  He looked out of place in a VW Beetle, the man sitting in the passenger seat next to him thought.

  Looked out of place – hell, he was out of place! That suit he was wearing, for a start – you couldn’t get something like that off the peg (or even made-to-measure) anywhere in the north of England. No, that was a London suit – a Savile Row suit – unless he was very much mistaken (and Ellis Downes, who had expensive tastes he could never afford, prided himself on never making mistakes like that).

  And then there was the haircut. It looked a simple cut, and it probably was, but there was an art to it which made the hair glow like sterling silver which had just undergone half an hour’s vigorous buffing at the hand of a trusted servant.

  I can sometimes seem pretty sharp myself – a real sophisticate – Downes reflected, but after I’ve been in Mr Forsyth’s company for five minutes, I feel like a country bumpkin.

  How old was Forsyth, he found himself wondering. Probably in his late fifties or early sixties, though he had the sort of the face that might well belong to a man in his early fifties or late sixties.

  ‘You don’t have to watch this yourself, Mr Forsyth,’ he heard himself saying, sickeningly ingratiatingly. ‘I can put a couple of the lads on it if you like.’

  ‘If I like?’ Forsyth repeated, without even turning his head. ‘A couple of the lads?’

  The man just couldn’t resist the opportunity to take the piss out of the north, could he?

  Oh, I bloody hate you, Downes thought. I worked bloody hard to get into grammar school, while you no doubt just wafted into Eton or Harrow or whatever other poncy public school your dad put your name down for on the day you were born. And maybe I didn’t serve as an officer in the Coldstream Guards, like you probably did, but I’d not been in the army for more than five minutes before somebody spotted my obvious potential and transferred me to Intelligence.

  Aloud, he confined himself to saying, ‘We may be out here in the sticks, but we are trained professionals, you know, sir.’

  ‘Are you, indeed?’ Forsyth countered. ‘Then what about the man who started this whole mess – the one who couldn’t even follow the simple outline I left him to follow? Judd, was it?’

  ‘Richard Judd was presented with an unexpected situation which called for a quick decision,’ Downes said defensively. ‘He took that decision, and the Centre has endorsed his action.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the action per se,’ Forsyth told him, ‘I’m referring to what happened next – to the chain of events that led to my being back in this rather nasty little industrial town, when I’d much rather be somewhere else.’

  ‘Judd couldn’t have anticipated—’ Downes began.

  ‘He should have anticipated it,’ Forsyth interrupted. ‘Any man who couldn’t have anticipated it shouldn’t have been on your team. He certainly wouldn’t have been on mine.’

  A police patrol car cruised slowly past the wrecking convoy, flashing its lights. Taking that as their signal, the bulldozer and diggers immediately fired up their engines.

  ‘Maybe they’ll be careless, and we’ll just get away with it,’ Downes said hopefully.

  ‘God give me strength,’ Forsyth replied, almost too quietly for Downes to hear him.

  When the rumbling sound began in the distance, Archie Eccleston was sitting outside his shed, drinking tea from a mug which bore the message: THE BEST DAD IN THE WORLD.

  Mary had bought it for him shortly after she’d given birth to Patrick, which had been a kind thought, because everybody else was praising her, yet instead of basking in it she found the time to do something which said that he had a part to play, too. He didn’t know then – neither of them could even have imagined then – just how limited a part God – or nature, or blind chance – had assigned to
him.

  It was no one’s fault, and they shouldn’t blame themselves, the doctor had said as the undertaker’s men were lifting the tiny coffin into the big black hearse. Patrick had had a rare form of cancer, and even the best care in the world – which the doctor was sure was exactly what they’d given him – couldn’t have saved the poor little lad.

  It was a week later that Mary had noticed he was still using the mug and had exploded.

  ‘You’re not the best dad in the world any longer,’ she’d screamed at him across the kitchen. ‘You’ll never be a dad again …’

  ‘You don’t know that, lass,’ he’d said tenderly.

  ‘You’ll never be a dad again, Archie, because I’m never going to be a mum again …’

  ‘Now then, lass, now then …’

  ‘… because I couldn’t stand the pain – so you can throw that bloody mug out before I smash it to pieces myself.’

  He hadn’t thrown it out. He couldn’t bring himself to do that, even though he knew she was right and you can’t be the best dad in the world to a dead boy. So instead of putting it into the bin, he’d brought it to the allotment, and it had been that mug – and this allotment – that had held him together while his marriage had been falling apart.

  The rumbling was getting louder, and after carefully placing his mug on the shelf, Archie stood up and made his way down the path towards the main gate.

  A few years previously, the rougher element of a visiting football team’s supporters’ club had demonstrated their disappointment at the result of the game (Whitebridge Rovers had murdered them!) by rampaging through the town and smashing shop windows. Then, almost as an afterthought, they had taken out their frustration on the allotments, ripping up flowerbeds and stamping on marrows (several of which had prize-winning potential). As a result, the council had enclosed the whole area with a six-foot-high wire-mesh fence topped with razor wire.

  The only way to enter the allotments now was through a double gate which was of the same height and basic construction as the fence, and when Archie arrived at the gate, there were already five other men (the remaining members of the night guard), gazing through the diamond-shaped mesh at the convoy of demolition vehicles, flanked by an escort of police cars and vans, which was slowly approaching.