Killer Lies (Reissue) Read online

  KILLER LIES

  A gripping detective mystery full of twists and turns

  DI Tom Mariner Book 3

  CHRIS COLLETT

  Revised Edition 2017

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  FIRST PUBLISHED BY PIATKUS 2006 AS “WRITTEN IN BLOOD”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, 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. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this.

  We hate typos too but sometimes they slip through. Please send any errors you find to [email protected]

  We’ll get them fixed ASAP. We’re very grateful to eagle-eyed readers who take the time to contact us.

  ©Chris Collett

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  THERE IS A GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOK FOR US READERS.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  DI MARINER SERIES

  FREE KINDLE BOOKS AND OFFERS

  Glossary of English Slang for US readers

  CHARACTER LIST

  For my parents, Muriel and David Cunningham.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is the third mystery featuring Tom Mariner. It is set in the early 2000s, when the internet was in its infancy, mobile phones had yet to evolve into smart phones, and people still read print newspapers.

  Chapter One

  Chugging along through the dense, dark early morning, Tim Leavis was counting off the days. It was less than a week now to the winter solstice, when they’d begin to lengthen again. Much as he liked his life, he’d never got used to these early winter starts, and this one was earlier than most, allowing him to feed the animals but still get back for a shower and breakfast before driving across to the village school in time to see Archie perform in the nativity play. The boy had been typecast as a shepherd, of course. Though pointing out the likely effects on the animal’s bodily functions had, at least, dissuaded Mrs Elliot from her romantic idea of having his son carry a new-born lamb across the stage.

  Passing a local beauty spot, the powerful beams of the John Deere’s headlights picked up a small creature scuttling across the road, then glinted back at him, reflecting off something shiny; the radiator grille of a car parked in the layby. From what he could tell it was a big car; black, though Leavis didn’t immediately recognise the make. Someone else with an early start, or more likely returning late from some pre-Christmas revelry. The driver’s door hung open and Leavis smiled to himself. Not the first motorist to use the woods as a convenient convenience. Better be quick, mate; cold enough this morning to freeze your tadger off.

  But when Leavis returned twenty minutes later, after depositing the hay in the sheep field, the vehicle was still there. Coming up behind the car this time, he could see that the boot was also open. The driver was crouching on the road behind the vehicle, peering underneath. Exhaust problems perhaps. Hoping that it wouldn’t take long, Leavis pulled his tractor into the layby to offer his assistance. That was when he realised that the figure wasn’t so much crouching as lying inanimate on the frozen ground, and suddenly more than the air felt chill.

  * * *

  In the dark the SOCO almost missed it. The arc lights that had been brought in were trained on the man and woman in the rear passenger seat of the limousine, their posture so natural they could have been calmly waiting for their driver to return so that they could continue their journey. As long as you didn’t look at their faces and the identical black holes that had ripped apart each forehead, spraying grey fleshy pebble-dashing across the rear window behind them. It was an efficient job. A high velocity weapon fired at point-blank range, one shot apiece. The victims would have had mere seconds to grasp what was happening. And the assassin had, on first examination, left nothing behind; no stray prints, hairs or fibres evident at this stage, though the car would get a more comprehensive going-over once it was back at the lab. Fortunately the farmer who’d discovered the gruesome scene had seen enough detective shows to know not to touch anything. Colleagues working around the third dead body, sprawled on the road beside the gaping trunk, were having more luck. Underneath the boot lining in the spare wheel cavity they’d found traces of a white powdery residue.

  Edging out of the vehicle the SOCO made one last sweep with his Maglite and caught a momentary glimpse of something . . . something that had been veiled by the intense glare of the spotlights. Twenty-five semi-transparent letters scribed on the glass of the passenger window in a reddish-brown hue. The author had clearly made use of the raw materials at hand. Every third letter was bolder than the others, the index finger dipped into its bloody inkwell at even intervals until the message was complete.

  ‘Ma’am,’ the SOCO ducked his head out and addressed the woman waiting patiently beside the car in the frigid air. ‘They’ve left us a message.’

  DCI Caroline Griffin stepped forward, removing her gloved hands from the pockets of her long wool coat. She leaned into the car as the SOCO moved his beam along the communication: Vengeance is mine. I will repay.

  ‘Not particularly subtle,’ she remarked.

  ‘Or original,’ added the SOCO.

  Chapter Two

  There was a first time for everything. Mariner humming along to Slade singing ‘Merry Christmas Everybody.’ Normally the song made him cringe, but this year apparently signalled a shift in his tolerance levels. Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ would have been more appropriate. Christmas shopping wasn’t something Mariner did either, but here he was . . . doing it, on his own, completely unprompted and in grave danger of looking like a New Man. It was mostly illusion though. Mariner’s underlying motive was rooted in the hope that an hour of exposing his senses to the garishness of Christmas might help him to shake off the image that had stayed with him since early this morning, when he’d stood knee-deep in an underground sewer, watching a police constable cut open a bound bin liner to reveal the decaying body of a woman.

  So far the strategy hadn’t been wholly successful, but he had another fifteen minutes before he was due to meet Anna and the others; another fifteen minutes to distance himself. So he slipped into Waterstones bookshop. In here the atmosphere was calm, the background chamber music a notch more sophisticated, but none
theless contrived, along with the aroma of real coffee, to soothe him into parting with some of his hard-earned cash, and for a while Columbian medium roast vied with the smell of raw waste that lingered in his nostrils.

  Like everywhere else Mariner had been in the Bullring, the shop was excessively warm and he sweltered in his overcoat: another rule broken. Overcoats weren’t his style, but Anna had persuaded him into one last winter and today it had come into its own, keeping him warm and helpfully concealing the uniform underneath. He strolled around scanning the three-for-two bestseller tables, and loitering over the latest wave of women’s fiction that Anna was so partial to and that invariably featured feisty, independent-spirited females. This year she’d probably have preferred a volume from the health section, under pregnancy planning and parents-to-be, but somehow Mariner couldn’t quite bring himself to move towards that corner of the shop. Instead he picked up a couple of what looked like the most popular of the chick-lit titles, with their ubiquitous fluorescent cartoon covers, and took them over to the counter.

  The checkout queue was long, the customers ahead of him apparently starting up their own private libraries, and for some time Mariner found himself standing beside a stack of glossy hardbacks, the early memoirs of former MP Sir Geoffrey Ryland. Not ordinarily popular reading matter, but there were no prizes for guessing the reason for their prominence today. Just one week ago Ryland had met a violent end, ambushed and shot dead in his car on a quiet Oxfordshire lane. Mariner absently picked up a copy of the book and skimmed the jacket. One of the Good Guys. Not, on the face of it, an attention-grabbing title, even though it might be true. Joe Public didn’t want to read about politicians who’d done the job well, they wanted the scandal, like Alan Clark’s love affairs. Sales of Bill Clinton’s autobiography had gone through the roof, everyone wanting to know the sordid truth about Monica Lewinsky and that dress.

  The flyleaf told Mariner little more than he already knew, tracing Ryland’s professional life as a human rights lawyer in the 1960s to his natural progression into politics as an MP for an inner-city London borough. A specialist in miscarriages of justice at a time when they were rife, he’d given up his parliamentary seat to chair one of the government’s most prized flagship institutions, the Judicial Review Commission, the job for which Ryland had received his knighthood. According to the news reports Ryland had died at the age of sixty-eight, no age at all. Only the good die young.

  ‘You taking that one too?’ The paperbacks were lifted from his grasp and Mariner looked up to see that he’d reached the head of the queue, to be greeted by a sales girl name-tagged Nikki. ‘We were all set to send them back to the warehouse,’ she told him. ‘But they’re practically walking off the shelves now. You wouldn’t believe what a sudden death can do for a writer.’

  ‘Or a musician,’ her mate chipped in from the neighbouring till. ‘When John Lennon got shot “Imagine” went straight to number one.’

  ‘Turned James Dean into a legend overnight,’ agreed Mariner. They both looked at him blankly. ‘The film actor?’ he elaborated. ‘Rebel Without a Cause?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Nikki’s friend said vaguely. ‘I think I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘So are you taking it?’ Nikki got back to the hard sell. ‘Might be a good present for someone.’

  A year ago it would have been perfect. Had his mother still been alive Mariner would have bought it for her. Ryland was one of a group of charismatic social reformers of her generation whom, alongside Bruce Kent and Nelson Mandela, she’d idolised. In fact that’s just how she’d have described all three: the good guys.

  ‘Go on then.’ Mariner put the book down on the counter.

  ‘Good for you,’ Nikki grinned. ‘You won’t regret it.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Mariner. ‘Especially at that price.’

  ‘You’ve even got an autographed one,’ she flipped open the cover displaying an illegible scrawl. ‘He came in for a signing in November and we had some left over.’

  ‘So you met Ryland?’ Mariner pulled his credit card from his wallet.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did you think he was?’ Mariner asked, as they waited for the transaction to process.

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘One of the good guys.’

  She shrugged. ‘He was very polite. And his driver thought a lot of him. He came out back for a fag, so I got talking to him. Ryland had got him out of prison, so he thought the old man was a hero.’

  Mariner considered what he’d read about the recent shooting. Word was that the killings were down to the driver. Not a nice way to repay your hero.

  Taking the bulging plastic carrier bag from the girl called Nikki and feeling slightly as if he’d been had, Mariner stepped away from the counter and felt a tingling sensation along his spine. He turned sharply and scoped the shop, but the handful of other customers either had their noses buried in books or were studying the shelves. He’d caught no one out. It had come on him suddenly, this sensation that he was being watched. He’d had the same experience several times during the last few weeks, though he’d told no one about it. They’d have suggested therapy. He put the feeling down to being tired. It was a long time since he’d had a holiday.

  * * *

  Mariner had arranged to meet Anna, along with DS Tony Knox at the visiting Frankfurt Christmas market, and he picked up the tail end of the colourful stalls on New Street. As he progressed deeper into the market the ambience subtly changed, the hard-nosed consumerism of the department stores giving way to a mellower side of Christmas. Under less pressure to buy, shoppers browsed the pastry and pottery stalls exchanging pleasantries, and the easy banter between the vendors created an atmosphere of genuine good will. This year there had been a clumsy effort by some local councillors to replace the market with a more patriotic English version but somehow Mariner couldn’t imagine that hot dogs and burgers would be an improvement. If he could only forget what he’d been doing all day . . .

  The busiest stands were those grouped below the steps of the museum and art gallery, offering a range of exotic refreshments. It was here that Mariner spied Tony Knox, beneath one of the food bar parasols, his arm draped round a woman, the latest girlfriend he’d heard so much about — Selina, if his recall was accurate. So many had come and gone since Knox’s wife had left him that Mariner couldn’t be sure. The pulling power of the middle-aged divorcee was one of life’s mysteries.

  ‘All right, boss?’ Knox asked as Mariner arrived at his side. The two men shook hands as Knox disentangled himself. ‘This is Selina,’ he said without ceremony. ‘Selina: DI Tom Mariner.’

  First impressions were that this girl’s model good looks carbon copied her predecessors, Knox continuing his quest for the antithesis to his ex. Slim and leggy in jeans and sheepskin bomber jacket, Selina’s hair was pinned up in an explosion of lethal blonde spikes, and the total image was straight off a page of the glossies. But the smile, when it came, was pure mischief. ‘The boss,’ she grinned, one perfectly-shaped eyebrow arching. ‘I’ve heard all about you.’ The stress on that last word implied that she knew rather more than Mariner would have liked, but at the same time he couldn’t help warming to Selina.

  ‘You too,’ he said, automatically. ‘Tony said you’re an accountant?’ As the snippet of information came back to him Mariner struggled momentarily to square the image with the occupation.

  ‘Try not to sound quite so surprised,’ Selina said, reading his face. ‘We’re not all fat and balding in a suit, you know.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘And she’s a blues supporter,’ Knox put in. ‘So I wouldn’t go getting too friendly.’

  ‘Well . . . nobody’s perfect,’ Mariner conceded.

  Knox passed him a mug of steaming Glühwein. ‘Dutch courage,’ he said. ‘Or should that be German courage? I thought you might need it.’ He raised his own mug, slipping an arm back around Selina and drawing her closer. ‘Prost.’

  ‘Prost.’
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  ‘Prost.’ The three mugs clinked together. ‘As long as I don’t end up slurring my words,’ said Mariner. ‘Might not look good.’ But at the same time he was trying to ignore the growing flutter of butterfly wings in his stomach. Standing up in front of the Chief Constable and other luminaries, along with a hundred or so of his colleagues wasn’t something he was often asked to do, even if tonight he would only be reading from the gospel according to St Luke.

  It said something for the heathens at the Granville Lane OCU that it was Mariner, lifelong agnostic, who was representing them by doing a reading at the force carol service, though his participation came only as a result of having his arm twisted up his back by Jack Coleman. ‘It shouldn’t even be me who’s up there,’ he grumbled. ‘The job should have gone to a good Catholic boy.’

  ‘Lapsed Catholic boy,’ Knox reminded him. ‘And I was never a contender. The Brummie masses wouldn’t understand a word I said, like.’ And to demonstrate, he thickened his Scouse accent to a series of guttural spasms.

  They heard Anna before they saw her, cheerfully apologising her way through what was becoming a tightly packed crowd. The mellow light accentuated the paleness of her skin while highlighting the copper tones of her shoulder-length hair. Watching her progress, eliciting smiles and good-natured teasing along the way, Mariner was reminded what a lucky bugger he was. Then he saw what she was carrying. He’d been feeling pretty virtuous about his purchases, but Anna appeared to have bought out Toys R Us single-handed.

  ‘Doing your bit for the national economy?’ Knox joked, relieving her of two enormous carrier bags and stacking them out of the way. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

  ‘Thanks, Tony.’ Reaching up, Anna planted a kiss on Mariner. ‘It’s just a few bits and pieces.’

  ‘Can’t guess who they’re for,’ Mariner said.

  ‘Tony didn’t tell me you had children,’ Selina said.