London Stone

Nick Bydwyn

Description

Private Investigator Drake Sanders is having a difficult day. Not only has he been press-ganged by an old police colleague into investigating a murder that he is somehow the main suspect for, but he's been hired by two different people to search for an ancient artefact that doesn't appear to be missing. As business has been slow he effectively agrees to do the same job twice, assuming that he might be able to plug a widening hole in his finances. As he digs deeper into both cases he discovers that his involvement may not have been as coincidental as it had first appeared. His investigations reveal that his employer's intentions aren't as benign as they claim, that what he is searching for has a significance far beyond being an important historical curiosity. This is borne out when he begins to attract the attention of high-ranking officials, conspiracy theorists, burglars and hired thugs who all seem intent on hindering his progress.Figuring out he has been used to further some greater plot, he has to unravel fact from millenia-old fiction in order to unearth the truth about about an elaborate scheme that threatens to cost him not only his career, but quite possibly his life as well.

Sujets

• City (Londres)
• City of London
• Cité de Londres
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800465879
• Langue: English

Extrait

London Stone
 
Nick Bydwyn
 
 
Copyright © 2021 Nick Bydwyn
 
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
 
 
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private stud y , or criticism or revie w , as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agenc y . Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
 
 
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ISBN 978 1800465 879
 
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Librar y .
 
Matador® is an imprint of T roubador Publishing Ltd .
 
Dedication
 
 
For my parents, who taught me to always reach for the stars, and to invest in a mattress just in case I fell back to Earth.
 
Contents
 
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 1
 
Drake Sanders wasn’t sure what hurt more: the pounding inside his skull or the fact he’d been stiffed on yet another job. With a deliberation of breath that was as much to stop himself from keeling over as it was to quieten the pain, he stood by the window in his dressing gown and watched the sheeting rain lash the glass. He stoically observed the rivulets as they made their way to the bottom of the wooden frame. Idle thoughts about the state of his health, the last case and the way the inclement weather mimicked his mood criss-crossed his mind. Of course it was raining. Why wouldn’t the universe drive the point of his worthlessness home by heaping on a huge slab of windy, wet insult?
If the coffee he was cradling didn’t kick in soon, he was going straight back to bed. He knew the black sludge in his cup would do its job as it had so many times before, a concoction made with just the right amount of anger and lack of sophistication that it provided maximum alertness coupled with an almost diabolical taste. Drake had learned long ago that neither sugar nor milk could temper the bite that his creation contained, so he saved on both and took it in its raw form. It tasted like nothing else on earth.
Slowly, he began to rebuild the mental pathways that would allow him to function as a normal person for another day. What was he doing with his life? What had possessed him to even attempt to become a “Private Revenue and Investigations Specialist”? And that title, why did he ever choose something so wordy and vainglorious? Now he sounded like an entire redundant government department rolled into the body of a single man, but he’d already ordered five hundred business cards and he was damned if he was going to let them go to waste. Fortunately it was very nearly an anagram of PRAISE, if he could get round to figuring out that final word. It hadn’t warranted a massive amount of thought as the main goal of the cards was to get jobs so he could earn money to, ostensibly, buy more liquor. By that criteria it could be said that his random advertisement was successful; nevertheless, his old designation, “Private Investigations Specialist” had a bit more flair.
He tried to keep his breathing regular as he mused on the fact that his last client had skipped the country. Just took the package and ran, literally ran to a waiting car and drove off, before Drake’s muscles had fully sprung into life. Not that he was any stranger to being double crossed, but in the majority of cases he’d had the sense to ask for a good fist of the money up front. Not this time. This particular time it seemed like someone had sent a heat-seeking missile right into his pragmatic blind spot. The heat-seeker in this case was a redhead; a tall, pouting, tousle-haired demon whose only objective, aside from acting as the right hand of his client, was to use her heels to kick him in his sensibilities until he was so bruised he couldn’t tell when he was being played. Dammit, never get involved. Impartiality was sacrosanct in this job. How had she made him willingly circumvent his own rules?
But this wasn’t the time to wallow. He needed clarity, needed something to do next. Did he want revenge? Go after her, confront her and her boss to demand payment? That would be foolish; they were on their home turf now and without a doubt were envoys to someone much better connected. Probably best to wipe the egg from his face and move on. You’re only as good as your last job; that was how business worked, so by this reckoning the next one needed to be a doozy.
One thing was certain, speculation didn’t pay the bills. The gathering, arranging and presentation of facts did. In principle that was the core of his vocation, the manipulation of available data to reach a solid and provable conclusion. No trickery was involved, despite what some had suggested in the past. The simple truth was that most people didn’t have nearly enough patience to sift through the debris to see what tumbled out and, if he did say so himself, Drake was very good at searching through other people’s crap. The little bits of detritus they thought they had obliterated, the papers they had burned, the items they had buried. By and large, people were sloppy and that’s where Drake was in his element. More than most he knew that it was almost impossible to be completely clean of incriminating evidence, whether physical or the squatting sensation of guilt that takes up residence in the back of a person’s brain. All he had to do was find the thread that had been missed and start tugging.
It was ironic that for all of his sharpness and crisp reasoning, the rest of his life was an apparent mess. He glanced around the room as if to prove the point to himself, and his view settled on the fireplace in his old Victorian loft space. It hadn’t seen any sort of flame in years, but the mantelpiece was an exercise in Jenga-esque stability; the books, the pens, the scraps of paper all supporting each other in an unholy alliance so that just moving or removing one of the items would affect the structural integrity of the rest of the set. By most measures the piled jumble was out of control, and yet it was in no danger of becoming a catastrophe unless unfamiliar hands fiddled with the structure.
Conversely, the things he actually needed to survive: bread, milk, fruit, were always somehow in short supply. The fridge that graced his kitchen was nothing more than a cold light box, rarely containing anything of worth, and yet despite being so rarely used it gained all manner of festering odours.
He wasn’t living in squalor, just a highly engineered mess, one that had a semblance of design to it and was at least a functional part of his life. On the whole he knew where everything was, where the important files were kept, which drawer contained new pens or light bulbs, where the bills were. This was infinitely perplexing to visitors, but Drake had come up with a workable conclusion: his brain liked to create order from the chaos of everyday existence. Whether that meant tackling a puzzling case or figuring out the clues to a crossword, it was all about finding a stable solution that tied everything up into a nice satisfactory ending. To have order there had to be a starting point of chaos to work from, a state with no meaning or reason, a place where common sense hadn’t yet taken hold. This was the essence of his work, rummaging around in other people’s mess in order to rebuild the grand edifice behind heinous acts. It was also the reason why he couldn’t bring himself, no matter how hard he tried, to tidy his small, cramped, musty apartment. He needed the challenge of the unknown to fire his brain cells and the only way to do that in a domestic setting was to induce a chaotic living environment. It was necessary; he had convinced himself of that fact.
He blinked hard and shook his head to try to get rid of these circular and unneeded thoughts. The coffee was having an effect, the synapses were kicking into painful action and instead of just watching the rivulets of water track down the window he was taking an interest in life beyond the pane. The people going about their daily monotony; the cars as they sped past to nowhere and the people scurrying from under one shop awning to the next, caught out by these well-forecast showers. While the headache wasn’t subsiding, it was at least settling. The spiky barbs were turning into dull thuds and it was only a matter of time before it could be wrestled into manageability with some well-placed medicine. To hell with the redhead, to hell with her boss. Now wasn’t a time for vengeance, now was a time for getting into a clean set of clothes and sating the monster clawing at his stomach. How long since his last meal? He’d had some potato chips last night, but before that...possibly thirty six hours since anything substantial had settled inside him. Hunger, much like any other desire, could be overridden and put aside temporarily. If only he’d remembered that with the redhead. Best not to bring that up again, the rent was still a pressing concern and so more proactive steps to find work were needed. After breakfast, though. Definitely.
 
Chapter 2
 
A big issue of living in the city was that there was rarely a norm in temperature. It was either too hot, too cold, too sticky, too windy or j