Dead Don't Die

Paul Barker

Description

In The Dead Don't Die, a kidnapping draws private investigator Taylor into the lethal network of a quarrelsome family and bitter international rivalries. In his quest, Taylor faces the most relentless of killers and encounters both beauty and the beast. But can he put an end to the deaths without losing his own life?

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: The Grainwater Press
• Date de parution: 14 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783014132
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE DEAD DON T DIE
Paul Barker
The Grainwater Press
2014 Paul Barker
Paul Barker has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by The Grainwater Press
First published in eBook format in 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78301-413-2
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eBook conversion by www.ebookpartnership.com
Cover : Richard Hollis
FOR SALLY
The dead don t die. They look on and help.
- DH Lawrence
1 :
Crime sometimes creeps up on you like a search dog. Sometimes it arrives like a flash of lightning.
The waitress brought Taylor his house-red. The lasagne was on its way. Taylor tried to distract himself by noting his surroundings. It was the sort of thing a private investigator was supposed to do. A couple of tables along, a youngish woman was on her mobile phone, saying Okay from time to time, but otherwise just listening. Her hand holding the phone had purple nail polish on the fingers, with little silver stars in the middle of each nail. Her blonde hair had dark streaks, but Taylor thought this was fashion rather than neglect.
She was staring straight ahead. Her face looked more wretched with every passing minute. She wore a simple red dress. Beneath the table she had kicked off one of her shoes (black). She kept stretching the toes on that foot, as if she had concentrated all her anxieties here.
The waitress was leaning against the bar of the open-plan kitchen, watching the cook. She had taken up a stance from which her eye couldn t be caught by any of the customers. No point in Taylor looking across expectantly. Years back, he remembered a friend talking about an American visitor coming across to London and being amazed that the city, then, had no pizza houses. The task now would be to find any high street without either a pizzeria or a coffee shop or both. Newspapers ran column after column about what globalisation meant. To Taylor it meant an Irish pub in Rome, hundreds of miles from Dublin. A pizza house in a French high street, where there might once have been a modest fixed-price family restaurant. A Belgian caf in New York s East Village.
At one of the tables looking out onto the nondescript street, there was a sudden crescendo of noise. Was it a quarrel, or simply people talking across one another? It was hard to see direct. Taylor looked, instead, at one of the large, slightly tinted mirrors which covered much of his nearest wall. This way he could see that the noise came from three men at a table for four. Two of them were talking loud, almost shouting, at the man who was sitting between them. This being England, the customers at the adjacent tables were doing their best to pay no attention. The man between the two others was sinking down in his chair, like a puppet without a string.
He looked square and heavy. His face, so far as Taylor could see it, was jowly. His neck barely fitted into his collar. He must be wearing a tie. He was leaning towards the table. His companions were thinner. The man on the left was balding, with the rest of his hair close-shaven. The man on the right had wavy hair, worn long. If you were casting for extras in a TV show, the pair could have been a boxer and his manager, or a footballer and his press agent.
It was unlikely, Taylor thought, that either of his guesses was right. Such men would hardly be in a local Italian fast-food joint, even one that was better than average.
As Taylor mused and waited, the scene shattered into chaos. The men who had been talking pushed their chairs back and stood up. The man between them began to slide his own chair back, as if he was wanting to get away. The other two bent over and grabbed him, one to each arm. Holding him, they shoved their way past the couple of tables that lay between them and the door. The lunch-time customers around them fell silent, briefly, then started to shout.
One of the customers, tall and lithe-looking, moved towards the three men. Without releasing his hold, the shaven-headed man half-turned and hit the taller man in the face. His colleague produced a gun and shot into the wall of the restaurant. The mirror glass splintered and fell. No one else moved from their tables, except Taylor. The gunman pulled the street door open. All three of them went out so suddenly it was as if they had been sucked out into a vacuum.
Taylor had almost got to the door when they went through it. He sprawled out into the London street under its half-grey, half-blue sky. The pavement was almost empty. To his left a black Mercedes was illegally parked on a double yellow line. Both the passenger-side doors were wide open. The man who d been bundled out of the restaurant was now being bundled into the car. His captors got in after him. One into the front seat. The other, with their captive, into the rear. The doors slammed shut as Taylor reached the car. It sped off so fast that he scarcely had time to see the registration number. He forced himself to invent a mnemonic to remember it by. He d had no time to photograph either the men or their car.
The evening paper and the local radio stations soon had the news. Company director missing, feared kidnapped, was the front-page headline, with a blurry version of what had happened. When the television news programmes got round to the story, they had one of their standard, pointless vox-pop interviews. They asked the cook : What did you feel when you realised what was happening? I was shocked, very shocked. We re all shocked. How do you come to terms with something like this? I don t know. It s going to take a lot of time. Cut to next item.
Taylor, now back at his flat, which was also his office, shrugged as he went across to the fridge for a Carlsberg.
His life was a life surrounded by crime. This was the way it had been for much of his adulthood. At university he took a sociology degree, where he began to be astonished at the glibness of the general explanations of crime : they were like trying to breathe though wodges of cotton wool. Then he was briefly in the police, where he thought he might learn more about how society actually worked. But he soon found out how pallid and bureaucratic much police work now was, with very rare upsurges of crisis. The police who stayed with the job liked to see themselves as a version of America. In England now, almost everything was overlaid with such imitations. The self-image of the police was as LA-style tough cops, portrayed in innumerable films, television series and paperbacks. This wasn t how it really was-but everyone needs a delusion of some sort, just to keep going. Taylor wasn t anti-police. He knew them too well for that.
Buttressed by his time as a private investigator, he d decided that the people who join a police force were a variant of those who decided to sign up for the army. Men-it would always be mostly men-who wanted a life governed by strict rules. But one where those rules also permitted, even depended on, sudden bursts of aggression. He d noticed how aimless the people who d come out into civilian life from the lower ranks in the army or the police, often in their forties, suddenly were. Everyday life was a life without stringent rules and with few excuses for outright aggression. Such men had a permanent sense of bereavement.
Taylor finished his Carlsberg. He was a bit heavier than he ought to be, but not too much. He could still out-run most of his contemporaries. His eyes were always watchful. He had always been like that, even as a child. He hung back and waited for others to act first, while he weighed things up. He wasn t a loner, exactly, but he was certainly an outsider. He knew that, and enjoyed it.
He went over to his laptop. It was perched at the end of a desk which was festooned with pens, stickers, calculators, a dish of 1p and 5p coins, and a paperweight reproducing a Rowlandson caricature of an artistic model-young Emma Hamilton maybe-posing naked in front of some gawping old men. Taylor could never remember which museum gift shop he d bought it from. Was it the Ashmolean at Oxford? He seldom visited Oxford. It wasn t a great city for the sort of crime he found himself asked to look into. The last time he went, Taylor thought, the most likely murder would have been committed by himself, in order to cut a swathe though the tourist hordes.
What had been going on in that pizza house? It was rare that Taylor was an actual witness to a crime. But the more he cast his mind back to it, the odder that crime seemed to be.
Why would kidnappers bring their victim to a pizza house before taking him away? Why would they let themselves be so publicly seen, so easily identified? How well did the victim know them? Or didn t he know them at all?
Over the next week, fuller reports began to be published in the press and on the London segment of the TV national news. The man Taylor saw bundled out of the pizza house was still missing. He was thought to be Julius Arthur Trevaughn, aged 51, described as a company director. This was a description Taylor had learnt to be suspicious of. It was a title that could cover a multitude of misdeeds. Unfair but, in the crime world, true.
It wasn t known