Missing For Good

Alex Coombs

Description

Is she alive, or is she missing for good...?

When the estranged daughter of Scotland's premier art dealer goes missing, Private Investigator Hanlon is hired to find out where she is.

But what she thinks will be a straightforward job, soon turns dangerous. The missing girl, Aurora, has a troubled past but what made her suddenly pack her bags and disappear?

Hanlon has her work cut out for her. The stakes are rising and she needs to get to the bottom of the case before someone else is attacked.

And is Aurora still alive, or is she missing for good?

A gripping new case for feisty female Private Investigator, Hanlon. Perfect for fans of Angela Marsons, Robert Bryndza and Lisa Regan.

What readers are saying about Missing For Good:

'Best book I have read for some time.'

'Oh my word, it took me next to no time to get into ‘Missing For Good’. In fact by the time I got to the end of the first few pages, I knew that I was going to be in for one hell of a read and I wasn’t wrong either.'

'A gripping, brutal and exciting crime thriller, that, yet again had me in the palm of it's 'hand' from the start.'

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Thriller
• Policier
• Women Sleuths
• Private Investigators
• Amateur Sleuth
• Traditional
• Thrillers
• General officer
• General
• Crime
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Boldwood Books
• Date de parution: 24 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838898656
• Langue: English

Extrait

Missing for Good


Alex Coombs
To Constance
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 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50


More from Alex Coombs

About the Author

About Boldwood Books
1

Jamie McDonald was waiting to kill someone. He looked again at the display on the dashboard – it read 18:55 Mon 24 Jan. It didn’t seem to have changed in what felt like an hour. The temperature outside was five degrees Celsius. About the same as a fridge. He was tense; time was dragging, moving so slowly.
‘So who’s paying for the hit?’ he asked the man sitting next to him.
‘What?’ Jordan McKenna replied, having been lost in thought.
‘I said, who’s paying for the hit?’ McDonald said. The two of them, he and Jordan, were parked up in a small white van by the side of the road in Howe Street in Edinburgh’s New Town. It was a dark night and a fine rain was falling.
Jordan shrugged. ‘Some guy,’ he said in a way that made it clear he wasn’t going to talk about it. ‘You don’t need to know.’
Bet it’s Millar, thought McDonald. He looked out of the window away from Jordan and checked the side mirror. That was all he was going to get. It didn’t really matter. He knew it was Millar. Jordan was Millar’s man in Edinburgh.
He glanced at Jordan, medium height and build, hunched in his puffa jacket behind the wheel. The orange street light outside shone on the two of them. He was a handsome guy, thirty-five, but the years and the lifestyle were starting to catch up. In this light he looked ten years older. You could see the lines. Now he took a tobacco pouch out of his jacket pocket and started to roll a joint.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Jordan?’ said McDonald irritably.
‘What does it look like?’ Jordan glared at him in an aggrieved way. ‘It’s only a joint, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Put it away.’
Jordan shook his head irritably but did as he was told. Nominally, he was in charge, but the reality was that the man sitting beside him called the shots. Jordan didn’t want to offend the man he had hired – he had a terrifying capacity for violence and Jordan was frightened of him.
Numpty, thought McDonald. Here they were in Edinburgh’s elegant Georgian New Town, just a short, five-minute drive along the cobbled streets from Bute House in Charlotte Square where the First Minister lived. It was quite probable that the police would be patrolling round here and what did Jordan want to do? Smoke weed. Two men in a small van. And not just two men. They looked like criminals. They were criminals. Why don’t we just put a sign up saying ‘up to no good’? he thought.
He put his hand in his inside pocket and felt the gun there. It felt reassuring.
McDonald was a formidable guy, his pecs visible through the dark blue jumper he was wearing. The huge muscles of his biceps bulked out his jacket. Hard, defined jail muscle. Jordan had met him at HMP Addiewell, at the time McDonald was due for release on license, eight years for a bar room stabbing.
When Jordan had been given tonight’s job and heard McDonald was available for hire, he’d asked him immediately. McDonald wasn’t the kind of guy to fuck up. What he hadn’t factored in was McDonald’s new-found tetchiness caused largely, in Jordan’s opinion, by him giving up his five-gram-a-day coke habit.
‘Run over again what we’re going tae do?’ Jordan said.
McDonald said wearily, ‘When we see the girl, I get out and open the back doors. When she reaches the van, I stop her, get her in the back and off we go. You drive, I restrain her. Simple. She won’t cause any trouble; she’ll be too frightened.’
‘And if there’s someone with her?’ asked Jordan. His tone was insistent. McDonald’s nerves were taut, he could really do without this pointless questioning.
‘One person, they get in the van with the girl. Two people…’ He shook his head irritably. He was tired of this. There could be endless permutations – what if she arrived riding a camel? ‘Fuck it, if there’s two or more with her, we dinnae do anything.’
‘OK… and then, if there’s just her?’ Back to the original scenario.
‘We drive out to Muirhouse. I deal with the girl.’ There was a yard that Jordan rented there. Even if anyone heard a gunshot in Muirhouse, they wouldn’t bother too much about it. It was that kind of place. You minded your own business. McDonald carried on.
‘We put her in the other van and I take her away. You torch this van. We meet up tomorrow at Morris’s bar in Partick, twelve noon.’
‘How are ye going to dispose of her?’
‘My business.’ McDonald’s tone shut down any more questions.
Jordan checked his watch.
‘Here she comes – guid, she’s alone.’
Lit by the orange street light, her long legs striding up the steep hill towards them, she wore jeans and Ugg boots and a woollen hat with a bobble of faux fur pulled down low over her face.
‘Sure?’ This was her. He took a deep breath. This was the girl he was going to kill.
‘Absolutely sure,’ Jordan said.
Now was the moment. He got out of the van. Cold rain and a bitter wind. Now the adrenaline hit him as the coke used to. Now his heart was pounding as he psyched himself up for dealing with her. Now he felt a mix of panic and excitement and then his eyes widened in recognition.
Christ, it was her!
‘Jamie!’ She smiled, her eyes sparkling with delight at seeing him. His right hand tightened around the gun in his pocket.
‘Hello, Aurora,’ he said quietly.
2

To understand the present, we have to revisit the past. Hanlon thought of her therapist’s words from eight months previously. Do we, Dr Morgan? Do we really? Speak for yourself, Doctor. I’m in the here and now.
The target appeared in the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight, the barrel of the .22 rifle resting motionless on her old folded Barbour jacket. A cold, February afternoon. The gentle chilly breeze tugged at her hair. She could smell the damp of the turf under her body, kept short by sheep grazing, and the tang of salt in the air from the sea. Clouds scudded across the hard grey Scottish skies.
Her breathing was steady, the bull’s eye at the centre of the concentric rings of the target motionless in the centre of the cross-hairs. She gently squeezed the trigger, feeling the rifle kick. Hanlon glanced down at the dog beside her, waiting with good-natured patience.
She ruffled the soft fur on Wemyss’s head and stood up, slinging the rifle over her shoulder, and walking over to the paper targets she’d been shooting at. She pulled them away from the old wooden fishing crate she’d gaffer-taped them to. Looking at the holes in the paper, she nodded, satisfied. It was good marksmanship. She stretched and looked down from the hillside where she was standing.
It was a spectacular view. Below her was the rocky coastline of the east side of the Argyll peninsula and the very blue waters of the Gulf of Arran. The island of Arran itself rose up majestically from the sea, its huge craggy hills dominated by the largest of the peaks, Goat Fell, its summit a crazily jagged assembly of rock, like nature attempting a futurist modern art sculpture.
Hanlon and the dog walked down the track that led to the road by the shore and the cottage she was renting. The land was frozen and cold. Dead, brown bracken, the few stunted birch trees ghostly and skeletal. About half a mile away, she could see the roofs of the village of Skipness. Even village was pushing it – there was a church, a shop, a small school and a village hall but there was just a small handful of houses there. She shook her head in wonder as she looked at it. She was a Londoner; she could never have predicted that she would end up living in such a small place.
West of the village, accessible by a rutted track, was the tumbledown one-bedroom cottage she was renting. Its main attraction for her was the isolation. That and the price. It was hers until the holiday season started in May, just a few weeks away now, then she would have to move on. She didn’t mind. She had no roots.
She could access her property by a path that led up into the hills as well as by its drive that ran up from the road. She was walking down this track when she saw the car, slowly bouncing its way along the potholed road towards her house.
Hanlon immediately dropped down into the bracken so she would be hidden from view, got her binoculars out and focussed on the vehicle. The dog, obedient as ever, crouched by her side. The car was a black Audi estate. She didn’t recognise it. She knew most of the cars in the village by now and it wasn’t one of them.
The Audi parked in front of her cottage, the driver’s door opened, and a man got out. He was tall, wearing a charcoal suit and tie, dark-haired. It wasn’t someone she knew. He walked up to the door, knocked, and waited. When no one answered he calmly walked back to the car and got in. Even from this distance she could sense his self-possession. She saw him take a briefcase from the passenger seat, open it, remove some papers and start to read, making notes with a pen. He did not look threatening. Hanlon had made more than a few enemies in her life; she was always looking over her shoulder. This guy looked harmless.
She stood up and walked down the track. As she drew nearer he noticed her, put his paperwork down, opened the door and got out of the car. He looked very out of pla