Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ready to read books .TXT) 📗

But slowly, surely, it had begun to gnaw inside me again—the hunger for a problem and the desire to make bad men pay for their brutality. Perhaps I’d never be rid of that need. Perhaps it was hardwired into me.

So why not start with this bad man? It would be simple to end him—my forearm around his throat, hard as granite as I dragged him into the house. Garris’ was a sheltered back garden, the neighbours’ windows discreetly angled so that no one could possibly have seen him burying Kerrigan’s broken body. No one to see now if I hauled the killer back through the patio door. No one to hear his muffled cry before I cut off his airway. I had never killed before, but during my thug-for-hire years, between leaving uni and joining the force, I had come close. More than once, if truth be told. I knew I had it in me. Garris knew it too.

“But you won’t,” he said as if reading my mind. “Because that really would be the end of you. And anyway, I still have the recording I took in The Three Crowns, as well as a few other bits and pieces that would inevitably lead to Harry Moorhouse’s arrest on the charge of murdering his father. I know, I know,” he said, waving aside an objection I hadn’t raised. “The poor man was desperately ill, in agony, it was a mercy killing. But you know as well as I, that if it went to trial, there’d be no guarantee of clemency. Well then, if anything untoward should happen to me, I’ve arranged for the proof of his guilt to be released.”

Rage scratched behind my eyes. I did my best to tamp it down.

“Honestly though, Scott, all this conflict is unnecessary,” Garris went on. “If you won’t take my word that I have no desire to kill again, then I’m perfectly happy for you to continue monitoring my activities. In fact, I welcome these catch-ups. I was never much of a people person, as you know, but that mind of yours? It still fascinates me.”

Leaning in, he tapped his forefinger against my temple. In that instant, as I cut my gaze towards him, I saw something in the dead marble of his eyes. Just a flicker of emotion, the stunned realisation that he’d gone too far.

“Don’t,” I said.

And he recoiled as if I’d struck him.

I left Garris standing beside Lenny Kerrigan’s grave, the stamp of some newfound fear on his haggard features.

Back behind the wheel of my ancient Mercedes, I clenched my fists until my knuckles cracked. Then I let go of a long breath, turned the key in the ignition, and headed out of the estate, finding a dual carriageway, the motorway, and finally a string of country lanes that led towards home.

As ever for a Traveller, ‘home’ was a constantly shifting location. Currently, it meant a muddy field on the outskirts of the tiny Fen city of Aumbry. More specifically, a forest clearing where we’d been booked for a special event due to take place in four days’ time.

I barely noticed the passing miles. Instead, I ran through the possibilities, as I had a thousand times since discovering Garris’ true nature. And just like all those other times, I came to the same conclusion: there was no way out of this nightmare. Even if I found evidence of his past murders, I couldn’t expose him without also exposing Harry’s secret. I might kill him and happily accept the consequences for myself, but that again put Haz at risk. No matter how much I worried at it, a solution refused to present itself.

All I knew as Aumbry’s cathedral spire appeared on the horizon was that my former mentor was right. I needed the diversion of a new puzzle. The sooner the better.

Patches of the vast medieval woodland that once blanketed much of this landscape flashed past my window. Reaching the signpost for “Purley Rectory”—now adorned with half a dozen flashier signs announcing both the fair and the special event—I turned right onto the forest road. It had recently been re-tarmacked, the bracken bordering it cut back to the treeline. I toed the brake. Traveller chavvies had taken to playing in these woods and their chase games were apt to spill into the road without warning. Predictably, there had already been noise complaints from the few neighbouring farms.

Away to my left, I spotted a child-sized skeleton as it raced between the trees, and all at once, I was thrown back to a long-forgotten October afternoon. Like little Joey Urnshaw, I too had insisted on wearing my costume every day leading up to Halloween. I think we must have been open in Hampstead back then because I remember my mother guiding me across the heath towards the posh houses that sat in the vale. As we walked hand-in-hand, she’d told me all the spine-tingling tales she could remember from her favourite ghost story writers—classics by the likes of Algernon Blackwood and MR James. I’d hung on her every word until we reached the attractive Victorian villas that abutted the heath. There I’d dashed from house to house, ringing doorbells and shouting ‘trick or treat!’

Hardly a door was opened to us and traipsing homeward, my plastic cauldron had rattled with only a scatter of sweets. My mother said nothing, though I can still picture the look on her face. A pinched fury that made her lips pale. Traveller chavvies never did well at Halloween, not compared to the local kids, but this was a new low. We’d stopped at a shop just outside the fairground where she purchased enough pick-and-mix to fill a dozen novelty cauldrons. Then, brushing back my curls, she’d said, “Don’t mention this to your dad. It’ll only make him wild.”

Even then I’d wondered if it wasn’t her own anger that worried her. I have very few memories of my