A Personal Favour, page 1
G R Jordan
A Personal Favour
A Kirsten Stewart Thriller
First published by Carpetless Publishing 2023
Copyright © 2023 by G R Jordan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
G R Jordan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
G R Jordan has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.
First edition
ISBN: 978-1-915562-18-0
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
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I like these cold, grey winter days. Days like these let you savour a bad mood.
Bill Watterson
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgement
Novels by G R Jordan
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
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
Read on to discover the Patrick Smythe series!
About the Author
Also by G R Jordan
Foreword
The events of this book, while based in a region of Alaska, are in an entirely fictional setting and all persons are entirely fictitious. Kyler’s Peak is a fictitious town based on no Alaskan settlement.
Acknowledgement
To Ken, Jean, Colin, Evelyn, John and Rosemary for your work in bringing this novel to completion, your time and effort is deeply appreciated.
Novels by G R Jordan
The Highlands and Islands Detective series (Crime)
Water’s Edge
The Bothy
The Horror Weekend
The Small Ferry
Dead at Third Man
The Pirate Club
A Personal Agenda
A Just Punishment
The Numerous Deaths of Santa Claus
Our Gated Community
The Satchel
Culhwch Alpha
Fair Market Value
The Coach Bomber
The Culling at Singing Sands
Where Justice Fails
The Cortado Club
Cleared to Die
Man Overboard!
Antisocial Behaviour
Rogues’ Gallery
The Death of Macleod - Inferno Book 1
A Common Man - Inferno Book 2
A Sweeping Darkness - Inferno Book 3
Dormie 5
Kirsten Stewart Thrillers (Thriller)
A Shot at Democracy
The Hunted Child
The Express Wishes of Mr MacIver
The Nationalist Express
The Hunt for ‘Red Anna’
The Execution of Celebrity
The Man Everyone Wanted
Busman’s Holiday
A Personal Favour
Infiltrator
The Contessa Munroe Mysteries (Cozy Mystery)
Corpse Reviver
Frostbite
Cobra’s Fang
The Patrick Smythe Series (Crime)
The Disappearance of Russell Hadleigh
The Graves of Calgary Bay
The Fairy Pools Gathering
Austerley & Kirkgordon Series (Fantasy)
Crescendo!
The Darkness at Dillingham
Dagon’s Revenge
Ship of Doom
Supernatural and Elder Threat Assessment Agency (SETAA) Series (Fantasy)
Scarlett O’Meara: Beastmaster
Island Adventures Series (Cosy Fantasy Adventure)
Surface Tensions
Dark Wen Series (Horror Fantasy)
The Blasphemous Welcome
The Demon’s Chalice
Chapter 01
Melissa stomped her feet on the snowy ground, her coat pulled tight around her. She watched as the snowflakes danced, twirling in the night breeze, spinning here and there before landing on her coat. They would eventually melt, taken by the heat of her own body from within the coat, but outside of her, the snow was falling thickly everywhere. She stood beside the bridge looking down at the river, hearing it rush along. On the far side was a single lamp, and the shadows were pushed back, but not as far as herself. It was a clandestine meeting after all. She needed to stay unobserved, away from others.
There had been footprints here when she’d first arrived, and she wondered if they were from her contact. After all, if you’d arranged to meet someone, would you not have got there first, checked out the land to make sure nobody else was there? The issue was sensitive. It involved many of the town’s senior figures, or at least it looked that way. She couldn’t be sure. There was no concrete evidence. But this woman? She would know. She would be able to say.
Her boss at the paper didn’t believe her. Melissa could sense that. Martin was nice enough, but he was an old hack. An American through and through, he’d been a part of Kyler’s Peak all his life. While he wasn’t exactly well respected, he was loved in the same way that fixtures around your house are loved. Sure, if they break, you might throw them out, but it reminded you of where you were from the time that they existed.
Melissa turned and looked back at the bridge. How had she ended up here? She had dreams when she’d started of joining a newspaper back in England. Having grown up in Birmingham, she had traded in the concrete jungle for the wilds of Alaska, and Kyler’s Peak was certainly out there. It was a nothing town in some ways, on the way to other places, with maybe some fifteen thousand of a population. Big enough to have things, but small enough to be unimportant to anywhere else.
Still, they’d given her a chance to be a senior reporter for whatever that was worth. She had never expected it—never expected to come across a story that if true was a scandal that linked to other parts of America. Other parts that scared her. She was unsure now what to do. Martin had been of no use. ‘Just get me evidence,’ he’d said. ‘It’s not a story without evidence. We can’t run with speculation.’ Then his last words, something he had never said. ‘Be careful.’ That was when she knew she was onto something. Martin must have seen it, must have had an inkling about it. He never told her to take care. It was Kyler’s Peak after all.
When the restaurant had rats running through it and she’d gone to interview the owner, he never told her to be careful. Yet the owner was a raging hotbed, claiming people had put the rats there. He might have been right as well, for the rival restaurant across town had seen a lift in business. When she’d done that truck-stop piece about the extra upload of semis coming through, as they called them here. ‘Articulated lorries,’ they would have said back home. Somebody had tried to warn her off about mentioning it, but Martin had never said, ‘Be careful.’ Now, she felt there was danger, a danger that she didn’t fully understand.
A contact worked in the mayor’s office. She knew the bids that had gone in; this person would have seen them. A low-level clerk, but one of those minor people in life who gets to see the important documents. They never heard the conversations that were too important to be written down, but they saw other things. Kyler’s Peak was famous, or at least a place of historical importance because of the gold in the area. It had been mined over a hundred and fifty years ago in great rushes, but now standing here, Melissa found it hard to believe.
The mining was long gone, but someone had said there was an old mine for sale. Claims had been made by local people to it and a bidding process was offered, the land currently owned by the local area. Envelopes would be entered with sealed bids. There would have been a bit of friction because some of those bids had come from people from out of town. That was one thing she learned about Kyler’s Peak. It was local. They were wary of anyone from the outside.
She had suffered it on arrival, but she had known how to play them, or the men at least, being nineteen years of age, with long blonde hair, and a reasonable figure. At least she believed so, still basking in the confidence of youth. She used her womanly charm to disarm the men, pushed past their scepticism of this person who had come into their community. She had also written some decent pieces in the paper, which had been well received. That helped. But the women were always watchful of her because she wasn’t one of them. Martin was. That’s why he was tolerated, because in truth, Melissa believed she wrote a lot better than he.
Melissa stamped her feet again. Was the contact not coming? She could have said. It was bloody freezing, even for here. She was about to turn away when she heard a noise from downstream. It was almost like a yell or scream that had started but wasn’t allowed to finish. Inside Melissa, the fire of journalism roared. Where most people would run from a scream, worried for their safety, Melissa leapt towards it, looking for the story.
She tore off down the banks, aware that the wind around her would mask most of the sound she was making as she stomped through the snow. The sound of the river would add to it. She was fairly confident that she could arrive on the scene without being heard. Inside, her heart pounded. Here, thousands of miles from where she’d grown up, in a land that wasn’t hers, she was chasing down a story again. Was it connected to her contact?
The contact had given the name Alice and no other details. When Melissa had checked the mayor’s office, they employed no one called Alice. Maybe she’d see her face and recognise her because she had checked through photographs of the staff she could find. They ranged from those about to retire down to girls as young as herself. When the voice had spoken to her on the phone in the paper’s office, she reckoned it was disguised, maybe coming through a handkerchief or one of those voice boxes. Nowadays, you could do so much so easily.
Another half-hearted scream and then a thump. She couldn’t be far away now. Melissa ducked past some trees and came across a scene beside the river.
There were three men standing there and she recognised none of them. That being said, they had scars across their faces, large parka coats on, but she saw tailored trousers and black leather shoes. Clearly three people that weren’t used to being out here in the wild. She had her own snow boots on. In fact, anybody from the town would do that. It was the time of year for them, a time of year when you didn’t venture out without a warm coat, gloves, hat, and thick boots.
The three men formed a small circle around a woman on her knees. She looked middle-aged and tears were streaming down her face. One of the men was holding her by the hair and using it, he yanked her head back, exposing her neck. His colleague was standing in front of the woman and delivered several blows to her face with the back of his hand. She seemed to be getting beyond the point of screaming, now just suffering. Melissa watched as blood trickled out of her mouth. The woman’s coat had been pulled back, her arms were now trapped behind her, but there was nothing sexual about what was occurring. This seemed to be a beating, good and proper.
Melissa crouched down in the snow, trying not to gasp at what she was looking at. She’s seen people getting beaten before, had been around fights, but these men looked serious, intent on causing the woman grief. More than that, there was a third one. He just stood and stared at them. He was silent in an eerie way, and when Melissa saw the man delivering the beatings look over at him, she realised that this silent man was the boss.
A switchblade was taken out and held up to the woman’s throat while the man whispered something in her ear. She shook her head.
‘I don’t know. God’s sake, I don’t know.’
The man in front of her looked over at his boss, who simply gave a nod. The switchblade was taken across her neck and the man stepped out of the way as blood began to spurt. Melissa could hear her desperately choking, trying to catch her breath, she tumbled to the ground, hands racing to her neck. Melissa staggered backwards from her crouched position, went to turn to run, and fell over a small post beside the river. She caused it to topple and her hand reached out desperately as it slid down the bank before hitting the water and causing a splash.
She glanced back in a panic towards the men and saw their heads flick round, looking directly at her. Hell! she thought. Hell! Run!
She spun onto her front, pushed herself up and started to take off through the trees. She put her hands in front of her, knocking branches out of the way, for she could hear them behind her. There was a blind panic forming inside her, but she tried to focus, tried to find the gaps between the trees, not to simply run into any large branches that would knock her to the ground. She ducked this way and that, then felt a branch scrape across her face. She put a gloved hand out and when she looked back down at it, she swore there was blood on it, but Melissa didn’t stop. They were still behind; they were still coming, for she could hear their panting.
She’d reached the bridge she’d been at earlier, ran into the light racing across it, but by the time she’d made it halfway across she could hear them, their footsteps approaching. She jumped off the end of the bridge into deeper snow. She hadn’t intended to, as she had thought the path should swing harder to the right, but it wasn’t there, and she sank down to her knees quickly. She tried to pump her legs, tried to keep going. A quick glance back and she saw the men jump into the snow behind her. They too sank deeply. Melissa reached with her hands to the left, pushing down with them and forcing herself out of the deeper snow back onto the path.
As she went to run again, she felt a hand clip her foot which in turn caught her other foot, tripping her up and sending her sprawling on the snowy path. She screamed. She was in the middle of nowhere, out alone in the dark of the night. The three men after her had cut the throat of the woman. What chance did she have? She flipped over onto her backside and saw the men dragging themselves out of the deep snow back onto the path. She rolled over, picked herself up, began to run and slipped on an icy part of the path. She slid forward but didn’t get her hands up in time as she connected with a tree and fell back down hard on the path.
Her head cracked off the solid ice below and she slid round, coming to a halt at the edge of the path. Groggily, she tried to find purchase, to be able to move again and she saw one of the men coming towards her. His leather shoes betrayed him, for he slipped on the ice and fell hard on his backside. In another time and place it would have seemed comical, but she didn’t laugh, too aware there were two more following him as the next came towards her. She tried to push with her feet and slid back slightly along the path, but she was going nowhere fast. A hand came down, picked her up by the blouse she was wearing underneath her coat. He was strong and held her up to level with him.
‘No idea, boss,’ said the man behind him. ‘Could be anybody.’
The last thing Melissa thought was how did people not know her? Everybody knew who she was in the town. She’d only been here six months, but she was that young reporter girl. How did they not know her? She never got to form a conclusion for a fist hit her hard around the temple and the world went dark.
Chapter 02
Kirsten Stewart cut open the fresh packet of coffee beans and dipped her nose into it. It was a housewarming gift from her former boss, Detective Inspector Seoras Macleod, and she noted it was the brand he always liked. Seoras had been fussy about coffee when she’d been there. Every time they met, he still was, but Kirsten loved the thought rather than the coffee. She took the beans, poured them into a separate container before taking a handful and grinding them up. Once she’d sorted the filter coffee machine, she switched it on and turned, leaning back against the kitchen worktop, looking around the flat she was in.
The world had changed greatly from her days working with Macleod. In recent times, it had changed beyond all recognition. She’d found the love of her life and she’d taken Craig away to a Greek island looking for time alone together. Their previous life in the secret services had caught up with them and now Craig was left maimed. He’d lost both legs below the knees.
Having come back to the UK, they’d once again taken up residence in Inverness, this time in a specially adapted flat. She’d made sure all the mods cons were there, all the devices to help Craig get about the house to be as independent as possible. She tried to make things as before. But she couldn’t: he was wheelchair-bound now.
