And Your Enemies Closer: A heart-stopping crime thriller, page 1
AND YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER
THIRTY MILES TRILOGY BOOK 2
ROB PARKER
RED DOG PRESS
Published by RED DOG PRESS 2023
Distributed by BLOODHOUND BOOKS 2023
Copyright © Rob Parker 2021
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Rob Parker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
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First Edition
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Hardback ISBN 978-1-915433-03-9
Paperback ISBN 978-1-915433-19-0
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www.reddogpress.co.uk
CONTENTS
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Prologue
Part I
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
Part II
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
Part III
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Epilogue
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Acknowledgements
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For my family and friends.
PROLOGUE
Midnight, and the silence couldn’t have been louder.
There were six of them in total. Four standing, two on the ground, bound tight in tarpaulin.
Standing over the bodies, a woman and three men stood beside a cliff face that overlooked the dark, rolling peaks of a massive landfill. Four badges between them, one individual suspended. That didn’t alter the bond they shared. Trauma was more adhesive than any glue.
‘Is this the deepest point?’ Madison asked. She was battered and blood-spattered, dressed incongruously in a boxing vest and satin fight shorts.
‘I can’t see any part that might be deeper,’ replied Seabreeze, the slight but wiry man who’d brought them here.
‘We don’t have long,’ Christopher reminded them. Clearly, he was jittering with nerves—the hard-man shaven scalp exposed as a lie.
Brendan Foley—the man who had started it all, the suspended officer—said nothing. He couldn’t. His mind had turned blank.
Had he meant to kill the men down there? Yes.
Should he have killed them? No.
But in those fraught moments, when the blood had pumped harder than ever, there hadn’t been time to sweat the details.
It was either him, or them.
So, he’d made sure it was them.
Four faces peered over the edge of the landfill, the sound of scavenging gulls drowning out the hiss of the nearby motorway, lights trailing a snake of hazed sodium between two cities.
Manchester, to the east. Liverpool, to the west.
‘Let’s do this, then.’ Seabreeze grabbed the nearest long bundle. Madison reached to help, and together, they managed to heave it over the side.
Together, they watched as the human-shaped oblong spun slowly towards the acres of refuse. The height of the fall gave the object speed, and when it hit the surface of junk and packaging, the body was immediately swallowed and lost. As he peered into the darkness, trying to make out shapes, it took a second to establish that he couldn’t make out the other corpse. Both bodies buried.
Crime sealed.
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Madison, ‘that’s case closed.’ She glanced around. ‘Any objections?’
‘None,’ replied Christopher, before spitting off the cliff in an apparent defiant purge of the whole episode’s bad taste.
‘Not a thing,’ said Seabreeze, as he turned away, heading back to the parked cars.
Brendan didn’t say anything. He turned on autopilot, and started walking back too.
All of this was watched by a shadowy figure just yards away, buzzing with the illicit.
He now possessed information of seismic importance.
PART I
LITTLE GODS
1
That twenty quid for the key code had been well worth it. The door to the storage centre silently swung open.
He took stealthy, broad strides to the central elevators. His hat was pulled down low, one of those Russian ones with the flappy ears. He’d tied it under the chin, in a neat bow, but it kept catching on his beard. Given a choice, he’d undo it—but he knew the cameras were everywhere. He didn’t dare look up.
Brendan Foley found himself standing before two industrial-size lift shafts, with a stairway on the left, and a handy map on the wall. Room 2272. Where is that?
His glance darted across the map. Second floor. He took the stairs, two at a time. At the top, a simple decision. Left or right? He couldn’t be seen to hesitate, not with those cameras on him. He moved to the right, picking up pace.
As far as he could see, yellow, steel-padlocked doors lined the corridor, one after the other, scrolling past him on either side. He watched the numbers ticking down as he walked. 2320. 2318… Nearly there.
Twenty seconds later, he was inspecting the stiff padlock of door 2272. It unnerved him. He wasn’t sure what would be enough.
He checked left, and right. Quiet. Empty corridor. Three in the morning would do that for you.
But there were cameras every twenty yards, covering both directions. Comprehensive, professional bastards.
He was playing with fire. He looked back down at the painted yellow steel.
He had to get at what was on the other side.
He had to see if it was true.
His heart pummelled his ribcage.
Brendan discreetly unbuttoned his jacket, and took a firm grip of the eighteen-inch bolt cutters in his gloved fists. Turning his back to the nearest camera, he slid the blades over the thick ring of metal, and squeezed the handles together as though in a last meaningful gesture.
The hydraulic assistance in the bolt cutter’s mechanism gained ground, and he felt the metal give slowly. He opened the cutters and tried again, trying not to groan with the exertion. He withdrew the blades with a heavy breath and checked his progress.
He’d cut into the bar by only a few millimetres.
But millimetres could add up—if he was quick. He checked both ways, brought up the cutters and squeezed again.
Progress was better this time—he had the right pressure and correct angle—but after a few more pumps, he could feel the lactic acid building up in his shoulders.
No good.
Brendan took deep breaths, suddenly aware of the extra noise he was making, and hoped to god that the security guard was either snoozing on the job, or doing something else entirely. Urgency hit hard.
The resistance started to give. He pumped the handles again until—with a sudden ping!—the padlock clattered to the floor. A buzz of elation coursed through him, but it was short-lived.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’ The voice was close, gruff, biting.
Brendan swore quietly beneath his breath, then slowly turned. This wasn’t a security guard. No uniform in sight. It was a civilian. Big bloke, leather jacket, rugby build, red hair slightly longer on top but right round in a thick beard until it greyed slightly at the point of his chin.
‘I’m talking to you,’ the man pressed.
‘I couldn’t find my key,’ Brendan replied. ‘I had to get in.’ All he could think of was the door in front of him, ajar just an inch, the dark beyond looming with sinister promise.
‘It’s not yours, is it?’ said Big Red. All statement, no enquiry.
‘Fuck off, mate.’ Brendan fought back with bravado.
‘Do you know who it belongs to?’
That changed everything. This guy was no Joe Bloggs. A smile played across Big Red’s lips, and he took a step closer.
Decision time. The plan had all been about getting in and out, no complications. There had been no provision for whoever this guy was, who was clearly in the know. He swung the bolt cutters up, as hard and as fast as he could, at Big Red’s chin.
The bigger man was quick however, and jerked his head away at the last moment, the pincers glancing off his jaw. Then he let out an animal roar of fury and dove headfirst at Brendan, pinning him against the corrugated-iron wall.
Brendan gasped in pain as the back of his head bounced off the wall, but he planted his feet wide apart, and pushed back. It got him nowhere. Big Red grabbed him beneath the jaw and began to lift him higher towards the strip-lit ceiling.
He suddenly couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow even, but Brendan at least had the quick-thinking to walk his feet up the wall behind him to take some of the weight off his throat. Then he pushed off the wall as hard as he could, surprising his opponent and toppling them both so that they fell all too noisily to the floor. Brendan threw his arms out. The other man didn’t stand a chance, and landed roughly on his back, beneath Brendan—who scrambled upright, straddling the man to rain blows, his opponent’s head rolling from side to side in useless attempts to avoid the punches.
After two strikes, he thought—that’s enough.
After three strikes, he thought this was police brutality.
After four strikes, he remembered he wasn’t a policeman anymore.
After five, he remembered what Big Red’s presumed employers had done to his family.
He stopped counting and kept pulling his fist back to strike again and again. At some point, the man stopped his groans, but Brendan carried on punching, until the man stopped moving, too.
He slumped against the wall and took a couple of breaths. Looked at his leather-clad knuckles, and the blood that spattered them. Wiped them off on his pants. That scuffle, and all the reverberations it caused, was likely to bring someone looking—if there was anyone in here that wasn’t being paid off, he realised. He had to move fast.
Brendan leapt up, his body screaming in protest. Beyond the door, it was pitch black. He reached inside and felt about for a light switch.
The room suddenly became starkly visible.
If Brendan hadn’t seen the things he’d seen already in his life, his breath might have caught in his throat. Instead, he stayed rooted to the spot as his thoughts raced far ahead of him.
Against the back wall, stacks of plastic boxes, all in a royal blue. It looked like warehouse stock, all arranged neatly, ready for shipping. In front of them, however, was a slumped figure—a dead man, tied to a chair. His neck lolled at an impossible angle and his eyes stared unseeing at the floor. His skin was deathly pale, except for a smattering of dark patches. This wasn’t just your usual corpse. Something was off. Something indefinable. Something wrong in the highest.
Finally able to look away from the cadaver’s blank grey stare, he saw the man had a piece of carefully folded paper in his lap. Grateful for his gloves, Brendan approached and eased open a corner of the paper.
There was a message, printed in a clean, simple typeset: TOLD YOU WHERE FUNNY BUSINESS WOULD LEAD. STICK TO THE PROGRAMME IN FUTURE.
Brendan’s gaze returned to the dead man. He was like a melted waxwork, folding in on himself. What the hell happened?
‘Jase?’ A voice came from the door.
He whisked around to see Big Red stood there, his cheeks bruised, both brows split and a nose off-centre like a bust sundial. Guilt and disbelief flashed through Brendan—he had done that. The man stood framed in the doorway, staggering slightly as he took in the scene.
It was obvious to Brendan. Big Red had known all along about the man in the chair.
The bigger man’s eyes returned to Brendan’s face for a moment, fear clear, despite the swelling around his eyes. Then, he bolted.
Brendan let him go, listening to the pounding of his feet down the corridor. He turned back to the scene. The real story was in this room. He walked to the nearest stack of blue boxes, and popped the nearest lid. Inside, it looked like birdseed.
In all of Brendan’s experience, no one had ever died because of bird seed.
He plunged in a hand and moved the seeds around, pushing lower and lower, up to his elbow, until he felt his fingertips brush against something. Something soft. Something he could grip.
He pulled his hand out of the box and held it at face level, staring at the contents.
‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered to the dead man sat beside him.
2
Even from this height, and surrounded by darkness, DI Iona Madison could tell the river was in a rum way. Brown, choked by silt and pockmarked by more than one shopping trolley, it was a bad place to end up—dead or otherwise.
A call had come in. A bag in the Mersey. A foot poking out. Madison didn’t have to be here, but curiosity had got the better of her—that and duty. This was her patch, although it hadn’t been for long. And she was determined to show her worth.
She had left the bright, spinning proclamation of the parked blues on the pavement by the bridge railing, to walk around to the opposite riverbank for a better look. She wore a black puffer jacket to ward off the late chill, brown boots fit for a hike, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. The youngest DI the northern forces had ever seen, and she was not one for pissing about.
Torch beams swung across the water’s surface, catching the black neoprene of the divers’ heads. Whoever had first spotted the bag—if it even existed—hadn’t stuck around after calling in. They were literally fishing in the dark here. This could be a hoax, or it could be a murder, but they wouldn’t leave until they found out which.
She quietly surveyed the scene below her, hands gripping the railing. Anonymous callers usually stuck around for a nosey to watch their handiwork play out, but all she could see now was the empty space where Mr Smith’s nightclub had once stood, the absent building even more imposing now. Madison had had her first snog in there, promptly followed by her first alcohol-induced puke.
There was a shout below, but it didn’t carry the excited urgency of discovery, more of a check-in. The divers were pointing out underwater obstacles. She tried to imagine the generations of crap that had been chucked in there. A car boot sale emptied out into the filthy water.
Madison’s thoughts were interrupted by her phone buzzing. It was gone two in the morning, so it could only be work-related. In fact, it didn’t matter what time of day it was; it was only ever work. Work-life balance? She’d need a life to have one of those.
