Closer Than Blood: An addictive and gripping crime thriller

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“What the hell?” He demanded once we were in the car. I started it before he had his door fully closed, then spun it around and shot out of the close. I tore up the road about a hundred metres then swung it around again, parking up behind a van.

“Tactical goading.”

Barry’s frown deepened. “You what now?”

“Just trust me, OK?”

“You can be a real pain in the arse, you know that?” he asked, shaking his head.

“I know,” I grinned, counting out the seconds silently in my head. I had got to forty-seven when a battered Ford Focus pulled out of the close. I pointed towards it as it shot towards the town. “But I’m a pain in the arse who’s good at his job. Now, let’s go see where our good friend Eddie is off to in such a hurry, shall we?”

Chapter 13 (#ulink_0df495a8-9e55-5dc6-85e3-72f5caa7a780)

Simmonds’ office was in the basement of a seedy hotel on the seafront in Kemptown, the area of the city that started out full of trendy bars and shops and gradually bled into Whitehawk. It was about five minutes’ drive from Eddie’s house, but he made it in half that, ignoring red lights and give-way signs with equal abandon.

It was hard to keep up without being spotted, but as he pulled into the tiny car park in front of the hotel I was only a couple of cars behind him. I parked on the seafront opposite, just far enough down that we couldn’t be seen from the building itself, then we got out of the car and crossed towards the hotel, Barry still glaring daggers at me.

“Was it really that bad?” I asked as we approached the dirty white building, its neon sign almost obscured by bird shit and black gunk from the traffic on the busy road.

“You went into Eddie Baker’s home and called him a liar. People have died for less!”

“We were never in any danger.”

“Really? It looked pretty dangerous to me.”

“No.” I shook my head. “They wouldn’t have risked a scrap with us, not today.”

“Why not?”

“You saw the clear sideboard next to the kid, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Was there any other place in the entire room that wasn’t littered with crap?”

“Not from where I was standing, no.”

“They wouldn’t have fought us,” I assured him. “Greg is a burglar, which probably means whatever was on that sideboard when we knocked on the door was stolen property. They probably bunged it in the kitchen or upstairs while Eddie held us at the door. No way are they going to start a fight with us when they had that in the house. One touch of a button and their lounge is full of very annoyed coppers.”

“You put our lives on the line because of an empty sideboard? God help me.” He sounded impressed in spite of himself. “You really do like living dangerously, don’t you?”

“There’s another way to live?”

Barry shoved me, finally giving in to a rueful laugh. “So, what now?”

“We go and see Bobby at the hotel, see what we can hear.”

Bobby Dixon was the hotel manager, a small, inoffensive-looking man in his early twenties with bad teeth and a habit of looking at his shoes when he spoke. He’d come to our notice when he’d been nicked for allowing prostitutes to use the hotel for their business, and we’d kept him out of custody on the understanding that he let us listen in on Simmonds whenever we wanted.

We crossed the car park outside the hotel quickly and stepped through into the shabby reception area, the door creaking alarmingly as it swung shut.

It was dim inside, almost dark, and a bored-looking girl in her late teens glanced up at us with disinterest from behind the counter.

“You want a room?”

“No, we want Bobby.”

“He’s in his office, you know the way?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. Before we passed her she was buried in her phone again.

Bobby’s office was at the back of the building, directly above Simmonds’ basement one. Thanks to some holes carefully drilled in the floorboards, it was now possible to hear everything happening in the room below, which was how we’d known about the drug deal in the first place. It was low-tech, but it worked.

I pushed the office door open without knocking, to see Bobby asleep in his chair, feet up on the desk and head back as he snored.

“Hey, wake up. Need your office.”

He started and scrambled to his feet, then saw who it was and immediately looked down at the floor.

“Oh, sure, uh, sure.” He hurried out, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, then paused in the doorway. “I don’t suppose, uh, I could find out when …”

“When I say so,” I said, cutting him off. “You’re lucky you’re not in a cell right now.”

“But what if he finds out I’ve been letting you use the place? He’ll kill me!”

“Then you’d better make sure your staff keep their mouths shut, because the only way he’ll find out is if someone here tells him. Now bugger off.”

He nodded, still looking at the floor, and left, closing the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, I rolled back the stinking carpet in the far corner and after perhaps thirty seconds of listening we were rewarded with the sound of approaching voices from below.

“… my fucking house and starts asking questions about you.” Eddie’s voice was loud enough to hear clearly, but when Simmonds responded, I had to strain to catch the words.

“What did he ask?”

“He wanted to know how you got in touch with that Jake bloke.”

There was a pause. “And what did you tell him?”

“That I didn’t know you.”

“And what happened then?”

“I threw the cunt out!”

“You threw him out?”

“Well, yeah. I told him to fuck off and he did.”

“Did he mention that Jake is his brother?”

“His brother? He didn’t say nothing about that.”

“Probably would have done if you’d given him the chance. Anyway, it’s a good job we didn’t buy off him in the end. Word is he stole that coke from the Russians and they want it back, along with his head.”

“Russians?”

“Yeah, a gang of them from London. They’ve put feelers out for Jake, want him dead or alive as long as they get their bag back. Fifty grand, they’re offering, so you tell your brothers that the one who finds him gets a cut. Any idea where he might be hiding?”

“No,” Eddie replied, his voice filled with greed, “but I can think of fifty thousand reasons to find out.”

Chapter 14 (#ulink_025c47a5-7018-51ca-8d88-3a7589256b72)

Barry and I sat in near-silence outside the Chief Superintendent’s office, broken only by the curses I was muttering under my breath as we waited for her to call us in.

“We’ll find him before they do,” Barry said finally, doing his best to sound positive. “There’s not many places he can hide.”

“Fifty grand!” I replied, shaking my head. “I know a dozen people who would carve his heart out for half that. It’s going to turn into a free-for-all. And speaking of which, what kind of fucking moron steals drugs from a Russian gang?”

“It is pretty stupid,” Barry agreed cautiously. “But maybe he didn’t realise …”

“This is Jake we’re talking about. If there’s one thing you can say about my brother, it’s that he doesn’t care who he’s screwing over, as long as he gets what he wants.”

I was about to say more, but broke off as the Chief Super opened the door to her office and gestured us in. She was back in uniform today, her shirt and trousers spotless and perfectly pressed.

“What news?” she asked as we all took seats around a small table near her desk. “Have you found him?”

“No, and we’re not the only ones looking.” I launched into my explanation, watching Striker’s frown deepen until it was almost a scowl.

“So,” she said when I’d finished, “let me make sure I’ve got this right. What you’re telling me is that the Russians your brother stole drugs from have put fifty thousand pounds on the table for his head?”

“That’s about the size of it,” I confirmed. “And I still have no idea where Jake is.”

“Fuck.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“So, what’s your next step?”

“Well it occurs to me that if the Russians have been offering money, they’ve been talking to people and that in turn means a trail we can follow. Instead of looking for Jake, I think we should concentrate on them.”

“OK, I can see the logic in that. Where are you going to start?”

“My team are already out and about asking questions. While they’re doing that, I was thinking we could canvass the local B&Bs and hotels. They’ve got to be staying somewhere, and if Jake was telling the truth then they don’t have much of a network down here. I also want to find out if we’ve got anything from the ambulance on Wilsons Avenue – there were loads of people with their phones out when we arrived.”

“Good.” Striker nodded. “I’ll get CID to help. I’d like to avoid using uniform as much as possible, I don’t want to spook these Russians and provoke them into doing something stupid. What else?”

“Well …” I thought furiously for a moment. I’d been too worried to think this through properly, but the Chief Super was the type of senior officer who expected her troops to come to her with answers as well as problems. “I can visit a few people, see if anyone I know has actually spoken to the Russians. If they’ve been putting the word out, someone must have been face to face with them.”

“Do that. I want these men in a cell before someone else gets hurt or they find your brother and disappear. If you need more resources, I’ll throw the whole damn division your way.”

“Thanks, ma’am.” I stood, recognising the dismissal for what it was, and ushered Barry out.

“That could have been worse,” Barry whispered as we took the stairs down to our office.

“It could have been,” I agreed, “but it could have been better too. These guys are professionals, and despite what I said upstairs I don’t think we’ll find them easily.”

“What do you need me to do?”

That was one of the things I loved about my team. We’d been working together for a long time now, and no matter how difficult the task they simply got on with it – no fuss, no bullshit.

“This fifty grand changes things. It’s going to draw some of the nastier bastards out from whatever rock they’ve been hiding under. So speak to your regulars, see if anyone interesting has surfaced. It’s early days yet, but you never know.”

We’d almost reached the door to DIU when it burst open, Phil Blunt careening through it with a dark expression on his face. The moment he saw me, he thrust his phone at me.

“You’re gonna want to see this,” he growled.

I took the phone and looked at it, seeing the webpage for the local paper, The Argus. I had little love for them, having had my fair share of negative press over the years, and so I wasn’t terribly surprised when I read the headline “War in Woodingdean!”

“Great,” I muttered as I read on.

A little before 9 o’clock last night, the sleepy village of Woodingdean was rocked by a scene more in keeping with downtown L.A. than the Sussex coast. According to reports, armed men, rumoured to be from a drug cartel, stormed the family home of Sergeant Gareth Bell, an officer known for …