Guilty as Sin
Guilty as Sin
Adam Croft
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Adam Croft
Published by Circlehouse.
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Acknowledgements
I have many people to thank for their input and experience in helping me to ensure that this book was as entertaining and factually accurate as it can be.
My thanks go to Russell Fairfield at O2-Telefonica for the information on mobile phone signal triangulation and locating missing persons. I am also grateful to NPIA Missing Persons Bureau for the statistics and information on missing persons.
My fearless and thick-skinned editors, Jenni Bird and Sarah Ashcroft and must also be thanked massively for tearing an otherwise frighteningly amateurish book to shreds.
Finally, a big thank you must go to Shaun Jackson, the winner of a recent charity auction to have a character in
Guilty as Sin
named after him. His contribution will have given a considerable benefit to many, not least Wendy Knight and Jack Culverhouse...
Foreword
Writing and publishing is a funny old game. When I first published
Too Close For Comfort
, I wasn't at all happy with the finished product. Expecting only a couple of hundred online sales at best, I became frustrated with the book after two-and-a-half years and published it regardless. It was just my luck, then, that the book would go on to sell over 60,000 copies within two months and top the worldwide Amazon and iBooks best-seller charts. Of course, I'm not complaining.
Too Close For Comfort
's extraordinary success still amazes me. It's no secret that I'm not keen on the book itself, but I'm delighted that so many people have been. The number of lovely emails (and financial donations!) received has been surprising yet touching. In
Guilty as Sin
, I can promise you a book with which I am very happy. Well, mostly happy, anyway. The word 'perfect' doesn't exist to a writer.
Since
Too Close For Comfort
was published, my life has, yet again, seen some big changes. My long-suffering girlfriend of five years agreed to marry me and we are currently in the process of moving house. I am far happier to have convinced myself to sit down and write this book within a much shorter period of time (two-and-a-half months, as opposed to years) as I feel it has a much improved flow. Besides, I don't otherwise know where I would have found the time.
For Joanne.
It was the last day of Danielle Levy's life.
As she sauntered around the corner into Heathcote Road on her way back from a hard half-day's work at sixth-form college, she had no idea of what lay in front of her.
It had been Maths today. It was always bloody Maths. Despite the fact that she had chosen to study Drama and English Literature as her two main A-levels, her mother had insisted that she choose at least one 'proper' subject. She'd thrown in Classics as her fourth option. Another protest, but she was actually quite enjoying it. She hated Maths, though.
Woodlands was all right, she supposed. It wasn't an all-purpose college like the one she had planned to attend before her family moved to Mildenheath, but it was all right. The sixth-form college was somewhat amalgamated with the upper school. The same teachers, the same classrooms. The same snotty-nosed little brats who didn't know what it meant to be grown up.
Every day when she turned the corner into Heathcote Road, her heart sank a little. True enough, it was the road she lived on, but her house was a good seven hundred yards further along the road. She had lived at 101 Heathcote Road only for a couple of months, but she had already become attached to the house. Passing the parade of shops, walking up the hill and exiting the right-hand bend to see her house standing proud in the summer sunshine always made her feel warm and glorious. It was home.
Darren's van was park jauntily on the cracked concrete driveway as she skirted around the edge of the lawn towards the front door. Her step-father tended to finish work early on Fridays. Not that he didn't finish early on every other day. She guessed there wasn't much call for carpet fitters after 2pm on a weekday.
Turning her key in the lock and crunching the bottom of the door over the pile of letters which lay in wait on the doormat, she heaved her rucksack against the wine rack, picked up the post and made her way towards the kitchen. The door had been locked, and it was clear to Danielle that she was alone in the house. It was then that she heard the familiar creaking of the back door.
It was dark. It was the middle of the day, but it was dark. The noise of the traffic outside had disappeared, the birds had stopped singing. Her chest had stopped heaving.
He stood over her naked, quivering body as the last lights of consciousness began to to ebb away from her battered shell. The odd low murmur escaped from her bruised and bloodied lips as the the blood in her veins thickened and resisted its final circuit. Her eyes rolled in her head as he smirked, before jerking his head back and propelling a globule of spittle at her, watching it hit her eyeball and cascade down her lacerated cheek.
She would be no bother any more. She was too close to the truth, far too close. Her idle threats had pushed him over the line. He felt joyous, powerful at the act that he had committed. He felt good.
The sirens that bellowed and swirled as they raced past served only to reinforce his feeling that he was above the law. He was the law.
He stepped backwards over the concrete floor and felt for the wooden handle. Jerking his hand upwards, he lifted the cast-iron sledgehammer from the floor with a deep scraping on the rough concrete below. With a wry smile, he brought it up above his head and brought it crashing down on her skull.
DS Wendy Knight stood slouched against the wall of the lift as it rose towards the third floor. Four weeks off work and she was knackered within a further two. 'If you rest, you rust', she remembered an old American actress once saying. Wendy certainly felt rusted up right now.
The juddering and shunting of the lift upon reaching the third floor almost knocked Wendy to her knees. As if simply confirming the arrival at the third floor for those who were still conscious, the lift bell pinged before the doors slid open and the familiar site of Mildenheath CID greeted her. Another Monday morning.
Making her way towards her desk, she noticed that once again it had been used as a dumping ground for empty coffee cups and sandwich wrappers. One weekend off duty and your desk became a landfill site. The joys of life in Mildenheath CID. Casually stuck to the uppermost coffee cup was a gleaming yellow post-it note adorned with DCI Jack Culverhouse's distinctive handwriting.
Briefing – mispers – 9am
Short and sweet – that was Culverhouse's style. No wasted energy, no wasted time. Wendy smiled inside at the second word. It was a while since they'd had a missing persons case to deal with. Almost 200,000 people were reported missing in the UK every year, with three quarters of people being found within 48 hours and less than one percent of missing people being found dead. That was still a lot of people, but the odds on dealing with a dead body were significantly lower than in a murder case, where you were assured of dealing with the grim and grisly process of an horrific death.
Death terrified Wendy. It was an occupational hazard, but one she would rather avoid. She was petrified of her own death and truly hated having to deal with death as part of her job. Death could wait, though. She had other matters of life on her mind.
Deciding against having a coffee due to a lack of cups (she knew where they had all got to), Wendy picked up her Moleskine notebook and rounded the corner towards the briefing room, where she found the room scattered with her colleagues, all looking far more refreshed than she felt on this Monday morning. Luke Baxter, newly promoted Detective Sergeant, was sat in the front row against the window, sharing a joke with Culverhouse. Baxter's fast-tracked promotion still rankled Wendy. She knew the golden boy of Mildenheath CID was far less than he was cracked up to be. Unfortunately, Culverhouse saw things very differently.
With a cough, Culverhouse rose and stepped slowly and purposefully in front of the information board as he waited for silence.
“Right. A nice little missing persons enquiry to kick us off this morning. Hopefully we can have the bird found by lunchtime and crack open a few tinnies.” Culverhouse's comment was met with muted laughter from the men and rolling eyes from the women. He jabbed a finger at the blown-up photograph stuck to the information board. It showed a happy, smiling young woman posing in front of a Christmas tree in a delightfully bad Christmas jumper. Wendy had noticed the growing trend in un-trendy clothing and admired the irony which had permeated fashion in recent years.
“Danielle Levy, aged seventeen. She was last seen attending sixth-form lessons at Woodlands on Friday lunchtime. Her mother and step-father said she didn't return home that afternoon, as expected. She often went into town with friends during the afternoon when she didn't have any lessons, but her parents got worried when she hadn't returned home that evening. She was officially reported missing late last night.”
Wendy nodded slowly as she jotted down the relevant notes in her notebook. A fairly routine case – seventeen-year-old girls went missing all the time and were by far the most likely people to do so. She knew, however, that once the first couple of days had passed, the chances of finding a missing girl alive would slowly crumble.
“DS Wing, I want you to get on to her mobile phone company and get some details on her most recent location. Baxter – I want you to man the phones at this end and get on to the local media and get some publicity on this. Frank – you and Debbie can start conducting door-to-door enquiries. See if the neighbours have seen her or if there's been any sign of a disturbance or argument recently. Knight – you're coming with me to speak to the parents.”
Wendy actually quite enjoyed being at Culverhouse's side when he carried out interviews and spoke with families. She saw herself as the yin to his yang; the good cop to his bad cop, and she was sure he realised this and appreciated it. Below the appreciation, though, was the realisation that as every minute – every second –ticked by, the likelihood of finding Danielle Levy alive rapidly diminished.