November Lake: Teenage Detective (The November Lake Mysteries) Book 1

NOVEMBER LAKE

Teenage Detective

(The
November Lake Mysteries)

Book
1

By

Jamie
Drew

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 by Jamie Drew

This book
is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents
are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used
fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance
to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations
is entirely coincidental.

This eBook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy
for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not
purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please
purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.

Also
by Jamie Drew

November Lake:
Teenage Detective (Book 1)

November Lake:
Teenage Detective (Book 2)

About the author:

Jamie
Drew is the author of the ‘November Lake: Teenage Detective
Series’. Just like, November Lake, Jamie Drew has been a real
police officer and has solved many crimes and mysteries in real
life.

Jamie
Drew now writes full time and is currently working on further
‘November Lake’ mysteries.

You can contact Jamie Drew by emailing:
[email protected]

November Lake: Teenage Detective

The Dead
Girl In The Room

The
Kidnapping At Blackwater Farm

The
Menacing Stranger

The Dead Girl In The Room

Police
Constable Anne Short lay dead on her bed. It wasn’t the simple fact
I couldn’t see the soft fall and rise of her body which suggested
she was no longer breathing, but the large gaping wound in the back
of her head. Her face was buried into a blood-soaked pillow. Her
short blonde hair was matted red and looked black in the dim light
that shone weakly from the desk lamp. I stood next to Constable
Kale Creed as we both stared at Anne’s corpse from the open doorway
of her room on the second floor of the police training
school.

I had
been woken by the sound of thudding and crashing outside of my own
room. With my long blonde hair matted to the side of my face, I’d
sprung from my bed and yanked open my own bedroom door. As I peered
across the short landing, I had watched as Kale Creed threw himself
at Anne’s bedroom door. Even though the hour was late, he was still
wearing his white police shirt and black combat trousers. His shirt
was open at the throat and he wore a grim look upon his
face.

“
Hey! Open up!” he demanded, as he rushed at the door again,
slamming his shoulder against it. “What’s going on in
there?”

There
were just the four rooms on our landing. My bedroom was directly at
the top of the stairs. Next to mine was Creed’s. Opposite our
rooms, were Constable Anne Short’s and Constable Colin Griffin’s.
Wearing just my pyjamas, I watched Kale shoulder barge the door of
Anne’s room again. This time, it buckled and shuddered against its
hinges, and flew open. It was then, over Kale’s shoulder, that I
saw Anne sprawled face down across her bed. I hadn’t known her
well. In fact I didn’t know any of my colleagues very well as we
were all just coming to the end of our first month at police
training school. All of us were just fresh faced recruits. I think
I was the youngest at just eighteen-and-a-half-years-old. Kale
couldn’t have been more than a year older than me and I figured
that both Constable’s Anne Short and Colin Griffin were both in
their mid-twenties. I’d overheard Anne tell Griffin that she was
engaged as he had tried to flirt with her over breakfast on our
very first morning. She waggled her hand before him, her engagement
ring twinkling in the fluorescent overhead lighting of the canteen.
I couldn’t help but notice how Griffin’s sharp blue eyes had
narrowed as he caught sight of the ring. Since Anne had given him
the cold shoulder, Griffin had glanced across the table at me and
winked.

“
Hey, October,” he had grinned, narrow face all nose and chin.
Just like the rest of him, his face was painfully thin.

“
That’s November,” I corrected him.

“
That’s what I said,” Constable Griffin smirked, brushing his
blond fringe out of his eyes. It was collar length and I’d already
heard one of the instructors tell him to get it cut. But Constable
Griffin had just shrugged his narrow shoulders at the request and
mooched away.

“
No, you said October, my name is, November. There’s a
difference,” I told him without smiling and smeared more Marmite
over my toast. It wasn’t that I had wanted to be unfriendly; I just
didn’t want to become
too
friendly with him. I had wanted to be a police
officer for as long as I could remember and the only companion I
wanted or needed for the next two years were my Blackstone’s Police
training manuals. Detecting my frostiness, Griffin pushed his chair
back from the table, and skulked from the canteen. I felt kind of
bad watching him leave, his uniform seeming to hang from his
scrawny frame, but there was something about Griffin that gave me
the creeps. However, he was a copper just like the rest of us, so
perhaps I was being too judgemental about him.

I pushed
thoughts of Griffin from my mind and stared into the room where
Anne now laid face down, dead on her bed. I was usually good at
making sense of what I was seeing and putting tiny pieces of
information together to form a larger picture. But the sight of a
colleague – a police officer – dead in one of the rooms at training
school was nearly beyond comprehension. How had something like this
ever happened? I could see that Anne’s death had been no accident
by the gaping wound that seemed to stare back at me like a
bloodshot eye. But who had murdered her and why? Was the killer
still nearby? Had this been a random attack or perhaps a robbery
gone wrong? Since attending training school we had been told not to
go out socialising in the local pubs and clubs showing any visible
police insignia as recruits had often been attacked in the past. I
had also heard stories that the training school had been broken
into and recruits rooms had been burgled. There was a common joke
amongst new probationers that the highest levels of crime were
often recorded at police training schools.

“
I can’t believe she’s dead,” Kale said, jarring me from my
thoughts. He sounded upset. “Who would’ve wanted to harm Anne? This
place is full of coppers – we’re all coppers here – and one of us
has been murdered. It seems unreal.”

“
But it is real,” I said, looking away from that deep black
wound shining wetly down the right side of Anne’s skull. I closed
my eyes and tried to squeeze out the image of Anne lying dead on
the bed. It made me feel queasy. But when I opened my eyes again,
she was still there.

“
Whoever killed Anne must have climbed out of the window,” Kale
said.

I looked
in the direction he was pointing and could see the curtains
flapping in the cold night breeze that blew in through the
window.

“
It’s not been opened, it’s been smashed,” I said, spying the
jagged pieces of glass that protruded like broken teeth from the
window frame.

“
So that’s what I heard,” Kale breathed deeply, stepping into
the room.

I placed
a hand on his arm. “Don’t you think we should wait…?”

“
For what?” Kale asked, cocking one of his dark
eyebrows.

“
What I mean is, shouldn’t we call Sergeant Black?” I
said.

“
I called him on my mobile the moment I heard the scream,” he
said, his keen blue eyes fixed on me.

“
You heard a scream?” I frowned. How had I slept through
that?

The wind
howled through the broken window and stirred Anne’s blood soaked
hair. The way it seemed to shimmer as if alive, looked kind of
creepy so I looked back at Kale. The hour was very late, and I
could see that the lower half of his handsome face was shadowed
with black stubble.

“
What were you doing awake so late?” I asked him, hoping that
if I engaged him in conversation it might stop him from entering
the room. I didn’t want to go in there. Not just because it was a
crime scene, but I had known Anne and it made me feel uncomfortable
being in the same room with her now that she was dead.

“
Cramming,” he said, looking back across the room at the body
on the bed.

“
Cramming?” I asked trying to bide myself more time in the hope
that Sergeant Black would soon arrive and take over.

“
We have that written exam on Monday, so I stayed up late to
study for it,” he explained. “I’m on the accelerated promotion
scheme so I can’t afford to fail them or I get dropped.”

“
But tomorrow is Friday and we can go home for the weekend.
Wouldn’t you have plenty of time to revise for the exam then?” I
said.

“
My parents are back from France this weekend, so I’m going to
spend most of it driving up to the Peak District. Not a lot of time
for study,” he explained.

I opened
my mouth to ask Kale another question in the hope that I could keep
him talking for at least another minute or two. But before I had
the chance to say anything Kale turned away and headed across
Anne’s bedroom towards the window.

“
Don’t you think we should wait for Sergeant Black to arrive?
After all this is a crime scene,” I reminded him.

“
And we’re cops, aren’t we and so was Anne,” he said pulling
aside the curtain and peering out into the darkness. “Whoever did
this could be getting away.”

I knew
that if I went into the room, I would see the clues. I always did.
Ever since I could remember, I had been the first to solve puzzles,
riddles and conundrums. I was like my father. He had been a police
officer too – a detective – before he had been killed on duty. My
father had warned me not to show off – not to be a know-it-all. But
I could help catch Anne’s killer. I knew I could if I stepped into
the room. I would figure out how the murder had taken place and
possibly who had committed it. Why shouldn’t I use my skills to
catch the person who killed Constable Short? I hoped one day that I
would be able to use my knack at solving puzzles to catch the
criminal who had murdered my father.

So,
hugging myself against the chill wind that blew in through the
window, I crept into the room. I looked at the bed where Anne lay.
I was kind of glad that I couldn’t see her face. There was a
picture of her smiling out of a framed photograph on the desk on
the opposite side of her room. That’s how I would’ve liked to have
remembered her. Standing next to Anne in the picture was a dark
haired man of about the same age. They had their arms around each
other and I guessed this was her fiancé. Anne’s desk was littered
with the notes she had been making in an attempt to learn by heart
the definition of theft. Somebody else who had been studying while
I had been sleeping.

I looked about the room and saw an armchair. It was identical
to the one in my room. Over the back of it Anne had laid one of her
white police shirts. The collar numbers twinkled from the epaulets
on each shoulder. I ran one finger over the shirt, then hunkered
down and inspected the carpet around the base of the armchair.
Bending low, so my nose was almost touching the floor, I brushed
the tips of my fingers over the carpet. What I could see was all
very suggestive to me. Beside the chair was Anne’s utility belt and
attached to this was a set of handcuffs and empty CS Spray holder.
The torch had come free and lay on the carpet just under the chair.
With my knees making a popping sound, I stood up and went back to
the bedroom door. I shut it halfway, then opened it again. Feeling
uncomfortable and with my heart speeding up a little, I went to the
bed. Taking a shallow breath, I peered over Anne’s body and
wondered what I might see. A spray of blood covered the headboard
and the wall behind it. Using my thumb and forefinger like a set of
tweezers, I slowly pulled back the duvet that covered her body. I
peeled it back no more than an inch and could see the ends of her
short blonde hair were drenched with the blood that had gushed from
her scalp, down her neck and onto her bare shoulder. I couldn’t
help but notice a large mushroom shaped stain of blood on the
underside of the duvet cover. Very slowly and biting my lower lip,
I pressed my fingertips against the side of her neck. I knew in my
heart that Anne was dead, but I needed to make sure. Although her
skin was still warm to the touch, there was no pulse. I let the lip
of the duvet fall back into place. I didn’t need to
see
anymore. I now knew
how and why Anne had been murdered. But more importantly I knew who
had killed her.