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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Self Published
ISBN-10: 1479166685
Type: Fiction
Pages: 301
Copyright: 2012
ISBN-13: 9781479166688
Price: $3.09 (eBook)
After a child is discovered murdered and hidden in a cardboard box. A vigilante tracks down the culprits and extracts retribution. This is the start of a vigilante killing spree.
During the reign of the Beatles and on the back of the Mersey beat revolution, other rock and pop bands emerged. Ray Evans joins one of these emerging bands and the story plots the rise and fall of the band Satan’s Whiskers.
A dark shadow hangs over the band after a child is discovered murdered and hidden in a cardboard box. A vigilante tracks down the culprits and extracts retribution. This is the start of a vigilante killing spree. From the very outset the police suspect that one if not all of the band members are involved, as the killings appear to closely follow the band’s movements. Is the killer really a band member? The story will keep you guessing until the very end.
Excerpt
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When young, I played in a rock and pop band. While travelling in the group’s van we rear-ended a lady driver, pushing her onto a zebra crossing where she collided with a pedestrian. The man was angry with the poor woman until he realised she wasn’t the author of his discomfort. On discovering the culprit for the rapidly growing bruise on his leg, he brought his complaint to its rightful source.
When he recognised the driver of the van, his mood changed. He invited us back to his house and told us the story of how he found a dead baby hidden inside a cardboard box. There’d been rumours that the child was dead, and that the drug addicted parents had hidden the body in a squat. He decided to find out if the rumours were true and crashed through the wall of the derelict house using a mechanical digger.
I decided to use this story as the baseline for a series of vigilante killings, with my band, Satan’s Whiskers, as a backdrop to the story.
Roy A Higgins
PROLOGUE
George and Edward Whittaker were brothers, of eleven and ten years of age respectively, they were the oldest of a large family of children, and the product of a single parent home. George and Edward terrorised the local streets, and their mother seemed to have lost control over them, if indeed she ever exerted any control over them in the first place.
On that fateful Saturday morning, after tiring of breaking windows in the derelict properties awaiting demolition, they took a walk down the canal towpath in search of more mischief.
A pair of swans had built a nest in the shallow water where a retaining wall had collapsed into the canal, and part of the banking had fallen into the water creating a temporary island. Edward threw a large stone at the pen in an attempt to scare her from the nest so that the eggs could then be taken and destroyed, but he hadn’t taken account of the cob, which had been swimming serenely close by on the ripple less water. The cob launched itself at the boys with a flapping of wings and its neck outstretched to inflict the maximum of damage to its antagonists. The boys ran for their lives, with the swan giving chase in fits, starts and flutters. They ran, and they ran, until the pain in their sides dictated that they couldn’t run any more. As they bent double, with their hands resting on their knees, while gulping in lung full’s of air between laughing hysterically, they heard a buzzing sound beneath their feet.
“What’s that noise George asked his brother?”
They both stopped laughing to listen to the sound, which could be distinctly heard coming from a cast iron grate set in the towpath.
“There must be a cellar,” Edward suggested to his brother.
“Let’s find it,” said George, with the intent of creating more mayhem.
Twenty feet away from the grate they discovered a door; it was a planked door of rotten wood, with a latch, and was fitted with an asp and a staple, indicating that it had once been secured against intrusion using a padlock. Six or seven stone steps led to a flagged floor below, and the buzzing sound appeared louder as they descended.
George went first with his brother hanging on to his shirt and peering over his shoulder nervously. The room was in darkness, except for a shaft of light which flooded down the grated coal shoot on which they had been standing when they first heard the sound of buzzing.
“Can you see anything?” asked Edward, while leaning against his brothers back and almost toppling him down the final few steps in the process.
They reached the flagged floor of the cellar without incident, and stepped out of the lightness from the doorway behind them, and into the darkness of the room. The room was cluttered with objects of an industrial nature, and the boys moved between them as they approached the sound of the buzzing.
“Get ready to run,” George warned his brother. “It may be a bee’s nest or wasps.”
“What’s that horrible smell?” Edward asked. “I think I’m going to be sick.” And he was.
Rounding an oil drum George thought that he saw two people standing together in the shadows.
“There’s somebody there,” he whispered to his brother, and they hid in silence watching.
“They seem to be tied up,” said George, “perhaps we should try to free them?”
“You do it,” said Edward, “I’ll wait here.”
George crept closer, while making sure that he remained hidden from view until he was sure that he was in no danger. He could see the two people a little clearer now. One appeared to be a woman and the other was a man, and he realised that they were naked and covered in flies. Suddenly the sun came out from behind a cloud, and a shaft of light streamed down the coal shoot and illuminated the faces of the people tied to the pillars which supported the ceiling. Rats milled around their ankles, and the couple stared directly at George from eyeless sockets. George vomited, and ran screaming from the cellar with his brother in hot pursuit.
A police investigation ensued, and it was then that I discovered I was a prime suspect. Return with me to the beginning and I’ll explain how it all began.
CHAPTER ONE
APRIL 1964
In April 196 The Beatles held the top five spots in the Billboard top forty singles in America. The Rolling Stones released their debut album, unimaginatively named The Rolling Stones. BBC 2 began broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Thieves stole the head from the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, twelve of the Great Train Robbers received sentences totalling three hundred and twelve years, and I joined the rock and pop band Satan’s Whiskers.
* * * *
When I accepted an invitation to play in a rock and pop band, I’d no idea that I’d soon become a suspect in a murder investigation.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror while shaving, studying my appearance as I trimmed my unruly eyebrows using the moustache trimmer on my electric razor. My mother often chased me around the house with a pair of eyebrow tweezers to rectify the eyebrow problem, but as she plucked her own eyebrows to destruction, before replacing them with a thin pencil line, I made sure that she never caught me.
After naming the band Satan’s Whiskers a week before, I’d tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the other band members to follow my example and grow whiskers as a gimmick. A week without shaving and the stubble of the first few days looked a little more beard like; although I had to concede that the side growth was disappointing to say the least, which would provide ammunition for other members to ridicule my efforts. On an impulse I decided to shave the beard into a goatee. If I didn’t like the final result then the whole thing would have to be removed, but what the hell, easy come and easy go. I examined my handiwork from every angle until I was satisfied that I looked as satanic as it was possible for me to look.
Freddie Cope was already at Ryan’s house when I arrived for band practise. I’d only met Freddie and Ryan a few weeks earlier, when I went into Blakewater with Archie, a friend from work, on Good Friday. Archie had attended the town’s grammar school, along with Freddie and Ryan, while I had languished at a secondary modern school after failing my eleven plus. I’d been expected to pass and my failure to live up to expectations had left my mother distraught, and my teachers scratching their heads in bewilderment.
Archie introduced me to his school friends, and as they had planned to form a band, the conversation inevitably drifted into that territory. On discovering, through conversation, that I played a bass guitar, which was currently languishing in my parent’s loft after a previously failed attempt to form a band, they asked me to audition at Ryan’s house the following Sunday.
I wasn’t sure if I would remember how to play my guitar after many months of abstinence, and wished that I hadn’t agreed to audition at all, for fear of embarrassing myself, but just like riding a bike, my ability to play was ingrained in my psyche and I became a member of a newly formed band by a unanimous vote.
“Hi Ray,” said Freddie, in his usual cheery way, as I entered the smoky atmosphere of Ryan’s bedroom, “How’s it hanging?”
“Bloody hell,” I said, “I can’t breathe in here, open a fucking window for Christ’s sake.”
Freddie was a happy-go-lucky character, with a ruddy complexion and curly blonde hair. He was solidly built, but without excess weight, and about my height of a couple of inches beneath six feet tall.
“Stop being such a sanctimonious prick,” he told me with a laugh, “Here have a fag and don’t say that I never give you anything.”
“You can stick your fags where the sun doesn’t shine,” I told him, as I didn’t smoke and didn’t want to start, or to breathe the fetid air in Ryan’s bedroom.
“How’s things with you,” I asked Ryan, as I pushed past Freddie to open a window before I suffocated in the smoky atmosphere.
Ryan, who was the exact opposite of Freddie, in both nature and appearance, grunted a reluctant “Hello,” while continuing to tune his guitar with a cigarette dangling from his lips and with smoke drifting into his eyes, which made him blink continuously and his eyes to water profusely. Because the two of them were so very different I found it was difficult to understand how Freddie and Ryan had ever become such close friends.
Ryan Cheshire was dark-haired with a swarthy Mediterranean appearance and an inch or two shorter than me. He always seemed to need a shave, and even though he assured me that he’d shaved that very morning, I’m embarrassed to report that his beard growth was already more impressive than was mine.
“Will Frank be coming to band practise today?” I asked Freddie.
Frank Rivers was our absentee drummer and known to us as Hank, because he idolised The Shadows.
“No, he always works on Saturdays,” replied Freddie, “but even if his work commitments allowed him to attend, practising in Ryan’s bedroom with a drum kit is never going to be an option.”
Hank and Freddie were maternal cousins, although they were so alike that they looked more like brothers. They were both fair haired with rosy complexions, but Hank’s hair was a shade darker than Freddie’s and he stood a couple of inches taller.
Hank had been playing the drums in a public house, along with an elderly organist, when Freddie persuaded him to dissolve his partnership with the old man and join the band instead. We’d played together just once since his recruitment, at the wedding reception of one of Hank’s paternal cousins, and on the night when we named the band, Satan’s Whiskers, at my suggestion, after I pointed out a cocktail, of the same name, in a drinks menu.
While we were practising Randy Bloomfield (1) entered the room; escorted by Ryan’s mother who was carrying a tray of drinking glasses filled to the brim with chilled orange juice. Randy was a married man with a baby daughter, and a wife who’d resigned herself to becoming a band widow.
At twenty years of age Randy’s hair had begun to turn grey, although his eyebrows remained thick, black, and bushy. He had strong features with heavy brows, and his nose appeared to have been remodelled in a boxing ring, but in truth it was a natural feature on the landscape of his face.
Randy’s band regularly played at a public house on the estate of council owned properties where both he and Ryan currently lived. The pub was popular with the younger demographic, but as the booking fee was particularly low; Randy was looking to offload this regular Sunday night venue in favour of the more lucrative offers which were flooding in.
“I’ve got a proposition for you lads,” he announced, as he helped Mrs Cheshire with the distribution of refreshments. “We’ve been offered a great booking, but unfortunately we’re obligated to play at The Manxman. I’ve spoken with Jack, the publican, and he’s prepared to give you a trial on Sunday evening if you’d be interested.”
“We certainly are interested?” Ryan blurted out without consultation. But he could be forgiven for that as he was the one credited with putting the band together, and was the unofficial leader.
“I’ll come down with you to The Manxman and introduce you to Jack,” Randy volunteered, as he wanted the matter settled as soon as possible.
“What are we waiting for,” asked Freddie.
Although the pub was within walking distance of Ryan’s house we chose to drive, as walking was never a consideration with transport parked outside of the front door.
The pub had only recently been built, and consisted of a very large single room divided by folding doors. A red carpet, covered with a busy pattern, helped to disguise the beer stains caused by frequent spillages, although it couldn’t hide the shiny spots of chewing gum which had been trodden into the carpet and were accumulating around the bar.
Customers, who had already been served, congregated around the bar with their drinks; making it unnecessarily difficult for others less fortunate to get served, even though many seats and tables were unoccupied.
Randy introduced us to the publican who was busy pulling pints of beer behind the bar.
“This is the band I was telling you about Jack,” he said. “They are available on Sunday and willing to stand in for us if you are prepared to give them a trial.”
“Stage is in there,” Jack informed us, as he finished serving a customer and came from behind the bar to push back the dividing doors.
Mounted on braked wheels, the tiny stage was a single step above ground level. A backdrop of vertical silver strips caught the reflected light from a glitter ball, which Jack switched on for effect, and it sparkled in a myriad of colours.
“The stage appears to be too small,” I observed. “We might have to set up the drums and amplifiers on the stage and spill onto the dance floor?”
“That’ll be okay,” agreed Jack. “Randy’s band always uses the dance floor,” which Randy confirmed.
“If you’re a success,” Jack continued, “I’ll book you to play on alternate Sundays.”
We concluded the business agreement with a handshake. I well understood why Randy wanted to move his band to pastures new, as payment for our musical services was valued at close to non-existent, although at this stage of our fledgling career, the money didn’t matter half as much as laying claim to our first professional booking.
On the return journey to Ryan’s house, a lady driver stopped, quite suddenly, at a pedestrian crossing. Freddie hit the brakes, but being ineffective, like every other aspect of our van, it shunted the lady’s car, pushing it onto the crossing and striking an unfortunate pedestrian on the shins.
Freddie had discovered the van languishing in a scrap yard, and there it should have stayed. The roof panel had detached above the windscreen, and when on the move it flapped like the sole of a hobo’s boot. The accelerator pedal along with the accelerator pedal linkage, were missing items, having been robbed from the van to repair an equally un-roadworthy vehicle. Luckily the engine sat between the front seats, and as the engine cover was also a missing item, it was a simple matter for the co-driver to accelerate, on the driver’s instruction, by pulling on a lever attached to the carburettor. I’d also discovered a worrying excavation in the cargo area. The hole must have been situated directly above the fuel tank as the smell of petrol fumes was overpowering. I speculated that the van might explode, with everyone smoking cigarettes in the van, although no one appeared to share my pessimistic outlook.
The damage caused by the shunt appeared to be indiscernible on the battered old van, but far more obvious on the lady’s shiny new car, as we crowded around the point of the collision making unhelpful observations.
“Who’s going to pay for the damage to my car?” asked the lady, distressed by the dented rear end and broken tail light. “Have you any insurance?” she added sceptically.
“Don’t you worry missus, I saw everything, so I did,” volunteered the pedestrian, until he recognised the driver of the van.
“Be Jasus, is that yourself Freddie?” he asked, instantly forgetting his role as chief witness for the prosecution.
Freddie worked as a carpenter on a construction site. The pedestrian, an Irishman by the name of Seamus O’Malley, drove mechanical diggers and dumpers on the very same site. His neck was as thick as the top of my leg and covered with tattoos. They climbed from beneath his T-shirt, reaching the underside of his chin and the back of his ears, while covering his huge arms and terminating at his wrists. LOVE and HATE where tattooed on his knuckles in capital letters, with flying bluebirds at the base of his thumbs. Although he’d shaved his head to disguise the fact that he was balding prematurely, the difference between his shiny dome, where hair follicles no longer survived, and the shaved area at the back and sides of his head, were quite discernible.
“How are you coping Freddie Cope?” asked Seamus, while laughing at his own pun. The accident forgotten and the lady driver ignored, as she attempted to remove the damage from her car by rubbing it with a wet finger.
“I’m coping well,” answered Freddie to Seamus’ question, which had become a ritual on the building site. Freddie didn’t like this ritual but Seamus did, so Freddie always went along with it, even though it had long ago ceased to be funny. “We’ve just arranged our first professional booking at The Manxman,” Freddie informed him proudly.
“Fair play to you Freddie me boy,” Seamus responded. “Will you still speak to old Seamus when you’re famous?” He laughed once again at his poetical brilliance, as he realised that his sentence rhymed. “I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it,” he quipped, and we all laughed out of politeness.
“Never mind the chit-chat,” said the lady driver. “You promised to be a witness.”
“Oh shut the feck up missus,” said Seamus. “You backed into him, so you did.”
Seamus was in his early-thirties with an English wife and two small children. He’d crossed the Irish Sea as a single man looking for work, and had never since returned to the island of his birth.
“Can we give you a lift?” Freddie asked him in an attempt at recompense for his driving misdemeanour. Seamus jumped into the back of the van without answering, while Freddie exchanged insurance details with the lady motorist.
On arrival at his home, Seamus opened five bottles of Guinness using his teeth, as a bottle opener appearing to be an unnecessary accoutrement in the O’Malley household. Drinking glasses were also an irrelevance as we were expected to drink directly from the bottles, even though Seamus had inserted each and every one of them into his mouth.
Seamus rolled up his trouser leg to reveal a purple and yellow bruise which had rapidly developed on his swollen shin.
“Just look at tat fecking ting,” complained Seamus, while we all laughed, unsympathetically, at his misfortune.
Mrs Seamus joined the conversation after hanging out her washing in the cobbled rear yard.
“You know the druggies who live in the squat down the street?” she asked her husband, eager to impart her latest piece of doorstep gossip.
Seamus displayed a distinct lack of interest in his wife’s commentary, but she continued with her recitation regardless of his apathy.
“I was talking to her next door, and she told me that nobody’s seen their baby for days. The rumour is that the poor little mite’s dead, and that the druggies might have killed it.”
“Tere’s only one fecking way to find out,” said Seamus, instantly accepting the mantle of investigator without any kind of nomination.
Seamus lived in a row of stone built terraced houses situated on a severe slope. Although re-surfacing had taken place in much of the locality more than a decade ago, the cobbles on this particular street remained untouched. This gave delivery horses, which were fast disappearing from the industrial landscape, a better grip as they pulled milk floats, coal wagons, and rag and bone carts up the hill.
Families at the top of the street were waiting patiently to be re-housed, while at the opposite end of the street houses were already in the process of demolition, to make way for a brave new world of concrete and steel multi-storey flats.
Seamus hurried down the hill towards the squat, with the rest of us in his wake. Once outside of the squat, he shouted obscenities through the letterbox, after discovering that he couldn’t gain access. When no one answered his challenge to open the fecking door, he used his shoulder in an attempt to force an entry. Seamus was powerfully built, and the door was old and in a poor state of preservation, but despite this apparent mismatch it stubbornly refused to give way to his brutal methods of persuasion.
“Come out you druggie bastards,” he called through the letterbox, but the occupants, if indeed there were any occupants, had few intentions of opening the door to a stocky foul mouthed Irishman with a shaved head, and covered from head to toe with tattoos.
“Go around te back and see if you can get in tere,” Seamus ordered.
Freddie did as he was bid, and I accompanied him to offer him either physical or moral support, whichever of the two was the most needed. The back door was also locked, and Freddie had no more success in breaking down the back door than had Seamus at the front of the house.
“Come away you wimp, and let me try,” I told Freddie, after numerous half hearted, and unsuccessful, attempts at entry.
First I ran at the door using my shoulder to break it down, as I’d seen so many times on television, and backed away holding my shoulder and gasping in pain. Then I tried kicking it in and jarred my knee so badly that I was hobbling. I’d seen doors broken to matchwood on television, by using a shoulder, or kicking it open with the sole of a boot, but the reality of breaking and entering using physical force is a very different proposition.
When we returned to the street, having failed in our mission to gain entry, Seamus headed towards the construction site, where he and Freddie worked.
People had gathered on hearing the ruckus; many of them watching the proceedings from the safety of their own front doorsteps, while others joined the growing number of dissidents outside of the squat.
“What’s gooin on?” asked a scruffy individual wearing a grubby waistcoat and a collarless shirt, with rolled up shirtsleeves and a filthy flat cap perched on the top of his head.
“Seamus is trying to break intut squat,” answered his neighbour.
“What the fuck for?” asked the enquirer.
“Somebody towd him that yon druggies av kilt their baby.”
“Fuckin ell!” the enquirer replied.
The crowd turned in the direction of a rumbling sound approaching us from the direction of the construction site. A bright yellow digger, which had been left unattended over the weekend, by no other than Seamus himself, was travelling towards us with Seamus O’Malley behind the wheel. The digger boasted a large hydraulic bucket at the front, for bull dozing and loading transport vehicles from piles of soil or rubble, and a long articulated arm supporting a much smaller bucket at the rear, for use when digging trenches.
When the digger reached the squat it stopped abruptly. Everyone in the vicinity stepped back in anticipation, as Seamus raised the bucket on its long extending arm. The downstairs windows had been bricked up to deter children from playing inside the derelict buildings. Seamus could easily have demolished the bricked in windows with a touch from the digger, but he didn’t want any of the children, especially his own, entering the building after forcing an entry. The upper floors were already open to the elements, as youngsters found it great sport to throw bricks and stones through the upper windows.
Seamus had reasoned, before borrowing the digger, that due to the windows being broken and letting in the worst of the elements, not to mention the continuous rain of missiles thrown through the already broken windows by children, no one could possibly be using the upper floor of the building. This was where he intended to enter and catch the occupants unawares. He extended the diggers arm and guided it, unerringly, towards one of the upstairs windows. Crashing through what remained of the window pane, he then dropped the digger’s arm. The bucket hit the stone windowsill with a jolt, and as the digger moved backwards slightly, bricks and glass crashed down onto the street below.
He stopped the engine, and exiting the cab he began to climb the hydraulic arm until he reached the bucket, while everyone on the street watched in awe and anticipation. The roof had already begun to collapse, and Seamus entered the building through a very unstable opening. Just as he thought the upstairs rooms were unused, and he descended a creaky staircase to reach the ground floor. On his way down the stairs he extracted a turned wooden spindle from the banister rail, to use as a weapon, should he need one, and he brandished it menacingly in anticipation of an unexpected attack. On reaching the ground floor, unmolested, he noticed that the back door was ajar, as if someone had left the house in a hurry. A lighted candle stood on a wooden orange crate creating an eerie glow, glued to its position by a mountain of wax which has solidified around the base. Dirty mattresses, scavenged from abandoned houses, littered the floor, as if multiple occupants had been using the squat, and not just the targets of his search.
Seamus unlocked the front door to let us in, once he was sure that the house was empty, and we searched the ground floor for any signs of a baby, either alive or dead.
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Seamus. “I noticed a dilapidated old wardrobe in one of the bedrooms.”
“Is the staircase safe,” asked Randy, eyeing it with trepidation.
“I came down the fecking thing didn’t I,” answered Seamus tetchily.
We climbed the rickety staircase, and Seamus opened the wardrobe door to discover a stout cardboard box advertising a popular brand of washing powder. He placed the box on the floor and opened it. Inside was the emaciated body of baby girl, swaddled in a filthy blanket and resembling an Egyptian mummy. Almost a year old, she was so malnourished, and small, that she could have passed for a child of half her age. Her pallor was of a waxy yellow, like a waxwork dummy I thought and not like a real child at all, and her lips and eye rims were tinged with purple. On removing the blanket, which bound her, we discovered that cigarette burns, and bruises, covered the whole of her tiny body. I felt a lump in my throat and I struggled to fight back the tears, as I stared at the tiny creature in sheer amazement. Everyone appeared to be as stunned as was I, and no one seemed able to find the words that they wanted to say. I’d never contemplated discovering a dead child when we’d embarked on this investigation. We’d followed Seamus like sheep, without question, or more like lambs to the slaughter. This was a scene I never envisaged, and am never going to be able to forget for as long as I live.
Seamus collapsed on the dusty floor, and despite his tough exterior he cried like a baby.
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