The Chosen Ones Read online

  Howard Linskey

  * * *

  THE CHOSEN ONES

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  FOLLOW PENGUIN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE CHOSEN ONES

  Howard Linskey is the author of a series of crime novels set in the North-East, featuring detective Ian Bradshaw and journalists Tom Carney and Helen Norton. Previously he has written the David Blake series, the first of which, The Drop, was selected as one of the ‘Top Five Crime Thrillers of the Year’ by The Times. Originally from Ferryhill in County Durham, Howard now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and daughter.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  No Name Lane

  Behind Dead Eyes

  The Search

  THE DAVID BLAKE SERIES

  The Drop

  The Damage

  The Dead

  This one is dedicated to Danielle & Cameron Pope with much love. I’m so proud of you both.

  On looking up, on looking down,

  She saw a dead man on the ground;

  And from his nose unto his chin,

  The worms crawled out, the worms crawled in.

  Then she unto the parson said,

  ‘Shall I be so when I am dead:’

  ‘O yes! O yes,’ the parson said,

  ‘You will be so when you are dead.’

  ‒ ‘Gammer Gurton’s Garland’, 1784

  CHAPTER ONE

  1997

  When Eva woke, imprisoned in a large metal box, the one thing that terrified her more than the prospect of her captor returning was the thought that he might not. Then she would be trapped here for good, or at least until she ran out of the things she needed most: food, water, air.

  Oh my God, how long would that take? She didn’t want to die like this. She didn’t want to die at all. She had to stifle the overwhelming feeling of panic and face the reality of her situation. As her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she realized she was in a container of some sort, with thick corrugated-metal sides, floor and roof. She felt dizzy and tried to focus on her surroundings so she could clear her head and begin to understand what might have happened to her.

  She was lying on a cheap camp bed with no memory of how she had got there. The only light came from a single battery-operated lamp set upon a packing case that acted as a makeshift bedside table. She felt incredibly weak and had a splitting headache which added to her conviction that she must have been drugged somehow. Had someone put something in her drink, or did something happen after she had left the pub? She couldn’t remember.

  How had she got here? Who had trapped her in this airless metal prison, no bigger than her bedroom at home?

  Then there were the unfamiliar clothes. She hadn’t been wearing them before. Her dress was gone. In its place there was a thick, dark-blue sweatshirt that was a little too big for her, its cuffs riding down over her hands, and a pair of loose tracksuit bottoms. Eva didn’t remember removing her dress voluntarily, or putting these other items on. Someone had stripped her then dressed her, but she must have been unconscious while it happened. She was still wearing the same underwear, minus her bra. The thought made her feel physically sick.

  In her fear, Eva’s hand gripped the side of the bed. The mattress sagged in the middle where it had once been folded for storage. It smelt new, as if it had been bought with her in mind – that was another chilling realization.

  The metal box was a rectangular shape and around twenty feet long and eight wide, with a door in the far wall. There was barely enough room to stand up. Eva tried to do just that but rose too quickly and her legs immediately buckled and she fell back on to the side of the bed, slipped off and landed heavily on the cold, hard floor. She managed to crawl towards the door, fighting the effects of the drug she was sure she must have been given. Once there, she struggled to pull herself to her feet. When she was finally upright, she tugged on the door then pushed at it. Even in her weakened state, she could tell it was stuck fast, locked from the outside.

  She returned to the bed, feeling as if her legs were about to give way again at any moment, and allowed herself to fall back on to it. Then she tried hard to remember what had happened to her, and fragments of the previous evening slowly came back to her.

  She had been in the pub with the girls. She didn’t think she had been all that drunk. Eva had a flash of recollection: the girls laughing together about something someone had said, then, later, they were leaving, some on to a club, but Eva couldn’t go with them because she was meant to be at work the next day. Would her colleagues at the gym have missed her and reported her missing, or would they just have assumed she had overslept or felt ill? Was anyone looking for her?

  She recalled almost falling over in the street outside the pub because one of her heels broke suddenly, and that she had to go barefoot, making her way gingerly along the pavement.

  What had happened after that? Her memory of the evening seemed to end with her standing alone in a street down by the quayside. She recalled walking away from a taxi rank because the queue was absurdly long; it could take an hour to reach the front. She’d been put off by the raised voices an
d the pushing in she’d witnessed, the kind of behaviour that always seemed to cause a fight. But, after she had made her decision to turn away, what then?

  Rain.

  Rain? She had a memory of rain, hard and unrelenting, with large drops falling and drenching her. She had worn no coat that night. It had been a sudden and malicious downpour that soaked her auburn hair and drenched her dress until it clung to her. It was so heavy people were running to take shelter, but Eva was barefoot and the ground was cold, wet and slippery. She couldn’t remember anything more after that. Had she been snatched in the street? Had she gone with someone willingly? She couldn’t imagine she would ever do that unless it was somebody she knew, but had the combination of the downpour and a couple of drinks made her careless? Would she have accepted a lift from a stranger? It seemed unlikely.

  The panic began to rise again in her, along with a clawing sense of despair. Eva had almost reached breaking point when she noticed something scraped on the wall near the foot of the bed: white marks, lots of them ‒ and she thought she understood what they were.

  She reached for the handle of the lamp and scrambled down to the foot of the bed, holding her face close and the lamp closer, so she could be sure. Scratched into the metal wall of the box were a large number of little white lines. Four verticals and a diagonal over them, to indicate the number five.

  Five days.

  Someone had been keeping track of the days, somebody who had been held prisoner here before Eva. Each clump of lines represented five days, and there were many, filling a large space that ran down to the floor of the box then ending abruptly. Eva began to scream then.

  Inside the box, her screams came loud and shrill and they went on and on, with a force powered by blind terror. Outside, they were muffled by the thick walls of her metal prison. No one could hear.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jenna Ellison always enjoyed the calm that descended at five minutes to six. It was just before locking-up time and her little shop was empty. Everyone knew what time she closed her doors and respected it. Dashing in with a couple of minutes to spare, to grab some washing powder or a packet of sweets, would be thought rude. It was one of the many reasons she never once regretted the decision to swap hectic city living for life in a sleepy village.

  It was serendipity: the shop had become available at exactly the right time. She had just enough money, had grown weary of Newcastle and was more than ready for a change. The old lady who had run the place long after normal retirement age finally bowed to the inevitable, selling the lease on the shop and the first-floor flat that went with it, to move away and live with her daughter and her family. Grange Moor needed a shop, so the villagers had given her a cautious welcome, keeping their distance while they waited to see what changes she would bring about. When the stock stayed largely the same but with the addition of products that proved to be popular, when the opening hours didn’t alter and she continued to run the villagers’ small ads in her windows for free, it stood her in good stead.

  Jenna wasn’t naïve. She knew she would always be an outsider, but she didn’t mind that. As long as the locals bought goods from her and continued to tolerate her presence among them, that was good enough for her. When the shop closed for the day, she felt like she was pulling up the drawbridge; happy to climb the stairs to her flat, feed the cat, cook something in her tiny kitchen and eat dinner in glorious solitude while watching TV in the lounge, with its bay window overlooking the village green, which always seemed to catch the last of the evening sun.

  Sometimes she would venture out to the local pub, order a glass of wine and exchange pleasantries with the locals before happily retiring to a corner of the lounge bar. Unlike most women she knew, she had never had a problem going into a quiet pub alone. For the most part, she was happy to be on her own. The men who approached her, especially the married ones, were easily but politely brushed off and she would go back to quietly reading her book. She didn’t want a man.

  When she thought of her life here in Grange Moor, Jenna felt a sense of serene calm. She had escaped her past, and the memories had slowly begun to fade, even though she knew they would never disappear entirely. Usually, she managed to push them from her mind.

  Until she saw the note.

  It was on the mat when Jenna went to lock the front door. It must have been pushed through the letterbox, but she hadn’t noticed anyone pass the window. There was no envelope, just the handwritten note, with neat writing in block capitals on lined paper.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  Jenna felt heat rush into the skin of her face and a sharp tingle of shock passed through her body. Who had sent this? How could anyone know? It wasn’t possible.

  There was nothing on the note to give her a clue: no familiar handwriting, no signature or contact number, no indication of what the writer might want from her to keep her secret, just that one simple, devastating fact.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Detective Sergeant Ian Bradshaw had been summoned to Kane’s office by his boss, DI Kate Tennant. It had been a frosty invitation, consisting of the words, ‘DCI Kane wants to see you,’ before she pointedly added: ‘again.’

  Now Bradshaw was waiting in the office ‒ his DCI was late for their appointment ‒ and he had time to ponder Kate Tennant’s hostility. He couldn’t really blame her. Whenever there was a tricky case with few leads, little evidence and the prospect of newspaper headlines such as ‘BAFFLED POLICE STUMPED’ becoming attached to it, there were usually only two possible outcomes. The first: the case would be assigned to Durham Constabulary’s only female detective inspector, for her team to pick up the poisoned chalice, and even then it would be done reluctantly, with senior officers admitting that this was the 1990s, after all, as if they were being bludgeoned into accepting the intrusion of women into their previously exclusively male environment. The other outcome would be that Kate Tennant’s already insufficient workforce would be reduced even further, because DCI Kane would see fit to ‘borrow’ Ian Bradshaw from her, to provide ‘a fresh pair of eyes’. Kane had a grudging respect for Bradshaw’s academic record, but he was defiantly old school in his own methods, so he viewed the DS with suspicion. Being called to Kane’s office could often feel like a back-handed compliment. Bradshaw knew he was seen as a last resort.

  He didn’t really fit in. He wasn’t a golfer or a mason, didn’t always agree with the orders he was given, often relied on his instincts and, to the bemusement of his colleagues, had no particular desire to be promoted. It wasn’t exactly true that DS Bradshaw was happy where he was; he just knew he’d be even more unhappy if he rose any further, and his mental health had been too fragile in recent years to add more stress to his life voluntarily.

  Bradshaw was hampered by a self-doubt that rarely seemed to plague more senior men. He wasn’t sure why he worried about not being good enough when he was often unimpressed by his superiors’ abilities, but he couldn’t help it. Bradshaw dreamed of a far less responsible life, without murder, with no missing children, abused teenagers, grieving relatives or multiple killers to contend with. On his last foreign holiday he’d seriously considered staying abroad to run a bar or work in a hotel. Wouldn’t a world of lemon trees and olive groves be more tranquil than this one?

  Bradshaw knew he would never actually do this. His overwrought mind needed the distraction that investigating complex cases provided. He dreaded to think how he would fare if he had too much time alone with his thoughts. He’d already endured counselling sessions to cope with earlier traumas, something he’d found utterly pointless. Kate Tennant was less convinced of the need to suspend the sessions. ‘Are you sure about this, Ian?’ she had asked when she signed the forms freeing him from regular appointments with the excruciating Dr Mellor. ‘You could probably use someone to talk to.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got mates,’ he protested, and she raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Not exactly pub chat,’ she said, meaning the time he h
ad spent one to one with a notorious child-killer, trying to get inside the man’s mind to solve the disappearance of a missing girl, but she signed the forms anyway, making him feel like a kid getting a note from his mum excusing him from games.

  Bradshaw had assured her there were no lasting scars from his repeated encounters with Adrian Wicklow. Of course he hadn’t mentioned the bad dreams, night terrors and chronic insomnia. He had also failed to explain another side-effect he’d begun to notice recently: his deadened emotional sense. Almost a year on, the things Bradshaw used to enjoy felt like pale shadows of their former selves. Seeing mates outside the force ‒ not that he had that many ‒ going to the pub, walks in the countryside, watching football, a meal, a drink, a kiss; all of these things felt different now somehow, as if they didn’t really matter all that much in the scheme of things.

  He was snapped out of these thoughts abruptly when Kane arrived. The DCI greeted Bradshaw with the words, ‘Eight detectives!’

  Before Bradshaw could react or even stand up, Kane dropped a copy of the country’s biggest-selling tabloid newspaper on to his lap. ‘Suspended!’ he said angrily. ‘All eight of them,’ and Kane shook his head vehemently, as if he had never heard of such a thing.

  Bradshaw looked at that morning’s front page. The headline seemed to roar at them:

  ‘BENT COPPERS CAUGHT IN STING’

  Underneath was a strapline that helpfully explained how a TV documentary crew had filmed detectives taking bribes and offering protection to drug dealers.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Bradshaw, scanning the piece. The documentary in question would be screened in a couple of days and Durham police were being forced to ‘clean house’ by undertaking a full and comprehensive investigation into the matter, which was likely to recommend a much-needed ‘root and branch reform’.

  ‘It’s a disgrace!’ roared Kane. Bradshaw felt quite buoyed by his DCI’s anger at the police officers who had besmirched the name of their force, but only for a moment. ‘It’s not eight detectives filmed taking bribes. It’s just one!’