Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ereader ebook .txt) 📕

boots behind me. We passed between the hoardings of a shooting gallery and a hook-a-duck stall. Up ahead stood the corral of trailers, and off to their right, a web of washing lines with a few damp sheets fluttering dankly in the breeze. The question as I headed towards the lines was, which of them? I knew I’d been practically untouchable during my time on the force–even the most psychopathic of mobsters is wary of taking down a serving police officer–but after my disgrace and release from prison? I could think of one or two who might still nurse a grudge.

We were within a few metres of the clotheslines when the juks’ persistent grumble broke into a scattershot of barking. My gaze snapped to trailer doors and windows, caught the glow of TV lights on drawn blinds. Travellers always protect their own, but I didn’t want backup. Not tonight. However it came off, I wanted this confrontation all to myself. And so, ducking under the first bedsheet, I shouted a command and the juks fell silent.

I yanked at the damp sheet, sending plastic pegs popping into the air. Then I was back under the clothesline, my fists twisted so firmly around the sheet that the soggy chill of it scorched my knuckles. My pursuer’s senses were keen, he’d be used to surprise attacks, and so I knew that brute force was my only option. He was already stepping away when I lunged forward and wrapped the icy material around his head. Something familiar in that face before it vanished under the suffocating white. A word, perhaps my name, deadened by the sheet. I didn’t allow myself time to register any recognition. Hesitation now could be lethal.

It took the man seconds to overcome his panic. Just a few moments of scrabbling at the chokehold of the sheet before his experience kicked in. Trying to save himself that way would get him nowhere, and he knew it. He had to disable the attacker, not the weapon. By the time he jolted sideways, pulling me with him and spearing his elbow into my gut, I’d dragged him as far as the forest. Despite the sudden winding, I managed to regain my footing and throw him hard against the nearest tree. I heard the dull smack of his skull on the trunk, saw the bedsheet torn away from his head. Ignoring the pain in my ribs, I sucked down as much air as I could and launched myself at him again.

Christ, but this guy was strong. I’d been a scrapper since childhood, almost all Traveller chavvies are, and through either the charm of my personality or simply because I possessed the kind of face people liked to punch, a lot of my adulthood seemed to have been spent brawling. But I’d hardly ever come up against such a tough bastard as this.

He was trying to say something while at the same time landing a left hook to my upper arm that sent me spinning into the undergrowth. I scrambled to my feet, ignored the click at my shoulder joint. He was speaking again, but this was a well-worn tactic. If a punishment beating isn’t going to plan then a ‘friendly’ word mid-confrontation, maybe an offer to defuse the situation, is often gladly accepted by the other party. Then, once his guard is down, the hurt can really begin.

The sky was moonless, the darkness thick in the forest. I couldn’t see his face properly. He held up his hands, palms out, a truce declared. I slouched towards him, panting, playing into this fiction. My heart hammered out a fast, skittish beat. I could sense the rage inside me, straining like the fairground juks at its leash. His words were lost against the blood roaring in my head. I moved quickly into his orbit and aimed a jab at the crook of his right elbow. He anticipated it, snatching at my wrist with a grip like iron, bending my arm backwards until I saw stars. I rolled with the counterattack, and dropping to one knee, used my free arm to drive an elbow into the big tibial nerve in the back of his leg.

Another man would have screamed in agony. This man let out only a short grunt. Still, the spasm did its work and his legs came unhinged, felling him to the forest floor. Meanwhile, I groaned to my feet and dug the phone from my coat pocket. Its torchlight flashed across the bedsheet, billowing on a branch and smeared with dirt, before finding my pursuer. Sprawled in a bed of autumn leaves, he was laughing against his pain and holding out a hand to me.

“That was a snide move, Scott,” he said. “But for old time’s sake, I forgive you.”

In the well of his palm, I saw the cigarette burn like a white sun, its rays radiating to the edges of his hand. At the sight of it, my anger vanished.

I suddenly remembered us in bed together, in the quiet confessional moments after making love, my finger circling that old scar as he told me the story of its origin. I had held him when the tears started in his eyes. Tears from a man whose job it was to inflict pain and to jest at scars. In the end, he’d broken down completely, reliving his youth on the Humber estuary. The mother who had abandoned him, the abusive father—a fisherman—embittered by the death of his industry and the shame of being unable to provide for his growing son.

I stepped forward now and pulled the flat cap from his head. Those denim-blue eyes, almost black in the dark of the wood, blinked up at me. Mussed by the removal of his hat, a shock of red hair stood out like flames while his pale skin complemented the white teeth behind that pained grimace. He flapped his fingers at me and the veins that ran like rivers down his huge arms pulsed in time with