Killing Jericho: A Heart-Stopping Thriller (The Scott Jericho Crime Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  KILLING JERICHO

  A Scott Jericho Thriller

  WILL HARKER

  End House Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 by Will Harker

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by End House Publishing

  For Trevor

  Contents

  STATEMENT OF SCOTT M JERICHO

  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

  STATEMENT OF SCOTT M JERICHO - CONCLUSION

  Scott Jericho will return

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  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  GLOSSARY OF TRAVELLER SLANG

  STATEMENT OF SCOTT M JERICHO:

  to be disclosed 30 years after my death

  HOW EVER DEATH EVENTUALLY found me, I’m sure it came on swift and brutal wings. That was how I lived my life, and an ugly end was probably no more than I deserved. All I can hope is that the darkness and violence that seemed my constant companions didn’t also reach out and destroy the people I loved.

  I imagine you now, some future investigator reading these pages, perhaps studying an old crime scene photograph of my ruined corpse. Whatever I looked like in death, let me tell you that I once had a beautiful mask: a nest of blue-black curls, strong features an unfinished stroke away from pretty, a pair of artless grey eyes that’d make Caravaggio swoon. You see, I’ve tried to be many things in my thirty-one years and not one is printed on my face. Reluctant fairground showman, earnest student, hired bone-breaker, CID detective, cleaner of prison toilets: through it all, my looks haven’t betrayed an ounce of hardship. Maybe that’s because I haven’t stuck at anything. To be fair, before I found the Malanowski children roasted alive in the back bedroom of their father’s shop, I was a pretty conscientious detective, but as to the rest, the years and the rust just roll off me.

  Of all those ill-fitting masks that I nipped and tucked into place, the one I’d most liked to have fitted was writer. Wherever I wound up—handing out plush toys on a hook-a-duck stall or pummelling ribs behind some genteel meth lab in the Oxfordshire countryside—I’d always have a notebook stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans. Ideas, neat little turns of phrase, a character sketch—I could write that kind of shit all day long. What I found tricky was coming up with a plot to hang it all on.

  Well, I’ve lived a three-card-trick of one now, so sit back, relax, and I’ll begin.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I KICKED THE CHAP OUT OF BED around noon. I suppose I should tell you right off, travelling showpeople have their own secret tongue; a rich and mystifying jargon designed to keep outsiders at bay. You’ll pick it up by instinct as we go on, but here’s a start: Chap (noun)—general dogsbody, usually male, who travels and works on the fair but is not himself a showman.

  “Fuh-uck,” he yawned, spearing an elbow into my ribs and rolling Michelangelo buttocks off the mattress. “All right, I’m going. God, if only you’d been this energetic last night.”

  I shrugged, acknowledging his critique. For two months I’d barely moved from my trailer (a rickety tin box built around the time Neil Armstrong hitched up his wagon and took the human race on tour), yet somehow I’d retained the arms of a stevedore and a physique that could still turn a head.

  The chap stepped into his briefs. Early twenties, we’d picked him up somewhere around Hampstead; a student earning a few quid on his summer break by working the circuit. I was groggy that morning, my brain half-buried in benzos, my body aching from a clearly unappreciated night of going through the motions, but there were patterns even I could read: a smudged ballpoint scrawl on his left hand—2009 – 1 – AC 302—a Court of Appeal citation, so a law student; leather wallet with initials embossed in gold, a studiously torn picture of a handsome, middle-aged woman in the sleeve as he flipped it open and checked his cash: a figure cut out, a father disowned?

  I grunted at myself. “Assumptions are your Achilles’ heel, Scott,” my old mentor DI Pete Garris had once told me. “You should always back up those hunches of yours. Cleverness will only get you so far.”

  “Catch you later, then,” the chap said, pushing blonde-streaked hair out of his eyes. “Maybe we can have a drink or something? Your treat; your dad doesn’t pay enough for me to splash out on booze every night.”

  “We’ll see,” I muttered. “Now, get out of it. I need to sleep.”

  It was all about sleep after all. That was why I’d bumped bones with him and then taken quadruple my Zopiclone prescription, all washed down with the corpse of a coffee I’d found decomposing on the kitchen counter. Like every night, I longed for that complete exhaustion where sleep comes fast and dreamless.

  Zac smiled and closed the door. Tucked away in the corral of trailers at the back of the ground, the only distinct sound I could hear was an ancient generator gasping itself to pieces. There was the ever-present song of the fair, of course—the somewhat sinister jangle of the carousel’s calliope mixed in with jabs of dance music from the Waltzer and the rattle, roar, and shake of the rides. If your ear’s accustomed, it’s almost a lullaby you can drift off to.

  The sun beat through the blinds. My eyes hazed, my body uncoiled. And then a blade of light played across the police file sitting on the table at the far end of the trailer, and I sprang, crablike along the bed, wrists meeting heels in my panic. Back to the wall, heart raging inside my chest, I could smell it again: the sting of unburned petrol, the stew of charred children, a stink that eighteen months could not erase.

  In my mind, I was back in the street, ducking under the blue and white cordon. I saw myself signing my name into the scene log—DC Scott Jericho—long, looping letters, full of the swagger of a know-nothing twat who thought he could bring sense out of any horror. Forensics whispered by in thei
r Tyvek suits, all their usual gallows humour missing. I knew the reason. I’d been the night duty detective and had taken the call. Even the most sociopathic SOCO knows not to joke when it’s a kiddie case.

  I dotted the ‘i’ in Jericho and strode into the burned-out shop, past guarded doorways, through to the living quarters at the back, nitrile-gloved hands at my sides, my mind clearing away the clutter of our team and the fire brigade’s own forensics unit. I started to sweat. A little rill ran down from my paper hood, the only moisture in this scorched memory of a home. The other officers fell back from the bedroom door as I approached (not badly damaged, I noticed: strange how fires behave) and let me through with a reverence that had nothing to do with me, a lowly detective constable, and everything to do with the clot of misery and despair that waited inside.

  The room felt like a holy place long abandoned. There were relics everywhere—twisted, melted things whose purpose only an archaeologist might have been able to reconstruct. Cheery in the gloom, yellow evidence markers surrounded the remains of a big bow-chested wardrobe. The forensics team gave a collective sigh as I reached out and pulled the double doors aside. I frowned then, both in the trailer, where I sat huddled like a tramp in winter, and in the memory. Something had dragged itself into the wardrobe and curled up like a butterfly in its chrysalis.

  It took moments to pick the illusion apart; to see that the something had originally been three somethings. I think I might have whispered No or Fuck or God. Three dead kids, arms pulled up like playground boxers, eyes tight shut, drawn together in their love and terror and desperation.

  The memory fractured. I kicked it away and got to my feet. Garris and his fucking files! Had he come yesterday? Surely I’d have remembered that interfering bastard picking his way through the garbage of my life and finding a space for himself to perch. I scanned the trailer and saw a cleared nook on the built-in settee. Yes, he’d sat there, between the mounds of my old books and a fortnight’s worth of laundry, but when exactly had he visited? No idea.

  I’d asked, if he had to bring cases I’d never review, could he at least put them in a non-official folder? Garris hadn’t asked why—human details were, as ever, unimportant to him—he just wanted a bit of off-the-record assistance from his former protégé. I stared now at the manila sleeve. A new case, a fresh way to fail. I didn’t even open the cover. Tearing the slim contents in two, I was about to shove the lot into the bin when Sal burst through the door.

  I’ve known Sal Myers since forever. We’d been Traveller chavvies together, our early childhood explorations covering a vast terrain of half-assembled rides, delicate fingers searching where they shouldn’t. Now, Sal blew a strand of auburn hair from her face and surveyed the wreckage of my trailer. Something had driven her here in a hurry and she looked royally pissed off. At first, I wondered if it was the recent departure of Zac, and although that turned out not to be the case, she must have seen him leaving and the news that brought her was momentarily forgotten.

  Sal looked around with the kind of expression she’d usually reserve for the most dinlo of joskins (Dinlo (adjective): fuckwitted; Joskin: (noun) anyone not a member of the travelling life, especially those that live in houses). I was sweating badly from the flashback, my back honeyed with it, jewels gleaming in my chest hair.

  “Had another one up here, then?” She locked freckly arms over the bib of her work dungarees. “If you’re trying to embarrass your dad, you can stop right now. The poor old mush is already walking around like he wants the ground to eat him up.”

  “Didn’t think you were so intolerant,” I muttered. “I know some round here are stuck in the nineteenth century, but you?”

  “Don’t give me that middle-class joskin bollocks,” she spat back. “No one here cares who you sleep with…”

  I didn’t believe that. Not entirely. For all their talk of being outsiders, the fairground has its own conservativeness. It holds its people close and likes them to be of a certain type; if divergence exists then such activities are to be carried out in the shadows.

  “Screw whoever you like,” Sal continued. In a fairly ineffectual way, she started cleaning up, dishes sploshed into the heaving sink, Fairy Liquid added to the toxic jumble. “That’s not what gets your dad down. It’s this. Week-old shirts that can stand up on their own, pizza boxes that look like biology experiments, and yes, you poking every slag in sight.”

  That wasn’t fair on Zac, nor most of the others. I opened my mouth to argue but didn’t get past the first syllable.

  “I don’t know, Scott,” she sighed. “Maybe you should just go. My Jodie, she idolizes you, draws you pictures, bakes you cakes, but I daren’t send her round here for fear of what she’ll find.”

  “Really? I think Jodie’s got a broader mind than her mother.” Groaning off the bed, I hitched blue jeans over my hips, toed my outsize feet into a pair of sandals, and pulled on a grubby white vest. Dishes crashed under Sal’s hands and she turned on me, cheeks flushed.

  “So she should just walk in and see you lying spaced out in that pit of a bed? She’s seven years old, for Christ’s sake. Look, Scott, I’ve tried, we all have. When you came out of prison, we did everything we could for you—and don’t forget, we never begged you to come back here.”

  I took a breath. “Sal, I had nowhere else to go.”

  “Course you didn’t. If you did, you’d probably never have seen your father again.”

  There was no answer to that. She had me nailed with the kind of killer observation that, in my CID days, I’d have reserved for a final interview clincher. My instincts were slow, as I’ve told you, my gifts—whatever they actually amount to—a shadow of those that had once so impressed Pete Garris that he’d cajoled me into joining the force. Even so, I knew that something was wrong.

  “What is it?” I scratched the heel of my hand through the dark bristle of my jaw. “You didn’t come here just to call me a joskin.”

  Skirting around her, I flicked open the door, cleared the trailer step and headed for the trestle table I’d set up outside. I poured a bowl of summer-warm water from a canister and was about to soap my face when Sal laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “He’s here,” she said. “The skinhead. They found him parnying behind the swing boats like some juk marking its territory. Ted and Johnny are guarding him right now.”

  “A skinhead?” My laughter was hollow. I knew who she meant. “Fuck’s that gotta do with me?”

  Glancing up, I saw a bluebottle at the trailer window. It bobbed and danced there like the resurrected on the Day of Judgment.

  “It’s the one you put in the hospital,” she said. “That fascist fuck who set the fire and killed them little Polish kids.” Sal’s voice came to me as if she were standing in another room.

  “It’s Kerrigan.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “DON’T.” SAL’S HAND AGAINST my chest. “Don’t give that murdering bastard an excuse to call the gavvers. You fight him, they’ll have you back inside, and pretty soon after Kerrigan’ll come for the last pot you pissed in.” I pushed her arm away and she gripped my wrist, her fingers loops of pale steel. “You won’t come back out again. You hear me, Scotty? You’ll die in there this time.”

  “In there, out here, what’s the difference?” I shrugged, realizing it was the first honest thing I’d said to her since she’d picked me up from HMP Hazelhurst two months earlier.

  Pulling free, I strode out along the backs of the joints, running now, jumping over trailer couplings. A few old aunts and grandmothers called to me from their steps and deckchairs, excitement piping in their cracked voices. They were attuned to the motions of their world and knew when a good punch-up was in the offing.

  Out from behind the side ground where the shooting galleries and mirror mazes stood, I jumped the rail of Urnshaw’s dodgems. Sparks brawled in the electric cage overhead as I zig-zagged between the riders. One of the chaps rodeoing the back of a bumper car shouted a
warning to his boss and Big Sam Urnshaw swarmed out of his booth and caught me by the elbow. This barrel-chested showman hooked something in my eye, the same signal the aunts had noticed, and in an instant, understood.

  “You gonna ruck someone?” he hollered over the racket of his ride. I shrugged. “Does the old man know?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He whistled and Sam Jr raced over. I’d left the life when I was nineteen, soon after my mother died, and not having grown up with this new generation I was viewed by them with suspicion. They knew my history—that I’d snubbed my heritage and become as near as damn it to a Judas when I joined the force—yet still I was one of them and Little Sam gave me a tight smile.

  “Go find Jericho,” his father instructed. “Tell him his son’s on the warpath. On your toes now.”

  The kid set off like a whippet.

  I didn’t want my dad in attendance but it’s seldom a showman can have a ruck to himself, so I quickly moved on. Whistles trailed me as other showmen vaulted their counters and stepped in behind. No one asked where we were going or why, they just knew something was about to go down.

  We’d come out of a line of side stalls when Sal caught up. She didn’t try to argue or pull me away, just marched at my side. Ahead, it seemed that even the punters had begun to catch on and they began to make a path for our procession. Danger’s always been part of a fair’s allure, right from the days of the knife-throwers and boxing shows, yet those pantomimes were never really what drew the crowds. Joskins know, you see? Deep down they’re aware that Travellers live outside the rules by which their own lives are governed and that, if they go to the fair, perhaps they might catch a glimpse of that older, truer danger. Now they lined our route, parents clutching small hands, kids with eyes as round as Ferris wheels.

  Kerrigan came into view. He was leaning against a miniature Wild West wagon, part of a set of carousel vehicles. He flashed a grin when he clocked me and jumped down from the ride’s runnerboard. Aside from the absence of the plastic mask that had held his shattered cheekbone in place, he hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him in the witness box at my trial.