Untitled crime novel

These first two chapters hopefully set the framework for who my victim is, who my murderer is and who my investigator is. Some detailed information may move to other chapters as the book progresses

CHAPTER 1

Hot puffs of breath mixed with the frozen mist in rapid clouds that melted into the fog, knees thudded in objection as her feet hit the ground. Her torso tightened, the tendons at the back of her legs strained and pulled against their will. Her vest top clung to her in an impossible sweat and made her freeze even more. Her arms were red and blotched with purple patterns around the goosebumps like tiny pimples in need of a skin cure, track marks and bruises dotted along her veins.

The streets were quiet but she knew she'd have a chance if she could just get across the new development site to the High Street or the alley car park. Taking main roads to the town centre where the police station was, and where she knew people would still be out celebrating Saturday night, could be a blessing but she couldn't take the chance again of flagging down a passing motorist for help. He must know she'd gone missing by now and he'd be looking for her. She squeezed through a gap in the fence around the development site, squatted down behind a parked car on Victoria Street, her stomach cramped in panic, and forced bile to her throat which she spewed out into the gutter.

Dirty hands with long fingers that ended with jagged and broken fingernails torn into bloody tips wrapped across her mouth and swiped it dry leaving a grubby trail. Her mind was numb, focussed only on cold and fear. It was incapable of rational thought . She repeated to herself to wake it up : “car park, alley, High Street.” She had to stay focussed. They were just ahead and help was just beyond. She darted looks left, right, behind her, crept out from around the car, the road was still quiet. No moving cars, no people, but several vehicles, white with frost were parked along each side obviously asleep until rush hour in the morning when their owners would struggle to wake them.

The lights of the apartment blocks on one side of the street were out except for a couple near the top in a soft hazy daze against the fog. The grand houses with stone steps leading up to big doors looked formidable and dark. The tatty houses on the other side of the street looked mostly uninhabited. She weighed up her best chances. Knocking doors would leave her exposed, out in the open, unprotected and bait if he came cruising by as she stood freezing, filthy, blood-stained and wretched waiting for someone to answer the door. If she tried to make town he could be hiding, waiting, and he'd see her before she got there. Her brain wouldn't work. It just told her to run and run fast. She stood, wrapped her arms around her and hunched into herself as if trying to squeeze her slim frame smaller into invisibility. She walked rapidly to the end of the street, past the corner shop, and then broke out into a sprint over the bottom end of High Street and to the car park at the entrance to the alley. She bobbed down again behind a parked car panting rapidly but hope of help there left her when there was no one around and no sound but that of her own breath still making the air around her warmer that it made her.

She crawled through the cars on all fours towards the alley that would take her to the top end of High Street where she was certain she'd get help. Somewhere deep from the depths of panic, fear and pain her brain agreed and proved her right when she entered the long dark old brick alley where she immediately heard cackling laughter and floating chatter rise up from the town centre.

The sound of normal happy life crept along the top end of High Street and got stronger as revellers approached the far end of the alleyway that shrouded her. Her intended roar for attention dissolved into a pathetic squeak from a parched throat on fire that did nothing to protect her from the freezing cold but robbed her of her voice. She screamed again as best she could as she ran along the alley but her voice again deserted her and was easily strangled by guttural laughter and playful high pitched squeals as the drunks walked on oblivious to the hope she had in them. Then there was silence. A stillness, like the moment when birds stop singing, insects vanish and flower petals close in defence against the sudden and furious storm that beats down in blind fury through heavy still clouds onto the exposed and open landscape.

The only sound was her own breath and her heart thumping against her rib cage. She stopped to listen to the noise outside of her own body and held what little breath she had. Nothing. No-one. She released rhythmic gasps as she fought to refill her lungs with air and bent over, hands on her ripped knees. She darted anxious looks up and down the black alleyway, hair in rats tails hung each side of her face and flicked like whips as they blew away from her as she puffed. Street lights bounced pale light into the blackness and she knew she was not far. It would be over soon. They'd have to believe her. She stood, and straightened, more relaxed this time, more focussed on where she needed to be and turned to run again. And then the blow. Sharp, searing pain in her temples and the back of her eyes, warmth spread like thick syrup down her face, and then darkness descended into black.

A man smiled, bent over her and lifted her up as if she was drunk and had to lean on him for support as he half carried and half dragged her back along the alley to the car park. Footsteps and mixed gentle voices sounded at the top High Street end of the alley so he shifted quickly into one of the old piss-stained and littered alcoves in case they turned in. He held the girl up against him and both melted into the darkness under cover of his black clothes. He held his breath as the clip clop of shoes and chatter of lovers got closer, level, and then moved past him before they stopped a little further up. They embraced. He heard the sound of their kissing like dogs slurping the last of the food in their dish. Animals, he thought. People were only animals with basic needs and he knew what they'd be doing tonight when they got home. Animals.

The girl moaned. He put his hand over her mouth and nose and held tight until she went limp again. A flicker of excitement ran through him as she slumped against him, heat rose in his chest and his heart beat a little faster.

The lovers were too engrossed in each other to notice the world let alone anyone else around them but after the embrace they walked on, chatting, giggling, laughing. He listened carefully and heard a car engine start at the other end of the alley. He waited a minute and then heaved the girl along. The fog had thickened and he could barely make out his battered old Vauxhall Astra in the car park but that was a good thing. There was no one around, visibility was limited in this fog and so he was sure that no one would see him.

He opened the boot of his car and slung the girl inside. She shouldn't have come looking. It was her own fault. She deserved all she got. But now he had a problem to deal with.

CHAPTER 2

The fog wasn’t as thick or as frozen as last night but the air was damp and grey. Gloom hung over the top of the two-up two-down terraced houses on one side of traffic dirty Victoria Street and the four storey houses on the other, some broken up into bedsits, some developed into student flats and others into high rise executive apartments. Fencing with a bent panel for vandals to squeeze through cordoned off the barren land and brick foundations of where the old second hand shop once stood between a refurbished dentist’s surgery on one side, with thick cream blinds in the window and brass lettering on the door, and the corner shop on the other advertising tobacco, sweets and newspapers with a big Fakham Herald Sold Here banner in the window. A big sign informed that the land had been sold and was awaiting development like many others in Fakham which hadn‘t quite reinvented itself before the crash came and money ran out.

Lou Weekes sat waiting for the lights to turn green. Things hadn’t really changed in a century, she thought. In the old days when men worked 14 hours a day in heavy engineering factories littered across the city, they paid rent to their wealthy industrial employers who lived in the big grand houses on one side while their workers shared the smaller overcrowded houses on the other with their families and lodgers who helped to make ends meet. Then, despite the poverty, the houses were pristine. Lou once interviewed an old woman who’d lived down there before the war who told her how they used to be in competition with their neighbours. The best housewives were always out early scrubbing the front door step. The modern white British poor on benefits and immigrants rented rooms in those now shabby looking houses and the only people on front door steps were the heroin addicts begging for “a bit of small change please.”

Grubby dust and nicotine stained nets hung in some windows. Others had panes broken out and cardboard strategically placed to stop the cold from getting in. Of course the new professionals on the regenerated side of the road were always complaining about those on the old side to the council and the Herald and anyone else who would listen about anti-social behaviour from the drug addicts, paid sickness benefit to get high on heroin or morphine every day, and the Eastern Europeans who had recently moved into houses that the professionals termed sheds with beds because they were so overcrowded.

The Polish, Lithuanians, Romanians, Russians and Czechs worked hard on the land in the neighbouring agricultural countryside, spent little, lived in cramped conditions in hope to send as much money home to relatives as possible so it’s no wonder they went outside to smoke, to chat, to socialise, to breathe fresh air, to drink cheap beer and vodka on the street because the pubs were now too expensive and exclusive since the bloody awful smoking ban that Lou despised so much. But such behaviour wasn’t in keeping with the new vibrant and middle class city the bourgeoisie council and the developers at Fakham Associates were trying to create. Wretched and poor people littered the area and gave it a bad name when Regeneration was the new buzz word on everyone’s lips which, it seemed, included regenerating the people who lived in the area if they weren’t quite bourgeoisie enough. But not all of the locals wanted it in traditional working class, and now largely underclass or professional class, Fakham. Change was coming fast, too fast, for the town which had altered more in 10 years than the previous 100.

Lou’s hands were on the steering wheel. She tapped her fingers impatiently, turned her wrist inwards and looked at her watch. If she didn’t get to her desk within the next five minutes, news editor Andrew Sharp would literally have her guts for garters. He was a nasty piece of work who could slice out your kidney before you’d realised you’d been stabbed in the back. She hoped he’d move on soon. That sort usually did even though their talent was always claimed on the back of good journalists who did the real digging and legwork for the great stories he claimed credit for and sold to news agencies for the few extra hundred quid each week that he didn’t deserve or earn.

She pressed her foot hard on the accelerator as the lights changed, turned onto the south end of High Street past the entrance to the alley that linked both ends of town, and then slammed down hard on the brake. A pedestrian shot out and had taken a chance at running through the red man at the crossing. Everyone was in a hurry it seemed. Lucky for Lou, and the idiot in a baseball cap and trainers, she was on the ball this morning when she had no right to be after last night’s session with her best mate Munday. They’d shared a few spliffs, a few giggles, Munday had played her his latest composition on his guitar and she knew when she crushed the last of several joints out at 2am, and then got up late this morning, that she’d have to hit the ground running. Munday’s cold shower helped to wake her up. The near miss with the pedestrian had certainly cleared the haze from the dope smoking but she was trembling at the thought of what would have happened if she‘d hit that man.

Instead of thanks for her rapid reaction that saved the dickhead’s life, the pedestrian in a matching off white track suit with black stripes down each leg and sleeve, looked back as he got safely to the other side, lifted his arm, faced his hand outwards and then raised his two index fingers and split them apart into the sign of a V and flicked. His profanity was no more than mouthed words drowned out by the noise of the busy traffic travelling up and down High Street in a rush. Lou’s heart still pounded at the near miss. Her whole body shook in rhythm to it’s forceful beat and she knew it was the dope that had made her so anxious. A horn sounded behind her. But she needed a minute to compose herself. She sat back, puffed out a huge sigh, reached for a cigarette from the well under the gear stick, a lighter from the dashboard and then lit up. She drew in a long draw and then exhaled with a huge pleasurable sigh and allowed the tension to drain away. Cigarette bouncing from her mouth, she pushed the car into gear and prepared to move on as the bloke in a suit in the car behind continued to pap his horn and make rude gestures at her that she could see in her rear view mirror. Everybody seemed in such a bad mood these days and she was no exception especially where Sharp was concerned but he was her boss so she’d have to button it.

A volley of profanities burst forth from Lou’s jacket pocket in an infantile, squabbling and offensive tirade, as she turned off the car engine in the Fakham Herald car park. She’d forgotten she’d changed her ring tone last night to the offensive cartoon show’s rude joke theme in a moment of high giggles with Munday who had Bluetoothed it to her mobile for a shared laugh. She knew she’d have to change it back, it wasn’t exactly “appropriate” for a professional who could be sat in an inquest hearing with grieving parents one minute, while talking to a headmistress about an infant school nativity the next, but she smiled in recognition of the caller.

“Hi Neil. What you got for me? Something I could use as a spade, I hope.”

Most hacks would kill for the kind of special relationship between Lou and DCI Neil Worthy from Fakham CID - if they didn’t kill each other first.

“What you been up to this time? I always said you were like dog s**t - you spread everywhere.”

“Very funny. I’m just running late and his lordship is bound to have a go. So what’s new?”

Lou banged the car door shut and the blip as she locked up remotely from her keyholder sounded. She turned her back to walk towards the metal door in the three storey purpose built Fakham Herald building which a handful of staff occupied since it's printing presses went and it downgraded from daily to weekly in line with falling circulation figures. Everyone got free news from the internet these days so they didn't buy newspapers - or as newcomers to the city they had no real interest or affiliation in community news from a town that they were mostly passing through with no intention of laying down roots.

She paused before pressing the combination of keys that would allow her inside and pulled out her cigarettes from her bag instead. She pinched one out, put it to her mouth and lit up.

“You’re still smoking then?” Neil said as Lou blew out.

“Yeah, don’t tell me you can smell it over the phone now too - isn’t that called fourth or fifth hand smoke or some rubbish?“

“I thought you were running late.”

“I am. But I need the extra five minutes I haven’t got this morning after a dickhead ran out in front of my car and nearly got himself killed and me done for driving without due care. But you didn’t phone to talk to me about my smoking, I’m sure.”

“No, but it’s why I left you.”

“Oh f**k off Neil. Her name was Jacqui and we both know it.”

She fiddled with her bag, put her keys inside and held her cigarette pack and lighter in one hand as the phone was held to her ear in a hunch with her shoulder attached to the hand and two fingers that pinched around the cigarette she was smoking.

“I was joking so please don‘t start on about Jacqui. I‘m trying to do you a favour here. You know damn well that cigarettes I can handle but a police officer living with a wreck head was only ever going to be career suicide.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you say so. I'm not going to argue today. I haven't got the will or the time.”

“Oh do grow up Lou. You’re not a teenager anymore. Drugs are bad. End of. There's nothing to argue about.”

“Look, what d’ya want Neil? Did you just phone me to have a go or have you got something I can use this morning?” She rolled her eyes and hooked her bag onto her shoulder.

“You heard about the fire?”

“Where?”

“It’s on the website but it’s being reported as arson with one fatality.”

“Well, thank God you told me. My car radio’s knackered so I haven’t heard the news this morning which wouldn’t have gone down well with Sharp. “

Lou imagined the way his lip curled and his nostrils flared in contempt at any reporter who arrived at work not knowing the day’s breaking news in advance and then he‘d go on about it all day, with little digs here and there about how news reporters who haven‘t got a clue what‘s in the news should be working in PR or stacking shelves. The thought stuck in Lou’s throat and made her gag. Jacqui had her own PR company and she sure as hell was doing better out of that than Lou as a weekly newspaper reporter who had struggled to pay her mortgage since Neil moved out and might well earn more working in a supermarket.

“But that’s why I’m phoning.” Neil said. “It’s more than a fire but the press doesn‘t know that yet. The fire was set deliberately �" and Barings is going to paint is as vandalism to keep the press off his back - but it was set to cover up a murder and the initial autopsy has found injuries similar to Maureen Casey’s and Susan Drake‘s”

The phone fell. Lou reacted quickly, did a jig, and saved it from crashing to the floor, sacrificing the cigarette packet to a puddle on the ground instead.

“But they got Simon Gillespie for those didn‘t they? “ She bent to pick up the pack and shook off the excess water, hissed, and rubbed the packet dry along the side of her black fleece jacket. “And I thought the police were not reinvestigating after Gillespie was freed on appeal because they were so sure he‘d done it? “

Neil tutted and blew out a heavy sigh: “That’s the problem. It looks like its come back to haunt us and this time Gillespie has an alibi. There is a press conference this afternoon but Baring isn‘t going to mention the link because he doesn‘t want to have to deal with the criticism even though we in CID think he should so you‘ve got to ask the right questions and get it out into the open because we need witnesses. I’ve got to get to the scene. Baring’s on the warpath. He was late himself this morning and is as angry as hell, barking out orders to everyone. You’re not the only one with an arsehole for a boss.“

Lou smiled : “At least we still have something in common then,“ she said. She fiddled in her jacket pocket and brought out a small engraved circular tin. She pressed a pin on the edge and it popped open to reveal a well used pocket ashtray. She stubbed her cigarette out on the black ash charred inside surface and clipped it shut again.”

“Come down to the scene. It’s Hermit Road. Forensics are there now. But don’t let on to Baring that I told you about it. “

“Cheers. I suppose you want something for that.”

“Well, you could pay me back tonight. 7 o’clock in the Painter’s Arms. There’s something I want to discuss.“

“Make it The Noose and I might consider it. What's it about anyway?”

“Jacqui's sister has gone missing.”

“F**k Jacqui. What‘s her sister got to do with me and why should I care?”

“Lou, this isn’t about Jacqui, you or me, but a 17 year old girl who hasn‘t been home or seen by anyone in two months and a chief superintendent who doesn‘t think her disappearance worthy of investigation.”

Author's Note

General feedback and constructive criticism needed. Do these first two chapters "show" you enough or "tell" you more. Does it seem realistic. Does it draw you in and make you want to read more.

Reviews

[Ron]

Yes the story holds the reader and it leaves you waiting for the next chapter. Writer creates strong characters. They are human and believeable. Depressing rural setting looks like a Fen land town of 2013 and is more interesting for that. Some syntax needs work as the story can gallop too fast as sentences become too long, some needing punctuation. Saying that the story general pace is spot on! It is measured.Like Fosdyke writer EMF who sets his stories of a twilight detective in Boston! I am sure Pat has re worked this story and I think this is detectable in its maturity! Pat Nurse has real talent & one to watch! Suggest read other writers EMF Donald Meikel & many more on WC. Review others and get reviewed, Pat demands constructive criticisim! A sure route to success. Keep it going Pat Nurse!

[Pat Nurse]

Thanks Ron. I'm looking forward to reviewing some work. I take on board fully your comments about syntax, pace, sentence structure and punctuation. I'll keep an eye on that as each new edit is done. The setting is a fictional town which I hope could be "Any(small)town" in the UK but I guess it is heavily influenced by places I've lived and worked including those in Lincolnshire. I don't want the responsibility of staying true to a real town which might restrict what I want to do and where I want to take my characters.

[Thurston]

The first sentence lists: hot puffs of breath, frozen mist, rapid clouds, and fog. Okay, stop there. But the same sentence has knees 'thudding in objection'. No, a new sentence is required.
Editing, or a serious word cull is required throughout.
Particularly adjectives.
Personally, I don't like it. Lips curl, nostrils flare, well, where is the writer's flair! You must create your own metaphors and write fresh prose, short sentences for the action, and you must weild an unforgiving marker pen so that I don't get repeated 'huge sighs' as I wearily try to determine who is whom and who hasn't paid.
Okay, it is a first draft. Try to be precise. Find the right word from your own experiences and not from cliches. Only Shakespeare can string a whole lot of famous saying together because they only became famous after he wrote them. You, as a writer, must create your own images.
The storyline is barely interesting, but it still could be. A hooker gets mugged isn't news. Not even a good story unless you have riveting prose. Go back and read Hemingway. Or even Micky Spillane.

[Pat Nurse]

Thanks. That is helpful. The clunky start has been flagged before so it's confirmation that it needs to change and advice on how to change it is constructive. The victim isn't a hooker. I'm happy for the reader to think she is, or whatever they want, but more will be revealed in chapter 3 (or 4) and we will revisit her again. You obviously didn't get the clue in Chapter 2 that the girl is "Jo." No doubt these chapters will change a lot by the time I finish the first clumsy and clichéd draft of the whole book. Writing is rewriting after all and these chapters just help to set the path on the initial journey to the end when I go back to the beginning and start the real work on prose.

[Thurston]

You are right. I didn't. I didn't delve deep enough even to understand fully what is going on. Do you see that THAT is what a reader does?
But you are a writer. Simply by writing as much and with a clear goal.
But you have to learn to make your prose GRIPPING. Be sparse in your descriptions. You are trying too hard to include everything in each scene. Just the essentials to progress the reader. But look, I know my friend liked it. I know you are capable of telling that story. But I stopped reading just like a reader does. Go and start again. That's what I say. Just like an athlete who doesn't win first time up. But you can do it, I concede.

[Pat Nurse]

Thanks again. I will go back to that start but not yet and I take on board everything you say about being sparse. Personally, I think both chapters have about three or four pars too many to start with which is why I said I am sure some of the detail that bog them down will be moved to other parts of the book as it progresses. First I want to frame more chapters and work more on my characters and how they interact with each other, fit into the plot and themes and who are suspects and of course who dunnit and why. All I will say now is that the man who is chasing the running girl and smacks her on the head could be the murderer - but is he? I don't want to give too much away. I wrote my response to your review very late last night and then realised this morning that I haven't yet told the reader that Jacqui's missing sister's name is "Jo". The whole breathing and knees thudding business was supposed to give the feeling that she's exhausted, panicked and she has run a long way before we see her heading down Victoria Street towards that alley that links north and south of town. She is afraid of just flagging down any motorist for help - her best chance really - because of what happened to her before - but we don't know that yet either except that all will be revealed as the plot unfolds. And yes, I know what you mean about writing to keep the reader hooked and reading on. I have no idea how James Joyce did it because that is one author who simply bores me to death because of his arty farty approach but he didn't too badly so I guess each to his or her own. It might be that when this book is finished, polished, written and rewritten and edited some more that you'd still hate it because it might not be your particular cup of tea and I might not be your particular type of author.

[Thurston]

I don't hate it,but am being realistic. Yet what you have written in response is excellent. You are seeing the road ahead and now I have no doubt you will improve rapidly. How to create a desire within the reader to 'go on'? The belief that he/she is travelling over new ground. That something awaits. That these people are either real or so well-drawn that the reader wants to know what befalls them, what is just around the corner. Get up front and personal with the reader. There are few rules however. And writing changes to suit the times. The formats. Society. You need to clean up the wayside descriptions and move at pace. Be simple and try things. I had to give a talk to what I thought were going to be adolescents about graffiti (St. John's cadets). Turned out to be 5 and 6 year olds. So I had to change the entire address and get them to put up their hands and ask questions. Their attention span is different. Identitfy your audience and locate them, then put your story in their 'pockets'. Then you will be amazed at how you connect. You are an interesting person in your desire to write this and I say: you can do it and become another JK Rowling. But if you can use two words, don't use four. As the famous man said to his correspondent:"I'm sorry this letter is so long but I didn't have time to make it shorter." You make the time. Cull brutally until you have the white glistening bones shining in the moonlight.

[Pat Nurse]

Brutal culling will come I assure you. I'm a journalist. I'm more than used to culling and adapting my writing style to fit various audiences and differing publications. Did you read chapter 2? Roy recognised the characters were shaping up even this early on to be "human and believable"

I still feel that most of the first pars of both chapters can go into parts of the book to be replaced with detail that shows the reader more about the journey I'm asking them to take. I wanted an active start to this book, to see and feel the victim's plight first and then to meet the character/s who will work their way through the plot to a dramatic action where all threads of the story will come together in a hopefully satisfying conclusion - but I'm miles away from that yet.

All I know for sure about creating a successful book and pleasing the reader is have a page turner - at least that is what published novelists have told me. If the reader doesn't want to read the next page then there's no point in writing it. Ron did, others elsewhere tell me that even with this very imperfect first two chapters they do too so I'll continue in my own vein, edit, cull, plot, develop, and tease the thing to a satisfying conclusion but I don't think I'll be posting on here again. It isn't helping. Oh, and btw, I don't want to be J K Rowling. Not my type of fiction at all but if I get anywhere near to writing with the beauty of Raymond Chandler or modern crime novelists that I enjoy like Mark Billingham, Peter Robinson, Val McDermid, and Peter James then that will do for me.