Fearful Symmetry Read online

  Fearful Symmetry

  A DCI Will Blake Thriller

  Obolus Books

  1

  Copyright © 2020 by Jon Mayhew

  The right of Jon Mayhew to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and

  Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be

  reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written

  permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Saturday 8th February

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Sunday 9th February

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Monday 10th February

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Tuesday 11th February

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Wednesday 12th February

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Thursday 13th February

  Chapter 28

  Friday 14th February

  Chapter 29

  Saturday 15th February

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Sunday 16th February

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Monday 17th February

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Later

  Chapter 43

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  This book is for:

  Clare Hulme, Jan Jones,

  Amy Rebecca Thomas, Laura Colwell,

  Suzanne Thomas, Frauke Hoffman

  and John Moorhouse.

  Although the story is set on the Wirral, the names of some establishments and roads have been fictionalised to protect the unloved and godless...

  but you can have fun guessing...

  Tyger Tyger burning bright,

  In the forests of the night:

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  The Tyger (William Blake)

  Everything is ready. My checklist is full of ticks; all the props and players are in place. All the deeds have been done. Nothing has been left to chance.

  Once I met a writer and he told me that every story, film, or book has what he called an inciting incident; the moment when something happens that throws the hero into the centre of the story. When they find the remains of the girl on the beach in Jaws and Chief Brody realises he has a shark problem is a good example, apparently.

  I wouldn’t really know, I’m not a writer. I always thought stories start at the end of something. I mean, what events made Chief Brody afraid of water? Don’t characters have a life that forms them before that one event? Isn’t being born an inciting incident? Or is the first action someone takes against you the inciting incident? The first slight, insult or blow? Aren’t they the things that form you and make you react the way you do? Or is that back story?

  Anyway, the writer did warn me that inciting incidents are hard to see sometimes; a lot happens at the beginning of a story. My kind of story always starts with a grisly discovery…

  Saturday 8th February

  Chapter 1

  The curtains were the first thing Dot Taylor noticed. They were drawn closed. She’d had a conversation about this with her husband, Dave, three weeks ago, as they locked up the house. “Keep ‘em shut, Dot,” He’d said. “It’ll fool the burglars!”

  “Curtains drawn all day tell any would-be burglar that we’re on holiday just as much as undrawn ones all night,” she’d said, and he couldn’t argue with that. He never really argued with her. Never had in all their forty-five years of marriage. Sometimes, she wished he had. The curtains were shut now, though, and unless Dave had popped back from their hotel in Cape Verde one night just to make a point, someone else had been in their house. She gripped his arm, as they pulled up to their bungalow in Hilbre Grove.

  “There’s something wrong, Dave.”

  Dave frowned and patted the back of her hand. “Calm down, missus,” he said. “Probably just a faulty alarm and Jean from next door has been in. We did leave her a spare key, didn’t we?”

  “No, she’s away too, remember?” Dot said, pulling her hand away. “Won’t be back for another week. Honestly, I’m sure you’re going doolally in your old age.”

  “Well, maybe it’s Don Pleavin, then. You know what a busybody he is with his Neighbourhood Watch. Bloody weirdo, that man, if you ask me…”

  Dot smacked Dave on the arm. “Mind your language. Don Pleavin doesn’t have a key, thank goodness. Now go and look!”

  Dave heaved himself out of the car with a grunt. The bungalow crouched in the cul-de-sac; a dark silhouette against the bright, afternoon sky. He shivered, hesitating at the metal gate that led into his front garden. Everything looked just the same but somehow it seemed quietly threatening. The front door was shut and there was no sign of any broken glass which suggested to Dave that if anyone had broken in, they’d got in through the back. He fumbled with his key in the lock and, finally, the door creaked open.

  The heat hit him first; a wave of fetid, hot air that rushed from the house to dissipate in the cold February night. A fusty gloom filled the hall; whoever had drawn the front curtains had also closed all the others. The air was thick with an earthy, sewer smell that crawled into Dave’s mouth and up his nose. He swallowed and then wished he hadn’t. “The heating must be on full,” Dave muttered to himself, trying to keep his mouth shut against the reek.

  “What’s that stink?” Dot said, appearing behind him and making him jump. “Smells like the drains have backed up.”

  “Smells worse than that,” Dave muttered, a feeling of dread creeping through him. He knew that smell; he could never forget it and the horrors that accompanied it. “Dot. You’d better stay back, love,” he whispered. Covering his nose and mouth with the crook of his arm. He crept into the hall and pushed on the living room door. With a strangled oath, he staggered from the room, cracking the back of his head against the wall and crumpling to the ground.

  Dot ran forward. “Dave!” She crouched next to him, trying to pull him up. Dave moaned and Dot choked on the foul stench from the living room. She made the mistake of glancing in through the door.

  At first, Dot thought someone had dumped a huge rag doll on the armchair by the fire; it was bloated and shapeless. And then she realised it was a body. One baggy arm hung down the side of the lounger. It lay, head to one side, face swollen and distorted. A mop of lank, blood-soaked hair draped over the stretched, blackened skin. The body looked like a balloon and had burst out of the blue blouse that tried to contain it. A cloud of irritated flies buzzed around the corpse, battering into each other. The armchair was normally a cream colour but now it was rust brown and Dot could only think that i
t was soaked in blood. But one detail seared itself into Dot’s memory; the scissors, with their rounded finger guards, poking out of the poor creature’s devastated eye. Whether it was the suffocating air or the sight in her living room that stopped Dot from screaming, she never knew. Instead, abandoning her prone husband, she crawled out of the house on her hands and knees and sat shivering on the roadside by the car. That’s where the neighbours found her.

  Chapter 2

  The insect drone of the clippers filled DCI Will Blake’s ears and he felt drowsy as they carved a path up the back of his neck. He’d managed to keep his interaction with the hairdresser functional and cursory without being rude, indicating he wanted it short at the back and sides but with a bit of spikiness on the top. Then he’d studiously avoided eye-contact while she ran the clippers around his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t like a bit of human company, nor did he blame hairdressers for being friendly or conversational. It was just that the conversation always went a little haywire the moment he said he was a policeman. Rather than kill any conversation, it generally seemed to encourage any hairdresser to give his or her considered opinion on prison sentencing or, even worse, result in a long and detailed account of their latest encounter with crime. Which was usually from TV.

  But he knew what the hot topic would be if he gave the game away now: Ellen Kevney and he really didn’t want to talk about her right now. A mobile hairdresser, she’d been missing for over two weeks. She’d dropped her two children at school in the morning before going on a call and hadn’t been seen since.

  Sometimes, Blake would say something non-committal like ‘I work in an office.’ This often worked better than the truth and wasn’t really a lie. Most of the time, Blake did work in an office. He just happened to be poring over the gory details of a recent murder, assault or robbery rather than a spreadsheet or a quarterly report. Not that he didn’t have his fair share of those either.

  “So what do you do in the office?” The woman said, clicking off the clippers and giving him a tight smile.

  “Oh. You know. Paperwork and stuff,” he said, rolling his eyes. “All that paper. And answering the phone. Never stops ringing.”

  Once he had lied and made up a story about going on holiday to South Africa to visit his parents who owned a farm and bred antelope. He felt bad about that, though and realised he couldn’t go back to that particular hairdresser without perpetuating the lie. Right now, it was all he could do to stop from looking skyward and praying for the woman not to rumble him.

  “You’re a copper, aren’t you?” The hairdresser said.

  Startled, Blake looked up at her reflection in the mirror. For all his tough-guy act at work, when he was confronted so baldly, he found it hard to keep the lie going. There was something about being stuck in the chair that made him feel vulnerable as well. She was a short, round-faced woman with a golden ponytail that pulled her face tight. Her almond eyes and small mouth made her look mischievous. “Sorry,” he said. “Is it that obvious?”

  “It’s all right,” she said, with that tight smile again. “You get a kind of sixth sense when you do this job for long enough. People who don’t want to talk. The one’s that are telling porkies. Some people are downright creepy. But you probably know that already.”

  Blake nodded slightly. “How long have you done this, then?” Maybe if he controlled the conversation, he’d get out before the subject of Ellen Kevney came up.

  “I’ve been cutting hair for about eight years now. Working here on and off for about two. I run a mobile service too.”

  Inwardly, Blake groaned. “You like it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I like being my own boss. It’s hard work, mind. On your feet all day.”

  Blake’s phone buzzed on the counter beneath the mirror. He nodded at it. “D’you mind if I check that?” he said, reaching from under the gown that smothered him before the hairdresser could reply. It was a text from Laura: Where are you? Thought I’d pop round if you’re not too busy. Blake frowned and clunked the phone on the side. It’d been four months since Laura Vexley had rescued Blake from his mother’s cat, Serafina. The cat was a behavioural nightmare, with a seemingly psychotic hatred of Blake but somehow Laura, a self-styled animal psychologist had a magic touch with the fiend. Since then, Laura had slipped into his life almost seamlessly. At first anyway.

  “Not work then?”

  “No,” Blake said, easing himself back into the chair. “Not work.”

  The hairdresser raised one eyebrow. “You sound almost disappointed.”

  “Just someone… a friend,” he found himself saying. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Someone being a bit pushy?”

  “Have you nearly finished?” Blake said, barely concealing the irritation in his voice.

  The hairdresser’s eyes hardened but she kept the professional smile. “I have if you want to walk out of here looking like you’ve brushed your hair with a toffee apple. I need to comb it down and layer it a bit.”

  “Okay. Sorry. Just a bit tense.” A gulf of silence began to open up and, for some stupid reason, Blake felt obliged to fill it. “You said something about a mobile service. You go to people’s homes, then?”

  “That’s generally what the ‘mobile’ bit means,” she said, scraping the comb through his hair and snipping. “But I’m picky about my clients. I usually meet them in a salon first or know them from somewhere else. Too many nutters around. Wouldn’t want to end up disappearing… like that Ellen, girl…”

  “Yes. Quite,” Blake said, trying not to groan with frustration. He’d walked into that one. “I was just thinking. Often I’m too busy to get a cut or I forget and then my boss tells me to get tidied up.” The gown felt tight around his neck. “Would you be able to include me in your rounds? It might be more convenient…”

  The woman paused and looked Blake in the eye. “Yeah. I could,” she said at last. “I usually have old dears who can’t get out the house or kids who have autism and don’t like the salon but I can do you, too. My name’s Keeley. I’ll give you my card.”

  The phone rang almost as Blake left the salon, pocketing Keeley’s card. Kinnear sounded as if he was being strangled. “Sir, you better come quick… we’ve found a body.”

  “Is it Ellen Kevney?”

  Kinnear blew a long breath into the phone. “It’d be hard to say, sir…”

  Chapter 3

  Police cars, vans and ambulances filled the tiny cul-de-sac of Hilbre Grove. The small estate in Upton had never seen such activity and curtains around the Grove were twitching furiously. Some residents stood at their front doors watching the coming and going of uniformed police and scene-of-crime officers. A few kids leaned against their bikes at the end of the Grove, shepherded away from the house by an eagle-eyed community support officer.

  Seeing the congestion, Blake had abandoned his car in the next road and walked, pulling his collar up against the cold February drizzle. He nodded to a few familiar faces and signed himself in on the crime scene register. DC Kinnear waited in the front garden of the bungalow, dressed in the obligatory white body suit. His face mask was pulled down around his neck and he gulped the air. Normally, Kinnear looked like he had a permanent smirk on his round face. Sometimes, people mistakenly interpreted that as flippancy. Today, he just looked sick to his stomach.

  “That bad, Kinnear?” Blake said, catching a note of decay on the air as he neared the house.

  Kinnear nodded. “Yeah, sir. The body’s been there a while, and the heating was turned up full,” he said, swallowing. “It’s a mess.”

  “The house owners?”

  “Dorothy and David Taylor, a couple in their late sixties. Just came back from their holidays and found this. They’ve been away three weeks.”

  Blake looked around at the bustling scene. “Where are they now?”

  “Arrowe Park Hospital, sir,” Kinnear said. “Mr Taylor fell and cracked his head, Mrs Taylor is in shock.” He gulped more air
down. “Nobody should have to see that.”

  Blake nodded as he pulled on his coveralls. His stomach squirmed. He’d been at this game for almost twenty years, but he never became immune to that feeling of dread when approaching a murder scene. The coveralls felt tight and restrictive over his big frame. Pulling up the hood, he trudged towards the front door of the bungalow.

  The front door had hung open since the discovery of the body but the stench in the air still hadn’t taken the hint and buggered off. Even with a face mask on, it pushed its way into his senses. “Oh God,” Blake muttered as he entered the living room, swatting at a lazy, bloated fly that droned around him.

  Mallachy O’Hare, the Crime Scene Investigator gave Blake a feeble wave, his long face greyer than usual. Another figure stooped over the decomposed body that filled the armchair. As Blake moved around the room, the figure turned and Blake’s heart sank.

  “Ah, Will,” Jack Kenning, the pathologist said. “Just attending to our unwanted guest here.” Blake gave a curt nod. Kenning had seen one too many television crime dramas and thought of himself as something of a comedian. Normally, he tried to cultivate the nonchalant attitude of an eccentric scientist, more interested in the body and clues than the person whose life had been so brutally taken. Even Kenning was struggling today.

  “Unwanted?”

  “I’m guessing from the reaction of the householders that they didn’t invite our friend here into their living room,” Kenning said.

  Blake looked away. “I try not to guess, Jack. It’s murder then?”

  “I can’t imagine anyone sticking a pair of scissors into their own eye like that,” Jack said, his chirpy tone faltering. “There’s blood everywhere, which would suggest she died here. But if you’re wary of guessing, I’d say that it’s suspicious at the very least.”

  “Yeah, I get the suspicious bit,” Blake muttered, losing his patience. “Any ID?”

  Mallachy shrugged. “Not so far. We’re waiting for Jack to finish, so we can start checking pockets.”