Death Row Read online

  Mark

  Pearson

  DEATH

  ROW

  Content

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  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Death Row

  Praise for Mark Pearson

  Also available by Mark Pearson

  Friday Night

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Acknowledgements

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407060118

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow 2010

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Mark Pearson 2010

  Mark Pearson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  I Walk The Line Words and Music by John R. Cash © 1956 (Renewed 1984) HOUSE OF CASH, INC. (BMI)/Administered by BUG MUSIC All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Arrow Books Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

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  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099550877

  The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

  For Kim, Curt and Tami

  DEATH

  ROW

  In addition to his novel writing, for the last decade and a half Mark Pearson has been a full time and multi-award-nominated, television scriptwriter working on some of the country’s best-loved and most popular drama series.

  Praise for Mark Pearson

  ‘A cracking debut, matching gore with suspense.

  His TV scripting experience shows’ Bookseller

  ‘Jack Delaney is hard to forget’ Time Out

  ‘Pearson scores a hit first time out with Jack

  Delaney, a hard-drinking maverick that fans of John

  Rebus and Jack Regan will love’ Daily Record

  ‘This is a cracking debut novel, the pace never flags,

  the dialogue is as sharp as a cut-throat razor’

  www.shotsmag.co.uk

  Also available by Mark Pearson

  Hard Evidence

  Blood Work

  ‘The percentage of adults who experienced sexual abuse as children and have had long-term side effects is not known. However, in one British study, thirteen per cent of the sample of such adults reported that they had been permanently damaged.’

  Counselling Directory 2009

  They all say it’s a physical thing. An urge. An uncontrollable desire that builds and swells, like an ocean at high tide, until action must be taken. A slow boiling of the blood. As uncontrollable and devastatingly powerful as a tsunami. But that isn’t it: it was part of it but just that – a part. It’s a mental thing, he knew that as well as any. Thoughts scuttling and skittering in the brain like hundreds of small crabs in a tin bath, climbing the sides with scratching, feverish claws, falling back into the writhing, clicking mass. Memories crawling through his mind like shickle in a turning drum.

  Billy Thompson. Just eight years old and his first trip to the seaside. His first trip anywhere more than five miles from where he was born and had lived his entire life. It was deep in the cold-hearted grip of a brutal winter and he was huddled against the passenger-seat window, shivering against the cold. It was a boxy, draughty, metallic rectangle-on-wheels of a car, with a hard bench seat and the wind whistling through gaps in the doors and window frames. It bounced and clattered on the uneven road, jolting him and sending needles of pain shooting though his thin, bony body. The wipers were scratching thick, flurrying snow from the windscreen and tears were pricking his eyes so that his vision of the changing landscape outside was softened, blurred. His life behind him fragmenting like the flakes of snow scattering into pin-points in the rear-view mirror.

  Billy’s uncle was a crab-and-lobster fisherman living in a small village on the south-east coast between Southend-on-Sea and Herne Bay. This trip was the first time Billy had ever been away from his family home and he would never be returning. His father had been sentenced to three years in prison for battering his wife once too often; his mother had been hospitalised for three weeks, during which time Billy was looked after by his next-door neighbour, Grace Williams, a woman in her late sixties with a houseful of cats and a forgetful nature. When Billy’s mother returned from hospital she decided she couldn’t bear to look at her son’s face any more – she said he looked just like his father – and arranged for him to live with his Uncle Walter, her elder brother, who was looking to take on someone he could train as an apprentice. Billy had never met Walter before, a tall lean man with a face like a rusty hatchet, battered by sea and sun and wind, carved lines of cruelty written into it like the scratchings of a blunt bradawl.

  Billy was bundled without ceremony from the car, shivering with the cold, the tears near-freezing on his cheeks, into a house that was only marginally warmer. He was put to bed with barely a grunt of welcome and a cold glass of water and then shaken awake at four in the morning to help his uncle at work. Cold, wet and hungry, he huddled in the back of the small craft as it slapped and danced on the yawing waters. Waves splashed over the sides, chilling his wind-blasted and sore face. He had made the mistake of complaining once – he didn’t want this, he wanted to go home – and his uncle had hit him. Not rebuked him or slapped him. But punched him. Hard, in the side of his face with a hand fashioned of sinew and muscle, knocking him to the floor where he whimpered but didn’t cry. He had long ago learned not to cry out. Then the boat was anchored. ‘Inside’ as his uncle called it, a mile out to sea. He was huddled against crates filled with shickle, the remains of the crabs and the lobsters after they had been processed. Empty, broken shells, claws, legs, eyes. The smell filled his nostrils, and the sound as his uncle tipped the crates emptying the eviscerated carcasses back into the cold water was like the sound of an army of cockroaches skittering on a dance floor.

  Like the thoughts dancing in his head now. Building like a symphony as the blood roared in his ears and he remembered how it all began. Back in that boat shed
with the smell of the shickle still ripe in his throat and his uncle tall in the shadows as he pulled the door behind him closed and looked down on Billy, with the inhumanity of a feral thing, his eyes empty. Billy remembered the sharp cuts in his knees as he was forced to kneel, the slivers of lobster and crab shell cutting through the thin fabric of his jeans.

  His uncle crossed to the workbench and turned on his new transistor radio; music played. The one everyone tipped for number one that Christmas. Johnny Ray, ‘Walking in the Rain’. It was nineteen fifty-six and it seemed to Billy that it had never stopped raining …

  He remembered hearing the music and looking up and seeing his uncle’s eyes that were no longer empty. He felt the soft touch of the man’s hand on his head now that was almost like a benediction. He didn’t remember crying but he could feel the moisture trickling into his mouth, the sweet salty taste and the lingering fetid smell of rotting flesh. He looked across at the small window, stained green with algae so that the light filtering weakly through made him feel like he was at the bottom of the ocean.

  He shook his head, clearing the ancient memory, and looked down at his twitching hand, arching it so that the sinews stood out like cord and made the blood vessels move below the translucent skin like thin blue slugs. His fingers curled inward, making his hand a crab.

  The Year of Our Lord 1995.

  Time to feed.

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  Jack Delaney handed the last of the plates to Siobhan, his seven-year-old daughter and the bright-eyed light of his life. She rubbed a tea towel quickly over it and then handed the plate to her Aunt Wendy, who dried it properly and put it in a wooden plate-rack that was mounted over the counter to the right of the sink.

  ‘Last one,’ said Delaney, pulling the plug out of the sink to release the soapy water.

  Siobhan pointed to the old-fashioned penny that was set into the base of the plate rack. ‘Why do they put a coin in it?’

  Delaney ruffled her hair. ‘The lady who makes them, it’s like her signature.’

  ‘It’s like Kate’s, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. She helped me choose it.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Wendy said as she looked around the kitchen. ‘She has a good eye.’

  Delaney grinned. ‘Obviously.’

  Wendy laughed and flicked the towel at him. ‘I wasn’t talking about you, big-head. What do you reckon, Siobhan? If he was any more of a doughnut … sure he’d be eating himself.’

  Siobhan laughed. ‘He’d be an apple doughnut.’

  Delaney fixed her with a serious look. ‘Why apple?’

  ‘Because they’re my favourites,’ she said, with a musical laugh, and hugged him around the waist.

  Wendy cast her gaze around the room. ‘Seriously, though, Jack. You’ve done a good job here. It actually feels like a home here now.’

  ‘Thanks. But, like I say, I had help.’

  ‘And like I say, just as well.’

  ‘Are you saying I haven’t got good taste?’

  ‘Only in women, Jack, only in women.’

  Delaney looked around the kitchen himself, a slight smile playing on his lips as he realised how far he had come since meeting Kate. It was furnished now with a range of styles: a sturdy wooden farmhouse table, a Scandinavian rocking chair in the corner with a tapestried cushion on it, an antique dresser. Some original framed watercolours on the wall. If it had just been down to him he would have gone to IKEA and got the lot from there, but Kate had put her foot down and made him take his time to work at finding the right pieces of furniture. In just a few weeks he had the whole house decorated and furnished and his sister-in-law Wendy was right, he realised. It did feel like home. In a way he was sad to have finished. He had really enjoyed hunting down pieces with Kate: from antique shops and auctions, from bric-a-brac stalls – photos and prints and original watercolours, sofas, chairs, sideboards, cutlery, crockery, glassware, wine rack and wine, whisky decanters and – most important of all – a big sled-style rubberwood bed they had bought from John Lewis that sat in the middle of Delaney’s wooden-planked master bedroom with antique mahogany pot-cupboards either side like a statement that Jack Delaney was back and open for business.

  Delaney realised that his daughter had asked him a question. ‘Sorry, darling, what’s that?’

  ‘I was saying … can I stay the night? Aunty Wendy said it was all right.’

  ‘Sorry, darling, not tonight.’

  ‘Oh please.’ Siobhan pulled her most pleading expression, her beautiful big eyes plucking at his heartstrings like Segovia on a banjo. She reminded him so much of her mother. At least he could see the resemblance now and take comfort in it. Months back and he’d have been in pieces, but things had changed. Kate had done more than just help decorate his house; she was helping him rebuild his life.

  He ruffled his fingers though his daughter’s curly dark hair again and felt the guilt.

  ‘Sorry, poppet, I’ve got a really early start tomorrow. But soon, I promise.’

  ‘What about a fairy story? You haven’t told me a story for ages.’

  ‘Just a quick one, then.’ Delaney sat at the table and picked Siobahn up, plonking her in his lap.

  ‘One with magic in it.’

  ‘All stories have magic in them, darling.’

  ‘Proper magic. Not just silly words. Anyone can make up silly words.’

  ‘All right then, I’ll tell you the story of the desert rose.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a time before man had taken metal from the earth and cracked the bargain they had made with the ancient gods—’

  ‘What bargain?’

  ‘They gave us fire so long as we burned only wood. When we took the metal from the earth and burned it we broke that bargain.’

  ‘You can’t burn metal, silly.’

  Delaney’s voice softened, his childhood brogue creeping back in with a sad and lyrical cadence to it. ‘But you can, darling. That magic wasn’t man’s to take, however, and the gods have been angry with us ever since. You see that anger in the melting of the icecaps so the polar bears have nowhere to go, and the angry seas rising in New Orleans and across the world to punish the poor and the defenceless.’

  ‘That’s global warning.’

  Delaney chuckled. ‘It is a warning, yes, darling, not that anyone’s listening, but this happened long before we stole the metal from the underground gods, in a time when tree braches shaking in the wind made music, and the stars overhead sang in the coal black of night.’

  Siobhan cuddled back comfortably against Delaney’s chest, listening, her eyes wide.

  ‘Long, long ago and far away’ – he began again – ‘there blossomed a single red rose. It grew in the middle of the never-ending desert within a ring of sharp-edged rocks in a bed of bleached white sands, and the rocks sheltered her from the biting winds that would spring up as suddenly as a sneeze. Cutting, swirling, hissing winds that raged and howled and danced across the desert like a swarm of angry killer wasps.’

  Siobhan frowned. ‘I don’t like wasps.’

  ‘But although they rasped and scraped and laid low all before them … the winds also carried the little rose seed hundreds of miles from the fertile lands of Araby and left it in the little hollow in the middle of the desert, before vanishing again, in the way of all winds, as suddenly as they appeared. Like a candle being snuffed out. So the little seed was safe where it had been placed, and the tears of the moon in the cool night sky watered it, and the sheltering rocks that ringed her were like stone guardians, so the rose grew tall and proud and beautiful. And the desert loved her. Never in his vast regions had he ever seen something so lovely. So that when the storms raged and the sands blew, the desert stood with the rocks and made sure there was an oasis of calm around the lovely rose.’

  ‘What was she called?’

  ‘Just Rose, darling. The rose of the desert.’

  ‘And what happened to her?’

 
; ‘Well, time passed and the little rose flourished. Her delicate red petals were so bright that they seemed to glow in the afternoon sun and her scent was so rare and fragrant and she was so beautiful that the heart of the old desert was nearly broken and he fell even more in love with her. The rose, however, became bored and restless. Nothing ever happened in her tranquil patch and so she wanted to see more of the world. Finally the little rose, sighing with boredom, plucked up her courage and decided to venture out of her little shelter in the eye of the desert. The winds had returned and the rose was overcome with curiosity about what could be making such strange and wonderful sounds. So the rose delicately pulled up her roots and stepped forth, around the corners of the standing stones and out of her patch. And the winds swirled around her, fluttering her delicate leaves so that she almost seemed to dance, and then – as suddenly as a thought – she was gone.’

  ‘Cheery story, Jack,’ said Wendy, one eyebrow critically bent.

  ‘What happened to her? Did she die then?’ asked Siobhan, her eyes still wide but a crease crunching her smooth forehead now.

  ‘Well, darling, the old desert caught a last lingering smell of the rose’s beautiful fragrance and then it was gone, vanished in the swirly air as quickly as you can snap your fingers.’

  Delaney snapped his own fingers, making Siobhan jump. ‘And the old desert was heartbroken because he had destroyed the very thing he loved.’

  ‘Yeah, don’t give up the day job, cowboy,’ said Wendy, frowning.

  ‘So the rose died because she left home?’ asked Siobhan.

  ‘Not at all, pipkin,’ said Delaney, grinning broadly. ‘The wind swirled around the rose and lifted her from the floor but cradled her in its airy arms and carried her high, high above the desert and far, far away. Across glittering seas that sparkled like wet turquoise and translucent jade. Over mountains topped with snow so bright and white that it would dazzle you to look at them, over countries with woodland so thick with forests it was like a carpet of branches that stretched from coast to coast, and finally they hovered over a land far below her that was as green as the brightest emerald you had ever seen.’