Murder Club Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mark Pearson

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part One

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Two

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part Three

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Part Four

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Detective Inspector Delaney is looking forward to spending Christmas with Kate Walker and his young daughter Siobhan, but the past always had a way of ruining Jack’s best-laid plans. And this holiday season is no different!

  A year previously, Delaney was responsible for the arrest of Michael Robinson, a viciously violent rapist. Robinson always claimed he was set up by the police but before he could be brought to trial he was brutally attacked in prison and left for dead. He didn’t die, however, and a year later, out of hospital and fit for trial, he is pointing the finger squarely at Delaney for the assault that nearly killed him. And not only that – it looks like he has a case!

  And everything is about to get a whole lot worse for the Detective Inspector when Robinson walks free from court.

  There are new faces at White City – and with them come old crimes, old bones and old scores to settle!

  It seems that Delaney is not the only one in West London with a past they’ll take any measures to hide. And as the body count starts to climb, it looks like Jack himself might be about to join the club.

  The Murder Club!

  About the Author

  For the last decade and a half, Mark Pearson has worked as a full-time television scriptwriter on a variety of shows for the BBC and ITV, including Doctors, Holby City and The Bill. He lives in Norfolk. Hard Evidence, Blood Work and Death Row, the first three novels in the Detective Inspector Jack Delaney series, are available in Arrow.

  Also by Mark Pearson

  Hard Evidence

  Blood Work

  Death Row

  For Lynn and Shirley

  The majority of women in society fear rape – no woman is allowed to ignore it. The majority of children are taught to be afraid of ‘strange men’ who offer us sweets, lifts, etc. We are taught as adults to keep our doors locked, not to be alone, not to look or act in any way that might ‘bring rape upon ourselves’. Perhaps the most obvious situation in which we are taught to be afraid is when walking home alone at night. The threat of violence is a total intrusion into women’s personal space and transforms a routine and/or potential pleasurable activity (for example, a walk in the park, a quiet evening at home, a long train journey) into a potentially upsetting, disturbing and often threatening experience.

  40% of adults who are raped tell no one about it. 31% of children who are abused reach adulthood without having disclosed their abuse.

  Only 15% of serious sexual offences against people 16 and over are reported to the police and of the rape offences that are reported, fewer than 6% result in an offender being convicted of this offence.

  From the Rape Crisis (England and Wales) website, 2010

  Prologue

  1.

  Twelve Months ago … Christmas

  ‘FUCK THAT!’ SAID Jack Delaney.

  The middle-aged woman dressed in a Salvation Army uniform looked horrified and would have backed away, but the pub was extremely busy, and she was jammed in tight amongst the revellers. Friday night at The Crooked Hat off the Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush was always busy. But it was only a short while to the Christmas holidays and The Hat was packed with people, young and old alike, getting into the spirit of the season. Office parties mingled with the regulars and the pub was filled with laughter and shouting and the kind of unresolved sexual tension that usually leads to regret and red faces the morning after. The couple behind the Salvation Army woman were going some way to resolving that tension, however, if the way they seemed to be swallowing each other’s tongues was anything to go by. Young women today, thought Delaney, you’ve got to love them.

  But he wasn’t smiling. Delaney wasn’t getting into the spirit of the season, he was just getting into the spirit. Irish whiskey to be precise and drinking it without strict adherence to the guidelines about the number of units of alcohol it was safe to consume. Jack Delaney had already consumed more than a week’s worth of them and tossed back another large Jameson’s as he scowled at the woman holding a collecting box under his nose.

  ‘Will you take a drink instead?’ he said to the woman, who shook her head outraged.

  ‘I don’t drink alcohol,’ she said. ‘The Salvation Army is a temperate organisation. “It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink, lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgement of any of the afflicted. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.” Proverbs 31, 4 to 6!’

  Delaney nodded at her and took a glug of his pint of Guinness. ‘Psalm 104: 14–15 “He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate – bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart.”’

  ‘You have studied the good book?’ she asked surprised.

  ‘I have studied man,’ he replied. ‘And was he not made in God’s image?’

  ‘So the Bible tells us.’

  ‘Then I have no desire to meet the maker of such a despicable race. Troll your jolly bowl around somewhere else, lady!’

  The woman’s face flushed, whether with anger or embarrassment Delaney couldn’t tell. He didn’t care either way. ‘Get us another whiskey here,’ he shouted across at the barmaid, a young woman called Aysha, who winked and stuck her thumb up before fetching his drink.

  ‘Oi, I was next.’

  Delaney turned round to the man standing beside him. In his late twenties with a goatee beard,
jeans and a loose, blue linen shirt. Probably working at the BBC, Delaney surmised, the place was filled with them nowadays. Creeping about from their numerous buildings around Shepherd’s Bush and further up the road at White City and Television Centre. Turning a proper old boozer like The Hat into some kind of trendy, yuppie, yahoo nightmare. It had even started calling itself a gastropub, for Christ’s sake. Delaney resisted the urge to smash his fist into the outraged prig’s face. ‘Fuck you!’ he said instead and the man seeing the latent violence in Delaney’s eyes backed away. Delaney wasn’t a particularly big man, but he was six foot tall with broad enough shoulders, dark, curly Irish hair. And eyes that would have been blue in the spring sunshine of a May morning, had he been well rested and refrained from strong liquor. As it was, the blue was tinged with red, and his eyes were not peaceful, if they were, indeed, the windows to the soul the BBC script editor was gazing into a very dark place. Dark and dangerous. He held his hands up and backed away. As best as he could, that is, with his heehawing colleagues from Media Central clustered around him like so many braying donkeys.

  ‘Cheers, darling,’ he said as he took the drink from Aysha, an extremely pretty, young woman, with come-to-bed eyes and a full, womanly figure. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘if I was ten years younger, I’d be having you in my bed faster than you can say “Christ on a bicycle”.’

  The Salvation Army officer took a deep intake of breath and made an involuntary sign of the cross on her chest.

  ‘Come back tomorrow when you are sober enough to get it up, and I might let you, Jack,’ said the barmaid with an earthy laugh.

  The Salvation Army woman shook her head at Delaney with both contempt and sadness. ‘I shall pray for you,’ she said.

  ‘Any woman gets down on her knees for me,’ he replied, ‘it’s not her prayers I’ll be wanting.’

  ‘Blasphemy, drunkenness and sins of the flesh. You are an unhappy man. And you’ll find no answers in that.’

  She nodded at the whiskey glass in Delaney’s hand.

  ‘I’m not looking for answers, lectures or salvation, lady.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Oblivion,’ he said and swallowed the rest of his whiskey.

  A dark-haired woman, somewhere in her late thirties or early forties, threaded her way through the crowd towards him. A group of office workers in their best suits and dresses wearing novelty hats had struck up a chorus of ‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly’. She was a curvaceous woman with thick, dark curly tresses, striking eyes and lipstick as red as a holly berry. She wore a short leather skirt, high-heeled boots and her ample chest was barely constrained by a tight bustier. She slipped her leather motorcycle jacket off as she approached the bar.

  ‘Now I wouldn’t mind putting something in her box,’ said Jack Delaney to the Salvation Army woman, having to raise his voice to be heard. The woman pulled a face as if she had swallowed a pickled walnut and pushed her way through the crowd, heedless of the cries of protest as people spilled their drinks in her wake.

  ‘Is that yourself, Jack?’ said the dark-haired woman as she got to the bar.

  ‘Who the fuck else would it be?’ said Delaney. ‘I’m sure as shit not the Pope.’

  ‘No. You’re not that. That’s for sure.’

  ‘Good to see you, Jackie,’ he said, tilting his glass at her. ‘What can I get ya?’

  Jackie Malone leaned in and whispered in his ear, pushing her breasts into his chest as she did so. ‘You wouldn’t have something to perk a girl up, would you?’ she said, with a deep, musical Irish accent.

  Delaney smiled. ‘Put your coat back on and let’s repair to the beer garden,’ he said.

  ‘Repair?’ replied Jackie Malone.

  ‘I read a book once.’ He grinned and steered her through the crowd to the back door.

  Outside it was cold. Their breaths made mist-streams in the air as they leaned up against the back wall, away from the rear exit. The garden was enclosed but not overlooked, not at night, anyway, when the office block beyond was closed.

  Delaney pushed her up against the rough surface of the brickwork and kissed her.

  ‘You hungry tonight, Cowboy?’ said Jackie Malone in a husky voice.

  ‘Always hungry for you, Jackie.’

  ‘Got a little something for me then?’

  Delaney reached into his pocket, unscrewed a small cylinder and tapped some white powder onto his hand. Then held it up to her nose. She snorted it down, then Delaney poured some more onto his hand and did the same.

  A drunken man stumbled out from the pub into the garden. Delaney reached into his pocket and pulled out his warrant card, which he held up to the man. ‘The beer garden is closed,’ he said. ‘Fuck off.’

  The man stumbled hurriedly back inside, as Jackie Malone undid Delaney’s zip.

  ‘Now where were we?’ she said then gasped as Delaney entered her. ‘Not such a little something after all,’ she continued with a smile and gasped again as Delaney thrust hard, gripping her hips tight against the cold brickwork.

  His eyes glazed over as he built a steady rhythm. Not oblivion but getting close to it. La petite mort, as the French called it, the little death.

  And at that moment, a mile or so across London, a woman was raped and mutilated.

  ‘Happy fucking Christmas everyone!’ shouted Delaney as he juddered to a climax.

  2.

  EARLIER

  THE WOMAN PULLED her coat around her and folded her arms.

  She looked up at the monitor and again at her watch. It was ten o’clock. The sound of the train still rattled in the tunnel ahead. Normally she would have caught an earlier train. But the blind date she had met at Kettner’s of Soho had ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot for them both after they had had a glass of unoaked Chardonnay, and it seemed rude to hurry it. It was Christmas after all. The season to be jolly and he had been easy company. She hadn’t been on a date with a man since she had split up with her fiancé, some six months earlier.

  She had returned from a business trip to Paris to discover her lover in bed with her best friend. It was hardly an original situation, but certainly never one she had had to deal with before. She was used to getting the man she chose, and, when things ended, she was the one ending it. True, she had done so with her fiancé but it wasn’t quite the same thing. To come home and find him with her chief bridesmaid in her own bed was more than just a slap to her face; it was a complete blow to her self-esteem. She was a beautiful, confident, intelligent woman and she knew it. She attracted men as naturally as a magnet attracted iron filings, but all that had changed. At least her self-confidence had, or her tolerance for men. For sure they still approached her but they were met with a frosty reception. Worst of all she realised she hadn’t really loved her fiancé in the first place. She had decided to marry him for all the wrong reasons, and realising that had made her doubt herself and her judgement even more.

  But six months was long enough. Her female friends had been very supportive at first, but had now – almost as one – decided that it was time for her to get back in the dating game, as the Americans called it. She had looked at singles sites, even went on a speed-dating evening once, but that was a disaster and she had walked out on it after the second ‘date’.

  That was a month ago but, undaunted, her married and partnered friends had been relentless. For her own good, they called it, putting candidate after candidate before her. A brother, a husband’s best friend, a really ‘nice guy’ from work, an ex-lover! In the end she had given in under the tsunami of pressure from them and agreed to meet the guy tonight. His name was John Smith. He was dressed in a dark two-piece suit with a white shirt and a blue tie. He might have been dressed for an interview. Maybe he had been. She smiled at the thought. John Smith looked like a salesman in the suit, but was in fact an opera singer. Only background character and chorus, he modestly pointed out. He was thirty-eight years old, had been divorced for four years (an amicable split apparently), wa
s five foot eleven inches tall with sandy blond hair and really blue eyes. He reminded her of the younger Robert Redford maybe, or Heath Ledger. But if he was aware of his good looks, he certainly wasn’t arrogant with it, as a lot of men were.

  ‘You remind me of someone …’ she had said.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes, can’t put my finger on it. You probably get that a lot, do you?’

  He had smiled. ‘As long as it’s not Brad Pitt.’

  She had laughed, genuinely. The first time in a long while a man had made her do that.

  ‘No. You’re all right. It’s not him.’

  The conversation had flowed pretty smoothly after that. He was an entertainer, she knew, probably trained in breaking the ice. But there seemed nothing disingenuous in the way he held her gaze when talking, and his flirtatious comments were flattering and on the right side of fun. He didn’t take himself too seriously and she liked that in a man. Her ex-fiancé, come to think of it, had been a bit of a stuffed shirt. In fact the more she did think about it, the more she realised how little there was that she really liked about the man.

  So when her date had offered champagne, not only did it seem churlish to refuse, but it seemed somehow appropriate that a bottle of the Widow Ponsardin’s finest drop, Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame at £175 a pop, should signal the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. A baptism in wine: out with the old, in with the new. And the thing was, John wasn’t being flash in ordering it, showing off. He had explained that he had just finished a good run with a show in the West End. Judging by his clothes, she reckoned it was not an uncommon occurrence. He explained that in truth he only did the singing part-time, couldn’t afford to go full-time. When he was resting he did freelance sales work and that paid pretty well.

  Stephanie had laughed, telling him that she had pegged him for it when she first saw him. She wasn’t surprised he was good at his job: he had something about him – charisma, she supposed, or empathy; either way, he was certainly comfortable to talk with. To trust. She guessed that went with his job too, but suspected it was something innate rather than a learned skill. God knows she had been sold to (or they had attempted to) by enough salesmen and women to appreciate the difference. She reckoned John should be getting lead parts, and he had confessed that his telephone voice was better than his singing!