The Disciple. Steven Dunne

      Jason’s limbs were screaming in pain. He decided he couldn’t sit it out any longer. His pursuer had either given up or taken the wrong path. So, with daylight beginning to creep across the horizon, Jason clambered back onto the path, standing as upright as he could manage. He rubbed his back until the noise of a breaking twig froze his entire frame. Slowly Jason turned. The man was standing ten yards away, facing him, perfectly still, perfectly unruffled. Jason tried to see his face but it was completely obscured by the balaclava. Through the hot tears distorting his vision, Jason could see the man’s breath as it hit the morning air. But unlike Jason, he wasn’t panting with fear or looking round for help.

      A second later the man moved towards Jason. In a black, gloved hand, raised to catch the dawn light, Jason fancied he saw the glint of a blade through his tears. He began to sob violently and his shoulders shook. He looked around to plot his escape but, instead of turning to flee, Jason’s legs crumpled and his knees hit the ground. Wailing, he curled himself into a ball as the man walked towards him and inclined his head to look down at him.

      ‘I told you. I’m sorry we did the old woman,’ he wailed. ‘I’m sorry about the cat.’ The figure bent down on one knee to examine Jason. ‘I’m sorry about everything. Please don’t kill me. Please. I’ll remember. I can be good. Please…’ Jason’s voice became a high-pitched whine as his emotions and any semblance of physical control disintegrated.

      Jason had no idea how long he’d been unconscious but by the time he woke dawn had turned into a bright chill morning. Birds were singing and the low sun was beginning to burn off the dew. He lifted himself onto one elbow and looked around. The man had gone. Jason stood, grimacing at the squelch of excrement and urine in his trousers, and turned to waddle home, eyes lowered to the ground in misery.

       Chapter Two

      Hudson rolled his greasy fish-and-chip paper into a tight ball and threw it at the bin next to their bench. It fell short and a couple of seagulls standing guard on the seawall railing glided down to investigate. Hudson stood to pick up the offending litter then jammed it into the bin – to loud dismay from the gulls – and sat back down, squinting into the pale sun. He pulled out his cigarettes and threw one in his mouth. After taking a man-sized pull he exhaled into a Styrofoam cup, taking a large gulp of coffee before returning it to the bench.

      Laura Grant had long since finished her tortilla wrap and now had her pen poised over a notebook, listing the tasks that Hudson deemed fit for the two DCs, Rimmer and Crouch, assigned to help them with the legwork, now that Tony Harvey-Ellis’s death was being treated as murder.

      ‘Anything else, guv?’

      ‘I guess we pay a call to Hall Gordon PR. Find out if Harvey-Ellis had any enemies they’d know about. Put that at the top of our list.’

      Grant raised her eyebrows and fixed him with her cool blue eyes.

      ‘You honestly think it’s possible?’ asked Hudson. ‘The daughter?’

      ‘Stepdaughter,’ said Grant. ‘Harvey-Ellis wasn’t her real dad.’ ‘But he was married to her real mum.’

      ‘Remember what she said when we first broke the news, guv. Someone we loved. It jarred at the time.’

      ‘She fits the description, I suppose. Right age, right hair,’ conceded Hudson.

      ‘And Tony and Amy had only been married four years.’

      ‘Is that significant?’

      ‘Well, let’s assume Tony and Amy knew each other for at least a year before they married. That means Terri’s known him for about five years. Terri is seventeen now which makes her around twelve when Tony and Amy first meet, thirteen when they get hitched.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘You’ve got two grown-up kids, guv. What were the most difficult years? Early teens, right?’

      ‘By a country mile.’

      ‘Right. Terri’s a seventeen-year-old girl who’s known her stepfather – the man who replaced her real father – since she was a teenager, before even. Now I don’t know how many people you know with stepmums and dads…’

      ‘Not many. Different generation. We had to grin and bear it.’

      ‘Well, I know three. Two of them hated their stepparent with a vengeance. I mean, hated. Enough to wish they would just die for breaking up the cosy family unit.’

      ‘And the third?’

      ‘They had an affair,’ said Grant. Hudson pulled a face. ‘There are no half measures with this sort of thing, guv.’

      ‘It’s a bit of a reach, Laura. But it’s easy enough to check all the same. Crouchy’s on the car park cameras to see if it was the girlfriend who dumped Tony’s luggage. So get Rimmer to sniff out a picture of Terri for that lowlife Sowerby to take a peek at, see if she’s “the usual”. Better yet, have him get a picture of her from school.’ Hudson smiled. ‘She might be wearing the same school uniform he saw her in.’

      ‘Will do.’

      ‘If this pans out and the girl has been having it off with her stepfather, it opens up all sorts of avenues. With Harvey-Ellis porking his wife and daughter,’ he said, with a glance at Grant to see if she was offended, ‘it brings the mother into the equation.’

      ‘Hell hath no fury,’ nodded Grant, ignoring her colleague’s choice of language. She knew from experience that he enjoyed proving female coppers were oversensitive. She thought for a moment. ‘Or maybe the mother knows and doesn’t mind.’

      ‘How could the mother not mind?’ said Hudson.

      ‘Maybe she knows but she doesn’t know. Knowing tears her life apart. She loses husband and daughter. But if she blinds herself, she’s a happily married mother – if that makes sense.’

      ‘Female logic?’ Now it was Grant’s turn to pull a face and Hudson, with a guilty laugh, held up his hand. ‘Okay, I know what you mean. She blocks it out.’ He squirrelled a glance at her. ‘Thank God you’re not one of those lesbian ballbreakers they’ve got up in the smoke, Laura.’

      ‘How do you know I’m not?’

      Hudson laughed. ‘Because you’re a top girl, Laura. A top girl.’ Grant raised a cautionary eyebrow, but couldn’t resist a smile and Hudson laughed. ‘Roll on next year, when I can collect my pension and piss off to Jurassic Park with all the other dinosaurs, eh?’

      ‘Amen to that, guv.’

      Jason Wallis lay on his bed and stared up at the ceiling, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling only the dry distortion of old tear tracks on his cheeks. He’d woken up a couple of hours previously but hadn’t moved at all.

      The house was quiet now. His aunt was in bed resting before her next shift and baby Bianca had finally fallen asleep after her lunch of chips and beans. Thankfully his aunt hadn’t returned until half an hour after Jason had waddled home, soiled and scarred by his ordeal. He’d had time to bung his fouled clothing into the washer and set it going before showering and retreating to his room in shame and terror, once more pulling the chest of drawers across his door for safety. He’d collapsed into bed and lost consciousness almost at once – to call it sleep would have implied rest – and had woken with a start some time later, a film of sweat covering every millimetre of his skin. He’d sobbed quietly for the rest of the afternoon before finally succumbing to something approaching sleep.