Silent Footsteps Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Jo Bannister

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Jo Bannister

  The Gabriel Ash and Hazel Best Mysteries

  DEADLY VIRTUES

  PERFECT SINS

  DESPERATE MEASURES

  OTHER COUNTRIES *

  KINDRED SPIRITS *

  SILENT FOOTSTEPS *

  The Brodie Farrell Mysteries

  REQUIEM FOR A DEALER

  FLAWED

  CLOSER STILL

  LIARS ALL

  * available from Severn House

  SILENT FOOTSTEPS

  Jo Bannister

  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.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jo Bannister.

  The right of Jo Bannister to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8864-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-984-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0196-6 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  ONE

  Benny Price finished his Christmas shopping, faced bloody death and met an Amazon warrior all on the same day. Since he worked in local government, this was possibly the most interesting day of his life.

  It was also the day of the first significant snowfall. Apparently it was the wrong kind of snow, because the machine that should have removed it from the railway lines gave up in disgust somewhere between Birmingham and Norbold. So, in consequence, did the Norbold train.

  Benny sighed, took his copy of Birdwatching Magazine out of his shopping bag and settled down to wait. He imagined that sooner or later the train operators would either dig out the track or provide buses to take their customers home, and in the meantime there was nothing to be gained by getting angry.

  Some of his fellow travellers were equally philosophical, some were not. Behind him, the mother of two under-tens tried to engage them in a game of I-Spy. It might have been more successful if the watery sun hadn’t set two hours earlier, limiting the view from the carriage windows to a pale, glowing panorama of snowy fields. When S and F had been used, the game ground to a halt much as the train had done.

  Across the aisle, a young woman with fair hair and ear-muffs took a tablet out of her briefcase and keyed up some document Benny could see but – he was too polite to crane – not read. He got the impression that its contents displeased her. She pursed her lips and her fair brows drew together in a faint critical frown.

  At the front of the carriage, two men in expensive coats traded anecdotes of Great Train Delays of Our Time in an increasingly competitive way. Taking seven hours to get from Coventry to Kidderminster beat five hours in the tunnel under Clover Hill, but was itself trumped by a derailment on the slow curve approaching Norbold. Apparently the driver had come in hot, jumped the tracks and attempted to enter the station sideways. The men in the expensive coats chuckled, and didn’t understand why Benny – who remembered the incident, and remembered that eight people were injured, two of them seriously – was eyeing them with disapproval.

  Behind Benny, someone was getting irritable. Voices were raised – at least, one voice was raised, and another was joining in, not with much enthusiasm but in a kind of placatory whine. ‘Yeah, Trucker, it’s a bummer. Don’t see what we can do about it though, do you?’

  ‘It’s our mam’s birthday,’ snarled the first voice. ‘You know how many of them she has every year? I promised I’d be there for tea. She’s going to think I forgot. That really pisses me off. Like I’d forget our mam’s birthday!’

  ‘She’ll know that, Trucker,’ the second voice assured him. ‘It’ll be on the News.’

  ‘Our mam’s birthday?’

  ‘The snow. It’ll be all over the telly. She’ll know the train’s snowed in.’

  ‘Snowed in!’ snorted the voice called Trucker. ‘That’s what’s wrong with this footling country. Two inches of footling snow, and the whole footling transport system grinds to a footling halt.’ He did not say Footling.

  Benny scowled into his magazine. He deplored bad language.

  There was the sound of movement behind him, and someone pushed roughly past his shoulder, creasing his magazine. It was a large young man in dirty jeans and an anorak patched with gaffer tape, an incongruously seasonal bobble hat pulled low over his brow. ‘Who’s driving this footling thing anyway? I’m going to tell the footling cupcake what he can do with his footling train.’ He did not say Cupcake.

  There are times when a man has to do what a man has to do if he’s going to respect the face he sees in his shaving mirror the next morning. Benny Price rolled up his battered Birdwatching and said firmly, ‘Kindly moderate your language, young man. There are women and children in this carriage.’

  For a spell that might have been only seconds but felt much longer, time stood still. Benny wondered if he hadn’t been heard and was going to have to repeat himself. But it was more that Trucker – was that even a name? – didn’t know how to respond to something he didn’t believe he’d heard. People didn’t speak to him like that. Fat middle-aged men reading magazines didn’t even think about speaking to him like that. Not if they didn’t want people in white coats retrieving their reading glasses with forceps.

 
Finally he managed, ‘What did you say?’ in a kind of strangled shout.

  Benny rose slowly to his feet. ‘I believe you heard me the first time. If you want to complain to the train company, write them a letter. But the people in this carriage are not responsible for your frustration, so don’t take it out on them.’

  Trucker turned to his much smaller companion like a mastiff consulting with a terrier. ‘He wants me to write them a letter,’ he jeered. ‘He wants me to write a footling letter to the cupcakes who run the footling train!’

  A kind of recklessness overcame Benny Price. He travelled a lot by train. He’d been in this kind of situation before. He’d always done the sensible thing. Not got involved; not provoked someone who was clearly unpredictable; waited for the trouble-maker to become bored with him and go off to jeer at someone else instead. And all the way home he’d tormented himself with what he would have said if only he’d thought of it just a little bit quicker.

  Today, he knew exactly what to say, and he was damned if he was going to go home without saying it. ‘If you need help with some of the longer words,’ he offered, ‘I can lend you a dictionary.’

  The large young man – and he was much larger than Benny; he might have been larger than Benny’s coal-shed – leaned forward, enveloping him in a miasma of half-digested beer. Benny doubted if he was drunk, at least by his own standards, but he wasn’t sober either. In a face approximately the same shape, texture and colour as a breeze block, the piggy eyes were hot with fury. Under one of them a small muscle was ticcing busily.

  ‘Do you think I can’t write a letter?’ he hissed, offended and vicious. ‘He thinks I can’t write a letter, Rat. P’raps I’d better show him what I can write. Put your hand out, smart-arse, and I’ll write my name on it real small and neat.’ Steel winked in the carriage lights as a blade appeared like magic between his fingers.

  Benny drew a deep breath and his chest swelled to meet the knife. A distant part of him thought: So this is how it ends … as foolish, as meaningless as this. Because he’d stood up to a thug on a train while everyone else pretended not to notice.

  ‘Come on, lads,’ said a clear voice behind Trucker’s shoulder, ‘it’s Friday night and I’m supposed to be off duty. If I have to arrest you now, I’m still going to be filling in the paperwork come Monday.’

  ‘And who the footling hell …?’ demanded Trucker; and as he turned, Benny Price saw the girl with the fair hair, on her feet now, the tablet set aside and the ear-muffs round her neck.

  She saw Trucker and Trucker saw her at the same moment. The young man gave a just audible groan, and the knife vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The girl – no, thought Benny, she was a woman, older than Trucker though younger than himself – let her face spread in a surprisingly amiable grin.

  ‘Trucker! I should have known it was you. I haven’t seen you for ages. Where’ve you been hiding?’ And then, remembering: ‘Oh – yes. When did you get out?’

  ‘Three weeks ago,’ mumbled the thug, like a schoolboy cornered by a cheery teacher.

  ‘Then it’s a bit soon to be trying to get back in again, isn’t it?’ She held out her hand, palm up. ‘Knife, please.’

  ‘Ain’t got no knife,’ muttered Trucker, shoving his fists deep into his pockets.

  ‘And Admiral Nelson saw no ships,’ retorted the young woman, leaving her hand where it was. ‘Knife.’

  ‘Aw, miss …!’

  ‘How’s this for a deal?’ she proposed. ‘I’ll take the knife for safe-keeping, to give Winson Green a chance to paint your cell before you need it again. Ask me for it sometime when you’re sober and you just might get it back. Then you and I can write a really rude letter to the train operators, listing all the places where railways manage to operate in real snow, not just a light dusting of Father Christmas’s dandruff. And this gentleman here’ – Benny Price, hanging on her every word – ‘can buy a round in his local and boast about the time he cheeked Trucker Watts and lived.’

  All the tension had gone out of the situation. Stabbing anyone now would have seemed churlish, somehow, even to Trucker. He gave up the blade.

  Unexpectedly the train started to move. They all staggered a little; then Trucker shouldered ostentatiously past Benny and went to find a seat where he didn’t have to look at the woman who’d disarmed him. As he went, though, his companion hurrying in his wake, he growled over his shoulder, ‘Happy Christmas, Miss Best.’

  Benny Price drew a normal breath for the first time in a couple of minutes. When he felt his heartbeat beginning to slow he said, ‘Is that your name? Miss Best?’

  ‘Hm?’ She’d been watching to see where Trucker went; but it seemed he’d had enough fun for one day. He made the men in the expensive coats shuffle up to make room for him.

  Looking back at Benny she smiled. ‘Yes. Constable Best, of Meadowvale Police Station in Norbold. Trucker and me are old … friends.’ It wasn’t entirely honest, but it was the best she could do.

  ‘My name’s Benny Price,’ he said seriously, ‘I’m with Norbold council works department. I hope you’ll consider me a new friend. If you ever need a new wheelie-bin, or a bulk refuse collection, just say the word.’

  She gave an appreciative chuckle. ‘A girl can never have too many friends at the council works department, Mr Price.’

  ‘Benny,’ he insisted. ‘Please.’

  ‘Benny.’

  TWO

  ‘So how did the interview go?’

  Hazel Best pursed her lips, considering. ‘I’m not sure. Not great, I don’t think. Nothing awful happened – I didn’t wipe my nose on my sleeve, or yawn during one of Chief Superintendent Forest’s little homilies. They were polite to me and I was polite back. But there was no great warmth there. I think that, while no one was actually prepared to say it, they wanted me to go away with the understanding that they didn’t see a future for me in CID.’

  Gabriel Ash was brushing his dog. It was a nightly ritual, performed after his sons had gone to bed, which dog experts insisted reinforced the bond between pet and owner. Ash wasn’t sure that the bond between him and Patience needed further reinforcement – he’d saved her from the council pound, she’d saved him from people trying to kill him – but she enjoyed their grooming sessions. And the boys’ nanny appreciated his efforts to keep the short white hairs off their clothes, even though Ash suspected he was redistributing more than he was actually removing. When he’d finished, there always seemed to be more of them on his pullover than on the brush.

  He cleaned the brush now and put it away before replying. ‘You could be wrong about that.’

  ‘I could,’ Hazel agreed. ‘I don’t think I am. They kept harping on about different people having different strengths, and the importance of the right person in the right job. And the fact that Uniform is the foundation of all police work, that they couldn’t afford to weaken the Uniformed Branch by transferring all their best officers to the specialities.’

  She was right: it was hard to take much encouragement from that. Ash said, ‘Would it bother you? Staying with Uniform?’

  She had been asking herself that on the train home. ‘Not as much now as it would have done a year ago. I always hoped to get into CID eventually. Now? I don’t know. It’s not like it looks on the telly. Anything resembling a major inquiry has such a big team running it, the contribution any individual can make is limited.’ She grinned. ‘Whereas, if you see a little old lady across the road and she makes it to the opposite kerb, you know you’ve achieved something worthwhile.’

  This was disingenuous, and both of them knew it. She was disappointed. But it was not in Hazel Best’s character to dwell on failure.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ she went on, putting aside the newspaper she’d been leafing through, ‘I bumped into an old friend of yours on the train. Trucker Watts. You remember Trucker?’

  Oh yes: Ash remembered Trucker. To the best of his knowledge, Trucker had only ever done one good thing, and that was to in
troduce Gabriel Ash to Hazel Best. Admittedly, he’d done it by beating the living daylights out him, leaving Constable Best to pick up the pieces; even so, Ash was not ungrateful. ‘What’s he doing these days?’

  ‘Well, what he was doing this afternoon was working himself into a paddy because the train was delayed by the snow. Some bloke from the council told him to stop swearing, and Trucker pulled a knife.’

  Ash regarded her levelly. ‘And?’

  ‘I asked him nicely and he handed it over.’

  It terrified Ash, the risks she took. ‘And if he hadn’t?’

  Hazel sighed. ‘Gabriel, I’m a police officer. On duty or off, I can’t pretend to be doing a crossword while Trucker Watts disembowels members of the public.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time,’ Ash said carefully, ‘you thought about being something else. Particularly if you’re right, and Division intend to keep you out of CID. There are other things you could do with your life. Maybe this would be a good time to think about a change of career.’

  She elevated one fair eyebrow at him. ‘Another one?’

  ‘Why not? You have transferable skills. What you learned as a teacher made you a good police officer; what you learned in the police will be of value whatever you decide to do next. These days, people don’t have one career all their lives.’ He gave a gentle, self-deprecating smile. ‘Look at me.’

  Hazel returned the smile with real affection; but being fond of him didn’t keep her from teasing him sometimes. She thought it was good for him, stopped him taking himself too seriously. ‘True,’ she said. ‘You were an insurance investigator, then you were a spy, now you run a second-hand bookshop. No one can accuse you of being stuck in a rut.’

  Ash had put her right on this so many times he knew she was only saying it to annoy him. He still couldn’t let it pass. ‘I was a government security analyst. I was not a spy.’

  ‘I could be a spy,’ she suggested.

  He believed – he hoped – she was still teasing him; but whether or not, he was knocking that one on the head. ‘No, you couldn’t.’