Ahead of the Game Read online

  Ahead of the Game

  A DCI Jack Logan Thriller

  JD Kirk

  Zertex Crime

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  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

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Epilogue

  DCI Logan Returns in…

  Psst! Want Access to Logan’s Wedding Speech?

  Also by JD Kirk

  AHEAD OF THE GAME

  Published worldwide by Zertex Crime, an imprint of Zertex Media Ltd.

  Copyright © 2021 by JD Kirk

  The right of JD Kirk 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.

  www.jdkirk.com

  www.zertexmedia.com

  Edited by Hanna Elizabeth.

  Cover Design by Andrew Dobell.

  Chapter One

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time, this self-employment lark.

  Working for yourself. Setting your own hours. No boss breathing down your neck. Just you, the open road, and an endless cavalcade of tourists lining up to hang on your every word.

  That was the theory, at least. That was how Ernie Woodcock had imagined it, and how he’d sold the idea to his wife when he’d first suggested jacking in his perfectly adequate, reasonably paid job of eleven years.

  It hadn’t worked out quite as well as he’d hoped. Not by a long shot, in fact.

  There was so much to do. That was the first problem he’d come across. There was always another Facebook ad to set up, another query to respond to, another fire to put out, both metaphorically and—on one occasion, when someone had sparked up a crafty Lambert & Butler at the back of the minibus—literally.

  And then there was the tax stuff. Most of it was well beyond his understanding, and he couldn’t afford to even think about an accountant at this stage. Fortunately, he’d made approximately fuck-all in the six weeks he’d been in business, so he wasn’t too bothered about it yet.

  Mostly, though, the big issue with running a tourist-related business of one’s own was that tourists, by and large, were all arseholes.

  Oh sure, there was the odd one or two who were decent. The occasional odd-one-out who didn’t put their feet on the seats, or talk all the way through his carefully-scripted narration, or loudly complain when he overtook some dawdling old bugger in a camper van right before a blind corner.

  These heroes—these rare gems—were few and far between, though. Mostly, it was wall-to-wall arseholes, and because he was still establishing his Tripadvisor rating, he could only nod and smile and bend over backwards to accommodate the loathsome bastards and their idiotic requests.

  Not a problem, Madam. I’ll clean that up. No bother. I hope poor wee Johnny feels better soon. No, don’t you worry about a thing.

  Wankers.

  Still, it had to be done. A few bad Tripadvisor reviews could spell disaster for a fledgeling tourism business. Just look at what happened with that theatre cruise company from Fort Augustus a year or two back. A string of bad reviews, and bankrupt within months.

  He wondered what had happened to the owners of that in the end, as he scrunched up the tinfoil he’d wrapped his tuna sandwich in, formed it into a little ball, then stuffed it back into his lunch bag next to his flask.

  The punters were eating at the coffee shop across the road. Three of them. South African couple in their forties, and a teenage son.

  And him with a bus built for twelve.

  He felt guilty for inflicting them on the folks who owned the place over the road. The Loch Oich Food Company was a family-run coffee shop and takeaway that had been on the market for about a year now, but with no takers. Hard to believe someone hadn’t bitten their hands off yet, given how ideal a spot they were in—right on the A82, a thirty-second walk away from the loch, and slap bang next to one of the more interesting landmarks on Ernie’s tour.

  They’d owned the place for years. He didn’t know why they were selling. Probably just wanted out of the tourist business. He’d imagine they’d had quite enough of dealing with the bastards.

  And now, he’d gone and inflicted three more on them. And an awful bloody shower they were, too.

  The husband—frankly, an absolute dildo of a man, who seemed to have modelled his facial hair on any or all of the Three Musketeers—had questioned almost every part of Ernie’s narration, from when the Caledonian Canal was built (1804 to 1822), to the length of Loch Ness (twenty-two and a half miles.) Ernie knew for a bloody fact that those were both correct, because he’d checked Wikipedia.

  The wife, on the other hand, had not engaged with the tour in the slightest. Instead, she’d talked on her phone the whole way, jabbering away to some shrill-voiced harridan on the other end of the line, snorting, and laughing, and giving it, “Oh, I know. I know. I know,” every three minutes.

  During the call, she’d been less than complimentary about the tour, and had made no attempt to be even the slightest bit subtle about it. Which was a bloody cheek, considering she hadn’t listened to a word of anything that Ernie had said.

  The teenage son had mostly just slumped up the back in silence, except to twice ask, “Are we there, yet?”

  Only Ernie’s ‘Remember Tripadvisor!’ Post-it Note on the dash had stopped him pointing out to the dour-faced little shit that he’d know when they were there, because ‘there’ would be back at the hotel where they’d all been picked up at seven o’clock that bloody morning.

  Scowling at the thought of another two hours with the family, Ernie folded the top of his lunch bag closed and tucked it into the passenger footwell.

  “Bastards, the lot of them,” he announced for the benefit of nobody but himself.

  He caught himself sighing heavily as the front door of the cafe opened and the three familiar figures emerged. The wife was still talking on the bloody phone. Surely, she hadn’t done that all through their lunch? She’d been non-stop wittering on the thing since the back of seven that morning. What was she trying to do, get her name in the record books?

  The husband strode purposefully down the steps at the front of the building and gave Ernie a wave like he was hailing a cab.

  “Aye, I see you fine, ya bellend,” Ernie muttered through a fixed rictus of a smile. “I’m a tour bus, no’ a bloody taxi service.”

  He opened the dri
ver’s door and stepped down, if only to emphasise the fact that he had no intention whatsoever of driving across the main road to pick them up.

  He savoured the moustache-twitch of irritation from the husband, then waited for them to join him by the minibus.

  “You alright there?” he asked, booming out the question in his best ‘affable host’ manner. “Get something nice to eat?”

  “It was fine,” the husband said, shrugging to highlight quite how indifferent he was to the whole experience. He shivered, despite his heavy coat. “Are we getting back in? It’s freezing.”

  Ernie sniffed in a deep breath that filled his lungs with the scents of springtime. “You think this is cold? You should’ve been here a few months back. Snow covering the place. This is borderline tropical. And it isn’t raining, which is a miracle in and of itself.”

  “I wish we’d just gone to Florida again,” the son said, and Ernie caught himself nodding in agreement. He wished they had, too.

  “Right, well, I’ve got a treat in store for you,” he said, setting off towards a tall, roughly triangular monument that stood by the edge of the road. “And believe me, you won’t get this at Disneyland.”

  “Are those… heads?” asked the husband, when they stopped by the monument.

  This was just the latest in his long line of stupid bloody questions, as far as Ernie was concerned. The sculpture at the top of the monument clearly showed seven heads, all neatly severed, and clutched by a carved stone hand at the top.

  “Correct! Seven of them,” Ernie said. “It’s the Well of the Seven Heads.”

  “Wow. How original!” the son remarked, and his father let out a gleeful little snort that put Ernie’s nose right out of joint.

  Bad reviews, he thought. Can’t get bad reviews.

  Rising above the remark, he began to recite his well-rehearsed spiel about the history of the well.

  1663.

  Letters of ‘Fire and Sword,’

  ‘Ample and summary vengeance.’

  Blah, blah, blah.

  He led them down the banking as he spoke, saving the good bits until they were huddled by the mouth of the passageway that led beneath the monument itself.

  “Seven murderers,” he whispered, the echo of the passageway adding gravitas and drama. “All beheaded. Washed right here on this spot, before being presented to—”

  “What the hell is that?”

  Ernie turned, surprised by the question. Or rather, surprised by who it came from. The wife had finally managed to unglue the phone from her ear and was angling the screen into the tunnel mouth, trying to use its dim glow to push back the shadows.

  “What’s what?” Ernie asked.

  She tutted and sighed like a surly teenager, told whoever she was on the phone to that she would call them back, then hung up and activated the torch function with a couple of indignant thumb presses.

  As soon as the light kicked in, Ernie saw them.

  Feet.

  Two of.

  Wearing trainers.

  “What the fuck?” the son ejected.

  “Give me that,” said the husband, taking the phone from his wife. He stepped forward and the torchlight drove the darkness further back.

  “Is this part of the tour?” asked the wife. “If it is, it’s horrible. It’s sick!”

  Ernie didn’t hear her. He was too focused on the contents of the passageway.

  Past the feet, he saw legs. Hips. Arms. Shoulders.

  The light revealed more of the passageway, but there the body ended.

  “The head. Where the hell’s his head gone?” Ernie wondered aloud, surprisingly calmly, given the circumstances.

  But as the screaming started behind him, Ernie had a horrible sinking feeling that this was really going to affect his Tripadvisor score.

  Chapter Two

  DCI Jack Logan stood surrounded by the smell of death. He’d love to be able to say this was unusual, but it was pretty much par for the course by this point in a long, and not particularly glamorous, polis career.

  The particular aroma of death that lingered in this place was far from fresh. The building had once been a butcher’s shop. It stood tucked away just off Shore Street—barely a stone’s throw from the Burnett Road station he was based at—and had mostly served local restaurants until it had shut down a year or so back.

  The stench of dead animal flesh had permeated the fabric of the building, but that was just background olfactory noise. Much more overpowering was the rancid reek of the human remains that had been discovered in the big walk-in freezer through the back of the shop.

  The property owner had made the grisly discovery back in February, when he’d come up from the south of England to prep the place for sale. The smell hadn’t hit him until he’d opened the freezer door, and months of stale warm air had come cascading out.

  Once he’d finished throwing up, he’d got straight on to 999. To Logan’s immense relief, he’d been pulled out of a strategy meeting with Detective Superintendent Mitchell and a couple of the higher-ups from the central belt, and the whole rigmarole of murder investigation had kicked off once again.

  It wasn’t hard to identify a suspect, of course. The remains had lain there decomposing since whoever had been paying the electric bill had stopped doing so, but cause of death was organ failure due to extreme cold temperatures. Logan had guessed that, even before the post-mortem.

  The Iceman, it seemed, had left one final surprise.

  They’d investigated, of course. Checked with the power company that had previously been supplying energy to the place. The name on the bill had actually been one of the Iceman’s original victims, which was a nicely macabre little touch, Logan thought.

  The bills hadn’t been paid in December or January, and the supply had been cut. It wasn’t like home electricity, where the company had an obligation to help you keep the heating on. With commercial supply, there was no such requirement. Two strikes and you were out. No heating. No lights. And certainly no big power-guzzling walk-in freezer.

  And so, the freezer’s contents had begun to thaw.

  The case wouldn’t technically be closed for a while yet. The paperwork would see to that. But for all intents and purposes, it was off Logan’s plate.

  And yet…

  He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat and turned on the spot, taking in the room around him. The windows were still boarded up, and the only light came from the open door. The shop had been picked clean by Geoff Palmer’s Scene of Crime team. There had been very little to discover this side of the freezer door.

  But what there had been—a metal pipe and a spray of blood on the floor—didn’t fit with the rest of the Iceman murders. Not exactly. Not quite.

  The rest of Logan’s team had told him he was overthinking it, but those two slight incongruities dangled like loose threads from the case file. He tried to ignore them, but kept circling back around.

  A metal pipe.

  A spray of blood.

  Two pieces of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit.

  His phone rang in his pocket. He stole another quick glance around at the shop’s interior, then stepped outside to take the call.

  The name that was emblazoned on the screen made him hesitate.

  “Vanessa,” he said, pulling the shop door closed behind him. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  His ex-wife’s tone had more of a chill to it than the mid-morning air. This was not exactly a surprise. She had demonstrated very little warmth towards him since…

  Well, for a very long time.

  “Jack. How have you been?” she asked. Although, ‘asked’ wasn’t quite the right word. ‘Asked’ implied the expectation of an answer. The words had been spoken out of habit, though. A verbal tic. He knew she couldn’t care less. That wasn’t what this was about.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  “What makes you think something’s happened?” Vanessa asked.

>   “Because you’re phoning me.”

  Logan locked the door to the shop, replaced the cordon tape across it, then marched back in the direction of the station. It was only a couple of minutes’ walk if he cut across the back way. If past experiences were anything to go by, Vanessa would’ve hung up on him long before he got there.

  “Yes. Well,” she said, and Logan could picture her shifting around uncomfortably on her big expensive couch. “I just… I thought you should know.”

  “Know what?”

  “It’s Maddie.”

  Logan slowed his pace at the mention of his daughter’s name. He swapped the phone from one ear to the other. “What’s wrong? Is she alright? What’s happened?”

  “She’s fine. She’s better than fine, actually,” Vanessa said. There was an inhalation from the other end of the line. A silent holding of breath. A building up to something.

  “Vanessa—”

  “She got married.”

  Logan stopped halfway across a side-road. A van honked at him, and he continued to the pavement before responding.

  “Married? What do you mean ‘she got married’?”

  “I mean she got married.”

  “When? To who?”