Jack-Knifed

Book 3: DCI Phelps

by Wonny Lea

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

`Jack-Knifed? is the first novel featuring DCI Martin Phelps and his team, based in the world-famous and vibrant Cardiff Bay. Mark Wilson, a decent, well-liked gay man, lives alone in a beautiful house in Cardiff. One Saturday evening, his closest friends go to his house for an evening of drinks and catching-up. Finding no answer, the concerned friends break in ? to a horrific murder scene. For Mark Wilson has been brutally, sadistically murdered in his own home. As DCI Phelps investigates, Mark?s traumatic early life is revealed. Was his killer someone from his past? Was his sexuality a motive? What about his violent, homophobic father ? a man who has already killed more than once ? Meanwhile, Mark?s estranged sister Amy broods on the hatred she has for her brother, blaming him for turning their father into a killer. As she sinks further in to the depths of drug addiction, who?s to say what her next move will be? As the body count rises, Phelps and his sergeant, Matt Pryor, soon realise they are on the trail of a serial killer ?

Release date: December 19, 2013

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter One
Paula remembers

‘Six hundred and fifty thousand pounds!’ shouted Paula Williams as she watched the National Lottery draw live on her new plasma-screen television. She had been shouting the same six words ever since she and twenty-two million other hopefuls had watched the first live draw, hosted by Noel Edmonds. She even remembered the date: Saturday 19th November 1994.

She had chosen six ‘lucky’ numbers based on her date of birth, the number of her house, and her age at that time, and by sticking a pencil in her calendar for the sixth number. This had meant that, as it was November, her final number couldn’t be higher than 30; Paula had ended up with her lowest number being 17 and her highest, 26. Around this time of this potentially life-changing selection, she had just started the second year of a part-time business course, and had spent weeks studying theories of probability and the relationship of random variables. Was someone who had chosen a wider range of numbers between 1 and 49 was more likely to be a lottery winner? Paula never could tell.

A couple of years later, just to add to her frustration, Camelot had introduced a second draw each week. Paula, like so many other suckers who always used the same numbers, was caught hook, line, and sinker. How could she not use her numbers, when she would surely hear all six read out the very week she decided enough was enough?

It was now 2010, and after doing a quick calculation Paula realised that she had spent over £1500 chasing those elusive winning numbers. She had no real ambitions to get her hands on millions, and had always thought that £650,000 seemed like a dream amount. There would be no need to dramatically change the life she actually quite enjoyed, but such a windfall would offer her lifelong security, the home she dreamed of, and a few of those once-in-a-lifetime holidays she sold to other people.

True, there had been a few occasions over the years when she’d won a tenner, and once, in May 2006, she had scooped an incredible £72.68! It was then that she almost ditched her numbers, because this win was the result of buying a lucky dip, with the machine at her local newsagents randomly choosing six numbers for her. That draw was notable not because of my win, thought Paula, but because of the sudden set invasion by Fathers 4 Justice protesters. She laughed as she recalled the look of total confusion on the host Eamonn Holmes’ face as they interrupted his programme.

So why was she sitting here now, on May 29th, 2010, thinking about the lottery? It was easy to realise why she remembered that particular draw, for apart from her less-than-life-changing win, she had that very night met David Price, who turned out to be a member of Fathers 4 Justice himself. He and his friends had obviously had prior warning of the stunt, and were celebrating its success at Paula’s local pub when she arrived there with a friend from work. Paula had quickly become closely involved with David. Closely involved – Paula remembered their six-week relationship being mostly made up of sex 24/7. But she had not shared his fetish for dressing up in superhero outfits, and extending similar antics into the bedroom had not been for her …

The past few months in work had been, to say the least, interesting. Paula worked in the travel business and had been forced to keep up-to-date on the volcanic eruption in Iceland. The huge clouds of ash had caused major disruption to the holiday plans of most of her clients, many of whom seemed to hold her personally responsible. She had had as little control over the volcano in April as she had over British Airways workers taking strike action in May, but that hadn’t stopped some disappointed would-be-holidaymakers shooting the messengers at her travel agency. Tonight, though, it was not the National Lottery that was of interest to Paula, but the Eurovision Song Contest, which had become a cult event for Paula and three of her friends. Paula smiled to herself as she recalled memories of previous ESC sessions, and plonking herself down on the edge of her two-seater red leather sofa she drank the remains of the instant Americano she had made earlier. It was almost stone-cold, but then Paula probably drank more coffee cold than hot, as it was in her nature to be easily distracted, and sitting still for five minutes at a time was only possible if something was really gripping her attention.

As the warm-up for the Eurovision Song Contest began, Paula finished her make-up, put on her probably too-high platform heels, and donned the long, lightweight multi-coloured coat she had bought in the January sales. She wore a blue sleeveless top and white linen trousers, and didn’t really need to wear a coat at all, but she’d fallen in love with one of the few designer labels she had in her wardrobe and was determined to wear it as often as she could.

The weather had been scorching over the past week or so. According to Derek the weatherman, temperatures in the city had reached the high twenties, but as Paula was fair-skinned she could justify covering up, as even the evening sunshine turned her skin bright red.

She had inherited her colouring from her father, and her mother had often said that Paula’s naturally dark chestnut-coloured hair and olive-green eyes were the only good things her father had left behind when he’d buggered off and left them. Paula could not be considered an outstanding beauty, but she was certainly attractive, and her friendly, outgoing nature drew people to her – as she’d sometimes found to her cost …

She locked the door of her flat in Claude Road carefully, and felt very angry that one of the other residents in the house had once again left the main front door on the latch. There had been a spate of break-ins in the surrounding streets, so many in fact that the local police had made house-to-house visits and posted leaflets in an attempt to get home owners to become more security conscious.

Paula adjusted the lock and slammed the door loudly, hoping that the message would get through to the other three groups of tenants, but the mixture of loud, tuneless music and drunken laughter from various parts of the house told her she was wasting her time.

To be fair to her in-house neighbours, she hardly heard a sound from them during the week when, as they were all students, she assumed they were either at one of the colleges or sleeping behind their forever-closed curtains. It was usually around 6 p.m. on a Friday that the house woke up, and stayed awake and rocking until the early hours of Sunday morning.

Still, she would be happy when she could afford to put down a good deposit on a home of her own, and her recent promotion to manager of the travel agency she worked for on Albany Road had brought that day nearer. Paula had been saving every penny she could manage since her acrimonious split with Chris almost nine years ago. Even now, though, simply remembering him caused her to feel anxious, and she realised that she was breathing faster now than she had been a few minutes ago.

It wasn’t surprising that the thought of Chris Benson was having this effect on her, as for seven months after she had ended their relationship, he had stalked her and did everything he could think of to make her life a total misery.

In the early days of their relationship he had been charm personified, and Paula had to admit that she had been very happy and more than a little swept away. They had moved from meeting to living together at breakneck speed, and then Paula found that more and more it was just the two of them, always, to the exclusion of Paula’s friends and relatives.

It had taken her some time to realise that Chris didn’t have any friends that she knew of, and he frequently described his relatives as ‘a waste of space’. The first sign Paula had of a very different side to Chris’s nature was when she had quite innocently suggested that they invite his parents to lunch one Sunday. He had flown into an instant, uncontrollable rage, shouting at Paula and throwing his cup full of steaming black coffee against the kitchen door, smashing the cup and one of the glass panels.

Copious expensive presents and excessive lovemaking followed this incident, as Chris declared his undying love for Paula, and tried to explain that she was the only thing that mattered to him, that all they needed was each other. Happy for the most part, Paula initially went along with this, but she soon began to realise that although Chris constantly told her he loved her, what he really loved was being in control of her. This scared her, and her fear was reinforced when she realised that her friends and family had stopped ringing. By now she was wary enough not to mention this to Chris and instead made her own enquiries.

Everyone she spoke to told her that Chris had been in touch and had explained to them that Paula was depressed and close to a breakdown. He had asked every one of them to ensure that she was left alone to sort herself out. With the benefit of hindsight, Paula remembered many phone calls when Chris had rushed to the phone, telling the caller never to ring again and slamming the phone back into its cradle. His explanation had been that they were getting nuisance calls and that it was best that he dealt with them, being a man and less likely to be intimidated. At the time, Paula was totally unaware that it was in fact her friends and relatives who were being lied to and verbally abused in her name.

The break up was like something out of a nightmare psycho film. First of all, the violence, including a blow to Paula’s face and the destruction of all the Wedgwood china she had inherited from an aunt. Then the renewed, gratuitous demonstrations of so-called love and affection. Paula moved in with her friend Suzanne at her home just outside Cowbridge, and was completely freaked out the following day when six different florists delivered bouquets to Suzanne’s door, starting with a dozen red roses.

The number increased by a further dozen every hour, finishing at 3 p.m. when a bemused young man rang her doorbell and handed over a bunch, almost as big as himself, of seventy-two red roses. Each delivery had arrived with a card hand written by Chris for Paula with the same message ‘You are and will always be mine and no one else will ever love you like I do.’

The words, now as then, sent a chill through Paula, and she shook her head to prevent any further memories of the hell she endured in the months following that day, the day she received a total of two hundred and fifty-two red roses sent not with love, but with a deep-seated desire to possess, control, and dominate.

The Eurovision Song Contest has been broadcast every year since it started in 1956, and was still watched by millions. Paula wondered just how many groups of sad people on Planet Earth were planning a similar evening to herself. She was meeting three friends, and for the past seven years they had taken it in turns to host an evening of listening to some of the most bizarre contemporary singing, only made bearable by copious amounts of good food and wine.

Tonight, everyone was going to Mark’s house, and Paula knew that it would be a special occasion. Although Mark was the only male member of the group, he was more of a woman than Paula herself, Anne, or Suzanne, she thought fondly. His house would be aglow with strategically placed candles, and he would have been cooking all day and producing the most delicious Turkish desserts imaginable. Paula felt her taste buds making her mouth water as she looked forward to some tuluba, the semolina doughnuts in syrup, and those almond cookies he called acibadem. She smiled to herself as she thought of his speciality, diber dudaği – a sweet paste soaked in a light syrup and shaped to resemble ladies’ lips.

Nothing would ever be further from Mark’s mind than real-life ladies’ lips, as his only interest in any woman was friendly – and to be fair, no woman could do better than to have Mark as a friend.

Although all his close friends knew that Mark was gay, he gave the outward appearance of being a good-looking heterosexual hunk of a man, standing at just over six feet tall and weighing in at around thirteen stone of total muscular fitness. Suzanne had often commented it was a terrible waste that no woman would ever enjoy him, and that there would be no little Marks growing up to delight future generations, but they all agreed it was good to have the friendship of a man without the usual jockeying for positions in his bed. Paula turned the corner into Claude Place and headed towards Albany Road, her mind still on Mark and remembering his version of the events that had brought him to Cardiff.

He was a bit older than Paula, having been born in August 1968 on a new, design-award-winning council estate at Penrhys in the Rhondda valleys. His father was a miner, and Mark had often recalled happy memories of his early childhood being at home with his mother when his two older sisters were at school. Their new home was his mother’s pride and joy with its coal-fired boiler that gave them heating throughout the house and oodles of hot water, which they used constantly because the cost was included in their rent.

Mark had darker memories of the weekends on the estate, the Friday and Saturday nights that often saw usually placid men turn into bullish aggressive animals after too much beer, lashing out at each other, and at women and even children who deigned to look sideways at them.

He was five or six years old when things started to go really wrong, and certainly the oil crisis of 1973 had put an enormous strain on his family, as the increased cost of fuel had to be recovered by the council with ever-increasing rents. Many of their neighbours opted to move to other villages in the Rhondda where they were able to take more control of their heating costs.

Gradually, more and more of their new neighbours were families dependent on state benefits, and the men who were unemployed had nothing better to do than hang around the place. The estate quickly deteriorated through lack of maintenance by the council, and the unkempt appearance encouraged general dumping of anything from litter to torched cars.

It didn’t take the new, streetwise neighbours long to realise that Mark was not a little boy who enjoyed kicking a rugby ball about, or scrapping, and he became known as ‘Mummy’s boy’, a name that was tame in comparison to what was to be endured as he grew to become a teenager. Mark’s father found it hard to cope with the taunts and the innuendoes of his fellow miners, and pushed his son into physical sports in an effort to knock what he called the ‘namby-pamby nonsense’ out of him.

When recalling these years of his childhood, Mark had told Paula how he remembered his mother soaking him in the bath at night and trying not to hurt him as she dried his cuts and bruises. He believed she felt his hurt and in some way blamed herself for his predicament. After all, the sort of son that he was developing into could have inherited nothing from his beer-swilling, rugby-playing, loud-mouthed father, who was one of the boys in every respect. His relationship with his father deteriorated as the latter took to using his fists to knock some testosterone into his small son, and his mother’s defence of Mark made her another target for this angry, disappointed man to land his punches on.

After a particularly brutal Saturday night beating for both Mark and his mother, Mark’s eldest sister Sarah intervened, and she got in the way of a vicious punch from her father that sent her reeling and crashing into the edge of the kitchen table. It would seem that her neck was broken on impact, for she never regained consciousness and died in Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil two days later.

The lasting memory Mark had of the event was one of silence as he recalled that Sarah had been screaming and screaming at her father and then suddenly you could hear a pin drop. He still believed that this accounted for the fact that he was unable to cope with silence and the first thing he did in the morning was switch on the radio. Music or sound of some sort or another had to be with him throughout the day.

Paula could barely begin to imagine the impact of the horror of that night on a vulnerable little boy. He was already damaged by physical and mental abuse and by his own feelings that he was different from the other boys in his class, and now he believed that he was in some way responsible for his sister lying still and so pale on the kitchen floor.

The ambulance crew, the police, and the social workers came and went at different times during that evening, as did a constant stream of nosy neighbours. Most of them had never previously been inside the Wilsons’ house but at that time had pretended to be part of a caring community.

Mark told Paula how he remembered a skinny policeman with lots of eyebrows taking him to his parents’ bedroom so that he could say goodbye to his mother and sister and hearing talk of a place of safety and being taken into care. Safety and care were comforting words but all Mark wanted to do was stay with his mother in spite of the fact that she didn’t even seem to know he was there, and just stared ahead crying for Sarah and saying that it wasn’t Bob’s fault.

If his father Bob was not to blame for hurting his sister then Mark thought he must be responsible, and that was why the policeman was taking him away.

Mark couldn’t understand why this had to happen when Amy was staying. He had not been aware that his distraught mother had told police and social workers that she couldn’t cope with her son and begged them to take him away. It seemed that she was now holding Mark responsible for the anger and hatred he had instilled in his father.

He had screamed and held on to the handle of his mother’s bedroom door but she had not got up to help him and Amy, the youngest of his two sisters, just sat on the edge of the bed sucking her thumb. Bizarrely, Mark thought she was lucky that their father had been taken away as he would have shouted at her for sucking her thumb as he had always done, calling her an eight-year-old baby bunting and threatening to tell her friends she still wore nappies.

One of the social workers gently removed Mark’s hand from the door handle and held it very firmly, leading him down the stairs and out into a dark and drizzly February night. The rain and the lateness of the hour had not prevented the sightseers and Mark had never seen so many of their neighbours in the same place at the same time, and again he heard that strange sound of silence everywhere.

Paula thought back to Mark’s accounts of the next few years of his life. He had told her bit by bit over a long period of time, and usually after a couple of bottles of wine, how he had been passed from one foster home to another. Until he was fifteen Mark had never stayed in one place longer than eight months, although foster parents and social workers were always keen to point out that this was because of exceptional circumstances and not because of any problems with Mark himself.

The best possible luck had come Mark’s way in August 1983, just ten days before his fifteenth birthday, when yet again he had packed up his belongings and got into the car of his most recent social worker to be taken to a couple living in Cardiff.

By then Mark was a tall, good-looking boy, but far too thin and not surprisingly lacking in social graces. His churlish attitude served mainly to disguise an underlying shy nature and a decided uncertainty about his place between being a child and a grown-up, and his preference between men and women. The couple he was taken to were Norman and Sandy Harding, and all he knew about them at the time was that they were older than the norm for fostering. They had been a pain in the side of the local authority for some time in their efforts to be considered suitable as long-term foster parents.

Already in their forties, the couple were seen by the authorities as a definite ‘no’ for caring for young children, but an unusually enlightened official had eventually agreed that they had a lot to offer some of the children who were nearing the end of their childhood placements and were needing support to take them out of foster care and into independent lives.

Regrettably, their first opportunity had been with Sophie, a fourteen-year-old girl who after just three weeks at the Hardings’ had invited half the teenage drug scene of Cardiff into her new home, an event culminating in the theft of some of Sandy’s jewellery and Norman taking a beating before handing over just £22.50, which was all the cash in his pocket at the time.

Maybe most couples would have turned their back on thoughts of any more fostering, but Norman knew what a difference a good experience could make to a child, as he himself had been fostered in Cardiff at the age of thirteen by a fantastic couple with three children and two dogs of their own, and a home that had had rules and discipline, but only in the context of love and lots of fun.

He had lived with the family even after his eligibility for foster care had ended, and when the Parry family had decided to move to Australia in 1962, Norman had gone with them and become a partner in the very successful company set up by Jim Parry with his two sons and his daughter, Sandy.

The company, SurfitA, was involved in every aspect of surfing that Southern Australia had to offer, with its base close to Boomerang Beach, Pacific Palms, in New South Wales. Local staff were taken on by the company to make surfboards to suit the local conditions, and after a few years the name SurfitA was on all the gear of any serious surfer, not just in Australia but around the world.

What a place to be a man in his late twenties – and little wonder that Norman fell hopelessly in love with Sandy Parry, and proposed to her one evening as they were watching the dolphins surfing around Boomerang’s northern headland. Their life together followed the fairly typical pattern of many married couples’, with the ups of weddings and births, and the downs of family illnesses and deaths, but their biggest regret was having no children of their own.

It was Sandy who always wanted to return to the real Wales, as she called it, and was on the eve of her forty-second birthday, as they sat reflecting their lives a little distance away from the frenzied celebrations of their relatives and neighbours, that Norman finally agreed and their preparations to return to Cardiff began. They spent hours considering the parts of the capital that they remembered from growing up there, but were amazed by the changes, sometimes forgetting that it was more than twenty years since they were last there and then laughing as they remembered how much they had changed in that time.

The house they chose was just outside the main city, in the village of Whitchurch, chosen because the area seemed relatively unchanged but was not far from the city centre, and the house itself was old and could do with complete modernisation. All of the negotiations for the purchase of the house were done over the phone and the sale went through without them having set foot in their new home. They employed an architect and builders through a brilliant project manager, Elly, so that by the time they set foot in Cardiff the house was just as they wanted it, with even the fridge and freezer well-stocked.

Elly met them at the Cardiff Wales Airport and drove them to the house that turned out to be everything they had hoped for and more. It was as they prepared their first meal in their new house that they decided to share their good fortune and came to the conclusion, as they were unlikely to be considered as viable adoptive parents, already being past the usual child-bearing age, that fostering could be an option. From that moment on, all their efforts went into transforming their new house into a home for whichever children they were fortunate enough to be entrusted with.

It hadn’t occurred to either of them that it would take such a long time for the authorities to process their application and indeed for it to be rejected in the first instance as they were definitely considered to be too old to foster younger children. So eventually, after almost three years of being subjected to every form of scrutiny and putting aside their first bad experience, Norman and Sandy welcomed Mark into their home and, as it turned out, into their lives.

From day one, Mark and Norman hit it off, and Sandy was fascinated to see how easily her husband related to the needs of this strangely sensitive young man, whose background could easily have made him aggressive and bitter but instead had taught him to appreciate every bit of good fortune, no matter how trivial. Small wonder that Mark thought all his birthdays had come at once when he was shown his room equipped with a sound system and even a computer, things he had previously only dreamed of or shared with others, but only at their convenience.

The next three years were exceptional by anyone’s standard, but to Mark they were beyond his wildest dreams. He finished his education at Whitchurch High, where diversity seemed to be the norm, and where the more out of the ordinary you were the more likely it was that you’d be accepted. For the first time in his life he met other boys of his age who were openly gay and, although he didn’t meet anyone he wanted to be with, he felt the shadow of being different lifted from his shoulders, and was at ease with . . .