Phoenix

Book 0: Karen Sharpe

by John Connor

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths; Suspense

Synopsis

The first novel in the grittily authentic Karen Sharpe series. The 8th April 1996 was a bad day for Karen Sharpe, the eighth anniversary of something so deeply buried she had hoped to forget it ever happened. Each year she tries to cope in whatever way she can. Most years she turns to booze. But this year that wasn't going to work. Sometime after midnight her DS and partner, is executed in a military style killing, whilst his pretty 21-year-old informant, ends up on a South Pennine moor with bullets through her face and chest. Karen had been due to meet both when drink and memories intervened, preventing her from getting there. As the investigation begins, odd details keep forcing Karen to examine her own unclear memories. As she follows her instincts, and some very disturbing clues embedded in her own secret history, she must confront her past and act quickly if she is to prevent the seed of destruction planted eight years before from wreaking devastating and brutal consequences. Fans of Peter Robinson, David Baldacci and Linwood Barclay will love John Connor!

Release date: April 21, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 340

Sample

She was numb, inside and out. The stuff running out of her eyes came without emotion, without control. It didn’t mean anything. She placed the child clumsily on the floor at her feet and lay back against the sofa. Inside her the weight was crushing, relentless. It was somewhere in her chest, around the heart, pressing against her lungs. Breathing was an effort. She wanted to close her eyes, roll into a ball, forget about it.

But when she closed her eyes she could feel the blood racing through her veins, see bright lights dancing across the lids like fireworks. She had not slept properly for days, weeks, maybe longer. Time had blurred. She couldn’t even recall how long she had been sitting there.

The thing was wrinkled, staring at her from ugly flaps of wrinkled, loose skin, screaming. She could hear the noise in its throat, see the contorted expression. But when she reached out her fingers to touch the blue skin at its cheeks she could feel nothing. Everywhere she looked, everything she touched, every sound that entered into her brain, even the lumps of food she placed inside her mouth – everything had become dulled. It was as though something grey was pulled down across her senses, cutting her off, insulating her.

Its eyes were milky, unfocused. She didn’t know whether it could see her or not. She had no idea what it wanted. She pulled her legs up to her chest and felt something slip from her hand and spill across her thigh. When she looked down she saw that it was a plastic bottle of milk, lukewarm. Far away, from beyond the door into the room, she could hear a key turning in a lock.

The television was loud, but not loud enough to drown it out. The incessant crying. The thing had been attached to her insides, sucking her blood. She had stood in front of the mirror and seen the effects. She had been too thin for it, a tall, skinny child with a pot belly and everything else drawn, jutting, skintight over the bones, black rings around her eyes.

She had not desired this baby, did not want anything to do with it. On the outside its demands were obvious, the grating, noisy needs – food, attention, warmth – any body would do.

It had come out slippery with her blood, wailing, underweight. She had turned her head away, reeling with the drugs. He had called it Mairead – his dead mother’s name. But it had looked more like a skinned rabbit.

She could hear him pleading with her now. She opened her eyes and saw him leaning over her, face dark with concern, confusion, the baby in his arms. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. ‘Please, Sinead … please …’ She could hear the desperation. Behind him the house looked as though it had been bombed. There was a smell in the place she remembered from her youth, from council estates where her classmates had lived. A background odour of soiled nappies, boiled cabbage, dirt. Where had he been?

She could see the love in the way he held it, cradling it, gently placing the bottle inside its mouth. When it stopped crying he put the bottle down and reached out to close his fingers around her own, understanding.

His hand felt like rubber. She shook her head slowly. She felt nothing inside. Nothing.

He told her he was going to get her help, call a doctor. He had always spoken gently to her, never shouted. He was telling her that they would move away, go somewhere else. Half of the problem, he thought, was this place, where they lived, a stinking, drug-infested high-rise.

Halfway through telling her this, something on the TV distracted him. He turned his head, watching the pictures, listening. Where his hand held hers she could feel his arm trembling, as if he were shivering with cold. Somewhere deep inside her brain she realised she had been waiting for this, had known.

She heard the names being read out by the newsman. The same names she had seen seven months ago, written on the slip of paper he had in his wallet. Farrell, McCann, Savage – one woman, two men – the newsreader said they had been planning to set off a bomb. She listened to what had happened to them and watched the blood draining from his face. They were dead, all of them. Shot dead that afternoon in the bright sunlight, in Gibraltar.

The words on the piece of paper in his neat, ordered, unmistakable handwriting had said ‘Spain/Gibraltar’ and there had been three other names listed beside the first three. She had overheard him on the phone talking about passports for them. The three other names were aliases, false names that they were to use on the documents. The details seemed so distant it was as though she was having someone else’s memories.

When the news item finished, he stood up from the sofa. He was frowning, breathing heavily, a thin layer of sweat on his forehead. He looked at her, into her blank eyes and she saw, even through the veil of numbness, that he was frightened. The baby began to cry again and he gave it the bottle.

‘We shall have to go away, Sinead,’ he said, very quietly. ‘There’s no choice now.’

For a moment she wondered who he was talking to. Then remembered. Sinead. That was her name. Sinead Collins. She nodded to him, watching the child sucking on the teat like a massive leech. In the back of her mind she could hear the pieces falling into place.

What had started seven months ago was over. That was what it meant. If she could find the energy to see it clearly, to work it out, then this too could be over. She could walk away.

She looked at the child and tried to recall whether in the five weeks of its short life she had felt anything for it. Anything at all.

But her mind had only images of its gaping mouth and toothless gums.

They stopped her car before she got to the wind farm. They had cordons across all the roads, isolating the scene. Where they had blocked the road above the village two big crime scene investigation vans were parked on the verges, as if it were the location shoot for a TV series. One of them was the catering truck – preparing coffees, refreshments, breakfasts, though no one was taking as yet (they would bus the probationers in later) – from the other she got her suit and pass.

When the man handing them over spoke to her she couldn’t make out his words. Her heart was racing, thumping in her chest like a steam hammer, her ears filled with a rushing noise. She asked him to speak louder. He began to talk irritably to her, asking her for her name and ID.

‘DC Sharpe,’ she said. ‘Karen Sharpe.’ Her voice was slurred, defensive. She held up her warrant card, hand shaking, but he barely looked at it.

‘They’re expecting you,’ he said.

Back outside she felt nauseous. Getting the suit on was difficult. She leaned against the side of the van and forced the chill morning air into her lungs.

She had to walk about a kilometre from the road blocks to the scene on a poorly kept road, the white sterile overalls squeaking like polystyrene as she moved. She tried to keep a straight line, but her head was spinning. Above and in the distance, in a wide, overarching, cloudless sky, she could hear X-Ray 99, the air unit, the chopping sound from the blades increasing and fading as it searched the heights between Cock Hill Moor and Lancashire.

It had started fifty-five minutes ago. She had awoken fully clothed, lying on her bed, an upturned glass sitting on her chest, the stink of spilt brandy in her nostrils. The phone ringing. As she had moved to answer it, something massive had shifted inside her skull, a weight, sliding from one side of her head to the other.

She had struggled to ignore the pain, trying to focus on the calm male voice on the other end of the line, which was asking her to come to a place called Wainstalls. The man had told her why, speaking slowly, carefully, waiting for her reaction. He was starting to tell her where it was before she spoke, cutting him off. ‘I know where it is,’ she had said, and hung up.

In the bathroom, the night before – Monday, 8 April 1996 – had come back in a rush, flashing past her eyes as a string of half-formed images and sensations.

It was the same every year. It began as a tiny, hissing voice, a muttering that would start without warning in the back of her head and mount steadily in intensity. There were no words to it, nothing comprehensible. Just as insistent, background pressure, threatening to throw her into a blind panic. Beneath it a feeling in her stomach like the acid of ulcers, burning. Every year she dealt with it in the same way. Sometimes she needed drugs, but usually alcohol was enough.

That was what she had done yesterday, why she had fallen asleep fully clothed and why she now felt as if someone had shot the back of her head off. She had woken up with it yesterday and had started drinking immediately. She had kept it up right through the day, wherever she was, whoever she was with. The details were sketchy.

Beyond the hangover and the dizziness, the morning after should have brought relief. Another year when the anniversary was past and gone. Another year she had survived it. But not this year. She had listened to the voice telling her to come to Wainstalls, stood up and felt it starting all over again. A whisper of madness trying to drag her back into the blackness.

She tried to remember the last thing that had happened the night before, when Phil Leech had left her. They had met Fiona Mitchell in a pub somewhere, early evening. She could recall that. Leech had been annoyed with her because by that point it had been obvious she was trashed. They were on duty, working. Leech was her DS, Mitchell his most important snout. There were rules.

He had given her a lift home in moody silence. She had started on the brandy as soon as she got in. Usually she drank very little and the brandy was all she had in the house. That was as far as the memories took her. She couldn’t even remember lying down on the bed.

As she set off up the dirt track she tried desperately to focus on what she could remember, working back from known details to get to others. She felt as if she were being drowned in something, some clinging viscous liquid that sat in front of her vision and obscured everything. What had happened was going to be important. She had accomplished what she set out to achieve every year on 8 April – she had blanked it. Now she had to get it back.

Wainstalls itself was a straggling collection of squat, stone cottages in the hills above Halifax. There were about thirty houses along the main and adjoining streets, more spaced out over the hillsides below and above. At the edge of the village there were the remains of a mill – redbrick walls dug into the slopes, a crumbling chimney, the hillsides above stained black with old pollution. The building had been converted into factory premises more recently, with bright metallic corrugated roofing.

But when people spoke of Wainstalls usually they meant the area above the village; the moor, the valley head, the high expanse of barren heath running up to the watershed and over the top to Cock Hill. Or sometimes the wind farm at the valley head where twenty-five gigantic wind turbines had been constructed. Gleaming white, industrial structures, they were as aesthetically apposite as the factory below them, or the massive row of electricity pylons that marched up the other side of the valley and over the top to Lancashire.

Wainstalls meant somewhere lonely, deserted. Windswept enough to have attracted wind turbines, but little else.

Ahead of her the South Pennine landscape was desolate, rising and falling in a featureless pattern of green and grey. There were no trees, few bushes, hardly any paths or walls once you got out above the valleys. The sheep they turned out to graze here were tough, scrawny – dirty balls of wool dotted in amongst the stiff stretches of marsh grass and peat.

As she came over the top of the rise below the wind farm, a group of murmuring, white-suited uniforms passed her, walking in the other direction, bent against the wind whipping down from the tops. She could hear one of them saying something about ‘a double tap’. He sounded like he didn’t know what it was. She walked past them in silence.

She knew what it was. Her heart skipped like a frightened animal.

They had let the Scenes of Crime Officer, forensics, the pathologist, the Senior Investigating Officer, his Deputy and an Armed Response Unit drive up there. Everyone else had to walk. Scene Management Priorities; she could remember the order from her training: Preserve Life, Preserve the Scene, Secure Evidence, Identify Victim, Identify Suspects. In this case, the whole moor appeared to be a major crime scene. They had secured it, roped it off, restricted access. The more people they let up, the more contaminated it became.

The cars they had allowed up were parked off the track just at the top of the rise, tucked up tightly against each other beneath a solitary clump of hawthorn bushes. She walked up to them, came over the rise and looked at the scene below her. She was standing on a rim of higher land, the wind cold in her face, her eyes stinging, looking down at a wide, black sheet of water, the surface shifting in ripples as the wind fanned over it.

A reservoir. There were a group of maybe eight people by the edge of it, white shiny figures against the green and black. A little apart from them, parked up on a flattened area of land, she could see a single motor vehicle, a Rover, driver’s door open, stalled and abandoned by the water’s edge.

A dirt track led off from the road down towards the car. The rutted, pot-holed road she had followed up continued to the wind farm and beyond to Cock Hill, about three miles distant. The track down, which the Rover would have followed, was cordoned off. Instead, they had used a line of metre-high metal rods to stake out and tape off a new track down through the tussocks of marsh grass and sphagnum moss. It was narrow, barely enough room for one person at a time. She began to walk down.

They saw her coming and someone must have recognised her. A man broke away from the main group and came up to meet her. He was tall and muscular, easily over six foot with strong broad shoulders. He looked about forty, but well looked after, athletic. Because she was focusing on the car, trying to see if it was empty, she didn’t recognise him until he was standing right in front of her, introducing himself, but also blocking her path.

‘You’re DC Sharpe? I told someone to meet you at the road block. You shouldn’t have had to walk it by yourself. I’m sorry. Thanks for coming up. I’m John Munro. I’m the SIO here.’

She looked up at him. He was about four inches taller than her. Clean shaven, piercing blue eyes. Hair that was thinning slightly. He had spoken with a faint Scottish accent. She had met him maybe ten times in the last five years. He wouldn’t remember her though. She wasn’t important enough. In West Yorkshire the SIO – the Senior Investigating Officer – on any Category A homicide was always a Detective Chief Superintendent.

‘Have they told you what has happened?’ he asked her. He moved closer to her, lowering his voice, eyes on hers, his hand reaching out to touch her arm, giving reassurance, support. His voice sounded concerned, careful. A side-effect of the accent, no doubt. And years of practice. Beyond him she could just see that the others had fallen silent and were watching. She recognised only one of them – Graham Dawson, the pathologist.

Her mind switched back suddenly to the night before, to Leech and Mitchell. She remembered Leech touching Fiona’s arm in the same way; reassuring, gentle. It had happened when they were in the pub, when he had been trying to get that extra bit of information out of her.

‘Yes. I’ve been told,’ she said. Her voice sounded steady. She met his eyes. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

‘Okay,’ he said, nodding, but uncertain. ‘I’ll go over with you. Remember not to touch anything.’ He hadn’t let go of her arm.

She allowed herself to be walked the distance from the end of the taping to where the car was. On the way over he asked her once if she was sure. She hardly heard him. She said something to him about having seen dead bodies before and thought he said, ‘Good girl,’ but by then they were alongside the car, moving towards the open driver’s door.

She saw that there was an arm hanging out, just outside the door frame, the fingers long, slender, relaxed. Then the legs. She recognised the shoes. There was a furious, deafening banging in her ears. Small splashes of black substance across the intact windscreen. She moved round, realising that Munro still had hold of her arm, that his grip had tightened and almost hurt.

There was one person in the car, sitting in the driver’s seat, upper body slumped towards the passenger side and head lolling backwards between the seats so that she couldn’t see the face.

The driver’s headrest was a mess, covered in a thick, blackening substance that had run down the back of the seat in long, coagulating gouts. It looked like a tin of black paint had been sloshed across the headrest and into the rear of the vehicle. Stuck within it were what looked like clumps of papier mâché, streaked in with a thicker liquid, green or grey in colour, like mucus. Past the headrest she could see the rear passenger side windows were completely obscured with it. The smell was overpowering. An abattoir smell. Stupidly, she turned to ask Munro what it was.

Munro met her eyes without saying anything. She looked back to it. Her brain fitted it together. It was blood. The back of the head had been shot away, spraying the rear of the car with bone, hair, blood, tissue, brain.

She swallowed, stepped forward, almost leaning into the vehicle, feeling the stench rising around her. She looked at the face. This was what she was here for, this was what they wanted her to do.

There were two small, black holes in the front of the head, above the line of the eyes – one at the right temple, the other towards the middle of the forehead. The skin was burned around the edges, blistered. A near perfect double tap from point-blank range. Not even a trickle of blood had come out of the entry wounds. His face was completely clean, the features untouched.

The eyes were open, but dull, sightless, the facial skin already stiff like a latex mask. But she could recognise him. No doubt about it.

‘That’s him,’ she said, voice steady.

‘Who do you say it is?’

‘It’s Phil Leech.’

She turned away from the car, her head reeling. For a moment she felt as if she were outside herself, watching everything happen. Nothing was connected to her. She saw it from above herself – Munro beside her, leaning towards her, hand on her arm, the huddle of figures a little apart from them, waiting. For a split second she felt convinced she was watching someone else.

At some level she knew the person Munro was touching was herself, Karen Sharpe, yet the figure seemed alien to her, a woman she didn’t recognise. She couldn’t even feel the point where his arm had contact with her.

Was this what she looked like? Tall – almost as tall as Munro himself – and thin. Beneath the steriles she was wearing a black, thigh-length leather jacket, a pair of scruffy, faded jeans and black, flat-soled shoes. Her hair was a mess; a nondescript brown, hanging to shoulder-length in thick, untidy strands. She could see herself constantly brushing it from her eyes. The face was so white as to look unwell, the eyes green, tired, squinting.

Memories came back to her unbidden. In the pub, the night before, she had gone into the toilets to look for Fiona Mitchell and had stared at this very person in the mirrors behind the sinks. She remembered thinking then that she was ugly.

As a teenager her mother had not let her leave the house without her putting on lipstick. As if lipstick were an essential item of clothing and the naked face – like anything naked – ugly. That much was obvious. Yet how many men had said otherwise? About her face, her figure, everything that she was?

Even her eyes. Her mother had told her that her eyes were too small, too close together. You have little piggy eyes. Those were the words she had used. Yet, men had always commented on her eyes. Bright, intelligent eyes. Eyes that would undress you. That was what they said.

She had remembered this as she was looking at herself, face devoid of make-up. At the time, Fiona had been hunched over the sink, vomiting, mascara running in thick black stains from her tear-streaked eyes. Karen had placed an arm around her, tried to convince her that everything was fine. What had been going on?

The pub had been off force, somewhere in Lancashire. Leech had driven her there; Fiona had been waiting for them. They had got there about eight o’clock and been out by nine. Leech had been expecting Fiona to pass him some information about a heroin dealer in Manchester who was about to set up a deal with Mark Coates. Had she done that?

The detail was gone. She needed to recall why Fiona had been sick in the toilets, why she had gone in after her, why she had been crying.

Leech’s relationship with Fiona was complicated. He had picked her because she was Mark Coates’s girlfriend and Coates was his target, the point around which his life had been arranged. Fiona was meant to be passing back information about Coates’s heroin dealing. Leech gave her no payments for this, though, and there were none of the usual snout/handler relations between them. So why was Fiona doing it?

She looked back at Leech’s shattered head and felt a dull sadness. She heard Munro say to the others that the ID was ‘positive’. Scene Management Priority number four: Identify the Victim. He still had his hand around her arm, continuing to hold her, but at the same time was giving instructions now, setting things up. She waited for him to finish, then asked if she could go.

‘Not just yet, Karen. I need to ask you some questions. Really important. We’ll go up to my car, shall we? Get out of the wind.’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Tony,’ shouting back to someone else, ‘my car, please.’

They walked back up between the tapes. He let go of her only because there wasn’t enough room there to hold on to her. They had to walk through the gap single-file.

His car was a big four-wheel-drive thing. She sat in the rear, Munro beside her, not touching, about two foot between them. ‘Tony’ went into the front passenger seat and twisted round to watch.

‘I’m sorry to have asked you to do that, Karen,’ Munro started.

‘I’ve seen it before,’ she interrupted him. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Yes. But am I right that you knew Philip Leech?’

‘I worked with him.’

‘He was your partner. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘More or less. He was my DS.’

‘But there were only two of you in that drugs unit?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you will have been close?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s why I’m sorry to have asked. That’s all.’

‘Better me than anyone else.’

‘Like his wife. Of course. But it’s bound to be upsetting.’

‘Yes.’ She was conscious that she didn’t sound upset. She rubbed her fingers together. She couldn’t feel anything. ‘I’m numb,’ she said, matter-of-factly.

‘It’s cold out there,’ Tony said, watching her hands.

‘Not numb like that,’ she said.

‘You’ll be shocked,’ Munro said. ‘We’re all shocked.’

‘He was a police officer,’ Tony said. ‘That makes a difference.’

She nodded.

‘You say you’ve seen it before, Karen,’ Munro again, voice very quiet. ‘Where was that?’

She frowned.

‘Do you mean in the job? You mean dead bodies?’ he clarified.

She looked at him, expression blank.

‘Or bodies like that? Killed in that way? Shot?’

‘I’ve seen hits before,’ she said. ‘Professional killings.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. That’s what it looks like,’ he said. ‘Why would anyone want to do that to Phil?’

She looked down at where her hands were resting in her lap. For some reason she found it irritating that he had called him Phil. He hadn’t known Leech, after all.

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘We’re not looking at anyone big enough. We’re not looking at anyone with the clout to do that. Not to a policeman.’

She noticed her use of the present tense.

‘Who was it you were looking at, then?’

‘Mark Coates.’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him frowning. ‘Do you know him, Tony?’

Tony nodded. She looked up at him.

‘Sorry, Karen,’ Munro said. ‘This is Tony Marshall. My Deputy SIO.’

‘Drug dealer. Middle range,’ Marshall said. ‘Nothing big.’

‘Just Coates?’ Munro asked her.

‘Coates and Varley. Luke Varley. He’s Coates’s brother.’

‘Brother? The names are different.’

‘Half-brother. Different fathers, same mother.’

‘Right. No one else then? Just Coates and his half-brother? That it?’

‘That was it. That was the Operation. Operation Anvil.’

‘Who else besides yourself and Phil on that? Who was SIO for it?’

‘Alan Edwards is SIO. There was just me and Phil, usually.’

‘For how long?’

‘Phil has been looking at Coates for nearly thre. . .