'Darkly entertaining police procedural with a difference' CRIME REVIEW
'Fizzes with life' - STUART TURTON, Costa First Novel Award winner
'A thrilling ride with dark humour, action and a touching side that's hard to forget' SUN five stars (book of the week)
WHO BETTER TO SOLVE A MURDER THAN A DEAD DETECTIVE?
When Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus storms a Lincolnshire farmhouse, he expects to bring down a notorious drug gang; instead, he discovers his own dead body and a spirit guide called Daisy-May.
She's there to enlist him to the Dying Squad, a spectral police force made up of the recently deceased. Joe soon realises there are fates far worse than death. To escape being stuck in purgatory, he must solve his own murder.
Reluctantly partnering with Daisy-May, Joe faces dangers from both the living and the dead in the quest to find his killer - before they kill again.
Recruits are loving THE DYING SQUAD:
'At times evocative of Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series, but without its hardboiled cynicism, this is an impressive and memorable debut' CRIME TIME
'Whip-smart, fresh with a dash of dark humour, The Dying Squad is a wildly entertaining read. Highly recommended' - ADAM HAMDY, Sunday Times bestselling author
'Adam has crafted something unique with The Dying Squad, mashing fantasy and crime together in a way I've not seen before . . . I'm sure it will be a huge success' - JAMES OSWALD, author of the Sunday Times bestselling Inspector McLean series
'Superbly plotted and packs an emotional heft rarely seen in a debut' - MW CRAVEN, CWA Gold Dagger Award winner
'Funny, creepy and compelling' - ANNA STEPHENS, acclaimed author of Godblind
'Grim, wry and inventive, a twisting tale with both guts and heart. Never has Lincolnshire seemed more desolate, or more menacing' - DAVID WRAGG, The Black Hawks
Release date:
July 22, 2021
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
368
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It sprinkled frost on its fields, squatted on the remains of its abandoned crops and draped everything in a sea of compacted fog, almost as if it were embarrassed by the place. The flatness of its Arctic landscape had always made Joe think of a disillusioned god, one who’d swiped the ground clean with the back of his hand, then shrugged his shoulders when tasked with its reconstruction. There was beauty in such bleakness, he supposed, if that was your kick.
It wasn’t his, but that didn’t stop him appreciating the spirit-level-flat horizon, because when you were on a stake-out, a clear line of sight was the partner that never let you down. It didn’t make the beaten-senseless farmhouse opposite any prettier, or the ditch, fifty yards away and cut like a chasm along the side of the road, any more pleasant to hide in. But he wasn’t being paid for pleasant.
Joe shifted on legs that were all needles and pins, ice water pooling around boots that weren’t as waterproof as advertised, cursing the dew and mush that had smeared itself on a raincoat four times above his pay grade, and reviewed the facts.
He was big on facts, Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus. He blamed it on an old cop show he used to watch with his dad; they were hungry for just the facts, ma’am in the Dragnet universe, and although much of what Joe saw of televisual police procedures annoyed him (and don’t get him started on the dime-a-dozen crime books that were spewed out daily), on that score he reckoned they got it right. All there was, was facts. Determine those, and the truth followed close behind, cowed and willing.
So, fact one.
There was a county-wide epidemic of teenagers being used to sell drugs in rural towns and cities. These kids were often imported from cities like London – or, in the case of Lincolnshire (the fine county he was currently ditch-hiding in), Nottingham – but just as often they were locals from broke-arse homes, presented with the opportunity to make more money in one week than they would do in a month working the fields, or, if they were really lucky, the arcades.
County lines, that was what the media called the practice. Joe supposed it was more lyrical than child abuse.
Fact two: the recent rampant influx of drugs had pickled the county in addiction and despair, ripping apart Lincolnshire’s locked-in-time-and-all-the-safer-for-it seams and resulting in areas like this, its inhabitants – and buildings – crumbling from pharmaceutically induced neglect and rot. Joe might not have had any great affection for his home – in fact he’d grown up outright despising it – but the point was, it was his home. If he simply stood by and let a ragtag collective from Shottingham – not his favourite term for the city – claim it, what did that say about him?
Nothing good, and he was good. Good at his job precisely because, for him, it wasn’t a job, but a calling. Some of his colleagues mocked him for this (most of his colleagues, if he was honest), but that was fine; he was content to leave them to their cynicism and their office politics and their massaged arrest figures. All he cared about was justice.
His dad’s disapproving face flashed up. He shooed the image away, just in time for fact three.
Fact three was that Joe had fought hard to head up the task force, swerving a considerably more prestigious murder investigation; the county line had to be not only disrupted but cut off for good, and he was the man to do it. The fight-back began with him, right here, right now, in a rain-bloated Lincolnshire ditch.
The gang itself (who went by the name of Pilgrims) were good, and they were disciplined. Their operation turned over hundreds of thousands of pounds each month, with safe houses scattered all across the county, money moving between them quickly and quietly.
Joe had hunted down good before, though – great as well – and when it came down to it, they all fell the same way. Greed, stupidity and addiction had been levelling the playing field since man had first crawled from the swamp, and it was those three anti-virtues that had led him here. A grabby solicitor in Skegness, one of the seaside towns welded on like a barnacle to the east coast, had taken a liking to one of the young Pilgrims he’d been paid to represent. The girl’s drug boss had taken exception to this favouritism, and the solicitor’s fear of reprisals had led him straight to Joe.
In return for his protection – and after putting the fear of God in him – Joe had been granted a look at the inner workings of the gang. Luck, that was what this game was based on. You needed it, and if you were patient enough, you got it.
Was it patience that was stopping him calling this in and raiding this safe house? As he’d lingered in the ditch, time stretching seemingly beyond meaning, there’d been enough comings and goings for him to know it was the nerve centre of the gang, or one of them. A click of the button on his radio and twenty minutes from now it would be over. A pat on the back, another foot on the career ladder, and no more ditch water.
He rubbed his arms, spasms of cold rippling through him.
No, it wasn’t patience. It was something else, some wriggling-in-the-gut instinct that demanded he hold his nerve, because if he did, he would catch not only some fish, but a whale too.
So he’d wait a little longer. It wasn’t like he could get any colder or wetter.
Somewhere a dog barked at something he couldn’t see. Joe ignored it, because there was always a dog barking in places like this, at times like this. The young woman walking down the middle of the road towards the safe house, on the other hand, wasn’t for ignoring.
Even from five hundred yards away, she made an impression. Mid teens or early twenties, it was hard to tell with her build. Tall, like she was reaching to high-five the sky, her angular limbs jutted out defiantly, a shock of bright pink hair crowning her head, which seemed slightly too large on her thin frame. Joe had seen her type before: beaten by life.
Where are you off to, kid? he wondered. As if I didn’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re not sweating heroin addiction. Maybe you’re collecting for your church group, and you don’t know this is a house of pharmaceutical ill-repute.
He frowned, chastising himself. It was easy to get cynical in this job, but easy rarely meant right. If she was as drug-ravaged as her frame suggested, the people who had sold her those drugs were the problem. His problem. She was a casualty of a war that had started long ago, one that had no end in sight.
Joe often wondered what victory would look like – and whether his superiors would appreciate it.
Now that he could see her better, she had something about her. It was the confidence of her walk, the way she held her head aloft like she was daring the world to take her on.
Not just daring; hoping for it.
As though sensing this judgement, the girl turned on her heel, whistling as she headed straight for him. Joe’s knees kissed dank water as he ducked down further, hand going to his radio as she reached the lip of his den. She posed little threat to him personally but considerable danger to his operation; if she alerted the gang inside the farmhouse to the copper lurking in a ditch outside, it was unlikely they’d carry on being nefarious.
‘Base, this is Oscar Bravo nine,’ he whispered, his voice an urgent gasp. ‘I’ve got a problem. Over.’
His reply was an earful of static.
Then, before he had time to swear at his malfunctioning equipment, she was in the ditch with him, showing a sureness of foot her awkward lope hadn’t hinted at.
‘All right?’ she said. ‘What we watching?’
‘Who are you?’ Joe hissed, checking her behaviour hadn’t alerted the posse of drug puppies in the farmhouse. Not so much as a curtain twitch. Satisfied that that wasn’t about to change, he turned to the girl in punk’s clothing. ‘Well?’
‘Not the most important question to ask, to be honest, mate. Being a copper, thought you’d realise that.’
Joe took his hand from his radio. ‘How do you know I’m a copper?’
‘Another beauty. Reports of your genius are clearly exaggerated.’
Joe stole another glance at the farmhouse. ‘And how would you be receiving reports on my genius, exactly?’
‘We’ve got the same gaffer. In a manner of speaking.’
‘You’re police?’ said Joe doubtfully, looking her up and down.
‘You could say that.’
‘You don’t look like police.’
‘Says the bloke trailing a Paul Smith coat in a ditch.’
‘What are you, sixteen?’
‘Never ask a girl her age, pal, particularly when she looks as joyfully young as me. Old enough to solve crimes in need of solving, that’s all you need to know.’
‘So you’re undercover?’ said Joe. ‘Bit young for that, aren’t you?’
‘I’m here to help,’ said the girl. ‘What else matters?’
‘What matters is I’m the lead on this operation,’ said Joe, ‘and no one told me a kid with a smart mouth and pink hair would be blowing my cover.’
‘Who’s blowing your cover?’ she said. ‘You see the gang storming out?’
The farmhouse was still.
She held out her right hand. ‘Daisy-May Braithwaite, at your fucking service.’
Joe looked from her bony china-doll wrist to her faintly acned face. Older made to look younger, perhaps? It was possible – he’d seen a thirty-year-old lad he’d been at basic training with pass for fifteen on an undercover operation – but still, her eyes. They were impossible to read, cloudy, like they were guarding a secret. This Daisy-May could be his daughter, and Joe was only scraping forty-five himself.
He let her hand linger in mid-air. ‘No one else is supposed to know about this op. I barely know about it.’
‘Well they do, I’m not bent and I’m here to help,’ said the girl, hand still offered. ‘Now, we taking this safe house, or what?’
Chapter Two
The mist bit the road off in both directions, like it was intent on isolating them from the outside world forever.
The girl knocked on the door.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Joe.
‘Where I come from, we knock before we break into someone’s house,’ Daisy-May said. ‘This is the country, after all.’
‘This is a bust is what it is,’ hissed Joe, looking at the door, expecting to hear a shotgun blast or the sound of fleeing feet.
The girl stepped aside, beckoning towards the door. ‘Be my guest. Hate to get in the way of a man and his bust.’
They waited, the door remaining unanswered.
‘We should radio it in first,’ Joe said finally.
‘It won’t work,’ said Daisy-May.
A squall of static told Joe the truth of her words.
She smirked at him. ‘See? No wonder there’s such a drug problem round here if you’re in charge of stopping it.’
He took a step back. He knew the gang were inside, because he’d seen them go inside.
‘Something’s not right here.’
‘No shit,’ said Daisy-May, winking at him, then opening the door. ‘You should be a detective.’
The majority of two boys lay in the hallway, chunks of them smeared on the walls and floor, their torsos carved apart by gunshot and violence. If they’d put up a fight, it was one they’d lost quickly and badly.
‘Well,’ said Daisy-May, ‘they ain’t getting up.’
Joe glared at her, holding a finger to his lips. The murdered kids looked barely older than her, yet she hadn’t flinched.
It was like she knew they were there, he thought. That or she’s seen so much death in her life that it doesn’t leave a mark any more. She has to be undercover, or at the very least an informant. Either’s a help until it turns into a hindrance.
He kneeled down to check for a pulse he knew wouldn’t be there, then tried to work out what bothered him most about the scene, other than two dead teenagers. He knew he should retreat, high-tail it outside and call it in to the station. This was a crime scene he could do nothing but disturb, and for all he knew, the person who’d shot these kids could be in the kitchen, making themselves a brew before their next killing spree.
The problem was, he couldn’t, because his radio wasn’t working.
He reached into his coat, searching for the familiar phone-shaped bulge, finding lint and negative space instead. That didn’t make any sense. He didn’t take a shit without his phone, let alone stake out a drugs safe house.
It had been there when he’d been hiding in the ditch.
Hadn’t it?
A thud sounded somewhere above them.
This is all wrong, thought Joe. Daisy-May being here. My phone not being here. The dead boys. The dead radio. Everything.
‘Sounds like we’re not alone,’ whispered Daisy-May, her breath cold in his ear. ‘Who could it be?’
Joe peered up at the ceiling. ‘You know what happened here.’
Daisy-May said nothing, much to his surprise. Her face was blank, like she’d slipped on a mask of neutrality. Where was the irreverence? The smart mouth?
That thud again, quieter this time, like someone had muffled it.
‘I don’t care whether you’re undercover, a narc, or a punter looking for a score,’ said Joe, his eyes drawn down to the boys with exit wounds for faces. ‘Wait outside. This is no place for you, trust me.’
‘Always thought trust was a thing you shouldn’t have to ask for,’ said Daisy-May, ‘but a girl can take a hint.’ She bowed elaborately, then backed away, smiling slyly at him. ‘Consider me fucked off.’
Joe shook his head, waiting until he heard the door slam shut. Things had been simpler when he’d been slowly freezing to death in a ditch.
He eased into the hallway, edging past a faded white door decorated with a bullet hole in its centre, giving silent praise to floorboards that didn’t so much as squeak beneath his feet.
The snail trail of blood down the centre of the hall was harder to appreciate. He followed it to the stairs, a single bulb dangling like a noose lighting the way for him, chunks of floral wallpaper hanging loose from the walls like they were trying to escape the poverty of it all.
He stopped to listen at the foot of the stairs.
Nothing. Not even the whisper of an apologetic thud.
His hand reached for the banister as his foot found the first step, wincing in anticipation at the sigh the house would make in response. It didn’t come; in truth he’d never felt lighter, more alive. It was as if his senses had been stretched to their limits, his vision pinging in and out of focus, like his system was warring with fight or flight.
Up, one stair at a time, his nose twitching at the lingering smell of soured gunpowder. From the massacre downstairs, or from something up here?
He reached the upstairs landing, stopping at the first door on the left, looking at breadcrumbs of blood that were drying up but still staining the ragged tan carpet. He had that feeling, the one that told him truth was lurking on the periphery, waiting to be discovered.
He gulped down a deep breath, then took a step towards the open door.
Joe staggered slightly, grasping the door frame like a lifebelt. This was a trick; it had to be.
His eyes disagreed. The pin-sharp vision he was now ‘enjoying’ laid out that truth in blood-red Technicolor. He scrunched them shut, the image he’d just seen lingering, regardless.
‘This is straight-up fucked,’ said Daisy-May from behind him, ‘don’t think I don’t get that.’
Joe stood there, eyes closed, the blackness in front of them marred with dance trails of red.
‘Open your eyes,’ said Daisy-May.
‘No,’ said Joe.
‘Now,’ she insisted, with a firmness and gravity that belied her years.
He did. The scene lay in front of him, unchanged.
A man in his forties. On the floor, on his back, legs stretched out, bent slightly at the knees, his arms wide, like he was trying to fly.
A shirt, once as crisp and white as his own, now red, flapping at the bottom.
A hole in his stomach, gouged out with a cocktail of gunpowder and fire.
His face turned towards them, the mouth slightly open, like no was trying to escape.
Joe grasped Daisy-May’s arm. ‘What is this?’
She patted his hand consolingly. ‘Could say not what it looks like, but it really fucking is.’
Joe stared at the man on the floor, the one who wore the same clothes as him, the same skin as him, the same face as him.
‘So yeah,’ said Daisy-May, ‘you’re dead, mate.’
Chapter Three
This had gone far enough.
Joe reached for his radio, ready to call it in, something he should have found a way to do ten minutes ago, static be damned. He didn’t know why they’d mocked up some poor bastard to look like him, but what he did know was how close he’d got to finishing this gang for good. To think they wouldn’t fight back from that position had been naïve, arrogant, even. That was on him.
What wasn’t, apparently, was his radio; Joe’s hand found the space where it used to be.
‘You look peaky,’ said Daisy-May, scratching her pale, emaciated stomach. ‘I’d sit down before you fall down.’
Joe ignored the girl, her voice white noise, and, crouching, shuffled towards the corpse on the floor. There was no getting around it: the similarity was uncanny. His slightly crooked nose, four-day stubble, identikit grey eyes. Only the skin was different. Waxy, the lustre bleeding away with the poor bastard’s life force.
‘She said you might be a denier,’ said Daisy-May, shifting from foot to foot impatiently. ‘Often the way, she said, with the older ones. Me, I accepted it quick, but you’re too clever to see the truth. Least, you think you are, which makes you dumber than a fucking horse.’
Take a breath, thought Joe. Take a breath and ignore her babble. This is a war story to tell at an after-dinner speech in five years’ time. An anecdote they’ll lead with when they write super-cop books about you. The opening scene in the biopic of your life.
‘There’s a rational explanation for this,’ he said, slowly getting to his feet.
‘You’re right there, pal,’ said Daisy-May, popping a stick of gum into her mouth. ‘You’re dead. Things don’t get more rational than that.’
Joe gave her a thin smile. ‘So, what? You’re telling me I’m a ghost? Is that it?’
‘Not telling you anything,’ said Daisy-May, inspecting a fingernail. ‘Just leading you to the water. Up to you whether you drink it.’
Joe looked at his hand, squeezed it into a fist, breathed in, then out, then jumped up and down on the spot. ‘Sprightly for a ghost, wouldn’t you say?’
Daisy-May rolled her eyes. ‘Prefer clanking chains and a bed sheet, would you? That can be arranged.’
Joe took a step forward, and with an outstretched finger poked her arm. The girl flinched slightly. ‘If I were a ghost, wouldn’t that just pass straight through you?’
‘You’ve been watching too many shitty horrors,’ said Daisy-May, ‘or not enough. And FYI, we don’t really use the term ghost, yeah? It’s kind of offensive.’
Joe snorted, then went over to the grime-encrusted window, the faint sound of sirens drawing him in. He smiled.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Or are you going to tell me that’s a phantom siren?’
Daisy-May joined him, peering past him at the blue lights on the horizon.
‘Nah, that’s the pigs all right.’
He nodded, satisfied, and perched himself on the windowsill. ‘Well then, you’ll be able to prove your point, won’t you? If we’re ghosts, or whatever the hell term doesn’t offend you, they won’t be able to see me, right?’
Daisy-May winked at him, tapping her finger against her forehead. ‘There’s that big brain I’ve heard so much about it. We’re going to be like the Holmes and Watson of the astral plane, you and me.’
The sound of the sirens got louder, then died away altogether, replaced by the squeal of tyres on tarmac. As Joe heard the thud of fist on door, a sliver of doubt crept down his spine. That body on the floor hadn’t begun to look any less like him; at the very least, it would give the boys downstairs a shock. Still, they’d be laughing about it back at the station within the hour. There’d be a rational explanation for it, once the facts had been ascertained. There always was.
Silence, then the sound of something metal meeting something wooden, splinters splintering, warnings yelled.
Joe swallowed, his heart galloping along with a steadily rising tide of panic. But didn’t that show the girl was talking nonsense? It was hard to imagine a ghost having a panic attack. Hard to imagine the concept of a ghost at all.
Two (three?) sets of footsteps in the downstairs hall.
An armed response unit, if those shots had been heard.
Daisy-May held her finger up to her mouth, miming shh.
Joe ignored her. ‘Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus, identifying myself. One DB, a gunshot wound to the stomach, two DBs at the front entrance, one witness.’
‘Technically I didn’t see you get popped,’ whispered Daisy-May into his ear. ‘But shout away if it makes you feel better.’
The footsteps below them stopped, and Joe felt a surge of relief.
They’d heard him.
He smiled triumphantly at her, then marched towards the door. ‘If you don’t want to get shot, I suggest you follow my lead.’
He placed his hands behind his neck and slowed his pace to allow her to catch up, the girl sarcastically mimicking his stance.
‘I am unarmed and walking into the upstairs hallway,’ he called down to them.
‘I could learn so much from you,’ she said.
Joe ignored her, swallowing hard and moving to the doorway as the footsteps made their way closer to them.
Then he saw them.
Two members of the ARU, one armed with a chunky SBR carbine, the other with the relatively svelte Glock 17 pistol, out in front but not too far, fingers on triggers, ready to do what was necessary, if it was necessary.
There was a moment when Joe thought it would be all right.
A second in which the ARU unit froze like they’d seen the man and the teenage girl on the landing, like they would issue the command for them to drop to their knees if they didn’t want their bodies torn apart by bullets.
That second passed.
The men edged forward, looking right through them.
This isn’t happening, thought Joe. This isn’t happening, and in a second I’ll wake up and say that out loud.
He felt Daisy-May’s bony hand on his back.
‘This is rough, first time it happens,’ she acknowledged.
The ARU were inches from them now.
‘DI Joe Lazarus,’ Joe said, his voice wavering. ‘One DB. Looks like he bled out a while ago.’
Like someone pouring water on your soul was how he’d think of it later, that first time someone stepped through the air he was occupying. As the cop’s flak vest and gun lurched through him, Joe’s senses desperately tried to process what was happening, his body refusing to obey his command to wake up. But this was real life, or whatever came after that.
The men stepped through him and into the room, pausing when they saw the body on the floor. The cop with the Glock reached to the radio pinned to his left shoulder. ‘Man down,’ he said quietly. ‘Repeat, man down. Dispatch RA unit immediately.’
His colleague crouched down to the unmoving body, taking a pulse.
‘Bit late for that.’ Glock cop shook his head. ‘This is a bad business. Going to be repercussions.’
‘Aren’t there just,’ said Daisy-May, taking Joe by the wrist and turning the world white.
Chapter Four
If dying was floating down a tunnel towards a serene sea of white light, it was immediately clear to Joe that he wasn’t dying. There was no way death could possibly be as painful as this.
It was like he’d been jammed into a flesh straw, then spat out: his arms pinned to his sides by the membrane tunnel all around him, fractured images of places and people that were familiar yet starkly alien playing all around as he was hurled downwards. Finally, with a sea of bile clawing its way up his throat, he crashed to the ground. He clawed at eyelids that were scrunched shut, gummed together with a sort of pay-the-boatman sleep slime.
It’s going to be OK, he thought. This is all a fucked-up fever dream, and it’s going to be OK. I’m not dead, despite what the girl said, because ghosts aren’t real. Flesh-and-blood coppers called Joe Lazarus are. I’ll wake up, and I’m going to be in bed next to my wife, my Claire, and sunlight’s going to be streaming in through the window, and all is going to be right with the world. This white haze is just part of the fugue-nightmare comedown.
All I have to do is snap open these eyelids, and I’ll be in business.
Here we go.
He forced his eyes open, the gunk in them thick, unwilling but ultimately pliable.
What he saw made him wish it wasn’t.
Despair throttled a cry from him, sinking his knees into the coarse, sandy ground of an earth he didn’t know, an earth no living person had ever known.
The landscape in front of him was pancake flat, as if some ancient demon had taken a cosmic sand-blaster to it, scouring away every last molecule of life. A thick sea of fog hovered just below his knees, stretching ominously in every direction, a river of pea soup to wade through. The sky above him churned violently, its clouds pregnant with ever-changing hues of red, black and grey.
In the distance – an unknowable, cosmically vast distance – the outline of a wall was visible. Joe turned through three hundred and sixty degrees to see that the structure encircled everything around him; it was as if someone had received funding from God to re-create the Great Wall of China. Whichever way he looked, the wall stretched. There were no joins, no bricks, even. There was simply wall and sky, and the effect of the two things hitting each other made him think of being at the bottom of an unfathomably wide well. The effect was nauseating.
Flashes of a life lost attacked him as he crouched in the dirt, people he couldn’t remember and places he swore he’d never forget crushing him in a vice of guilt and regret, the insanity of the last few moments – if moments even existed any more – leaving him short of breath and shorter on hope.
None of this is real, he thought. Despite what my eyes are telling me, none of this is real.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
Firm.
Insistent.
Real.
‘Hold it together,’ said Daisy-May. ‘And don’t fuckin’ puke on me, all right?’
Joe ignored the girl, plunging a hand through the fog and into the earth beneath it, the nearest thing to his old reality that he knew. He lifted his fist then opened it, staring at the grains of grit as they tumbled downwards. ‘You’re telling me I’m dead.’
‘Wrong tense. I said you were dead, and get on this: you st. . .
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