Blood Work
Authors: Mark Pearson
BLOOD
WORK
For the last ten years Mark Pearson has worked as a
full-time television scriptwriter on a variety of shows
for the BBC and ITV, including
Doctors
,
Holby City
and
The Bill
. He lives on the north coast of Norfolk.
His first Jack Delaney novel,
Hard Evidence
, is also
available from Arrow Books.
Also available by Mark Pearson
Hard Evidence
WORK
MARK
PEARSON
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 9781409035787
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2009
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Mark Pearson 2009
Mark Pearson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Arrow Books
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited
can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781409035787
Version 1.0
For Mum and Dad
The woman's muscles spasmed and as she
floated towards consciousness she heard a man's
voice, and what she heard made her want to
scream and kick and thrash her arms. But she
couldn't move. She had been drugged, she knew
that. And the drugs held her paralysed. She
could barely open her eyes a millimetre but it
was enough to see what the man held in his hand
and if she had been able to scream she would
have ripped her lungs apart doing so.
The blade in the man's hands dipped and she
could feel the flesh and muscles of her stomach
parting. No pain. But she could feel it. She could
see his head bending lower, his other hand
reaching forth, reaching into her. Violating her.
Then he stood back, holding a mass of tissue in
his hand, blood dripping from it as if he was
squeezing what he held. And she closed her eyes,
willing it to stop. Suddenly she could feel the
cool air, feel it lift the heat from her skin. As she
sank deeper inside herself, she could picture that
heat like a fine cloud of particles swirling up into
the black inkiness of the night sky, separating,
dissolving and lost to the universe.
And then she didn't feel anything at all.
A group of noisy, enthusiastic young men gathered
around one corner of the bar of the Unicorn, a mock-
Tudor pub. A large-screen TV was commanding their
attention. England was playing South Africa in a
friendly and the atmosphere in the pub was rowdy,
but not aggressive.
Detective Inspector Jack Delaney stood at the other
end of the bar and waited patiently for the young
man, with short cropped hair and arms like strings of
rope and the word 'WRATH' tattooed in big, black
letters along the length of one forearm, to get around
to serving him. Any other day he would have been
simmering with barely contained fury as the barman
flirted with a couple of South African girls with hair
as yellow as corn and strong, bright teeth. But Jack
Delaney had other things to occupy his mind that
night.
All things coalesce somewhere. All things come
together in a pattern. He couldn't see it yet, but he
knew it was there. Finding patterns was his job, after
all, seeking what linked seemingly disassociated
events. What Delaney did know just then, as he waited
at the bar, with dark images flashing through his
memory, was that he had a focus again. Something to
help concentrate all the hurt and pain and anger he
had lived with for four years into a single point of
energy and use that to move forward out of the wreckage
of his past, annihilating anything that got in his
way. Jack Delaney didn't do standing still very well.
The barman's casual smile died as he approached
Delaney.
'Help you?'
'Pint of Guinness and a pint of lager.'
Delaney threaded his way back through the crowd,
smiling almost imperceptibly at the pair of blonde
women, who were straining quite noticeably the
yellow and green fabric of their 'Boks' rugby shirts,
happy to draw attention to themselves. He put the
drinks down on the table in front of his erstwhile
boss who held a cigarette, as ever, in one hand and a
lighter in the other.
Chief Inspector Diane Campbell looked up at him,
a devil-may-care smile dancing in her puppy-brown
eyes. 'Fifty-pound fine, it's almost worth lighting the
bastard up.'
She held the cigarette aloft as if there may have
been some doubt as to the identity of the illegitimate
object.
Delaney pulled out a chair and sat down. 'True.'
'Meanwhile the fat cats of Westminster can smoke
in their bar at the Houses of Parliament. Never mind
their bleeding expenses, that's the real problem.'
'Not going political on me, are you, Diane?'
Campbell whipped her neck, flicking her bobbed
hair left and right. 'Not in this lifetime.'
'Good to hear.'
Campbell looked at him for a moment, the
mischief still in her eyes. 'I saw Kate Walker talking
with you at the cemetery.'
'And?'
'Anything you want to tell me about that?'
Delaney took a long pull on his pint of Guinness
and thought about it. Thought about Kate and her
dark hair, her haunted eyes, her beauty. Her fragility.
Remembering the hurt in her eyes as he had stood
beneath the naked sky of a west London cemetery
and told her that they had no future. He knew the
damage that had been done to her as a child by her
uncle, his ex-boss Superintendent Walker, knew that
damage had scarred her as an adult, knew that that
same uncle had tried to kill her because she was
helping Delaney rescue his own child, Siobhan, from
his clutches. Kate Walker had suffered enough, but
he had made her suffer more. He'd already buried
one wife, had carried the guilt of it for four years, and
when it came to making a choice between the living
and the dead . . .
He had chosen the dead.
He took another swallow of Guinness before
putting the glass down and looking Campbell in the
eye. 'Not a thing.'
'Wouldn't blame you if there was. She's got a fine
figure on her for a brunette.'
Delaney didn't smile. 'We're about to put her uncle
away for a long, long time, Diane. That's all I care
about.' He leaned across the table and gripped his ex-boss's
hand. His grip was firm, uncompromising, but
she neither flinched nor sought to release herself from
his hold. 'Just tell me what you've heard about my
wife's death.'
She nodded, and Delaney released his grip. She
resisted the temptation to rub her hand but held
Delaney's gaze as he took another long pull on his
pint of Guinness.
'Kevin Norrell.'
Delaney put his glass down, his voice arctic. 'What
about him?'
The water fell like hard rain. The kind of powerful,
punching rain you get in a tropical downpour. Kevin
Norrell put his hand against the cool white tiles of
the prison shower and felt it pound his body, the jets
of water like needles. He bared his teeth. If he had
his way the man who had put him in this prison was
very shortly going to get him out. The water sounded
like rain too as it spattered and puddled around his
feet. He'd never liked the sound. It reminded him of
his father, Sean Norrell. The memory, as ever,
making his hand form involuntarily into a hamlike
fist as his mind wandered back to his childhood, the
summer of 1977 and the first time he was ever
incarcerated.
The Hunter's Moon was a spit-and-sawdust pub
halfway between West Harrow and Harrow on the
Hill, set in a concrete housing development built in
the sixties, complete with a small, built-in shopping
precinct. The pub was at the end of a row of shops
including a laundromat, a convenience store, an off-licence
and a chemist. Three floors of council flats
rose above the shops and pub, and were echoed on
the opposite side of the street by four floors of
similarly grey, utilitarian boxes. The Labour government's
vision of utopian, urban living on the
architect's drawing board may well have looked like
a sunny vision of an ideal future; but whereas his
green ink had imagined trees and benches and
contented people, the stark concrete reality was inked
in far more abrasive colours. The graffiti, though
distinctly urban, certainly wasn't art, and couldn't be
considered political, unless 'Jane fucks Ted' counted.
You could lay money on the fact that the romantic
dauber wasn't referring to Edward Heath and Jane
Fonda.
It was raining. The kind of constant, wind-blown,
swirling, miserable rain that clogged up drains and
sewers, and it went with the soulless, plastic signboards
above chain-link shutters, the sick, yellow
light that leaked from the street lamps, and the
garbage that floated on the street like rats go with
sewage, or pigeons go with shit.
Half past eight on a cold November's night and the
reality of the place was as far removed from the
architect's sunny vision as Sean 'The Coat' Norrell
was from a working grasp of quantum physics.
Inside the Hunter's Moon, the smoke hung heavy
in the air, like a pale cloud. The lino on the floor was
colourless and faded, but had once been red, presumably
to hide bloodstains. The lights behind the
bar were bright, though, as were the coloured lights
in the jukebox that was pumping 'Float On' through
crackling speakers that, like the rumpled person
standing at the bar, had long since seen better days.
He was a long-haired, fifty-year-old man with a knee-length,
black leather coat. He scowled as he ran
filthy, dirt-stained fingers through his greasy locks of
hair and winked at the barmaid as he sang along with
the record. He cupped his crotch with the other hand
and bucked his hips forward in a crude, suggestive
motion.
The barmaid had been in the job for well over
thirty years and hadn't been impressed by much in
the last twenty-nine years of it. Her low-cut top
revealed a chest as smooth as corrugated cardboard,
and her rasping voice held as much affection as a
wheel clamp. 'I wouldn't touch your fucking cock,
Sean, if I was wearing asbestos gloves.'
Norrell leered at her and gave a final thrust. 'Your
loss, darling.'
'Sit down, and shut the fuck up, Norrell,' came a
voice beside him.
Sean Norrell turned to say something but, when he
saw who was standing next to him, the words died
on his lips. He nodded a deferential smile and sat
back on his stool, fumbling a cigarette nervously
from a stained packet. He took a sip of his lager and
scowled. Harp, thirty-two pence a pint now and it
still tasted like cat's piss.
The man stood next to him was dressed in denim
jeans, with a denim jacket, short blond hair and
piercing, blue eyes. Mickey Ryan, thirty years old
with a heart as cold as a Norwegian whore working
al fresco. He looked at Norrell now with the kind of
approval usually reserved for faecal matter
discovered on footwear.
'You got my money?'
'It's in hand.'
Ryan's voice was level, dispassionate as he leaned
down and glared in his eyes. 'Your dick will be in my
left hand and I'll cut your fucking balls off with a
rusty knife you haven't got it by Friday.' The barmaid
smiled, approvingly.
'You take my gear you pay me for it.'
'I'm good for it, Mickey. You know that,' Norrell
muttered.
But Mickey had already turned back to the
barmaid. 'Double vodka.'
She fluttered her spider-leg eyelashes at him and
smiled seductively. 'On the house.'
Ryan looked back at Norrell, his eyes like flint.
'You still here?'
Norrell hastily swallowed his lager as Mickey
Ryan picked up his drink and headed back to the
pool table where a couple of nineteen-year-olds, in
skintight hot pants and platforms shoes, waited for
the territorial pat of his hand on their young backsides,
marking ownership. He'd have liked to pick up
a pool cue and smash it across Ryan's smug face. But
as the blue-eyed man turned back to look at him
pointedly, Norrell put his empty glass on the counter
and scurried for the door. You didn't mess with
Mickey Ryan. Not ever. Sean Norrell knew where to
pick his fights and it wasn't at the Hunter's Moon.
He stepped out from the pub, blinking as the
driving rain lashed his face and made his way across
the street to the block of flats where he lived. He
stumbled into the stairwell and held his hand against
a concrete pillar to steady himself, and shake water
rain from his long hair. He grunted and walked up
the steps to his flat and fumbled his key into the lock
of the faded red door of 13 Paradise Villas. They got
that about right. Paradise in neon and street lamp.
Nirvana by substance abuse. Heaven and hell in a
fucking handcart.
He fumbled the door open and stumbled inside to
domestic bliss. The theme tune to
The Good Life
was
playing on the television, his runt of a son curled up
on the stained, brown velour sofa watching it, his
eyes fixed, not even glancing at him. Norrell's nose
wrinkled at the smell of charred food.
'For fuck's sake, Linda. How fucking hard is it to
cook a sausage?'
His wife, Linda Norrell, glared at him from the
kitchen set off the small lounge. She was thirty-two
but looked fifty, a sick fifty at that. Rail-thin, with
straggly mousy hair that had, at some time, been
dyed blonde, she was wearing a pair of tight, drainpipe
jeans that made her legs look like sticks, a mauve
shirt and a white tank top. The make-up on her face
was applied with the delicacy of roadworks and did
little to hide the bruising, or the emptiness, around
her eyes. A cigarette dangled from tightly pursed lips
as she flipped some sausages in a smoking pan, she
looked across at her husband, expressionless for a
moment, and then a light flickered somewhere in her
eyes. 'Fuck you, Sean.'
On the sofa Kevin Norrell tensed. He knew what
was about to happen next. On the television screen
Barbara Good was telling her husband off for not
wiping his wellies before coming into her kitchen. In
his kitchen his father was slapping his wife openhanded
across the mouth, opening up her lip to bleed
afresh. Her screams of abuse mingled with his father
shouting back at her, slapping the side of her head
like a contrapuntal melody. And suddenly Kevin
Norrell had had enough. Tom and Barbara Good
might not have a television, but he did, and all he
wanted to do was watch it.
The thin boy uncurled himself and stood up from
the sofa. At school they called him Pencil Norrell. A
gangly boy, tall for his age, his head disproportionately
large, a head his neck seemed to struggle
to hold up. Once of the older boys had stuck a
condom over his head, and laughed as he almost
suffocated. Pencil Norrell with a rubber top!
Kevin walked over to the kitchen table and picked
up the almost empty bottle of cheap vodka that was
stood on it. Lipstick marks smeared the spiralled
glass at the top. He held it for a moment listening to
the sound of his parents' invective mixing with the
cutting bray of Tom Good's laugh. Then he smashed
it against the wall. His parents stopped, and looked
back at him astonished, their mouths agape like
cartoon characters.
Sean Norrell was the first to find voice. 'What the
fuck you think you're doing?'
And Kevin Norrell punched the jagged, broken
bottle forward, as hard as he could, stabbing it into
his father's thigh. Sean Norrell squealed like a snared
rabbit and dropped to his knees, his hands cupping
the wound, watching horrified as blood spilled
through his spread fingers.
Thirty-two years later on and Norrell held up his own
hand, letting the shower water run through his fingers,
shaking his head as if to clear the memories.
His father hadn't died that night. The damage to
his thigh was excruciating but treatable, an inch
higher and it would have been his groin, the surgeon
had pointed out, and that would have been a lot
more serious. Sent home from hospital he managed
to sell the remaining lump of cannabis resin he had
left and pay Mickey Ryan most of what he owed him,
not enough to save himself from a beating, mind, and
the boys who gave him it laughed as they
remembered that he had been nearly bottled in the
nuts by his own son. They made sure to give him a
kick or two in the groin before they were done. The
kicking reopened the wound and Sean Norrell, rather
than seeking medical attention, simply self-medicated
with cheap whisky and strong lager and the wound
became infected. He died some weeks later from
septicaemia.
