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  DARKE

  By

  Matt Hilton

  DARKE

  By

  MATT HILTON

  Published by Sempre Vigile Press

  Copyright © 2018 Matt Hilton

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images used under standard license from freedigitalphotos.net Cover design © 2018 Matt Hilton

  Before…

  Brandreth House was rotten at its core, a place of mould and decay and crumbling masonry, of dusty cobwebs and creeping shadows. Its walls were buckled, its roof missing slates, and barely any window retained glass, and those that did were cracked or discoloured with a patina of grime. Deformed woodland surrounded the house, a barrier of trees and shrubs at odds with the hills that loomed overhead. A pond excavated from the earth by its Victorian owners had brought ruination to the house and their fortune. Seepage from the naked slopes had flooded in, turned the surrounding land to a bog that crept to the house’s foundations. If the rot didn’t claim the building, the morass would sooner or later suck it into the bowels of the earth. It was a fitting home for the last surviving heir of the Brandreth family, because through to his core he was rotten too.

  He was a young man driven by unhealthy tastes, an alcoholic, with an unsavoury sexual appetite. He was a shambling brute, surly, unkempt and stinking, whom his neighbours avoided. On the rare occasions he’d met trespassers, he’d shown his displeasure, exerting his right to eject them from his property with threats of extreme violence. He was a danger to all, and in particular to the most vulnerable members of society. He wouldn’t entertain uninvited visitors, though it was rare in the past few years that a particular room had gone unoccupied. The basement was at most risk from the rising water, but until now its thick walls and stone floor retained its integrity, and it was the most soundproofed. There his unwilling guests were held, and there he fed his sick appetite, all under the watchful guidance of his sole companion, a deviant more shrewd and deceitful than Brandreth, and more dangerous.

  Stuttering blue light from a video monitor sucked the life from the features of his mentor, lending him a corpse-like cast. The man wore a thick beard, and his hair to his shoulders. Brandreth’s dishevelled appearance was through laziness and a lack of personal hygiene, but the other had purposely cultured his look, to help conceal his identity. Witnesses would recall the beard and long hair, not his true face beneath. For the ‘Fell Man’, as the press had dubbed him, was the subject of a manhunt stretching from the northern lakes of Cumbria to the furthest coastlines of the British mainland.

  Brandreth was a simpleton, but he had his uses. He was easily manipulated through payment in alcohol or in depraved carnal acts. In exchange he’d allowed his mentor free range of his ancestral home to use it as he wished. In the sub-basement the man had retrofitted a video-editing suite where he churned out multiple copies of videotapes to supply his clients. Brandreth was engaged mostly in packing and carrying chores, because his technological savvy extended little beyond switching on an electric kettle. His appetites fed, Brandreth had become a servant in his own home.

  His mentor tapped the nearest flickering monitor. ‘She’s awake.’

  Brandreth exhaled through his nostrils.

  ‘When did you last check her restraints?’ There was urgency in the Fell Man’s voice.

  ‘When I was in earlier, emptying her piss bucket.’

  ‘She didn’t loosen that strap while she was asleep. Get in there and do it up again, and make sure she knows the consequences of trying to free herself.’

  VCR machines whirred steadily in the background. The air was stuffy, charged with static electricity. The atmosphere was abruptly filled with a tangible buzz of annoyance from Brandreth. He wasn’t mad at the command, but at the audacity of the girl. He stormed towards an access door to the basement, and threw it open with a wordless shout. He was still descending a small flight of steps when the Fell Man jolted rigid in his seat. On-screen, the girl leapt from the piled mattresses on which she’d slept, and darted away free of her leather restraints. A corresponding yell followed as Brandreth charged after her.

  There wasn’t a camera positioned to view where she ran, but there was another route from the basement, up a set of stairs to the kitchen. If Brandreth had been remiss in checking the girl’s restraints, had he also forgotten to bolt the door from within after he carried out her slops bucket? The Fell Man was out of his seat in an instant, but he didn’t pursue Brandreth. He exited the sub-basement, charging along a dank passageway and into the yard at the rear of the house. As he expected, the small figure hurtled from the kitchen less than ten metres away. She skidded on bare feet when she spotted him, emitting a gasp. The oval of her mouth was a raw hole. The girl turned and ran, pushing aside tendrils of bramble that encroached on the back of the house. Thorns snagged at the shapeless grey shift that covered her skinny frame from bony shoulders to knobbly knees, dug at her flesh and hair, but she fought past. Brandreth stormed out in pursuit, his boots slapping the broken paving. For a shambling giant he was surprisingly fast with momentum behind him. He almost had the girl in a few lunging steps, but then his momentum was also his undoing. Overbalanced as he reached for her, he tripped and went down hard. The girl slipped away from his grasping fingers, and Brandreth fought to stand. The Fell Man shoved past him, and didn’t pause to check on him. Brandreth scrambled up and followed, cursing savagely.

  Beyond the confines of the mildewed walls of her prison, their prey couldn’t have had any prior idea of her surroundings. She fled without forethought: driven by terror she raced towards the rear of the grounds, with the Fell Man in pursuit. He’d easily run her down if she attempted to swarm up the nearest slope, a repository of tumbled boulders and snarled thickets of gorse. He was almost on her when she dodged to the right, and then she was between the branches of shrubs left to run wild years ago. The Fell Man crashed through them, and Brandreth rushed further to the right to hem her against the bank of a stream that bled from the fells above.

  Driven by panic the girl plunged into the stream, grasping at exposed roots on the opposite bank to avoid being tumbled downhill by the rushing water. Muddy and dripping, she scrambled up the opposite bank, and fled up the slope. Cursing her under his breath, the Fell Man danced over slick stepping-stones in the stream. She had gained a few steps on him, but he was powerful and each step sent him higher up the slope towards a crown of stunted hawthorn bushes at the top. He was within a single lunge of capturing her but then the child was under the misshapen canopy, and between the close-knit branches she scurried like a rodent. He dropped to his hands and knees to pursue, and there she had the advantage.

  She was a determined little rat. If she kept running she would escape, but the Fell Man had too much to lose to give up the chase. Brandreth, gasping at the unexpected effort, was somewhere behind him and couldn’t be relied on to cut her off. Gritting his teeth, he bulled a passage through the stunted, but tough little trees and was abruptly over the crest, and descending into a valley. Twigs snagged in his beard and hair, caught in the neckline of his jacket and scored a weeping groove in his flesh above his collarbone. The trouble the little bitch was putting him to…
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br />   The girl emitted short bleats of fear, fighting forward through a cage of branches. The crackle of breaking twigs sounded like the popping of sparks in a bonfire. Her shift was held in the grasp of a thorny fist. She yanked and fell on her front, and the Fell Man grabbed at a grimy ankle. She kicked and squirmed and then scrambled forward, but got only as far as the branch would flex. Abruptly she broke loose and gaining a few feet, she threw herself towards where the copse thinned. The Fell Man rammed a passage after her. She halted unexpectedly. So did the Fell Man.

  From below sounded the excitable squeals of children at play.

  Moving forward with less urgency, he glanced down at his prize. Her hair was tangled, dirty, laced with broken twigs and leaves. Her shift was torn and filthy, and scratches covered her limbs. Her tiny shoulders rose and fell as she gasped for breath. She stood in a daze, unaware of the imminent danger. She raised a hand and he sensed her mouth opening. He clamped a palm over her face and dragged her backwards into the gloom beneath the trees. He crouched, his hand forcibly cupping her face and her squirms grew frantic as she fought for life. He ignored the dirty thing in his hands, concentrating instead on the two girls peering up the hill. Had they witnessed him grabbing the girl?

  One child he disregarded. She was an androgynous little thing, with a thick thatch of coppery hair crowning a round boyish face, and even at a distance he was certain she was cross-eyed. The hem of a padded coat scuffed the tops of wellington boots designed for someone larger. But the second girl held his gaze. He almost forgot about the child perishing under his hand, while he stared at a vision. The girl was willowy, graceful, a beauty: when she turned away and bounded downhill, followed by her ungainly sibling, it was with elegance unmatched by any girl he’d taken before…and he coveted her.

  The Fell Man advanced to the edge of the copse, dangling the wretch against his chest, one hand now clenching her throat, while watching every move the graceful girl made. Down below them at the very perimeter of the ancient estate he spotted a car, and a woman loading items into its boot. He ignored the adult, ignored the child chugging downhill in her ill-fitting boots, and ignored the now floppy girl in his arms; there was only one person worthy of his attention.

  ‘Victoria,’ he whispered throatily.

  It was not the name of the graceful girl, but of one who’d similarly entranced him many years ago. It was through the dark desires Victoria had ignited in him that the Fell Man was born.

  He backed into the deformed trees, still watching as the girls joined the woman by the car. They stood abashed, being scolded. There was no frantic pointing uphill, so he was satisfied he’d gone unobserved. Behind him, Brandreth forced a crackling path through the trees. The man’s dependency on alcohol had sapped all vitality from him. He stood a moment, hands on his thick thighs as he gasped for breath. The Fell Man sneered, then aimed his derision at the wretch he still held suspended above the ground. She was as light as the filthy rag she resembled. He tossed her down at Brandreth’s feet.

  ‘Make up for your bloody stupidity and do something with that.’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘What do you think?’ The Fell Man had felt life slip from her as he’d crushed her trachea. ‘It’s no good to us now,’ he said. ‘Drop it in a deep hole like you did with the others.’

  Brandreth didn’t complain. Through his inattention it was his fault their prisoner had escaped, so it was down to him to clean up his mess. He reached and pawed up the dead girl, whose back arched over his bent elbow. Her mouth fell open, a wet hole with only the stub of a disfigured tongue, from which escaped a wheeze of escaping air. Her last breath was sour. Brandreth glowered at her lax features, and his lips twisted in disgust. He preferred when their victims pleaded for mercy. He was secretly pleased she was done with, because he’d never fully enjoyed playing with the little dummy.

  By the time he next checked, his mentor had gone.

  Soon after he heard the belching growl of an engine, and formed an ugly smile. The Fell Man was hunting their next plaything.

  1

  The girl’s hands were clasped as if in prayer, knees tucked tightly to her abdomen. Her eyelids were scrunched, her prayer fervent: begging for the agony to stop. It had gone unanswered except by death. Alongside the child, her dead mother also lay on her side. A hand reached as if to offer comfort, fingertips falling short by a few inches. The mother’s face was rigid, contorted forever by grief. Ten-year-old Bilan Ghedi’s death wasn’t instantaneous; she’d died screeching, her body contracting around the bullet in her abdomen, while her mother Nala, blood pumping from a throat wound, strove to protect her children in her final moments.

  Detective Inspector Kerry Darke caught only a snatch of the awful scene through the slim opening in the forensic tent. It was enough. She turned away, shuddering out a groan. Why did another little girl have to die?

  ‘You still with me, boss?’

  She blinked rain from her eyelashes. She was a transplantee to the capital since transferring to the Met’s Gangs and Organised Crime taskforce, a northern lass used to rain heavier and colder than the showers currently washing over South Lambeth.

  A concerned frown creased the olive skin of Detective Sergeant Danny Korba’s forehead. His slicked black hair and the shoulders of his suit were sodden.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, Danny.’ She offered a weak grimace. ‘Sorry…Bilan’s death got me thinking, that’s all.’ She blew out her cheeks, tucked her auburn hair behind her ears and concentrated on the DS. ‘What’ve you got for me?’

  Korba read from a tatty pocket book. ‘Two suspects, a driver and shooter. Car’s a sonic blue Subaru Impreza, older model, with the airfoil on the boot. Partial license plate only.’ He read it out.

  ‘You’ve passed that to ANPR and the control room?’

  He clucked his tongue. ‘Course I have. You ask me, though, the plates have been switched. Those Impreza’s rolled off the line back in the nineties, so it won’t have a five nine plate.’

  ‘Hoping for an ID of the shooter’s too much to ask?’

  Korba’s eyebrows beetled. ‘Still waiting to hear from the wooden tops,’ he said – meaning their uniformed colleagues tasked with canvassing the area for witnesses.

  ‘Let me know as soon as you get anything.’

  She waited for clearance to enter the forensic tent. The pavement was greasy under foot, dotted with pigeon shit. It fronted a commercial strip, an eclectic mix offering everything from cheap mobile phones, fruit and vegetables, Moroccan coffee and budget dental plans. There were residential flats above the shops, and some locals leaned over their balconies for a better view of an abandoned pushchair and the corpses hidden a few feet away from it.

  Other observers gathered beyond the police cordon. Uniformed officers diverted traffic around Larkhall Park, while others conducted a fingertip search of the road and kerbs. Three spent brass shells had already been recovered, photographed, tagged and bagged. On hands and knees constables continued a wider search, the rain pattering on their arched backs. A mother, her daughter and two-year-old son had been shot at. The victims were Somalian, and already the suggestion was that the gunman was white — an ember to be fanned into flames by racists on opposite sides of the colour divide.

  A female constable coughed an apology at Kerry’s side.

  ‘What is it?’

  At five feet six inches, Kerry wasn’t tall. The constable was a couple of inches shorter, sturdy rather than overweight. Her round cheeks were florid. She nodded at a tall black man cornered in the doorway of an Oriental supermarket. ‘Funky said you’d better come and speak to him, ma’am, or he’s leaving.’

  Kerry recognised the gangling Nigerian, and his nickname. Ikemba Adefunke was on her radar, a footsoldier of Jermaine Robson’s Nine Elms Crew. ‘I’ll be with him shortly.’

  ‘He said the dead can wait, but he’s a busy man.’

  The gangster’s rheumy gaze challenged her.

  ‘Uh, he’s a w
itness, ma’am.’ The constable shifted foot to foot, staring over her shoulder at Funky. He inclined his chin. Kerry snorted, and the constable snapped to attention. ‘Ma’am, Funky knows the gunman, but will only tell you who it is.’

  ‘Alright,’ Kerry said, ‘I’ll see him. You three stay close.’

  The constable scurried to obey. Kerry ducked through the rain sluicing off the supermarket’s awning. She shook drops from her hair, rubbed the back of her wrist across her mouth.

  ‘Take your own fuckin’ time, why don’t ya?’ Funky’s head bobbed with each deep, mellifluous word. She closed in, invading his personal space. Funky’s skinny neck bent like a vulture’s. He studied her eyes, snapping from one to the other and back again. She had heterochromia, her left iris a light shade of amber, her right dark green. Some people were creeped out by her mismatched stare, and she’d learned to use it. His arrogance melted away.

  ‘I hear you’ve got a name for me, Funky.’

  ‘Mebbe I should keep it to myself, Detective Inspector Darke.’ He made her name sound like urban slang for shit. ‘Seein’ as you don’t look too interested in hearin’ what a black man’s got to say.’

  ‘It’s not like your kind to give anything to the Old Bill…expect lip.’ She wasn’t talking about his skin colour.

  ‘I make an exception when some white boy tries to shoot me in the back.’

  ‘How could you tell he was white if you had your back to him?’

  ‘He was a shit aim. Hit that woman and her kid instead, then took another shot at me.’ He snorted. ‘I turned round and looked that fucker dead in the face and he still missed me.’

  Three shots. Three spent shells found on the road. Maybe Funky was telling the truth, except she had an inherent distrust of his kind – meaning criminals. ‘And you recognised the shooter?’