Dedication

In Loving Memory of Erin

COPYRIGHT

An Isolated Incident

Published worldwide by Zertex Crime, an imprint of Zertex Media Ltd.

Copyright © 2021 by JD Kirk

The right of JD Kirk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

Edited by Hanna Elizabeth.

Cover Design by Andrew Dobell.

Chapter One

Improbably, there was somebody at the door.

Way out here.

At this time of bloody night.

There had been no glow of headlights. No sound of an engine, nor of tyres coming sweeping up the makeshift driveway. No closing of car doors, no swishing of footsteps through the grass.

No sound at all, in fact.

Just the knock. Just a moment ago.

And again. There. Just now.

His wife’s face registered the same concern that he felt. Or a fraction of it, anyway. She didn’t know.

Not like he did.

“What on earth?” she muttered.

He silenced her with a look and a finger to his lips. His bones were suddenly heavy, and it took more effort than it should have to raise his hand to his mouth.

She flicked her gaze to the door that led off from the other end of the living room to where the kids slept soundly in the room next door. Her concern was that they’d be woken by the noise. It had been a long few days. They all needed some unbroken rest after the last few weeks.

His own concerns were somewhat more visceral.

The knocking came again. It was firm. Insistent. A knock that had no intention of going away. A knock that would only get louder.

A crack from the embers dying in the hearth made him tense. A whisper from his wife made him jump.

“Who’s that at this time of night?”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? What am I, bloody psychic?” he whispered back.

The curtains were drawn on all the windows, and the only light was the brooding red glow of the dying fire. There would have been no beacon for a stranded motorist to spot. No siren’s call promising warmth and shelter to any travellers wandering lost on the hills.

Whoever was at the door had come here on purpose. With a purpose.

“Maybe they’ll go away,” his wife reasoned.

“Maybe,” he said.

They wouldn’t, he knew.

They should’ve kept moving. Should never have stayed here this long. But, she’d loved the place so much, and it was so remote and out of the way.

And he’d been so careful.

Hadn’t he?

He was casting his mind back over everything he’d said and done outside the house—everyone he’d spoken to, every lie he’d told, and photo opportunity he’d politely declined—when the knock came again. Louder, this time, less patient.

“It might be someone hurt, or in trouble.”

“It might be,” he said. His gaze was fixed on the door. He could only see part of it from the armchair he’d claimed as his own back at the start of the week, and the darkness outside turned the frosted glass window to a square of charcoal black.

But he got an impression of something out there. Real or imagined, a shape loomed beyond the glass. Large. Imposing.

Inevitable.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“You’d better answer it. They’re not going to go away,” she said.

His gaze unlocked itself from the door and went to his wife in the chair across from his. He almost swore at her. What? You go and fucking answer it! But, she was right. Anyone who came all this way out into the middle of nowhere to knock on a door at this time of night was not going to just give up.

The people who were after him would never give up. They’d hunt him to the ends of the earth, if it came to it.

Perhaps, they already had.

The poker scraped on the rough stone of the fireplace as he removed it from its hook. He’d been jabbing at the flames with it for most of the night, keeping the fire going as best he could, and the metal tip still radiated enough heat to burn anyone who found themselves on the other end of it.

And, of course, there was the damage it could do with a good hard whack.

He saw his wife’s eyes flit to the makeshift weapon. She said nothing, but got to her feet and positioned herself in front of the door to the room where the girls were sleeping.

They could call the police, of course. Assuming the wind was blowing in the right direction for them to get a signal. But it would take them at least twenty minutes to get here at full pelt with lights flashing.

Add in the time to make the call, to explain, to give the address, and—

The knocking returned as a thumping fist that rattled the glass in the old doorframe. He jumped, his breath catching in his throat, his grip tightening on the limply held poker handle so that it sprang erect.

“Fuck,” he whispered, and the word hung there in the fiery red murk.

He thought about the back door.

He thought about leaving her—leaving them—to face his mistakes.

But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t.

Someone would almost certainly be waiting out the back, too.

The door shook. His wife hissed.

“Go and see who it is, Archie!”

The poker shook in his hand.

Out there in the darkness, a shape shifted behind the glass.

Chapter Two

Drat!

He’d sliced it. Idiot!

He kept his eyes fixed on the ball as it curved off to the right, and studiously ignored the gleeful remarks of this morning’s companion.

“Look at it go! Water, water, water!”

There was a distant ker-splunk and a sound from behind him that was a cheer disguised as a commiseration.

“Aw, bad luck, Boyley-ma-boy! You’ll no’ be getting that one back without a wetsuit and snorkel.”

Rufus Boyle scraped his vibrantly white top teeth across his bottom lip, bit down for a moment until the urge to swear had passed, then turned to his opponent and smiled.

“Ah well. Can’t win ‘em all, I suppose,” he said, playing up his privately-educated Edinburgh twang just enough to remind the other man who his betters were.

“Seems like you can’t win any this morning, can you?” his opponent replied, grinning like the proverbial idiot. He was a local man. Mid-fifties, so around Rufus’s own age. Worked in the aluminium factory half a mile down the road. John, or Bob, or something equally as mundane.

The club had matched them up based on both ability and availability. Rufus liked to play early, but not too early. Mid-morning worked best for his schedule, as it allowed him a leisurely breakfast—either in the downstairs snug, or out on the balcony on the rare occasions that the weather allowed—and an hour or two to get the day’s business out of the way.

John, or Bob—Billy, maybe?—worked late shifts at the factory, so mid-morning was a good fit for him, too. And they were, though Rufus hated to admit it, well-matched opponents.

Handicap-wise. There, besides gender and approximate age, any and all similarities ended.

“How come you’re doing so shite the day? Something on your mind, Boyley-ma-boy?”

Rufus detested the name the other man had given him, but had made a point of not letting on, in case his protests served as some sort of encouragement.

He’d much have preferred ‘Rufus’ or, ideally, ‘Mr Boyle.’ But Boyley-ma-boy? God Almighty. It was how John, or Bob, or whatever his name was always addressed him, and each time he did, it brought him one step closer to having his head caved in with a pitching wedge.

“I’m going to play again,” Rufus stated, fishing another ball from the pocket of his gaudy tartan breeks and setting it on the tee at his feet.

“Of course. Go ahead,” the other man said. “Just mind and write down the one-stroke penalty.”

The sudden jerk of Rufus’s hand knocked the ball off the tee and onto the grass. “I meant I’ll just write off that last attempt entirely.”

“I know you did. But it’s a one-stroke penalty. Them’s the rules, Boyley-ma-boy.”

Rufus picked up the ball, squeezed it hard, then returned it to the tee where this time it remained.

“Fine. Yes. Fine. I didn’t realise we were taking it quite so seriously, but fine. Whatever makes you happy,” Rufus said, punctuating the sentence with an impressive array of passive-aggressive hand movements and facial expressions. “I mean, if it means that much to you…”

“Just playing to the rules,” the other man said, and even without looking, Rufus could picture his self-satisfied smirk. “You seemed to think it was so important on the ninth, when I—”

“I said I’ll take the penalty,” Rufus said.

The bastard was trying to get under his skin. That was it. Throw him off his game.

As if Rufus didn’t already have enough to worry about.

His watch gave a buzz, warning him of an incoming call. He glanced at the display, muttered below his breath, then unzipped the side pocket of his golf bag and retrieved his phone. “Sorry, I have to take this. Business-related.”

“Fire on, Boyley-ma-boy. No rest for the wicked.”

“Quite, yes,” Rufus said, stepping away with his finger hovering above the button that would answer the gently vibrating mobile.

In truth, he was quite grateful for the call. Ever since he’d mentioned to John, or Bob—Chris? Could it be Chris?—that his working day ended around ten in the morning, he’d been subjected to quite a lot of ribbing from the others at the club.

This largely took the form of him being called a lazy, workshy bastard, so there was a certain sense of satisfaction now that his leisure time was being interrupted due to a business matter at—he checked his watch again—nearly half past eleven.

Hopefully, once the other fellows at the club realised he was always on-call for business-related emergencies, they’d appreciate just how hard he truly worked.

He answered the phone and spoke in a slow, clear voice to the woman on the other end. “Good morning, Magda. I’m in the middle of something. Is there a problem?” he asked, not wasting any time. His cleaner wasn’t ringing him up for a friendly chat, after all. She knew better than to do that these days.

“Mr Boyle. It is are you good morning, yes?” Magdalena replied in what could generously be described as ‘broken’ English, and more accurately as ‘barely.’

“It was, Magda. What is problem? Why you calling?” he asked, simplifying the sentence structure and raising the volume of his voice, which was as close as he ever got to speaking any language that wasn’t the Queen’s English. “What you need?”

“Who the fuck are you talking to? Tarzan?” asked his golfing nemesis. Rufus already had his back to the man, but rolled his shoulders forward to further shield the conversation from his prying ears. Ears which, Rufus imagined, had not been cleaned behind in years.

“Is house, Mr Boyle. Guest House. Is no empty, I think. Is guest people still inside.”

Rufus blinked. Magda was a fine cleaner, but holding a conversation with her could be like trying to carry water in a sieve. Not only was her grasp of the language tenuous at best, Rufus had also come to the conclusion that she was thick as pigshit.

Never exactly a winning combination.

Still, she was a hard worker, knew her way around a vacuum cleaner, and the one thing she had a worse understanding of than English was the minimum wage regulations.

“Was that a question, or are you telling me?” he asked.

“Pardon?”

“‘Is guest people still inside,’ you said. Was that a question, or are you saying they’re still inside?”

“Still inside. I think. Curtains…” Magda hesitated, like she was replaying the word to check it was the right one. “…closed. All closed. Up. Down. Closed.”

“They might have left them shut.”

“Pardon?”

“I said… Nothing. Forget it. Have you looked?”

“Looked?”

Rufus removed the phone from his ear, pushed out his lower lip with his tongue to imply the woman on the other end of the line suffered some sort of disability, then swallowed back his rising irritation.

“Just knock. Check. They should have left.”

“They should have left.”

“I know. That’s what I just said!”

The sound of a titanium driver striking a golf ball made him look back over his shoulder. The hissed, “Yes! Get in!” only served to further spoil his mood.

“Just knock on the door and go in,” he instructed.

“I no like to go in if people inside.”

“They won’t be inside, Magda,” Rufus snapped. “If they are, then they bloody well shouldn’t be. So knock, go in, and if they’re in there, tell them to sling their hook.”

The silence from the other end was riddled with confusion. Rufus sighed and rubbed his forehead with a gloved hand.

“Look, I’ll hold on. Go in. If they’re there, you can put me on speakerphone. I can talk to them.”

“I… I should go in?”

“Yes! For Christ’s sake, Magda. It’s not hard. Go in. In you go. You go in. Understand?”

The sound changed on the line. A breeze blew. Birdsong echoed. A car door thunked shut.

“I go in. But I no like.”

Rufus wanted to point out that he didn’t particularly like having his morning golf game interrupted for the sake of some unopened curtains, but the linguistic gymnastics that would be required to get his point across would only frustrate him, so he elected to remain silent.

“You about done?” his opponent asked. “We’ll have people wanting to play through if we don’t get a shifty on, and I’m working at two.”

Rufus held up a finger for silence. “Just… one moment.”

He listened to Magda’s breathless panting as she lugged her cleaning box up the incline to the guest house’s front door. She was wheezing like an old racehorse on the way to the knacker’s yard. Christ, don’t tell him he’d have to start looking for a replacement. Cheap foreign labour was proving increasingly difficult to get.

“You there yet?” he asked, after what felt like an eternity of listening to her puff and pant.

“Soon. One minute more,” she rasped.

Rufus rolled his eyes, gave an apologetic sort of wave to his golf partner, then turned away again.

“How far away did you park?” he asked. “Cornwall?”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Just hurry up. I’m in the middle of something important.”

“Here now,” Magda said, dropping the level of her voice.

“Why are you whispering? Don’t whisper. Just knock once and go in. You’re in the right,” Rufus told her, then he simplified that all down before she could question it, and repeated only the, “Go in,” part.

He heard her knocking. It was quiet and timid-sounding. If the guests were still asleep, it would do nothing to wake them.

“They no answer.”

“Then go in, woman! You’ve got keys.”

Rufus listened to the clack and the creak of the door being opened.

“It no locked,” Magda told him, her voice barely audible now above the sounds of wind and birdsong. “I go in. I go in and—”

He heard her gasp.

He heard the thump of her phone hitting the floor, the rustle as it bounced and slid across the carpet.

He heard her babbling in her native tongue, the words themselves meaning nothing to him, but their increasingly hysterical tones telling him that something was seriously wrong.

And then, through a crackle of low-signal static, he heard her muffled screams.

Chapter Three

DC Tyler Neish had been married less than forty-eight hours, and was already halfway through the first official argument with his new wife.

They sat in Sinead’s car outside the polis station on Burnett Road, windscreen wipers fighting a losing battle against the raging rain. He sat in the passenger seat, shoulders stooped and head down, like a child being reprimanded.

“No, it can’t wait,” Sinead told him, her voice all hard and sharp around the edges. “You need to tell him today. Your operation’s on Thursday.”

Tyler wobbled his weight from one arse cheek to the other. “Aye. No, I know, I just—”

The look she shot him was harsher still than her words had been. They’d been having this same conversation for almost a week now, and no amount of gentle encouragement and supportive words had helped spur him on.

Seeing him slouched there, she found herself softening again. She couldn’t be annoyed with him. Not about this. Plenty of other things, aye, but not this.

She took his hand and wove her fingers between his. “I know it’s scary, Ty. But they have to know. He has to know.”

Tyler nodded, but didn’t yet look up. “I know. I know, it’s just…”

“It makes it all real?”

“Suppose. Maybe, aye. But not just that,” he said. He met her gaze then, and the fear and uncertainty in his eyes almost brought tears to hers. “What if they start treating me differently? What if it’s… you know, weird?”

“Weird how? They’re not going to starting ringing bells and shouting, ‘Unclean!’ or anything.”

Tyler smiled at that. “Aye, but… they would, wouldn’t they? Normally, I mean. If it was something less… serious.”

Sinead blinked as she realised the root cause of her husband’s hesitancy. “Wait… you’re worried they won’t rip the piss?”

“What? No!” Tyler considered this. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe. Aye. I just don’t want it to be different, you know?”

“You do remember who we’re talking about, yes?” Sinead said, smiling. “Do you really think that lot could stop taking the piss for five minutes if they tried?”

Tyler gazed ahead at the station. The movement of the rain on the windscreen made the building’s walls shift and dance like the whole place was alive. A smirk tugged at one corner of his mouth.

“You could be right,” he admitted. “And, I mean, it’s not like we’re not used to morbid stuff. We deal with death all the time, don’t we?”

“We do,” Sinead agreed, unclipping her seatbelt. “But you’re having a bollock chopped off, you’re no’ dying.” She gave his hand a squeeze, then nodded ahead at the shimmering station walls. “So, don’t you think it’s time we broke the news?”

* * *

DCI Jack Logan sat alone in his office, quietly making an arse of eating a bacon and fried egg roll. The egg was runnier than he’d been expecting, and the yolk had erupted out of the back of the roll on the first bite then splattered onto his desk.

Fortunately, this was far from his first bacon and fried egg rodeo, and he’d had the foresight to place the white paper bag the roll had come in directly in the splash zone, thereby saving his desk from the worst of the mess.

He couldn’t say the same for his hands. Yolk, grease, and melting butter were slowly cascading along the lengths of his fingers, dripping in oily blobs whenever they met the fold of a knuckle.

Usually, he’d power through, then surreptitiously lick the worst of it off when no one was looking, but there was too much mess already. He was just one bite in, and his hands were so covered he didn’t dare continue without first cleaning up.

He’d just set the roll down in the nest of the paper bag, and was contemplating what he could use to wipe his fingers when a gruff male voice came from the direction of the door.

“Fuck me, what have you been up to?” it demanded. “Fingering Casper the Friendly Ghost?”

Logan glowered at the man looming in the doorway, and for a moment the only sound was the irregular dripping of egg yolk on paper.

“Bob? What are you doing here?” he finally asked, giving his hands a wipe on the crumpled white bag. “I thought you’d catch fire if you ever set foot in the place again.”

The former Detective Superintendent Bob Hoon gave a grunt that simultaneously acknowledged the joke and made it clear he didn’t find it funny. “Aye, well, needs must,” he said, giving nothing away. He pointed to the roll on the desk in front of Logan. “You going to eat the rest of that, by the way?”

“Yes. Of course I am,” Logan replied. He gestured with glistening hands to the darkened Incident Room at Hoon’s back. “Seriously, how did you get in?”

“How the fuck do you think I got in? A jetpack? I walked in the front door and up the stairs. Surely that’s no’ a stretch of even your limited fucking imagination, Jack?”

Hoon dropped into the chair across the desk from Logan, spread his legs wide, and began twisting from side to side until the metal and plastic creaked out a little rhythm.

Logan expressed his irritation with a tut and a sigh, then leaned forwards so his elbows rested on the desk. This put him directly above the remaining four-fifths of his roll, and the aroma of bacon and egg drew an impatient grumble from his stomach.

“Let me rephrase that question, then,” he said. “Why did you get in? What do you want?”

“A favour.”

The shock hit Logan like it was a physical thing, making him blink and draw back. “A favour?”

“You deaf, or is there a fucking echo in here?” Hoon asked. “Aye. A favour.”

Logan drew air in slowly through his teeth and stared at his old boss like he was trying to read the man’s mind—disturbing as that would almost certainly be.

“Are you in trouble?” Logan asked. “Because I can’t help if you’ve got yourself arrested, or—”

“Fuck off!” Hoon interjected. “You think I’m a fucking scally or something? Believe me, if I was up to no good, you eggy-fingered fuckmuppets’d be the last to know about it. Am I in fucking trouble? Jesus.”

“What, then?” Logan asked, keen to get back to his roll as soon as was humanly possible.

Hoon tapped his hands on the arm of the chair. His throat clenched and relaxed a few times, like a bird trying to regurgitate something large and unpleasant.

“I need a reference,” he finally managed to say.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!