MURDER AMONG FRIENDS a totally gripping crime thriller full of twists Read online

  MURDER

  AMONG

  FRIENDS

  A totally gripping crime thriller full of twists

  JANICE FROST

  First published 2020

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  © Janice Frost

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Janice Frost to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  ISBN 978-1-78931-550-9

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

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  GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH SLANG FOR US READERS

  To all my loyal readers.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks to everyone at Joffe Books for everything you do to make my books the best they can be.

  Also, my thanks to Stuart Gibbon of Gib Consultancy for his speedy and thorough answers to all my questions on police procedure.

  Prologue

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  The moment he walked into the shop he felt self-conscious. He told himself to chill. He had every right to be here. It wasn’t like it was a female-only zone, like the women’s underwear section in Marks & Spencer’s. Not that he’d be seen dead in a shop like that. He wasn’t looking for women his gran’s age. He liked them young. Not too young, mind. He wasn’t one of those perverts who fancied children.

  A brunette fingering a slutty satin top caught his eye. Underage? That was an adult-rated top she was holding up to the mirror.

  He took a deep breath. I’ve got this.

  “That top would look amazing on you.” He couldn’t believe his luck when she responded with a giggle. Usually they gave him that look or walked away without a word. He’d even been told to fuck off.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t want to look like a slag.”

  “You’re too pretty for that.”

  “It’s expensive.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five quid.”

  “Try it on. I’ll buy it for you.” Eager. Too eager.

  Suspicion clouded her eyes. “No thanks.” He’d blown it.

  “Bitch,” he said, quietly, so that only she could hear.

  “Get lost.”

  “I hope you get gang-raped.” That shut her up. He smiled at her, enjoying the look of shock on her face.

  Time to go. The security guy, whose radar he’d been trying to avoid, was making his way over.

  “You alright, miss? Is he bothering you?”

  He held up his hands. “I was just leaving.”

  If he ever saw that bitch again, he’d make her sorry she rejected him.

  Chapter One

  DI Steph Warwick nodded at the special standing on the opposite side of the road from the dead man. According to one of the regular PCs, her name was Jane Bell. She had been first to arrive at the scene. She was also on her first ever shift as a special constable.

  Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end. Steph crossed the road.

  “You okay?”

  “I think so. I wasn’t expecting something like this on my first night in the job.”

  “How come you’re on your own? Rookie specials don’t have independent patrol status.”

  “The regular PC I was assigned to had to rush off to the hospital after our shift. His wife’s in labour. I was parking the car when I overheard a call about an incident at Greestone Stairs.” She glanced at the corpse. “I’m afraid there wasn’t much I could do for him.”

  Steph frowned at her. “You shouldn’t have responded on your own.”

  “You’d think a passer-by might have stopped to help him,” Bell continued.

  Steph was irritated that Bell hadn’t acknowledged her reproach. Even more annoyingly, she continued to ramble.

  “I suppose most people would assume he was a drunk, or a spice zombie. I noticed some blood on the steps leading up from the archway. Maybe he was dragged up here.”

  “Or he might have dragged himself up and collapsed on the bench.” Steph pointed out the hard-to-miss evidence for her theory, a bloody handprint on the handrail running alongside the steep path.

  “Oh. Yes. Of course. I didn’t notice that.”

  “Well, you’d had a bit of a shock. It’s your first shift.” Steph couldn’t resist a dig. “And you’re only a special.”

  “Right. Yes. That’s true. Would it be okay if I stick around for a bit? My shift’s over but I feel kind of responsible for him.”

  A murder investigation was outside the remit of a special, especially one with as little experience as Bell.

  “We’ve got it covered. It’s likely to be a long night. Think yourself lucky that you can go home now.”

  Bell’s lips turned downwards in the manner of a disappointed child. Steph wondered how old she was. Mid-forties? About the right age for a mid-life crisis. There was no upper age limit for volunteering as an SC but these days more and more of those who joined were in their early twenties, using the specials as a springboard to a career in the regular force. Some people volunteered after experiencing crime first-hand as a victim. Others were inspired by the opportunity to give something back to their community, or because they got a buzz out of helping people. Which was Bell? If pushed, Steph would have bet on her being one of the do-gooders.

  Steph surveyed her surroundings. A steep, irregular stone pathway approximately eighty metres long, Greestone Stairs connected the Lincoln Minster Yard with Lindum Hill, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

  The stairs were reputed to be haunted. Now there would be one more ghost to add to the motley collection of hanged
clerics, rolling bishops’ heads and hovering orbs of light. Perhaps these spectres were huddled around the body already, eager to claim the young man’s spirit as one of their own. It wasn’t hard to believe on that cold January night, the steps sparkling with frost, a veil of freezing fog obscuring the view of the creepy stone arch farther down. Steph shivered.

  She approached the corpse. The glow from a nearby Victorian-style streetlamp cast a fuzzy light on his upturned face, bringing his features into soft focus. Steph leaned in, noting the brown hair slick with bloody highlights, the pallid skin, the lifeless, staring eyes.

  A CSI began taking photographs of the body. When he’d finished, Steph donned a pair of latex gloves and together they searched the victim’s pockets.

  The scene was illuminated, suddenly, by the headlamps of an ambulance parking further up the hill. Good. The man was dead all right, but only someone medically qualified could pronounce life extinct.

  The CSI retrieved a plastic driver’s licence from the young man’s wallet. “Mark Ripley. Twenty-three.”

  No one said anything. So now the victim had an identity. They would be able to reconstruct his life bit by bit over the coming days and weeks. That made a difference to a lot of people, but not to Steph. She had a professional interest in getting to know Mark Ripley. That was all. What he was like as a person was of no interest to her unless it helped advance the case.

  The wallet contained a plastic ten-pound note, some loose change, a credit card and a dozen or more loyalty cards for stores and cafés. His phone was in his inside coat pocket. It wasn’t locked. A selfie on the screen showed a smiling Mark Ripley looking very much alive. Beside him was an attractive, dark-haired young woman. The picture had been taken at ten to midnight outside a cab office.

  Steph’s colleague, DS Elias Harper, looked over her shoulder. “Shame he didn’t get in the taxi with her. Maybe he’d still be alive.”

  Steph nodded. She turned around and noticed, with a stab of irritation, that Jane Bell was still hanging around. She was inspecting the blood on the handrail. Probably still beating herself up over missing such an obvious clue.

  Steph had nothing against specials. There were areas of policing where they could be of use — dealing with the fallout from binge-drinking on a Saturday night, chasing shoplifters, boosting police numbers at public events and demonstrations. A lot of regulars mocked these volunteers, or resented them, but she wasn’t one of those. Like most cities, Lincoln was crying out for more officers on the streets. They needed all the help they could get.

  But a murder investigation called for a trained detective, not a volunteer taking a break from the day job.

  “Thanks for your input,” she said to Bell. “We can manage from here.”

  “Isn’t there anything more I can do to help? I could—”

  “Your shift’s over. Go home.” Time was too precious and Steph’s patience too short to be dealing with a needy newbie. Bell should have the sense to realise she was just getting in the way.

  “Right. Okay.” Still, the infuriating woman hovered, as though she hadn’t grasped that she was being dismissed for a second time. Steph glared at her.

  Finally, Bell got the message and walked away.

  “Excuse me.” It was a silver-haired man in a maroon quilted dressing gown. “I live in one of the houses on the terrace. Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  He wasn’t the only one up. There were tell-tale lights and gaps in curtains in many of the houses round about.

  “There’s been a serious incident. We’re dealing with it. Please go back inside, sir. We’ll be speaking to everyone later in the morning. In the meantime, please let us get on with our jobs.”

  Unlike Special Constable Bell, the man didn’t need telling twice.

  Chapter Two

  Standing in front of the mirror in her special constable’s uniform, Jane felt like an imposter. Or a little girl in dressing-up clothes who believed they had the power to transform her into the real thing. Even though she wore the same uniform as the regular police officers and had the same powers and responsibilities, the feeling persisted. She was a fraud, a phoney. Sooner or later she was going to be found out.

  Her feelings had only deepened after last night. She’d been well and truly shown up by that DI Warwick. How could she have overlooked the blood on the handrail? As soon as Warwick drew her attention to it, she’d realised how ridiculous her own theory was. Who kills a person and then drags them up a flight of steps to place them neatly on a bench?

  Mark Ripley had crawled up those steps in the last agonising moments of his life, clutching the rail for support as he neared the top. Maybe he’d been hoping to reach the row of terraced houses where he could rouse one of the occupants and ask for help, but the effort had exhausted him. He’d seen the bench and stopped to rest, not realising he’d never rise from it again.

  Jane closed her eyes. It was a tragedy. A terrible waste of a young life. The man had looked not much older than the kids she’d taught in the sixth form at Oliver Granger’s. He was of an age with her own kids.

  Jane thought back to the wet afternoon in April of last year when she’d made her first tentative enquiry about the selection process to become a special constable. Despite having read that age was no barrier, she’d been relieved to hear that mature applicants were valued for their skills and experience.

  A telephone interview had followed a couple of weeks later, then some written tests, another interview, fitness tests, a medical assessment, security checks and, finally, a four-week training course.

  She’d been more nervous than she’d expected when she turned up for her in-person interview, for only then had she realised just how much she really wanted to be selected. From that point on, failure wasn’t an option. When the day of her attestation ceremony finally arrived, she’d felt a real sense of achievement, even pride, on being sworn in as a special constable,

  Her training wasn’t over. For the next two years she would work, under supervision, towards her IPS, or independent patrol status. During that time, she would be required to demonstrate her competency in a range of tasks. Only after successful completion of this phase would she be allowed out alone.

  DI Warwick’s condescending manner towards her had been a stark reminder of her inexperience, of her lowly place in the police hierarchy. Maybe Warwick was one of those regulars who looked down on volunteers. Especially the ones who’d worked only a single shift and had the temerity to ask if they could hang out at a murder scene.

  Was she judging the DI too harshly? Warwick hadn’t exactly been rude, just offhand, a bit arrogant. Definitely lacking in patience. Maybe she hadn’t meant to come across as patronising. She was just doing her job. Jane liked to look for the good in people, but she was struggling a bit with DI Warwick.

  Jane had volunteered to work for sixteen hours a month. Most of her shifts would be on Friday and Saturday evenings, like the majority of specials who had other lives and other jobs. She had her second shift that evening. It was hard to envisage how it could top the previous one. She’d been prepared for drunks and junkies and a bit of public disorder, but murder! No wonder she was feeling a tad nervous about stepping out in uniform for a second time.

  She sighed. Perhaps the friends and relatives who’d questioned her decision to join up were right. Maybe she was mad to take this on at her age.

  She’d expected some negative comments. Her son’s opinion had been particularly grating. Couldn’t you just volunteer in a charity shop like most middle-aged women? His ears were probably still ringing from her response to that piece of advice. Her daughter had merely shrugged and said, “Go for it, Mum, if it makes you happy.” They’d been on Skype. Norah was obviously looking at something else on the screen while she was talking to her. Jane doubted she’d even heard what she said.

  Her kids were part of the reason she’d volunteered. Both had left home and were living their own lives far from Lincoln. Hers had begun t
o feel empty. At forty-five and a widow of three years, she’d felt a need to hit the refresh button on her life.

  She’d begun the process of reinventing herself the year Sam died by moving house. From the country to the town, the reverse of what a lot of people her age tended to do. She’d also downsized, swapping a four-bedroom modern family home in a village eight miles from Lincoln for a three-bedroom end-of-terrace cottage on Danesgate, right in the heart of the city and within walking distance of the castle and the cathedral. The estate agent’s blurb had described it as ‘requiring some modernisation.’

  This hadn’t put Jane off. A project was just what she’d needed to take her mind off being alone. She’d seen the house’s potential immediately, and she was up for the challenge. Her husband, Sam, had been a builder, and his friends generously offered her ‘mates’ rates’ on the bigger jobs.

  Jane tackled a lot of the smaller jobs herself. There had been layers of wallpaper to peel off the walls and a fair bit of filling to do before she could redecorate according to her own taste. She’d scrubbed the floorboards in the bathroom with white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda to neutralise the smell of urine before two of Sam’s ex-employees, Barry and Clive, installed new fixtures and fittings. All the other floors in the house she’d sanded down and restored.

  She’d hired another of Sam’s builder friends to build her a small conservatory off the kitchen. This was a delightful space for reading or enjoying a view of the garden.

  The rooms in the house were spread over three floors. A window on the first-floor landing offered a glimpse of the cathedral towers, and was one of the reasons why she’d bought the house.

  Her bedroom was on the second floor. The window there looked over her fair-sized garden to a view of the city skyline, these days increasingly dominated by uniform blocks of flats hastily erected as accommodation for the university’s burgeoning student population.