Reprobates

Caffeine Nights Publishing

Fiction aimed at the heart

and the head..

Published by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2014

Copyright © RC Bridgestock 2014

RC Bridgestock has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work

CONDITIONS OF SALE

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

This book has been 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 of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

Published in Great Britain by Caffeine Nights Publishing

www. caffeine-nights com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-907565-
73-1

Cover design by

Mark (Wills) Williams

Everything else by

Default, Luck and Accident

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to say thank
you to our publisher Darren Laws at Caffeine Nights Publishing and Literary Agent Brie Burkeman at Brie Burkeman & Serefina Clarke Literary Agency, for their continued hard work, support, dedication and tireless enthusiasm. Mark (Wills) Williams, once again for the excellent art work for the ‘Reprobates’ cover and Gemma Beckwith for her up-to-date police knowledge.

We couldn’t do it without you!

DEDICATION

To all our family for their continued love and support, and to the The Forget Me Not Hospice Charity, Huddersfield that supports children with life threatening/limiting conditions and their families in West Yorkshire.

REPROBATES

‘Spring forward, Fall back,’ the rhyme floated through Dylan’s mind. He was glad when this time of year came. The longer daylight hours meant criminals didn’t have the comfort of that extra cloak of darkness. However, today it meant an hour less in bed.

On the horizon he watched the light of the impending dawn peep over the distant hills. The rays of the morning sun waved and flickered, bending and shooting upwards and outwards. He saw the light spread in between the earthy mounds into a kind of pearly haze, stretching its arms and scattering the darkness as it reached out towards him. He travelled the main road into Harrowfield as the sun slowly rose to its feet, up and over the dull green backdrop of the Sibden Valley and beyond the hill into Southowram. Nearing St Peters Park the first rays of sunlight penetrated the forest and he began to see the grey green trunks of oak trees and the brown remains of last year
’s bracken. Jack yawned and wound down his window slightly, stopping for a moment at a red traffic light. He heard the birds whistle and call. A draught upon his neck caused a shiver down his spine.

The warmth of the bed he had just left, with Jen in it, beckoned his return. Maisy had been in a peaceful slumber,
‘bottom up’ in her cot when he’d looked in on their daughter.

‘Cutting teeth
’s no fun, is it sweetie?’ he’d said softly as he winced at her flaming red cheek. Maisy had flicked her ear irritably and her eyes twitched which Dylan took as his cue to leave quickly before she sensed his presence and woke – Jen would never have forgiven him.

Max hadn
’t stirred, other than to roll the whites of his eyes, when Dylan stepped over him at the foot of the stairs. It wasn’t his usual greeting of excited hairy limbs and drool. ‘Maisy kept you awake too mate?’ There was no other response than one weak flap of a tail.

Being a police officer wasn
’t easy – least of all for the Sunday early turn. Dylan’s work was as much a choice of lifestyle as a job, that was challenging and unpredictable at the least for both him and his family. It was a vocation that never stopped asking questions of his ability. The long, changeable shifts and the crisis-driven nature of the work often turned life on the home front into an emotional roller coaster. But then nothing worth doing was easy and that saying applied to his wife too, for loving a cop.

Dylan drove his car slowly through the opened hefty, metal gates into the secure backyard at Harrowfield Police Station. Its emptiness spoke volumes about the lack of staff working at that particular hour. Jack Dylan was today what the police term the
‘on call shift’ senior detective for the area. He would spend his working hours on site and be readily available to immediately respond to any reports of serious crime. The generally quiet, Sunday early turn duty was as a rule a good opportunity to get stuck into the copious amount of paperwork, that seemed to grow like a fungus, in his in tray. Quicker than the plant on my office windowsill, he thought. Chuckling to himself he recalled the uniformed officer playing a prank on a lady in the admin department where Jen worked. The fragrant green leafed gift she had lovingly tended from a sapling turned out to be a cannabis plant he’d retrieved from a crime scene. Once their bumptious Chief Superintendent Hugo-Watkins got wind of it, it backfired dramatically on the PC who ended up doing a six week stint of nights. Common sense didn’t always accompany the title of a police officer.

Dylan opened the Incident Room door and stood for a moment, rarely had he seen it looking so desolate. The telephones were silent. There was no constant hum of conversation or the tak tak tak sound of the typists at work. A sound to him that was like a thousand crickets, on a warm evening, chirping on the keyboards.

Dylan walked past the rows of haphazardly abandoned office chairs. A clear-desk policy in force meant the computer terminals were the only thing thereon, other than the odd telephone dotted about here and there. He walked directly to his office at the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, turned at his door and scanned the CID office. The place looked frozen in time. He shivered, unlocked his office door and turned on the lights. The fluorescent bulbs flickered and then juddered into action. He heard a door slam loudly in the outer office and he knew only too well that the silence would be short lived, as he slid into his cold but comfy big old leather chair and switched on his computer terminal. His finger hovered over the keys. At the command, he input his password. His telephone rang. He reached out and took a deep breath of air into his lungs in anticipation.

‘Dylan,
’ he said brusquely. He proceeded to clear his throat.

‘
Good morning, sir,’ said an overly jovial voice. ‘Force Control.’

‘
The room that never sleeps...’

‘
Absolutely!’ Richard Pauley said. ‘We’ve just received a call from the Mortuary. Someone’s broken in and stolen a body.’

‘
Or maybe someone’s broke out?’ Dylan interjected, his lips pursed, his eyebrows raised. His pen lingered over his notepad.

‘
Well you never know sir, stranger things have happened. After thirty years in this job nothing surprises me any more,’ said the civilian employee nonchalantly. ‘Uniform are at the scene and are requesting CID supervision.’

‘Any
more info?’

‘
The mortuary attendant arrived at work to find the fridge alarm activated, a fridge open and one of the bodies, that of a female is missing.’

‘
Do we have a name?’

‘
Of the corpse?’

‘Yes.
’

‘
No, sir. Can I show you attending? Uniform are already there.’

‘
Guess so,’ Dylan said, fingering the papers in his over-spilling in tray. He wrinkled his nose, hung up the phone, grabbed his coat and was on his way out of the door when he caught sight of Detective Constable Vicky Hardacre getting out of her car.

‘
Put a spring in it, we’re off to the mortuary,’ he called.

Vicky moaned. ‘Oh no,
’ she said, her lips hardly moved.

‘
A missing body,’ Dylan said, as she approached.

‘
I wish my head was bloody missing,’ she said. ‘That’s all I chuffin’ need.’

‘It
’s the last thing anybody needs,’ he said patting her heartily on the back. ‘But look on the positive, we’ll be walking out,’ he said, smiling at her as he opened his passenger car door for her to get in.

‘
I guess... Well at least it’s not a post-mortem,’ she said, as he sat down in the driver’s seat, next to her. Her head tilted to one side as if she was weighing up the odds. She belched loudly.

Dylan frowned and pursed his lips as he looked in his rear view mirror and proceeded to negotiate his way out of the car park.

‘Too many lagers and a bad curry,’ Vicky said shaking herself. ‘Gotta mint?’

Dylan reached in his pocket and without looking at her he threw a packet into her lap.

‘Bodies don’t just get up and walk out of a mortuary,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Unless... Hey, suppose we have a vampire at large in Harrowfield?’ For the briefest of moments her voice took on one of an excited child then her eyes became large round animated balls. She held her stomach and groaned.

‘It
’s frightening to think how your bloody mind works,’ Dylan said glancing across at her disbelievingly.

She shrugged her shoulders and grimaced.
‘Whatever.’

‘
Whatever what?’

‘
Whatever, sir,’ she said.