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116 pages

English

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When Liverpool solicitor and detective Harry Devlin takes on a client who has been taping his wife's telephone conversations with her lover, he gets more than he bargained for. The first mystery is the identity of Becky's boyfriend, whose voice Harry finds oddly familiar. Then, as a case of adultery slides frighteningly into conspiracy to murder, a trespasser makes a shocking discovery: three dead bodies in a converted church. Who are they? Who has killed them, and why? Trapped in a maze where neither victims nor apparent culprit are who they seem to be, Harry must go into the dark places of the human heart to find the answers.

Sujets

Political

Adventure (Guyana)

Politics

Adventure

Thriller

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	13 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789821321
Langue	English

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Eve of Destruction
Book five of the Harry Devlin series
Martin Edwards

First published in 1996
This revised edition published in 2021 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 1996, 2021 Martin Edwards
The right of Martin Edwards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Dedicated to my my mother

Love is merely a madness and, I tell you,
deserves as well a dark house and a whip as
madmen do, and the reason why they are not
so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Eve of Destruction
Discovery
Shaun could not see the bodies, but he knew where they were buried.
The house beyond the trees had once been a church and these grounds were the old graveyard. He was trespassing, but he told himself he had as much right as anyone to be here. After all, his grandmother had worshipped at St Alwyn’s for fifty years, until the powers-that-be decided it must close. They blamed falling congregations and the cost of maintaining a cold and cavernous building. When the vicar retired, they merged neighbouring parishes and put the place up for sale. St Alwyn’s was deconsecrated and Shaun’s grandmother had wept at the betrayal.
‘They should have let the dead rest in peace,’ she had complained, her leathery cheeks damp with tears.
Shaun never understood why she made so much fuss. He did not believe in anything he could not touch or see. The old woman’s lifetime of faith had counted for nothing when a clot of blood formed in her brain. So why worry about a little breaking and entering if the chance arose?
He had been pebble-kicking his way past the high sandstone walls, killing time on a hot July evening. Since his grandmother had died, his mum spent more time than ever out on the Liverpool streets, sidling up to any man who reminded her of the father Shaun had never known. He did not resent being left to his own devices: it was best to be able to do as you pleased. He was on the lookout for a car in which to practise handbrake turns, but he’d seen nothing to tempt him so far. A white Mercedes which would have been a supreme prize raced past him, heading for the city centre. Then he noticed that someone had left the back gate to St Alwyn’s ajar. He did not hesitate. Forbidden territory fascinated him and there might be rich pickings if no-one was around. He was used to living on his wits. If anyone from the house accosted him, he would turn on his cheeky smile and ask if there were any odd jobs going.
The thought of the bodies underground did not trouble him as he sidled along the sunken path with his hands in his pockets. Corpses only came alive in the videos he watched late at night. He was unshackled by superstition: fifteen years old and feeling lucky. Ladders were for walking under, mirrors were made to be broken.
On either side of the paving slabs, brambles and couch grass formed a thick tangle. The tombstones had been removed, each memorial to the dear departed hauled away, leaving the old bones stripped of their last claim to identity, not only out of sight but also without a name to be remembered by. A chipped cross had been propped up against the inside wall next to a couple of abandoned tablets. A melancholic rhyme on one of them bemoaned the brevity of life, but Shaun could not decipher all the weathered lettering and anyway, what was the point? The words meant nothing, had no connection with a particular patch of earth, or the dead interred beneath it.
His grandmother had called it sacrilege. On behalf of those who could no longer speak for themselves, she had railed against the bureaucrats who had decreed that times must change and that a house of God should be transformed into a private hideaway for the rich. She had been a lifelong socialist and although the Labour Party had let her down even more often than the Lord, she could never have been untrue to the convictions that had seen her through three quarters of a century. Every time she had hobbled past St Alwyn’s, she had been consumed by a mixture of rage and curiosity. What were those incomers doing in her church?
At the time of the deconsecration there had been vague talk about rights of way, but the people who bought the house were careful to discourage visitors rambling through their garden and the gate at the back was usually kept shut. Shaun said to himself that if he managed to steal something from them it would be no more than they deserved. Maybe even his grandmother would not have disapproved, would have regarded him as a sort of Robin Hood. The kind of man he imagined his father to have been, despite all the old woman’s muttering about fecklessness and prison sentences.
Fragments from a shattered urn crunched under his feet. On his left, the marble face of a stone angel simpered at him: he stuck his tongue out in reply. The sky was overcast, the atmosphere humid. His tee shirt was stained with sweat and sticking to his thin frame. The trainers he had lifted from Woolworth’s were chafing his toes. Clouds of midges buzzed under the oak branches and he noticed a squirrel half a dozen paces ahead of him. Its little eyes glistened and seemed to dare him not to venture further. He threw a pebble at it and the creature scuttled away, furtive as any petty criminal. This corner of the churchyard was entirely overgrown. Dandelion seeds drifted lazily through the air and foxgloves and ivy encroached upon the path. He moved forward, careful to brush aside each low branch which threatened to scrape out his eyes. A bend took him out from under the canopy formed by the spreading oaks and the bulk of St Alwyn’s loomed ahead of him.
He knew nothing of architecture, yet even he could recognise that this was a place intended to inspire awe. It dated back to Victoria’s reign and he’d heard from his grandmother more about its history than he cared to recall. Only one story stuck in his mind. An earlier church had once stood on this site, but it had been destroyed by a bolt of lightning which had struck during a December evensong. The organist had been killed and so had the boy who was blowing the bellows.
The stone walls were stained with soot. The new owners had cut a couple of windows into the steeply pitched roof above the old nave to let in more light and the squat bell tower was adorned with a burglar alarm. Shaun knew the alarm’s red light would have been winking if it had been set. Approaching the porch at the side of the church, he saw that one of the double oak doors was ajar. The temptation was overwhelming and he was in no mood to resist it. He pushed at the heavy brass handle and the door swung open with a disconsolate whine.
As he crossed the threshold, he realised that everything was about to go wrong. The place was cold after the heat outside, but it was more than that. The silence was stifling. No unlocked house in the heart of the city should be so quiet or smell so strangely of decay. He wasn’t afraid of being caught: what frightened him was that there was something here he could not understand. His flesh began to itch and his throat had dried. Facing him was an arched entrance with a pair of flung-back doors. Beyond, the vestibule opened out into a vast hall. Unable to help himself, he inched forward until he stood underneath the arch, then froze. The largest rug he had ever seen stretched across the centre of the hall. Once the rug had been beige, but now it was disfigured by dark spreading marks.
The sight of the bodies hit him like a kick in the face. Not all the dead of St Alwyn’s were safely underground. There was a great deal of blood, more than Shaun had ever seen in any of his midnight movies. He felt his gorge rise and he tried to force his eyes shut, but they refused to close. Some of the blood had splattered the far wall, as if a mad artist had taken it as his canvas. Three people were sprawled across the floor. Two of them reached towards each other, as though in the moment of death they had striven to unite in a final embrace. The third, barely alive, mumbled something Shaun could not quite catch and stretched out an arm, seeming to point at an object which lay a couple of feet away. As Shaun began to retch, he saw that the object was a small and sightless furry animal. A young child’s toy teddy bear.

Before
Chapter One
‘The wages of sin is death!’ cried the pavement prophet.
Not necessarily, thought Harry Devlin as he followed Shaun Quade out of the juvenile court. It was the week before Shaun would make his discovery at St Alwyn’s and Harry had been watching his young client get away with murder – or, at least, with the theft of enough cars to fill a main dealer’s showroom. The outcome owed less to advocacy or even innocence than the Crown Prosecution Service’s failure to notify the key police witness of the trial date. The prosecutor’s shame-faced application for an adjournment had been rebuffe