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Diamond Crime Books Ltd - Stephen Timmins

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180 pages

English

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John Hannay is a loner. Strong, brilliant, tenacious and damaged - still haunted by the wreckage of his childhood. He is also the grandson of Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps. And the only man who can halt a crime to wreak havoc on the British economy. As the problems and violence scale up, he realises he is being dragged into a calculated attack of revenge upon himself. He must fight government corruption, scandal, fraud, murder and vengeance. And the only way to do all that, is to stay alive.

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Thriller

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Publié par	Diamond Crime Books Ltd
Date de parution	02 avril 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781915649010
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Timmins has spent a significant portion of his adult life working in television, although his wife, Elaine, maintains that “working” is too strong a word and he, himself, declines to call it a career. Born and brought up in Surrey he now lives in a village near Bristol. He has been a fan of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay stories since childhood and often wondered what would have happened to Hannay’s descendants. This book and its two sequels tell their story.

Published in Great Britain in 2021
By
Diamond Crime

ISBN Number: 978-1-915649-01-0

Copyright © 2021 Stephen Timmins

The right of Stephen Timmins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

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 without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Diamond Crime is an imprint of Diamond Books Ltd.

Thanks to Jeff and Phil and Roger and Paul.

Book Cover Design
jacksonbone.co.uk

Also by Stephen Timmins

The Fortieth Step Thrillers

Volume 2 – Revenge
Volume 3 – Promise

And coming soon to Diamond Crime:

The Stanwood House Chronicles

Flora’s War
Kit’s War
Flora’s Peace

For information about Diamond Crime authors and their books, visit:
www.diamondbooks.co.uk

To Elaine

The Fortieth Step
Volume One
Legacy

Stephen Timmins

Chapter One

The Mark VI .455 revolver made in 1916 by Webley and Scott is a heavy gun. You have to pull back the trigger – cocking, it’s called – to fire the first bullet. If you’re using it indoors it helps to wear earplugs as there’s an eardrum–shattering crack when the trigger is squeezed. I had forgotten about the ear plugs. I had forgotten about the recoil…
The recoil that had knocked my arm up high enough for my second shot to miss the silhouette in the doorway altogether. The silhouette now with a jagged, one inch hole just below the hair line on the right side of his neck. The silhouette, now executing a slow–motion, unsteady, inebriated dance, now with a sluggish, bright red torrent pulsing from his carotid artery. The silhouette, whose empty, dying eyes held only half–frozen irritation, a pistol half–gripped in his half–raised hand, still coughing out slow bullets into the Persian rug. His legs buckled – finally. I was over him – through the door before the second man had even begun to react. I grappled with the third, tearing at his coat, then I was past him too.
Only then did the adrenalin rush drain away and the world speed back up and I was left with just the breathless ache in the base of my spine from the fight–or–flight chemical that had pumped through my nervous system. And at that point reality bit. I had killed a man. I was a murderer. So I did what any sensible murderer should do. I ran.

* * *

And yet… this had been a day that had started normally enough – by my standards that is: twisting and turning in the bed sheets, dripping sweat, panting, puling and, finally, curled up, shaking on the floor in the corner of the bedroom. Just that early morning horror of the worst of my nightmares. The one about the awful pain; the one about the day of my eighth birthday just before the end of the school term, although no one had sent me a present or even phoned; a privileged childhood you understand, sent away to boarding school from the age of seven.
Over my childhood years I had stored up enough material for quite a collection of these nightmares, most of which dated from the time of the awful pain – oh, and a limp too, a limp I’d tried to disguise to this day – the day when I thought they had come to kill me – twenty–seven years, five months and fourteen days later.

* * *

The house phone had rung once. I’d watched it. I’d watched it because I’d assumed a phone call this early was just going to be one more threat from my habitual threatening caller. But it wasn’t. The phone had bleeped. It rang again. It bleeped then bleeped again. It rang once. Now I know Morse code. My father had thought my learning it might be useful for some reason. He would play a game with me at breakfast, tapping out Morse requests to pass the toast or the tea – even the marmalade (that one didn’t really work though – I was too slow). I'd loved that game. It was one of the few things I can remember doing with my father before he was killed.
I had grabbed the house phone, dialled 1471 and listened. A mobile phone had made that call. I entered its number into my own mobile and walked to the window tapping out the Morse code message with my thumbnail against my bottom teeth.
G E T O U T. Why?
Then the house phone had rung once more and, once more, I had watched it. Three, four, five rings: back to normal. I’d waited for my voicemail message to end and listened to the now familiar, soft voice with a hint of the brogue. I had sighed.
“Ah, your outmoded answer machine is back on again. Do you still think I am just a crank caller, John? Is that it? Is that why you stopped speaking to me?”
It was true. I had spoken to him once – at the beginning. And I had thought then that he was a crank caller. Mind you that was before he had revealed how much he knew about me, how much he knew about my family and my family’s friends and it was before he had mentioned what he called ‘the information’. I’d been puzzled at first, then angry, and now? Well, what do you think?
Get Out.
“Have I not told you that ignoring me just makes things worse for you, John? Have I not told you what I will do to all your family friends if you do not co–operate?”
Get Out.
“It has been a long time, John – far too long in fact. For many years I had no need of the information, but now I do.”
I heard him draw in a breath, and for reasons which only now have I begun to understand... I stayed.
“Very well. We're coming to see you. It is time for an ending.”
An ending so soon and I’ve only just begun.

* * *

Such is the contrariness of my black, depressive nature that the thought of probable and immediate death cheered me no end. I remember I walked through into the drawing room with the suspicion of a spring in my step and opened my grandfather’s safe behind the Rex Whistler portrait of the great man himself. I pocketed my passport and the small bag of personal papers. The surprisingly large sum of cash I had withdrawn over the last six months went into my pouch and then I stared at the final object in the safe – my grandfather’s Webley revolver. Eventually I picked it up, broke open the head and slotted the cartridges into the holes. I hauled an armchair in front of the window and closed the heavy wooden shutters, allowing just the narrowest shaft of light to hit the back of the chair.
And then I waited, crouched in the darkness, for a man I didn’t think I knew, who wanted some information I didn't know I had, clutching a World War One gun I had never tried to use.
Seconds passed.
I heard a click, which I guessed to be the front door, a creak that was probably the boards in the corridor and then silence and I blinked and missed the drawing room door opening and the figure that had ghosted in and tripped over the edge of the Persian rug by the hearth. He spoke from the floor through what sounded like gritted teeth. “Turn a bloody light on, will you!”
The voice was that of an irritated, upper class Englishman. He didn’t sound quite so frighteningly professional as I had expected, but still I stayed where I was, crouched on the floor at the far end of the sofa in the dark. The figure clambered to his feet, muttering. Finally, he found the windows, pushed the shutters right back into the walls and turned to look for me. I raised the revolver and cocked the hammer. He jumped, shied back for an instant, looked at me more closely, cleared his throat and spoke.
“Um, could you put that down... Aah, carefully, please.”
It was most definitely not the voice of my crank caller. The man scrutinised me. I returned the compliment. He was tall, wide shouldered, very handsome in an haut monde kind of way, with that hint of a sneer permanently visible – you know the look. You know the type too – cut back shirt collar, old school tie (Rugby, I believed), Anderson and Sheppard suit, glossy, ‘dirty’ blonde hair, expensively cut, brushed back, (gelled probably) and a little too long – a cad I imagine my grandfather would have said. I asked the obvious question. “Was it you who sent me the Morse code message?”
“Well, not me as such, but...”
We both heard the front door latch click at the same time. Something that looked distinctly like panic came into his eyes for a second then he grabbed me clumsily by the shoulder and pushed me hard behind the sofa and hurried towards the door, calling out as he walked. “That you, John? Where have you been? Your front door was open so I…”
His voice tailed off. He teetered on the balls of his feet as he saw who was there. I peered round the edge of the sofa, but could see only silhouettes in the doorway beyond him.
“Hang on, you’re not John! Have I made a giant cock of it all again ? This is John Hannay’s flat, isn’t it? I haven’t gone and gatecrashed the wrong bloody place, have I?
A soft voice – the soft voice with that hint of the brogue – answered him.
“I to