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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Gareth Wiles

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95 pages

English

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Peter Smith is the final link between The Great Collective and The Space. With him, the curse must end... The Great Collective were the first to make contact with The Space. Granted immortality, they lived and lived, ceaseless witnesses to humanity's ills. Resentment manifested itself as the evil Reaping Icon. The fate of the world rests on stopping his poison. Inspector Noose - finished, alone. Framed for a heinous double murder, the so-so crime solver and love rat hits rock bottom as his past misdeeds catch up with him and seed his tragic downfall. He will never come back from this, but one last deed must be done to put things right. Alex -- weak, feeble. Blamed for the assassination of the Prime Minister and frustrated by a wife who hates him, the young man lets himself become consumed by the malevolent Reaping Icon. He opens Alex up to The Space - the summation of everything that ever was, is or will be - and gives him ultimate control over humanity. Peter Smith - dead, alive. The man who dies and is reborn endlessly now knows who he is and wants to break free from his curse. Nobody wants to live forever, but to have his wish he must contemplate a confrontation with the manifestation of all humanity's evil: Reaping Icon. But will joining him prove more inviting than stopping him..? Where The Birds Hide At Night follows on from Gareth Wiles' previous books - IAMDEAD, Icon's Request and AMatter ofDark - which are all a part of The Great Collective saga. It will appeal to those who enjoy sci-fi with a hint of mystery, as well as fans of Gareth's previous books. His books have received glowing feedback, whose readers particularly enjoy the speculative nature of his novels, as he takes current debates and gives them a dark twist.

Sujets

Thriller

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783066599
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Where The Birds Hide At Night
Gareth Wiles

Copyright © 2014 Gareth Wiles
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1783066 599
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador ® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

A special thanks to my friends Claire and Ross
Contents

Cover

By the same author

VERSE

HOW NOOSE GOT THERE

HOW ALEX GOT THERE

THE WAITING ROOM

WHAT HAPPENED TO ALEX NEXT

WHAT HAPPENED TO NOOSE NEXT

PETER JOINS THE MUSEUM CLUB

WHAT HAPPENED TO NOOSE NEXT

ALEX’S RISE

PETER’S ODYSSEY

ALEX’S ISSUES

THERE’S AN EYELASH IN MY EYE

ALEX’S ISSUES

NOOSE’S DILEMMA

THE EMPTY MIRROR

CONTEMPLATION

CULMINATION

MR MONKEY RETURNS IN: THE CLONED CLOWN

COMPLETION
By the same author
I Am Dead
Icon’s Request
A Matter of Dark
VERSE

He was trying to escape his backside,
The way he walked.
He would gallop along,
That great weighty sack above his legs
Bouncing gallantly after him.
His head bobbed too,
When it wasn’t turning to glare
Upon that meaty encumbrance usurping
His otherwise trim silhouette.
Pigeon boy flounced.
HOW NOOSE GOT THERE
Noose flopped back in his seat and thought: Sod off world, I can’t be arsed with you today. There was good reason for thinking this. He’d had a lot on his plate lately – the remains found under Neville’s bed being identified as Peter Smith and the murder of Inspector Kennedy, to name but two. He just wanted to put the whole thing behind him, and move on. It was all rather inconvenient, this whole affair, especially seeing as it involved the murder of a fellow inspector at the station. Kennedy had been chopped up into little bits and dumped in a plastic recycling bin outside the local Myrtleville supermarket. Peter, of course, had been dead for years. A colleague dead. A friend dead. A little upsetting, really.
He checked his watch, catching a brief reflection of his awful grey face in it. He hadn’t been living these past few years. He’d been existing, in a word, drawing in enough oxygen through his vacant maw to sustain continued existence. It was a maw – he felt within himself a culmination of a lifetime’s worth of failure after failure. He’d failed his colleague, he’d failed his friend and, above all else, he’d failed his family – failed them so many times. He felt he’d become just like Peter Smith, turning his back on everything that had proven too much of a challenge. Thoughts of his family now came to the fore in his mind – something he didn’t want to think about right now. Perhaps he was angry. Yes, he was angry. All those years Peter was missing he’d been able to paint him as some sort of victim of fate in his mind. Now his body had turned up – his final position on this planet confirmed – Noose brought back all the bad Peter had done. That he may well have been murdered by Neville, and a victim after all, was not what Noose was thinking about. He was thinking about how Peter had torn his family apart. The obsession with that man had cost Noose dearly. And, here he was obsessing again. No, he had to clear this whole thing from his mind. To think about his family, then – and not Peter – was perhaps a good idea.
A potential ending to Noose’s day was going home, alone, right now or staying here in his office. He could trawl through all the documents on his desk, re-reading the same old files about the same old people. That Lucy Davies’ killer was still at large troubled him again momentarily, but she was just one person in a long list of names that swirled around his head. Just names, labels, now. Another option to see Noose out for the evening was going out to a bar. This was alien to him – he had long given up socialising. The last real socialising he’d done was with Peter, and that hadn’t exactly been the height of human interaction. That name again! Noose just couldn’t shake it from the forefront of his mind. Perhaps the biggest trouble of this whole debacle was that Peter had clearly died never knowing who had murdered Lucy. He just knew Peter would have been in touch had he discovered the culprit. Unless, of course, the person had also done Peter in too. No, Noose just didn’t feel that was what had happened. For some reason he sensed Peter had taken his own life. Did any of it matter now? For a detective inspector, Noose felt strangely disinterested in solving crimes at this very moment in time. All he wanted to do was get the weight of life off his back. It was all bogging him down a bit.
Slowly he got up from his desk and ambled towards the door, stretching his hand out to take a hold of the handle. He looked down at his hand, the fingers unable to flatten out without due effort. All his fingers on both hands curled in towards the palm when not in use. Age, perhaps? This worried Noose… this terrified him. He was getting older, and his life was shit. No, he wasn’t really bothered anyway. Everybody’s life was shit if you gave it some thought. Nobody had the perfect life. Even if they believed they had, something always came along to spoil it. Noose had been witness to, and experienced firsthand, all that. His job had allowed, or should that be forced, him to see all manner of horrors. Always he’d been left, when those who’d either been the victim or the criminal had buggered off, to his own devices. Memories, forever in his brain, accumulating. Each family Noose came across had only lost, say, one individual. But, he had to experience this over and over again, day in and day out. Endless people. Of course, it was their actual loss of a loved one and their suffering would continue for the rest of their lives. It was confined to them, though. For Noose, standing back and looking in, it had left him with an overwhelming anguish towards humanity. Hatred, if you will. Humans just didn’t help themselves, and it was supposed to be his job to help them – help they mostly didn’t want. He opened the door and stepped into the corridor. Superintendent Hastings was standing there, about to have walked in. His bright white hair caught the fluorescent tube of light on the ceiling and shone down, causing Noose to pull back. Lost in his own little thoughts, it was the only indicator to the man that his superior officer was trying to get his attention.
‘Another bloody murder,’ Hastings sighed, thrusting a sheet of paper in Noose’s face. Noose was away with the fairies, moving his weight from one leg to the other as he pondered his existence in his office doorway. ‘Henry you twit,’ Hastings barked. ‘A corpse, delivered to death by the hands of a fellow man,’ he went on.
‘Or woman,’ Noose uttered.
‘What?’
‘Delivered to death by the hands of a fellow man… or woman,’ Noose went on, scratching his head. ‘That’s exactly what Peter would have responded with.’
‘I haven’t got time for this, just get down there and get on the case.’ He pulled the paper away as Noose started to look interested. ‘You are up to this, are you not?’ He turned and rubbed his chin. ‘Considering all the shit that’s been hitting the fan around here of late, I do wonder.’
‘It’s a very large fan, Sir, but I can cope,’ Noose responded, snatching the paper from Hastings’ hand. He quickly scoured it and suddenly gasped. Confounded, he read the dead body’s address again.
‘Something wrong, Henry?’ asked the tired, and rather old for the job, superintendent.
‘Nothing, just this address. You do recognise it, don’t you? It’s next door to-’
‘I’m well aware of the location, coincidental or otherwise.’ Hastings placed the fingers from both hands around his neck and moved his head from side to side as a pained look befell his reddening face. Despite his age, his face was not sagging or especially wrinkled. He’d clearly been lucky, or just led a healthy life. Whisky was something he enjoyed consuming regularly, though it appeared to have done him little harm. A stiff neck, then, appeared one of the few signs of advancing years. ‘Just go and sort it out, will you. It’ll get your mind off the Kennedy case.’
‘Yes, thanks.’ He started down the corridor. ‘Who’s on that?’ he called back as an afterthought.
‘Nicola Williams.’
Noose blinked heavily.
* * *
Pulling up outside the house, for a moment he stayed in his car. Looking across as police officers cordoned off the area and Lauren made her way inside the building with her toolbox, Noose cleared his throat and spoke to himself: ‘Come on, Henry.’
‘Sergeant Helen Douglas,’ a gentle voice called out. Noose turned and looked out of his side window to be met by two piercing green eyes staring intently at him. He got out and slammed the door shut, making his way to the house as Helen followed. ‘I’ll be working alongside you on this investigation, Sir,’ she continued. Noose wasn’t particularly happy – all his other sergeants had met awful ends. He kind of didn’t want to get attached to this one from the outset, so the best thing was to be very cold towards her. Luckily, too, he had developed an inability to recognise beauty – it had gotten him into a lot of trouble in the past –