Where The Bodies Are Buried

  WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED

  A. S. FRENCH

  NEONOIR BOOKS

  Copyright © 2022 by A. S. French

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, businesses, locales and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ALSO BY A. S. FRENCH

  Crime Fiction and Thrillers

  The Astrid Snow series

  Book one: Don’t Fear the Reaper.

  Book two: The Killing Moon.

  Book three: Lost in America.

  The Detective Jen Flowers series

  Book one: The Hashtag Killer.

  Book two: Serial Killer.

  Book three: Night Killer.

  Northern Crime Fiction

  Where The Bodies Are Buried

  Writing as Andrew. S. French

  The Arcane Supernatural Thriller Series

  Book one: The Arcane.

  Book two: The Arcane Identity.

  The Ella Finn Fantasy Novella Series

  Ella and the Elementals

  Ella and the Multiverse

  Ella and the Monsters

  Ella and the Dreamers

  Supernatural Short Stories

  Dead Souls.

  Go to www.andrewsfrench.com for more information.

  CONTENTS

  1. Home

  2. Mystery Train

  3. Echo Beach

  4. Train in Vain

  5. Memories

  6. Neighbourhood Threat

  7. Watching the Detectives

  8. Father and Son

  9. Down at the Doctors

  10. Taxi Driver

  11. Happy Hour

  12. Police and Thieves

  13. The Sound of Silence

  14. Houses in Motion

  15. School Days

  16. Art Attack

  17. Sister Morphine

  18. I Fought the Law

  19. Food for Thought

  20. Street Fighting Man

  21. Glory Days

  22. In My Life

  23. Tubthumping

  24. No Thugs in our House

  25. Combat Rock

  26. Mack the Knife

  27. For Whom the Bell Tolls

  28. Bodies

  29. Butcher Baby

  30. Lean on Me

  31. Sunday Morning

  32. Gun Fury

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  1 HOME

  A pig’s head was waiting for us on the doorstep. It sat in a pool of purple liquid glistening in the wind. My father pressed his walking stick into the eye, making a popping sound like a burst balloon. When he removed the wood, what looked like gristle came with it. He waved it in the air, and the stink of rotten meat punched me in the nose.

  It didn’t seem to bother him as he stepped over the head and placed his key in the door. Someone who had landed at Normandy beach at eighteen and witnessed the liberation of Auschwitz less than twelve months later wouldn’t be fazed by this. And I’d seen a whole lot worse in my forty-five years.

  As he entered the house, he glanced at me through a face that hadn’t, to my knowledge, smiled in my lifetime. His ninety-three-year-old bones rattled in the doorway, his mouth open to show me those yellowing teeth.

  ‘Halloween’s come early this year.’

  Only it wasn’t Halloween, it wasn’t blood, and the pig’s head was plastic. The messages to me from the locals had increased in frequency and design, from obscenities scrawled on toilet paper shoved through the letterbox to this latest exaggerated communique. I didn’t want the old man getting agitated by them, and, so far, he seemed to have treated the intrusions the same way he’d brought up his four children – not worth bothering about. He was in the living room with his coat dumped on the passage floor when I closed the front door behind me. I grabbed the coat and hung it on the end of the bannister. He’d had it for fifty years – it was older than me, with much more care and attention lavished on it than he’d shown for any of his children.

  ‘I’ll put the shopping away and the food in the oven. You get settled and turn the TV on.’

  His favourite game show was about to start, which meant the sound on the set would be loud enough to bother the Devil. I’d been back in the family home for a month, and every night it was like being at a Motörhead concert. I wasn’t sure how long my hearing would last. Or my sanity.

  I switched the oven on to warm it up and emptied the shopping bags. A man in his nineties would eat little to nothing if left on his own. I’d bought a four-pint carton of milk because his doctor had told him he needed calcium for his bones, though he knew it was too late for that. A fall two months ago had broken his hip, and now there was a piece of metal inside him to join the shrapnel acquired in France seventy years before. I placed three packets of cup-a-soup into the cupboard, opened the fridge for the corned beef, and washed the grapes. It was a measly haul for anyone to eat, which is why I’d bought us fish and chips as well.

  ‘Food of the gods,’ he used to tell me when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

  I slipped the food into the oven, then returned to the front door. When the messages had started not long after my return, I’d assumed it was only kids welcoming me back to the community. However, when they increased in frequency, the theme became more apparent: it was the opposite of a bizarre greeting. Coppers were not wanted here, even ex ones.

  I dropped the plastic head into a plastic bag and cleaned up the mess, getting fake blood and grey mincemeat over my hands. The gloom of night had overtaken the minimal street lighting on the estate, but I sensed there were eyes on me, more than human ones: but electronic devices recording my every move.

  I wondered if this was what it was like to be loved – a perverse, unnerving, unwanted love, but love nonetheless. I returned inside and dumped the bag into the bin. Once I’d washed my hands, I took the food out of the oven, warming my hands as I put it on plates and brought it into the living room.

  The sound blared from the TV as I entered, so much I had to raise my voice to be heard.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  It was a stupid question. Since I was a child in this house – my parents moved here when I was two – I’d never known him to go a day without alcohol. My mother told me he hadn’t touched a drop before he joined the army, but he’d made up for it since.

  He was motionless in the chair, worrying me he’d slipped into one of his fugue states. His doctor had warned me they were becoming more frequent, those periods where he would forget who and where he was, gazing into space. I wondered if he’d forgotten how badly he’d treated his wife and children, and now, when he stared at me as an adult, he was in a different life.

  His eyes were fixed on mine, staring at me from the same unemotional face I’d known for forty-five years. I’d seen him angry twice, turning gammon-faced as he’d raged at my mother, but that was it. It wasn’t a long stare, his interest in me evaporating in a second as he turned his gaze back to the TV and a group of people pushing plastic coins over the edge of a moving construct. The money tumbled down to another level and pushed more coins around. I remembered playing such a game as a kid at the seaside, amazed now that someone had converted it into prime time entertainment.

  Motion flickered inside his eyes. ‘Get me a cide
r.’

  I went to the kitchen for two cans since I couldn’t let him drink on his own. When I returned, the game show had finished, but the noise was just as loud from an old black and white cowboy movie.

  I pulled up a small table and placed his fish and chips in front of him. Cider lingered on his mouth, the reflection of the TV flickering inside his eyes. Perhaps it was the only life there. I retreated to the sofa, the hot plate warming my legs, the sounds of cowboys shooting each other bouncing off the walls. He must have watched the same movie dozens of times over the years. I glanced at him funnelling fish between his lips, noticing him mouthing the dialogue from the film as he ate. Was this what I had to look forward to?

  An hour later, I took him upstairs to bed. When I’d first returned to the family home – to his house, as he kept reminding me – I mentioned converting the back room into a bedroom so he needn’t struggle up the stairs every night; but he wouldn’t have it.

  ‘I won’t be dying in there.’

  His withered frame was tiny in the large bed he’d once shared with my mother. That was before she left him after thirty years of a relationship colder than the iceberg which sank the Titanic. It was an image I always associated with him: a human iceberg; a man whose true self was only thirty per cent above water, the rest concealed from everyone else. Maybe it was even hidden from him.

  His snoring was as loud as the TV as I went to my room. There were three bedrooms in the house, and I’d chosen the smallest because it was the one I’d had when I was a kid, where I’d locked myself away and withdrawn into my world of books, movies, and music. The posters had been removed from the walls a long time ago, but some of my books were still there; an old copy of Dune was the highlight, surrounded by other science fiction and horror novels from the sixties and the seventies.

  Voices slipped into my room from beyond the wall, reminding me of my childhood. When I’d first moved into this bedroom – my brother had been upgraded to the bigger room when my older sisters left home, so I got his – I’d been convinced it was haunted. So every night, I’d pull the covers over my head as the voices drifted out of the wall and seemed to taunt me.

  It was only after two weeks of this that I mustered up the courage to tell my mother. Her laughter filled the house as she slapped her side and told me the truth – the voices were filtering in from next door, from the room connected to mine by a thin slice of stone.

  Now, I placed my ear to the wallpaper and listened, hearing muffled sounds increasing in velocity: two people arguing. These neighbours differed from my childhood, a man and a woman about a decade younger than me. I’d seen them in passing, the misery imprinted over their faces like tattoos. As the noise died down, I slipped back on to the bed, leaving their whispers to settle into the ether like ghosts.

  The headphones were in my ears as I searched through my phone for music to send me to sleep. Would it be something new to guide me towards a better future or a delve into my past to live my life all over again through nostalgia and the misty-eyed memories of an existence that never happened? I settled on some contemporary minimalist electronic tunes as the soundtrack of my current plight.

  The plink plonk of keyboards must have done the trick as I woke up in the early hours with a desperate need for the toilet. It was only when I’d finished pissing, stepping out to make my way back to my bedroom, that I noticed the piece of paper hanging halfway through the letterbox downstairs.

  I could have left it there, but was intrigued why someone would do such a thing at night. Perhaps it was another welcome message to me from the locals. I crept down the stairs in my bare feet, my toes curling against a carpet as old as me.

  My knees creaked as I bent to get the paper. I unfolded it and read the three sentences.

  Meet me tomorrow at the train station at one o’clock. I’ll be on platform two. It’s important for your family.

  I returned to bed and reread it.

  It’s important for your family.

  I dropped it to the floor. Everyone in this house was my family, and I wasn’t too keen on either of us.

  Nothing was important anymore.

  And I didn’t think it would be ever again.

  2 MYSTERY TRAIN

  It was a small train station, but was busy for a Saturday afternoon. I’d left the old man at home watching the racing – gambling was always his favourite thing, but now he only watched and never fluttered. I’d arrived thirty minutes earlier than the appointed time with my mystery person.

  The air was crisp, filled with the smell of lavender vape smoke. Some patrons had dumped plastic cups on the benches, pale items which would take longer to decompose than their corpses. There was a new bike stand in the far corner, but most of its rows were empty. I strode by it and went through the subway and across the other side for Platform Two. It was unoccupied, the next train to the beach twenty minutes away.

  I plugged the headphones into my mobile and selected a random playlist. While I checked the latest football news online, the Lizard King was warbling about cars hissing by. A thin man overwhelmed with shopping bags was the first to join me on the platform. He stumbled up the steps and dropped half of his purchases.

  Cheap frozen meals constructed from the worst ingredients tumbled from his haul, mixed in with a two-litre bottle of Lucozade and about a thousand packets of pickled onion Monster Munch. I removed a plug from my ears, The Crystal Ship sailing through my head, and helped him.

  The chicken hot pot meal for one was cold and damp to the touch, and I wondered if he’d get these to his freezer before they melted. He gave me a grin wide enough for me to see his mouth was missing half its teeth, and of those left, there were more dark than light ones.

  ‘Thanks, big man.’

  It was an expression most people used when meeting me for the first time. My physique was one thing I hadn’t inherited from my parents. When I reached fourteen, I was over six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. My body was muscular even before I started working out, but once I hit the gym, I was a walking advert for a teenage Conan the Barbarian. I was built to join the military, but when somebody mentioned it to my father, he’d roll his eyes, and I assumed it was his way of saying, ‘Don’t do it.’

  So I joined the police instead.

  I’d still be there twenty-five years later if I hadn’t done something stupid.

  The shopping man retreated into the waiting room as the platform filled up. I slipped on to a bench and scanned the latest news. The government had promised to borrow billions after slamming their predecessors for doing the same. A bloke who drove over a tent at a campsite killing a woman was sentenced to eight years in prison. Which meant he’d be out in four, possibly three, while the victim’s loved ones would endure a life sentence there was no release from. Climate change protesters were arrested after painting several buses yellow in the capital. There was more bombing in the Middle East. The Royal Family were complaining about press intrusion by giving interviews to certain sections of the media.

  I was reading the sports section when a shadow fell across me. One o’clock was here, and I’d hardly noticed. I slipped the phone into my pocket and peered at the person standing over me. She was tall, willowy, wearing a floral dress, a large floppy hat, and fashionable sunglasses. Her clothes were perfect for a summer’s day at the beach, but even with the headwear and glasses, I recognised her: the woman from the other side of my bedroom wall. She dropped a piece of paper into my lap and turned towards the approaching train.

  It fell to the ground as I stood. I picked it up and read it.

  Get on the train before me. I’ll sit behind you. Don’t turn around or speak. No one can see us together.

  Thankfully, there was no instruction to destroy the message by eating it. Instead, I put it into my pocket and walked towards the end of the platform as the train arrived. The rest of the people scampered for its two carriages.

  The doors opened and passengers got off, forcing their way throu
gh those waiting to board. A young woman on crutches struggled to make her way to the front. A group of drunk young blokes blocked her by either accident or design. I cracked my knuckles, staring at them until they parted like the Red Sea. She smiled at me as the conductor helped her aboard. I got on and sat a few seats from her. The drunks headed to the other carriage.

  A hiss announced the doors closing, and the metal wheels chugged slowly at first before picking up speed. As I peered out the window, watching the town disappear as industry belched out chemical vapour towards the football stadium, we left the station. The sounds of excited kids and weary adults filled every seat. The one next to me stayed empty and I assumed my significant, hulking presence had deterred most people.

  Someone sat behind me. I didn’t turn around but glanced into the window, hoping to see a reflection buried inside the sight of the local port outside. The journey should only take ten minutes, but time wasn’t on my mind as she leant in close to my neck.

  ‘We can’t talk here.’ Her voice was a whisper slithering into my ear, a plume of mystery and suspense, making me wonder what her aim was. She smelt of jasmine and it was like having my brain buried inside a bunch of flowers. ‘When the train stops, get off and head towards the sea. There are some benches near the pier; take one, and I’ll meet you there.’