No Time to Die_a thrilling CSI mystery Read online

  No Time To Die

  CSI Eddie Collins Series

  Andrew Barrett

  Contents

  Also By Andrew Barrett

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Copyright © 2018 Andrew Barrett

  The right of Andrew Barrett to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2018 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

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

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Also By Andrew Barrett

  CSI Eddie Collins Series

  The Third Rule ( Book 1)

  Praise for Andrew Barrett

  Praise For Andrew Barrett

  "The writing is superb, the characters are true to life and the story is gripping - what more can you want from a book?" Neats Wilson - The Haphazardous Hippo

  "The chilling cover certainly matched what was inside and had the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end." Amy Sullivan - Novelgossip

  "This is a very skilfully crafted story to fit in so much in such a short space and make it so the reader wants more." Grace Smith - Reviewerlady: Good 'n' Read~y

  "THE NOTE by Andrew Barrett is the perfect choice if you’re wanting something twisty that you can read in one sitting." Jessica Robins - Jessicamap Reviews

  "It packs one hell of a punch for a novella and kept me on edge throughout." Susan Corcoran - Booksaremycwtches

  "This is a superb little book that can easily be read in one go, not that you could put it down anyway." Susan Hampson - Books From Dusk Till Dawn

  "A thoroughly enjoyable read. Love Eddie!" Nicki Murphy - Nicki's Book Blog

  "A short, sharp and surprising storyline, I literally flew through this book." Sassy Brit - Alternative-Read

  No Time to Die is dedicated to Kath Middleton

  Prologue

  How it Began

  The bass was amazing. It thundered through the lower ground floor of the Tangerine Oasis nightclub as though the walls were going to fall down. ‘Freak Like Me’, the new one by the Sugababes, pounded loud enough to create mime from speech. Sophie felt the bass resonate inside her chest. She held Lisa tightly, nuzzling into her neck, and felt her sweat against her own skin, and revelled in her odour. Lisa suddenly broke the embrace and pulled her towards the toilets.

  It was still loud in here, pumped through small wall-mounted speakers so that even after the door swung closed, it reverberated through their throbbing bodies as though nothing else in the world existed. Nothing mattered anymore, and Sophie kissed her with a passion reserved for their more intimate moments back in the flat. Their hands searched each other, and the kissing grew rampant, urgent, energy-filled like a need, tongues delving, fingers probing, sweat mingling, breath hot and sweet and fast.

  And then the door opened.

  The added bass pulsed into the room, echoed on the tiles, and the girls looked around. Chloe stood there in shock, her mouth open for an instant before it closed and her lips pulled back into a silent teeth-filled sneer of rage. And then she screamed, ‘Fucking bitch!’ and was on them in a second.

  All three slid on the shiny tiles, and under Chloe’s momentum, they hit the floor heavily in a mess of arms and legs. Bags scattered, shoes came off, make-up rolled across the floor. Nails scratched and gouged. Then Chloe punched Sophie in the mouth and grabbed her by the hair, leapt on top of her. Blood spattered in tiny droplets across the white-tiled floor, and Lisa was pushed to one side. She looked in horror as Chloe smashed Sophie’s head into the floor, clumps of hair in her fists.

  Sophie screamed, arms flailing, and Lisa sat there stunned as if it was all happening in slow motion. Painfully slow. She grabbed something, it was a shoe, and she swung it at Chloe, an arc that had no aim or purpose other than to disrupt.

  And then everything stopped.

  There was no music. The silence was crushing. The passion was dead.

  Lisa held her breath, hand covering her mouth, eyes wide as Chloe lurched and then fell to the floor, scattering lipstick tubes, eyes open staring through the ceiling into an abyss. Unblinking. Blood dripped onto the floor, a rivulet chased the lipstick.

  Lisa screamed.

  Sophie got to her knees, rubbing the back of her head. Her other hand smudged the blood that had splashed across her chest; more had misted on her face.

  Lisa scurried into a cubicle, ready to vomit. She retched, coughed and panted, seeing the silhouette of her reflection in the water. Sweat fell from tangles of hair. Ripples erased her.

  And then the sound came back and, with it, her other senses. She could feel the goosepimples on her arms, could feel the tiles with her toes, could feel her body shaking and the bile in her throat. The door opened, and the bass came louder, and Lisa held her breath.

  Someone behind her screamed and ran back out of the toilets yelling something almost incoherent. The one word she heard very clearly was ‘police’. Over and over again.

  ‘Lisa!’

  Lisa turned in the cubicle and saw the tears in Sophie’s eyes.

  ‘Go. Get out!’ Sophie was shouting at her. ‘Run, dammit. Fucking run.’

  The Sugababes sang: ‘I’m not about to pay nobody’s way, cos it’s all about the dark in me.’

  1

  How it Ended

  — One —

  Sophie Moran saw unrestricted sunlight for the first time in almost nine years. She stood on the stone steps and admired its quality, which seemed strangely altered to her now. Perhaps free people saw with different eyes, rich with full HD colour.

  In her hand, she held an HMP carrier bag. In it was just about everything she owned. The rest of her stuff, the passport and driving licence, things like that, were in her solicitor’s storage somewhere in Leeds.

  She breathed deeply, listened to the hum of traffic on the distant road and saw cars in the nearby car park that she didn’t recognise, all sleek and modern now compared to how boxy they were almost a decade previously.

  Sophie ambled down the steps, across the car park and found a wooden bench next to a dustbin on a stretch of grass. The bin was overflow
ing with McDonald’s fast-food wrappers that attracted a dozen or so wasps. She sat at the far side, away from the bin, and marvelled at a view that didn’t include bars, gates, screws, or inmates, of sounds not obliterated by keys, shouts, screaming, crying, echoing…

  Sophie Moran looked at her watch, marvelling that it was the first time in years that the time actually mattered to her. And it mattered because her sister was due any time now. Sophie burst into tears.

  — Two —

  Two days after stepping out of prison, Sophie stepped into Leeds. She had business there; mainly consisting of things to get her feeble life back on track, to pick up the threads of existence that had been severed so cruelly and make something of herself.

  For a good portion of her remaining time inside, and constantly over the last two days, she’d wondered how Lisa would be living. She wondered how she was doing, if she missed her at all, if she even thought of her. Every day, the torment grew a little until it blocked the view of everything else. It was huge inside her head, and it grew prickles like the spiky husk of a horse chestnut seed.

  There was nothing else left to do; there was just a craving for a normality she hadn’t felt for nearly a decade, and since her life had ended while being in the throes of a blazing romance with Lisa, it seemed that the obvious thing to do in order to get normality breathing again, was to find her.

  Like haemorrhoids surrounding an arsehole, a ring of solicitors’ and barristers’ properties surrounded the courthouses in Leeds city centre. It was from one of the barristers’ offices that Sophie Moran exited, carrying a new plastic bag. In it were her personal papers, driving licence, passport (now expired), bank details, file of correspondence from the solicitors and barristers, discipline criteria and notice of summary employment termination from West Yorkshire Police, letters of support from The Police Federation, letters of condolence from her landlord, ‘Sorry – you’re evicted’, and details of the storage company where all her remaining stuff was – probably ruined by mice now anyway.

  She had £628.42 to her name, no job, no prospects of a job and the title of ‘murderer’.

  But she had Lisa.

  Finding Lisa was priority number one.

  2

  Outside the supermarket were two CCTV cameras, both aiming inwards, roughly to where the main entry door was. They weren’t working right now because Pikey and Ste had been up on the roof three hours ago and disabled them. It would take the service technician, based across in Manchester, until at least eleven to get here. He was a busy man, because crews across West Yorkshire had been out overnight doing similar things to other CCTV cameras operated by his company. And when the service tech came in to work this morning, he and his colleagues would be overwhelmed with requests for their expertise.

  At bang on nine o’clock, the red security truck, with Seven Security Services sign-written in large white letters down the side and across the front, pulled into the car park right outside the automatic entrance doors to the store. The driver had parked in a blind-spot, unprotected by surveillance equipment, and because this was the first of their scheduled seven drops this morning, the truck was literally sagging with cash.

  Pikey looked on. All they had to do was get inside the bloody thing. Without destroying the cash.

  It would be good too if they could manage the whole job without hurting anyone, and especially without killing anyone, but needs must, and if the guards were uncooperative, they could look forward to a decent insurance pay-out and a desk job with wheelchair access. Or a really snazzy burial paid for by a grateful company.

  Pikey gave the nod as the passenger guard climbed out and slammed the door shut. He walked around the front of the truck and along the driver’s side to the revolving hatch. As the hatch opened and he took out the cash box, a drunken male fell against the passenger door and then clumsily walked into the rear-view mirror, knocking it upwards and away from the side of the van. Now the driver was blind to the passenger side of his truck; all he could see in the mirror was lightly clouded sky. The drunken man stood upright, wobbled and waved an apology and a kiss to the driver, who gesticulated towards him as he wandered off clutching his bottle of cider.

  The guard walked inside the building with the cash box.

  Another male, this time not drunk at all, ran along the passenger side of the truck carrying a creeper board. The creeper board was the kind of thing a mechanic would lie on and wheel himself under your car to fix a blowing exhaust. As he ran, he leapt onto the creeper like a luge rider might do. He quickly guided himself beneath the truck and from a belt pouch removed two small metal boxes each fitted with an adhesive magnet. He stuck one of the boxes, about the size of a cigarette packet, to a section of floor just aft of the driver’s seat where the comms equipment and auxiliary battery were located, and the other just under the passenger seat where the main vehicle battery was. He flicked a tiny toggle switch on each box, and red LEDs lit up.

  Then he got the hell out of there.

  People walked past the car park, mostly oblivious to what was happening sixty feet away. And those who saw the drunken man or the tobogganer carried on with their journey. Either they didn’t believe what they were seeing, or they did and just didn’t want to get involved. Other people entered the supermarket while speaking on their phones, or while thinking about what to buy, or while watching some drunken man having an argument with himself a few yards away; either way, people were too distracted to notice or care.

  Then the police arrived.

  Outside the car park, on the wide footpaths, they parked two plain white Vauxhall Astra cars with flashing roof-mounted light bars. Megaphones attached somewhere in the cars began pushing out repeatedly the following message read by a female with a soothing, smiling voice: Do not panic, this is a training exercise. Do not panic, this is a training exercise…

  A plain-clothed officer alighted from each car.

  The guard with a now empty cash box, walked back out of the supermarket as the two charges detonated. The sound was a sharp crack that had an almost piercing quality about it, yet it dissipated quickly as the truck lifted an inch or two on its springs. A cloud of dust and metal fragments boomed out on a mini shock wave just prior to the exhaust pipe falling off. The truck’s hazard lights stopped working, the engine cut out and suddenly by comparison everything was very quiet except the megaphones and the debris tinkling to a stop, thirty yards away. From beneath the van, battery acid dribbled onto the lightly cratered tarmac.

  Do not panic, this is a training exercise.

  In the same moment, a masked man used a metal bar to take the guard’s feet from under him. The guard hit the floor on his knees and collapsed quickly onto his side. The clear Perspex shield over his face fogged from a muffled scream. As the guard writhed on the chewing-gum encrusted floor, the masked man knelt on his chest, pointed a gun at his abdomen and said, ‘If you press your panic button, I will shoot you in the kidney. Do you understand?’

  The guard, face a crumpled mess of pain, nodded vigorously, the back of his helmet scraping on the ground.

  ‘If you do not do as I say immediately, I will also shoot you in the kidney. Understand?’ Another scraping nod. ‘Get to your feet.’ The masked man stood back and continued to point the gun at the guard’s abdomen as he stood, hopping on damaged legs. Shoppers walked by the scene as though nothing was quite so important as their morning milk and eggs. A few of the more alert customers peered out from inside, standing alongside a couple of impressed security guards. They stared in silence, watching the training scenario with fascination. A woman stopped the pushchair and crouched at the side of her child, pointing and laughing. The child giggled.

  ‘Tell your colleagues you have a weapon pointed at you, and they are to get out of the truck without activating their panic buttons. I will shoot if I detect a panic button. Understand?’

  The guard nodded and limped to the driver’s window where he banged on the reinforced glass. The driver looked stunned
by the blast directly behind him and stared blank-faced at his colleague through a thin haze of smoke. He listened for a moment, eyes wide and shocked, his face loose, mouth gaping, and eventually nodded his understanding.

  A single person stopped alongside one of the police cars, rested his elbows on the car park wall and watched the proceedings with nothing short of delight on his face. Less than thirty seconds later, there were twelve people watching, seemingly enjoying the show. Do not panic, this is a training exercise, spoiled their experience a little, but they endured it with a mixture of smiles and astonishment, some commenting upon how realistic it all seemed, and others wondering if it was part of a film they were making.

  The truck driver spoke into the mic, seemed to realise it wasn’t working anymore, and so banged on the bulkhead behind him and shouted some instructions. The driver’s door opened. The reinforced doors at the back of the truck opened too as a white van reversed up to them. The dazed cash man joined his sobbing buddy and the slack-jawed driver at the side of the truck where the revolving hatch was, and all three knelt on the floor as though attending a private prayer meeting. The gunman stood over them offering communion.