[Eddie Collins 01.0] The Third Rule Read online

  The Third Rule

  CSI Eddie Collins Series

  Andrew Barrett

  Contents

  The Note

  Also By Andrew Barrett

  Prologue

  1. Friday 29th May

  2. Friday 29th May

  3. Friday 29th May

  4. Friday 29th May

  5. Wednesday 3rd June

  6. Friday 5th June

  7. Thursday 18th June

  8. Thursday 18th June

  9. Thursday 18th June

  10. Friday 19th June

  11. Friday 19th June

  12. Friday 19th June

  13. Saturday 20th June

  14. Saturday 20th June

  15. Saturday 20th June

  16. Saturday 20th June

  17. Saturday 20th June

  18. Saturday 20th June

  19. Saturday 20th June

  20. Saturday 20th June

  21. Sunday 21st June

  22. Sunday 21st June

  23. Monday 22nd June

  24. Monday 22nd June

  25. Monday 22nd June

  26. Monday 22nd June

  27. Monday 22nd June

  28. Monday 22nd June

  29. Monday 22nd June

  30. Tuesday 23rd June

  31. Tuesday 23rd June

  32. Tuesday 23rd June

  33. Tuesday 23rd June

  34. Tuesday 23rd June

  35. Tuesday 23rd June

  36. Tuesday 23rd June

  37. Tuesday 23rd June

  38. Tuesday 23rd June

  39. Tuesday 23rd June

  40. Tuesday 23rd June

  41. Tuesday 23rd June

  42. Tuesday 23rd June

  43. Tuesday 23rd June

  44. Tuesday 23rd June

  45. Tuesday 23rd June

  46. Tuesday 23rd June

  47. Tuesday 23rd June

  48. Tuesday 23rd June

  49. Tuesday 23rd June

  50. Wednesday 24th June

  51. Wednesday 24th June

  52. Wednesday 24th June

  53. Thursday 25th June

  54. Thursday 25th June

  55. Thursday 25th June

  56. Thursday 25th June

  57. Thursday 25th June

  58. Thursday 25th June

  59. Thursday 25th June

  60. Thursday 25th June

  61. Thursday 25th June

  62. Thursday 25th June

  63. Thursday 25th June

  64. Thursday 25th June

  65. Thursday 25th June

  66. Friday 26th June

  67. Friday 26th June

  68. Friday 26th June

  69. Friday 26th June

  70. Friday 26th June

  71. Friday 26th June

  72. Friday 26th June

  73. Friday 26th June

  74. Friday 26th June

  75. Friday 26th June

  76. Friday 26th June

  77. Friday 26th June

  78. Friday 26th June

  79. Friday 26th June

  80. Friday 26th June

  81. Friday 26th June

  82. Friday 26th June

  83. Friday 26th June

  84. Friday 26th June

  85. Monday 29th June

  Epilogue

  Free Short Story

  The Lift

  Acknowledgments

  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 2012 by Andrew Barrett

  Republished in 2018b 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

  The Note

  A thrilling novella introducing Eddie Collins, CSI

  Have you ever had that feeling of being watched but when you turn around no ones there?

  I have.

  It was raining, and I was working a murder scene around midnight when that prickle ran up my spine. If I’d listened to that feeling, if I’d thought back to my past, maybe I could have prevented the terror that was to come.

  Back at the office, I found a death threat on my desk.

  I had no idea who sent it or why they wanted to kill me.

  But I was about to find out.

  I’m Eddie Collins, a CSI, and this is my story.

  Download here for FREE!

  Also By Andrew Barrett

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  Eddie Collins Book 2: No Time to Die

  ALSO BY ANDREW BARRETT:

  The End of Lies

  This book is dedicated to…

  My lady, Sarah.

  Prologue

  January

  The next few minutes were the last normal minutes of Eddie Collins’s life.

  At ten-thirty on the evening of Thursday 15 January he slammed the car door, and shivered the key into the ignition, glad his shift was over. As he drove away from the police station, icy gusts whipped overhead telephone wires and hurled sleet against the fogged windscreen.

  He stopped shivering at the end of Bridge Street, and turned left towards the dual carriageway that would take him to his motorway junction. He checked the dashboard clock and expected to be home before eleven, cuddling up with Jilly by half past.

  But Eddie was wrong.

  As he picked up speed, the houses on the left became a dark grey blur, and he was about to relax and fill the car with some Pink Floyd when something caught his eye. In the orange hue of a street lamp, he glimpsed a woman sprinting along the snowy footpath. A man dressed in black chased her. One more glance, before the scene was behind him, showed Eddie that the woman was screaming.

  He forgot about the music and tried to see them in his rear-view mirror. But they were just grey shadows among grey shadows, turning streetlight-orange every fifty yards or so.

  As the road opened out into a dual carriageway, he approached a gap in the central reservation, and he approached a junction in his life, a choice: do nothing, or do something. He indicated, turned and drove back the way he’d come, white knuckles on the black steering wheel. The sleet came heavier and the sky darkened further. There was no other traffic in sight; the road and the situation were all his.

  There they were up ahead to his right. A man chasing down a screaming woman. Eddie couldn’t take his eyes away from the terror on her face. Her hair flowed behind her, yet there were wet curls of it flattened against her forehead as though frozen there. In her right hand she held a bag, and Eddie knew that was what the man wanted.

  He slowed and turned in the road.

  She glanced over her shoulder and the man pounced.

  Now from behind her, Eddie saw them land in a heap on the freezing, wet footpath, and imagined her face grazing along the slushy tarmac. For a moment, they were a tangle of arms and legs, but from the tangle emerged the handbag, and the robber ripped it free.

  He slammed on the brakes only yards away and her crumpled shape turned white in the headlamps. The coldness and the sleet stabbed Eddie as he leapt from the car, ignoring the audible alarm sounding, door ajar, door ajar – and ran towards the woman. She lay in a heap on the wet pavement, her clothes soaked, her
skin pale and wrinkled like that of a corpse pulled from a lake.

  She tried to stand, and the light caught the pain in her eyes and the wet snotty face; it caught the string of saliva whipping from her mouth.

  A million thoughts ripped through Eddie’s mind: he was going to be late home if he didn’t hurry, and Jilly would be worried about him. And then he wondered about his car, door open, engine running, and an awkward conversation with the insurance company coming his way. “How could you be so stupid, Eddie?” Jilly would shout, and he could say nothing in his defence because it was stupid. How many people would interfere with a street robbery these days?

  As he helped the poor woman stand, only one of those thoughts caught his attention: get her in the car and get her out of here.

  But that wouldn’t be an end to it.

  Eddie guided her into the front seat. He climbed into the wet driver’s seat, closed his own door, and set off after the madman.

  The woman cried. From the grazes along her right cheek, tiny spheres of blood grew and dribbled down her wet face. Her hair hung in black strands across her shoulders, and steam rose from her trembling fingers.

  In between shivering sobs, she said something; might have been thank you, kind sir; or, why didn’t you get here earlier, asshole; or it might have been, shouldn’t you call the police? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he was gaining rapidly on the man in black.

  Eddie stamped on the brake, told the injured woman to stay there – actually shouted it at her – and then leapt from the car again. His feet patted through the glossy wetness on the pavement and ran through the orange streetlight, mottled with falling sleet, chasing down the man who had chased down the woman. His trousers were shiny and wet, and the wind ripped into his legs as though he were wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. His hair was a mass of freezing water that drained the heat from his head, and dripped inside his collar. His ears ached, his cheeks were numb, and the cold air rasping into his lungs felt like he was smoking an industrial blowtorch.

  He shouted to the figure, but the figure kept running. Eddie was gaining when the man ran down a shallow grass embankment covered in patches of snow, before slipping on his arse, sliding towards a low wooden fence that gave out onto some industrial units under construction. He kept hold of the bag, though.

  Eddie’s feet now pattered through freezing grass and slipped on the mud at the top of the embankment. Still there were no other cars around. No one to help.

  The man turned, knowing he was trapped. He looked around, head flicking from side to side, and saw that he had two options: hop over the fence and become stuck in a building site quagmire, or run along the fence-line until he came to the motorway. Eddie closed the distance down, and shouted, “Hand it back, arsehole!”

  The man stood his ground.

  Eddie edged down the slippery embankment, and the man turned out to be a skinny rake of a kid probably only twenty years old.

  Eddie felt uneasy. The kid should be shouting his submission by now, he should be scampering up the embankment trying to formulate some kind of deal: Hey, mister, give the lady her bag back, and we’ll call it quits, okay? Or, I’ll leave the bag here and walk slowly away, you don’t follow, and then everyone’s happy. It didn’t happen.

  At first Eddie thought there was fear in the kid’s eyes. But it wasn’t fear; it was laughter. The skinny rake of a kid was laughing at him.

  Why would he laugh? He was cornered. He would only laugh, Eddie thought, if he had the upper hand. Why did he think he had the upper hand?

  And then Eddie’s world shattered.

  May

  Of the whole affair, the London Tribune said:

  If proof were needed that the Offensive Weapons Amendment Act 2007 was little more than a toothless tiger, the events of Friday morning in Victoria Underground Station thundered it home with irreverent bluntness.

  At first people thought it was a terrorist attack. Bystanders were shot down in a hail of fire not from some inhuman terrorist, but from one of their own. Terence Bowman was a stockbroker of repute...

  …and he was a man going places. At least he was, until the doctors had told him he would be wasting his deposit if he booked a winter holiday this year.

  Just enough time had elapsed for him to accept that he was going to die, when a stranger approached him. That stranger was a big man with broad muscular shoulders, a man who didn’t really have a neck to speak of, just a head and then a body. The stranger had a proposition for him.

  Terence took eight days to agree to that proposition.

  And this was the result. Friday morning, rush hour in the capital, standing room only in the claustrophobic station where the bustle of people and their smell was overwhelming. Terence Bowman was still a man going places, though today he would be going to hell, the direct route.

  He stood on the platform awaiting the 07:32, palms sticky, forehead a clammy mess, and a mild tremor radiating through his body from the heart outwards. Terence filled his lungs with the sour air and wiped tears from his cheeks.

  Inside his holdall, in the place usually reserved for his sandwich box, was a killing machine: Glock 18C semi-automatic pistol.

  It was time to make his family’s future secure, the stranger had said.

  Before he knew it, his hand curled around the Glock, and because of the next two and a half minutes, Terence Bowman’s name would become infamous as the event that felled a government.

  He could hear the approach of the train.

  Terence dropped the holdall and pulled the trigger. He held it tightly and turned around quickly, almost majestically as though in a waltz.

  For him, the world grew calm and quiet. He squinted as flecks of warm flesh spattered his face. The silent screams of those fleeing were the accompaniment to the Glock’s rhythm, and the waltz grew quicker.

  In reality, the noise was enormous; pandemonium reigned as a red mist showered those a little further away.

  The last of the rounds left the muzzle. Shell cases tinkled onto the floor. A ripple of heat from the gun wafted into the air. Terence stepped off the platform into the path of the 07:32.

  …police are baffled by the killings. Twenty-three people died in the massacre. It brings the total of gun-deaths in the UK to 228 this year, eighteen per cent up on last year.

  It is time for Labour to move over and give the opposition leader, Sterling Young, and his shadow Justice Secretary, Roger King the chance they have so vehemently sought. Gun crime is the most feared crime in Great Britain, and it will take a new administration with radical policies to tackle it.

  The Yorkshire Echo.

  By Michael Lyndon

  Great British Independence Party victorious

  "We're getting out of Europe," says PM Sterling Young

  IN A wave of euphoria usually reserved for rock and film stars, Prime Minister Sterling Young was driven through London yesterday and took up residency in Downing Street.

  A spokesperson for the party said: “Sterling’s first job is to extricate UK from the claws of European servitude. This country has long needed to be its own master again, and G-BIP has set in place the necessary elements to bring about that new freedom.”

  He went on to say: “And then the real work can begin: that of fighting crime. And who better to lead that fight than the newly installed Justice Secretary, Sir George Deacon who recently replaced the late Roger King.”

  Roger King MP was murdered outside his Kensington home three weeks before the general election. Some sceptics still ponder the so-called sympathy vote caused by him being shot dead in front of his family.

  “If you want to kill serious crime, you have to kill serious criminals.”

  Sir George Deacon

  1

  Friday 29th May

  When he came to, the brandy bottle lay next him. His cheek was wet with liquor, the crushed cigarettes were a murky brown colour floating on the small pool next to his face. Eddie closed his eyes tight. Anything to stop th
e tears.

  You’re a drunken twat.

  Words spoken by Jilly weeks ago – months ago. The scar on his left leg ached.

  Yes, he was in a bad state, but his problem was infinity; his problem was time running along the x-axis versus stress running along the y-axis. But there never seemed to be time without stress. Stress was a constant.

  Only the end of time could stop it all. But what use would sobriety be to him then? Who cared if the guy in the coffin was pissed or not?