Black by Rose Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Black by Rose

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Author’s Note

  Reader’s Club Download Offer

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  © Copyright 2019

  Praise for Black by Rose

  ~ An outright masterpiece.

  ~ It’s clever writing and rewarding for the reader to see how it all comes together.

  ~ A phenomenal read. As always with books by this author it had me holding my breath from start to finish and totally captivated me. Wow! what a thriller.

  ~ The writing is urgent, exciting, at times upsetting, even terrifying. It is utterly convincing and extremely brutal where it needs to be.

  ~ This Andrew Barrett at his best and Eddie Collins at his worst what a brilliant combination could not put it down.

  ~ Fast paced, thrilling, thought provoking. I couldn’t fault this book.

  ~ You really get to care about Eddie and your heart is in your mouth when you read about what happens to him.

  ~ If you like CSI type books that are fast paced, gritty and with great believable characters, this is the book for you.

  ~ This book has love, tears, humour and drama. A well written story with tension and some edge of the seat moments.

  ~ When I was reading it, I struggled to put it down; when I wasn't reading it, I was itching for an opportunity to pick it up again.

  Subject to change without notice

  Black by Rose

  By

  Andrew Barrett

  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-tiles, 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.”

  Chapter One

  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.

  Banging against her leg as she walked down the steps was 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 crossed the car park and found a wooden bench next to a dustbin on a stretch of grass. The bin was overflowing 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 cruell
y, and begin making 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.

  Chapter Two

  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 exactly 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 w
ere 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.

  The drunken man suddenly sobered up; he and the bobsleighing mechanic climbed into the back of the cash truck. The white van’s rear doors opened and the two plain-clothed police officers climbed aboard; one received cash boxes from the stricken cash truck, the other took them and squeezed them into a specially constructed wooden frame bolted to the van floor, while another drilled two 8 mm holes in the ends of each polyethylene case.

  It was like a production line. Smooth and well-rehearsed.

  Do not panic, this is a training exercise.

  A sixth man, dressed in a leather floor-length apron, clear face shield, and wearing long, heavy duty leather gauntlets, pushed an adapter into one of the holes in each case and from a distribution manifold behind him, fed a small tube onto each adapter.

  When the cash truck was empty, the drunk and the bobsleighing mechanic jumped off, collected the cider bottle and metal bar, strolled to the white van’s cab and casually joined the driver inside.

  With all the cases secured, all drilled, adapters and tubes fitted, the leather apron man turned on the liquid nitrogen canister mounted in a sturdy wire cage beyond the manifold. Then the plain-clothed police officers left the van and closed the rear doors, leaving the drill-man and Mr Nitrogen in the dark until the overhead lights blinked and came on. Mr Nitrogen diligently checked for leaks, then read the cylinder’s gauges and made adjustments as the van began moving away. He and the drill-man watched as creeping frost grew on the pipes.

  The van travelled for less than a minute before it stopped.