Time to Pay Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Lyndon Stacey

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Damien Daniels has been murdered; shot through the chest by an unseen marksman. It looks like a professional job but there are no clues as to who pulled the trigger.

  The only witness to the shooting, Gideon Blake, is unable to provide any information that would help the police. However, a cryptic list he later discovers hidden amongst the dead man’s possessions warns of a dark and terrible conspiracy.

  Disturbed by his findings, Gideon soon finds himself drawn deeper into the mystery, one that he must solve before the marksman targets his next victim . . .

  About the Author

  Lyndon Stacey is the bestselling author of Cut Throat, Blindfold, Deadfall and Outside Chance. She lives in the Blackmore Vale.

  Also by Lyndon Stacey

  Cut Throat

  Blindfold

  Deadfall

  Outside Chance

  Time to Pay

  Lyndon Stacey

  To Patsy, Ray and Howard, for friendship, good

  food and long evenings of enjoyable discussion.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to the usual suspects. Also Tina Parham at Wiltshire Ambulance Service Emergency Operations Centre, and to Dave Baker of Hotline Electric Fences for answering some very unusual questions without demur.

  Prologue

  THE NIGHT BREEZE whispered through the trees and around the weathered stone of the tower, sending a handful of dead leaves skittering playfully along the base of the wall. It rippled through the white cotton shirt of the young man high on the ledge, evaporating the perspiration on his skin, and ruffling his fine blond hair.

  The youth stood like a statue, his jaw set and eyes fixed in mesmeric fascination on the jumble of stones below. It was quiet now, almost peaceful; the voices that had driven him here – mercilessly tormenting him – had died away, but there was no going back.

  He stepped forward, the grit under his shoe sounding loud in the silence. The wind had dropped. It was as though the night was waiting.

  A shadow raced across the parkland as the moon slid behind a streamer of cloud. When it emerged again the ledge was empty and the fickle wind rose once more, carrying with it the memory of a thin, high scream.

  1

  GIDEON DIDN’T HEAR the shot that killed Damien Daniels. In fact, despite the sporadic gunfire from the clay-pigeon shooters in the field beyond the wood, it didn’t immediately occur to him that Damien had been shot.

  They had been discussing Damien’s horse; Gideon being, among other things, an animal behaviourist and Nero being a horse as troubled as he was talented.

  One moment they were riding down the grassy woodland track congratulating themselves on the encouraging progress the horse had made over the past few weeks; the next, both animals had jumped forward, accelerating like a pair of drag racers. Gideon grabbed at his reins, rapidly shortening them to bring his horse under control, and was surprised to see Damien’s riderless horse shoot past him.

  Instinctively soothing his own mount, he twisted in the saddle and looked back.

  Damien was lying unmoving, tumbled on the soft, hoof-pitted turf of the track.

  This in itself wouldn’t have been remarkable, if the man hadn’t, until just a few years before, been one of the leading jump-jockeys in the UK. Now, at thirty-eight, he had given up his competitive career and was busy building a considerable reputation as a National Hunt trainer, but he was still, without a doubt, one of the best horsemen that Gideon had ever worked with. The horse’s startled leap might have been expected to cause problems for a novice, but it seemed inconceivable that it should have unseated someone as experienced as Damien.

  After his initial rush forward, Nero only moved half a dozen steps further before turning to look back at his rider, eyes and nostrils wide, his face reflecting the bewilderment that Gideon was feeling.

  ‘Damien? You all right, mate?’ he called, though as soon as the words had left his mouth he could see that he wasn’t. He appeared to have fallen awkwardly, landing on his head and one shoulder, and now lay more or less face down with his neck twisted at an unnatural angle.

  Gideon went cold with shock.

  ‘Oh, shit!’

  He swung his leg over his horse’s neck and slid off, leading the animal to the side of the track where, with shaking hands, he looped the reins over a sapling before hurrying to Damien’s side.

  What could be seen of his face, between the crash cap and the ground, was smudged with dirt; the one visible eye half open but its gaze fixed.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Gideon breathed. ‘Damien! Can you hear me?’

  He didn’t really expect an answer and he didn’t get one. Kneeling down, he placed two trembling fingers against the man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He tried several positions without success, watching the back of Damien’s navy bomber jacket for any perceptible rise and fall, as he did so.

  There was none.

  ‘Come on, Damien. This is stupid.’ Gideon couldn’t get his head round what had happened.

  In any other circumstances the obvious course of action would be to begin resuscitation, but first-aid training had drummed into him the cardinal rule that you must never move anyone with a suspected neck injury. Here, it was a case of damned if you do – damned if you don’t, Gideon thought desperately.

  Fighting against panic and the growing conviction that it was too late to help, he took his mobile phone from its pouch on his belt and keyed in three nines.

  ‘Emergency services,’ a female voice said, after a blessedly short space of time. ‘Which service do you require?’

  ‘Ambulance. Quickly! It’s a riding accident and I think he’s got a broken neck. I can’t find a pulse.’

  ‘Right; I’m transferring you through to someone who’ll take your details. Please hold the line . . .’

  There was a faint click and another woman said in a broad Scottish accent, ‘Ambulance Emergency. What is the address of your emergency?’

  When she’d pinpointed Gideon’s location, the operator asked for a brief description of what had happened, and Damien’s condition.

  ‘You must hurry, please!’ Gideon said, as he finished.

  ‘OK, Gideon, try and keep calm. The ambulance is already on its way. Stay on the line. I’m going to hand you over to a paramedic who’ll talk you through what you should do for the casualty.’

  Before Gideon could thank her, she’d gone and a masculine voice said, ‘Hello Gideon, I’m Rick. Now, what’s the condition of the patient?’

  Gideon was still kneeling beside Damien. He described the way he looked, and felt for a pulse again with the same negative result as before.

  ‘And he’s not breathing?’ the paramedic asked, when Gideon told him. ‘Right; well, we need to get him breathing again. Don’t worry, I’ll talk you through it.’

  ‘I know how, but he’s face down and I can’t move him if his neck’s broken . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we don’t have any option. It’s crucial that we restore heart and lung function and we can’t afford
to wait for the ambulance to reach you. Exactly how is he lying?’

  Following the step-by-step instructions of the calm voice on the phone, Gideon began to turn the injured man with gentle hands, breaking into a sweat as he strove to do so without causing further damage. As he carefully lowered Damien’s body onto its back, the blue jacket fell open, revealing a small red-rimmed hole in the centre of his white tee shirt. Gideon recoiled in shock.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ he said faintly, staring in horrified fascination; struggling to take it in. He’d fallen off his horse for God’s sake! He felt bile rising and swallowed hard.

  On the ground by his knee, his mobile phone emitted a short burst of tinny vocals and he reached for it, noticing, with a fresh surge of distaste, that he had blood on his hand. Where had that come from? Wiping his fingers in the grass, he picked the handset up.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘How are we doing?’ the voice enquired, calmly.

  ‘I think he’s been shot,’ Gideon heard himself say, quite composedly, the words stating what his mind refused to admit. He couldn’t have been shot – ordinary people don’t just get shot for no reason. It was a Sunday morning in Somerset, not a war zone.

  ‘Where?’ the paramedic asked.

  In the woods. The inappropriate humour caught Gideon unawares, and he was glad he hadn’t spoken aloud. With an effort, he dragged his eyes away from the obscenity of that neat, round hole. He knew the trainer had been wearing a back protector; presumably that had prevented the wound being visible from behind. A cautious investigation revealed that blood had soaked his shirt. Under the Kevlar shield, Damien’s back was a mass of torn flesh.

  ‘Gideon?’

  ‘Yes?’ He swallowed hard.

  ‘Did you say he’s been shot?’

  ‘Yes. In the chest. He’s dead.’ Gideon’s whole body had started to shake, and he clenched his jaw, trying to stay in control. How could he be dead? They’d been talking. Even now, his face looked peaceful, bronzed, healthy; as if he was just sleeping.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ Gideon checked the sarcastic retort that rose to his lips. After all, the man was just doing his job. He couldn’t see the awful finality of the hole in Damien’s chest and the irreparable chaos of his back.

  ‘Right. I’ll inform the police. Don’t touch anything else. I suggest you vacate the area, as a precaution. You have to consider the possibility of danger to yourself.’ There was a pause, during which a fresh burst of gunfire broke out in the adjacent field, then the voice came again, full of urgency. ‘Gideon, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. They’re shooting clays. I’m not in any danger.’

  ‘But your friend has been shot,’ the paramedic reminded him.

  Incredibly, Gideon, still grappling with the enormity of the first discovery, hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might also be a target. This had been no accidental shooting. Shot from the clay shooters’ guns would have dispersed harmlessly long before it reached the track through the woods and Damien’s wound clearly hadn’t been made by lead shot, but a bullet. Someone must have lain in wait. Was Gideon even now being watched? Were the gun’s sights now lined up on his chest? He looked swiftly round.

  Nothing.

  The broad grassy ride stretched away for perhaps a hundred yards in either direction, edged in places by sprawling brambles and flanked by conifers in dense, regimented rows. Above the branches of dark green needles the sky was blue and, a few feet away, roused by the April sunshine, an early bumblebee buzzed around a clump of pale yellow primroses.

  Was that movement in the trees?

  He stared, his heart thudding heavily, but could see nothing more than branches stirring in the breeze.

  How far away had the gunman been?

  He had no idea.

  It was an intensely unnerving sensation. He wondered if there would be any brief realisation before all form of awareness was snatched away, or would everything just cease. The concept was beyond his imagining.

  ‘Gideon? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m OK.’ He pulled himself together. ‘I think if he was going to take a shot at me, he’d have done it by now.’

  He wished he felt as confident as he sounded, but the fact remained that Damien had been shot by what the evidence suggested was an extremely competent marksman. As Gideon had no clear idea where he might be hiding, there appeared to be little he could do to avoid the same fate, if it was, indeed, on the cards.

  ‘Listen, I’ve got to catch his horse,’ he told the paramedic. The situation was bad enough without the added worry of having tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of racehorse going AWOL when the emergency services arrived. At the moment Nero was calmly grazing on the soft grass at the edge of the track but he was an unpredictable beast at the best of times, and Gideon placed no dependence upon the mood lasting.

  Pocketing the phone, he stood up, feeling intensely vulnerable. He wasn’t even wearing a back protector; but then, Damien’s hadn’t done a lot for him.

  Nero saw him coming and lifted his head, jaws champing. He’d stepped through the circle of his reins as they trailed, and feeling the pull on his neck he threw up his head and stepped back in alarm.

  ‘Steady, lad.’ With an effort, Gideon tried to calm the turmoil in his own head and concentrate on the matter in hand.

  Another burst of gunfire made him jump, but it was only the clay shooters again. He noticed, with a kind of detached satisfaction, that Nero had hardly reacted to the sudden noise. It was one of the problems they had been treating him for, and the reason they’d been riding in the wood on a shooting day.

  After a couple more steps backward, Nero allowed Gideon to take hold of his rein, but then he was left with another problem: the horse wasn’t good about being tied up. Gideon suspected that somewhere in his past, something had frightened him in that situation, and left him with an unreasoning fear of restraint. It was something else they’d been working on together, and Nero was improving, but this certainly wasn’t the time to put him to the test. He was quite capable of breaking his reins and galloping off into the sunset.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to deal with police and ambulance men while hanging onto a borderline-neurotic horse, but the only alternative wasn’t really an alternative at all. A call to the stables would doubtless bring help running – but there was no way he would willingly expose any of Damien’s family or staff to the horror of the scene before him.

  He looked across to where his own, more placid, mount had stripped the new foliage off the sapling he was tied to and was now making a start on the bark. He, at least, seemed content.

  Gideon’s thoughts returned to Damien’s family. The trainer had shared Puddlestone Farmhouse and the adjacent cottage with his parents, his younger sister – who was also his assistant trainer – and his wife and three-year-old son. They were a close family unit and he dreaded to think of the effect this was going to have on them.

  Unbuckling Nero’s reins to free them, he ran the stirrups up and slackened the girth. Guessing that the police, when they arrived, wouldn’t want any more hoof and boot prints than strictly necessary in the vicinity of the crime scene, he unhitched his own horse and led them both twenty yards back down the track.

  The sun shone on, determinedly cheerful, and a fly alighted on Gideon’s hand. He shook it off, imagining the flies that were almost certainly collecting on Damien’s ravaged body. The thought was disgusting, but it was a fairly warm day and Gideon was only wearing a rugby shirt, and no jacket that could be taken off and used to cover the dead man.

  He glanced at his watch. Ten to twelve.

  How long had he been waiting? It seemed like for ever.

  How soon could he expect help to arrive?

  Gideon longed for the weight of responsibility to be lifted from his shoulders. He was way out of his depth.

  It was quiet in the woods. The clay shoot had stopped, he realised, and in the distance h
e could hear the faint swish of traffic on the road. Seconds later he heard the first far-off sounds of a siren, growing steadily louder. From past study of the map, Gideon knew that the ambulance couldn’t be more than four hundred yards away when it eventually wailed to a halt, but the trees were too thick for him to see its flashing lights.

  For several minutes he waited, straining his eyes and ears for any sign of the crew, and then his phone trilled, making him jump. He hoped to God it wasn’t any of Damien’s family ringing to find out where they’d got to. What the hell could he say?

  ‘Gideon? Do you have a blue and white shirt and two horses?’ The male voice was accompanied by a certain amount of heavy breathing and background noise. ‘OK; we’ve got a visual and we’ll be with you very shortly.’

  Gideon assumed it was the ambulance crew, on foot and hurrying, and sure enough, within moments he could see two figures in Day-Glo jackets approaching through the undergloom of the conifers from the direction of the clay shooters’ field. The horses lifted their heads, still munching, and watched them come.

  They emerged onto the track, one – young and almost bald – carrying a folded-up stretcher and heading straight across to where Damien lay; the other middle-aged and rather portly, pausing beside Gideon, ostensibly to check on him but, in reality, breathing hard and needing a moment to recover.

  ‘All right, mate?’ he asked between breaths.

  ‘Yeah. What about you?’

  The ambulance man bent double and shook his head.

  ‘Stitch,’ he said succinctly. ‘Not as fit as I used to be.’

  It took only a matter of moments for the younger man to confirm death, which verdict he relayed to his colleague by straightening up, pursing his lips and shaking his head. He made his way back to them, and Gideon didn’t miss the wary glances he cast at the surrounding trees as he did so.

  A crashing sound startled the horses and presaged the arrival of two uniformed police officers, one swearing as he attempted to disentangle himself from the vicious grasp of a blackberry runner and the other evidently finding it highly amusing.