Grave Passion Read online

  GRAVE PASSION

  Phillip Strang

  BOOKS BY PHILLIP STRANG

  DCI Isaac Cook Series

  MURDER IS A TRICKY BUSINESS

  MURDER HOUSE

  MURDER IS ONLY A NUMBER

  MURDER IN LITTLE VENICE

  MURDER IS THE ONLY OPTION

  MURDER IN NOTTING HILL

  MURDER IN ROOM 346

  MURDER OF A SILENT MAN

  MURDER HAS NO GUILT

  MURDER IN HYDE PARK

  SIX YEARS TOO LATE

  GRAVE PASSION

  MURDER WITHOUT REASON

  DI Keith Tremayne Series

  DEATH UNHOLY

  DEATH AND THE ASSASSIN’S BLADE

  DEATH AND THE LUCKY MAN

  DEATH AT COOMBE FARM

  DEATH BY A DEAD MAN’S HAND

  DEATH IN THE VILLAGE

  BURIAL MOUND

  THE BODY IN THE DITCH

  Steve Case Series

  HOSTAGE OF ISLAM

  THE HABERMAN VIRUS

  PRELUDE TO WAR

  Standalone Books

  MALIKA’S REVENGE

  Copyright Page

  Copyright © 2020 Phillip Strang

  Cover Design by Phillip Strang

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine, or journal.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This work is registered with the UK Copyright Service.

  Author’s Website: http://www.phillipstrang.com

  Dedication

  For Elli and Tais, who both had the perseverance to make me sit down and write.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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 1

  Brad Robinson was about to break the law, not that he knew it, and he was in too much of a hurry to worry anyway. He was a bright child, his mother would say, but then she had a soft spot for him, seeing that he was the only one of her three children who wasn’t taking drugs, incarcerated in prison, or, in the case of her daughter, selling herself. To the sixteen-year-old’s mother, it looked as though he might make his way in the world without resorting to crime, even becoming a worthwhile member of society, which she had aspired to but had failed to achieve.

  Jim, the eldest of her three children, had at twenty-two seen the inside of more than a few prison cells. He had had to grow up hard; his father was a criminal as well as a drunk, and on many a night, he had beaten his mother senseless.

  At the age of fourteen, Jim, strong for his age, had taken on the bane of the Robinson household and thrashed his father mercilessly with a cricket bat. The upshot was that Jim, the saviour of his family, spent time in a young offender’s institution, and his father, once the wounds had healed, had briefly returned to the family home, a squalid council house with little charm, picked up his clothes, packed them in a suitcase and had left; not a word of farewell to anyone in the house, other than a pat on the shoulder for the eight-year-old Brad.

  The second eldest, Janice, was an attractive blonde-haired child until puberty hit. After that, she had discovered boys, and then men, and then drugs. She was now twenty-one and living a transient life, moving from one place to another, eking a living by selling herself, injecting when she could, eating whatever food she could afford.

  Brad tried to see her every couple of months, but it wasn’t easy. He was sixteen, and his life should have been a time for exams and sport and chasing girls. Not that he tarried on the latter, as he had grown up a good-looking lad, and the genetic traits that had made Jim violent and Janice a tart hadn’t touched him. He was more like his mother, except that he had tried alcohol on a couple of occasions and never found a love for it. He was glad of that.

  The house wasn’t somewhere you took Rose Winston. Brad didn’t want to destroy her impression of him. She lived not far away in a better house and her parents owned it; her father was a professional man and her mother was a schoolteacher.

  Rose had made it clear that sex was the next step in their relationship; after all, they had passed through passionate kissing and heavy petting. The next stage was the final act, where he, the over-eager Brad, and Rose, the expectant female, would come together in a crescendo of drums, the sound of waves lapping on the shore, an abandonment of themselves as they became one.

  That was how Rose, an avid reader of love stories, saw it. Brad, sensitive as only a sixteen-year-old male could be, knew that wasn’t how it was, but he wasn’t about to tell her the truth, not just yet. It was messy, he could have told her, over far too quickly, and if she wanted banging drums and the music, then she’d better take a radio with her.

  The best he could hope for was a balmy summer’s night, a secluded spot in Hyde Park. He had purchased a cheap bottle of wine and taken a blanket from home, the cleanest one he could find. His mother wasn’t strong on cleanliness, although she was on vodka.

  Brad, in his reflective moments, wondered about his parentage. His mother was a short woman, whereas he was tall for his age and slim, although her facial features showed in him, as they did in his brother and sister. But Janice was as short as her mother, and Jim wasn’t much taller, and the father of the three had been short as well. His mother, who had read about it in a magazine, her usual window on the world, apart from the incessantly-on television, said his height and physique were a genetic throwback to an ancestor. Not that he could see it, as his grandparents on both sides were equally short, and at family gatherings, not held since Janice had taken to prostitution, he had stood head and shoulders above the rest.

  Jim’s all too frequent brushes with the law were regarded as an occupational hazard, as the Robinsons regarded petty thieving and crime as a vocation, and the occasional incarceration as an inconvenience. However, Janice’s fall into degradation had stunned them all, and her name was never mentioned by her mother, who in between drinking herself into a stupor was a regular churchgoer.

  The evening was balmy, the love that Rose felt for Brad was that of a fifteen-year-old, which was what she was. The age of consent was sixteen, although Brad wouldn’t have known that, and so what, everyone was having sex at the school they both went to. Rose had been feeling the pressure from her peers for the past year after she had inadvertently blurted out that she was still a virgin.

  Rose had always felt that intimacy with another should be within the bond of marriage, and if not that, then part of an intense interdependency of one human on another, a person she could trust. And Brad was that person, she had decided five weeks previously when they had first gone out together. He had been th
e perfect gentleman, not once grabbing at her breasts or trying to put his hand up her skirt in the back row of the cinema; not like some others that had tried and been rebuked. The reason some at the school had accused her of being a prick teaser. She wasn’t; she was just a good girl, about to become a woman, about to give herself to Brad.

  The plan was in place. Brad was to leave his house in Compton Road at Kensal Green at 9.45 p.m. It was a Saturday, and there was no school to worry about the next day, not that Brad’s mother would have been concerned, although Rose’s would have been.

  Rose was to tell her parents that she was sleeping over at her friend Steph’s house that night, which was fine by them, as Rose chose her friends well, and Steph was a person they liked and trusted. It wasn’t the real person that they saw, Rose knew that, as Steph was well ahead of her in the losing virginity stakes, and had been with half the boys in their class at school, including Brad, not that Rose was concerned. With Steph it had only been lust, as Rose’s best friend was of easy virtue.

  It had been Steph who had given Rose instruction in the more exquisite art of lovemaking, which wasn’t how it was in the novels she liked to read. Rose was convinced that Steph had experienced the physical act without the emotion, something she was not going to do.

  ***

  The two young lovers met outside Kensal Green Cemetery on Harrow Road at ten in the evening. Brad was on time, Rose was two minutes late. They held each other tight and kissed.

  It was Brad who suggested they take a short cut through the cemetery to Kilburn Lane where they could catch a bus down through Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill. And once they had reached Holland Park Avenue, they could walk up Bayswater Road and into Hyde Park.

  Brad had chosen the spot, suitably romantic and secluded, but he wasn’t sure how he’d last until they got there. He also wasn’t sure why it had taken five weeks for him to get to this stage with Rose. He thought it was love, but he couldn’t be sure. But whatever it was, it was important to him and to her.

  They were, as he saw it, two people embarking on a life together, not a fumble in the dark, not like it had been with Rose’s friend, Steph, nor with the others. After all, he wasn’t a virgin, six women to date, and Rose was to be the last.

  His brother, Jim, would have said he was a fool, and that women were only good for one thing, not that his advice was required, nor would he be commenting, as he was doing three years in prison for holding up a newsagent, the proceeds totalling just three hundred and twenty pounds, and even then he’d left his fingerprints on the cash register, and they were held in a police database.

  Janice, his sister, another romantic, would have seen the gallantry in her young brother, recognised herself in Rose. Although at the time that Brad met up with Rose, she was about to be flat on her back for the seventh time that night, and it was no sixteen-year-old with sweet intentions; it was an obese, sweaty man in his late forties.

  Rose felt some trepidation about walking through the cemetery, not because she was squeamish, but on account of having first watched a horror movie at Steph’s before venturing out, knowing full well how distressed her parents would be if they knew of her deceit. The film, a dystopian zombie frightener, long on darkened scenes and violent deaths, devoid of a discernible plot, had not interested her, but it was Steph’s bedroom, and she had been polite and had watched it.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Brad said. ‘Save a couple of minutes.’

  He took her by the hand, and the two of them walked through the imposing entrance. It reminded him of a scaled-down version of Marble Arch, not that he knew why a cemetery should have such an entrance, nor that Marble Arch had been built in the nineteenth century, a triumphal arch that had initially been built as the state entrance to Buckingham Palace and had been moved in 1851 to its current location at the junction of Oxford Street, Park Lane, and Edgware Road, at the north-east corner of Hyde Park.

  Rose felt a cold chill as they walked through. Some of the graves were maintained, most weren’t, and the occasional one had flowers on top of the headstone, or laid on the grave. Brad would admit to not feeling as brave as he had, as it was dark in the cemetery, whereas out on Harrow Road it had been bright with the street lights and the traffic. Even though they were only halfway through, only two hundred yards from where they had entered, the ever-present noise of the bustling metropolis of London had dimmed, replaced by a low hum in the distance.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Rose said as she grasped Brad’s hand tighter.

  Neither did Brad, but he wasn’t about to say that there was something that was freaking him out.

  A man walked hurriedly by, his hat down low, his coat collar turned up high.

  The two young lovers quickened their pace; the exit of the cemetery on Kilburn Lane visible not more than fifty yards distance.

  Rose let out a scream. ‘Over there,’ she pointed.

  Brad, feeling calmer once again, thinking to the night’s event, especially after they had drunk the wine, didn’t react at first.

  ‘Brad, over there, on that grave.’

  Brad looked briefly before averting his gaze; after all, his mind was elsewhere. He looked again. ‘It’s a body,’ he said.

  Rose ran out of the cemetery; Brad stood transfixed.

  Slowly, realising the situation, Brad walked closer to the grave. He pointed the small light on his smartphone at the body, saw that it was a woman and that in her body there was a knife.

  Once out of the place of death, the two of them hugged each other, the street light shining on them, a bus passing by on the other side of the road; the bus they would have caught. Rose crying and Brad shaking like a leaf.

  It was Rose who spoke first. ‘We have to call the police.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘It’s a dead body, we have to tell someone.’

  Brad took out his smartphone from his pocket, and shakingly dialled the emergency number. ‘There’s a body, Kensal Green Cemetery, the Kilburn Lane entrance,’ he said.

  After three minutes, the sound of a police car.

  ‘Do you want to stay?’ Brad said, conscious of Rose’s parents' reaction.

  ‘They’ve got your phone number, and yes, we must stay.’

  Brad knew that she was right. So much for a romantic evening, he thought but did not say it to Rose.

  Chapter 2

  Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook, the son of Jamaican immigrants to England, had hoped for a quiet night at home with Jenny, his wife, but it was not to be. As a DCI in Homicide at Challis Street Police Station, as well as being the senior officer in the department, it was up to him to take the lead after the phone call from his second-in-charge, Detective Inspector Larry Hill, a man too fond of drinking beer, although after the last run-in with Isaac, and another ultimatum from his wife, he was now on his best behaviour.

  Isaac had been surprised when he arrived at the crime scene to find Larry sober. He hoped it would stay that way, but he wasn’t confident. His inspector, Isaac knew, had a regular habit of falling off the sobriety wagon. Larry was a functioning alcoholic, and one beer didn’t stop there. They continued till he was barely capable of standing, and on one occasion he had attempted to drive home, only to be stopped after twenty seconds by a patrol car that had been waiting outside the pub.

  Also at the crime scene was Detective Sergeant Wendy Gladstone, the most senior member of Homicide, in terms of her age and her time in the police force, not in rank.

  ‘What do we have?’ Isaac asked. Even though he had been casually dressed at home, he had changed into a suit; Larry had not. Another bone of contention, Isaac knew, but it was not to be discussed that night. Tonight was for murder.

  ‘Female, white,’ Larry said. ‘A knife wound to the back.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘We’ve not disturbed the body, and it’s still warm. We’ll leave that to Gordon Windsor and his team.’

  Isaac could only concur, as Windsor, the senior crime scene
investigator, would have reacted badly if an inexperienced police officer or a seasoned detective inspector had disturbed the body. As he would say, ‘If the body’s clearly dead, then leave it to us.’

  On a previous murder case, two wet-behind-the-ears and overzealous police constables had almost destroyed vital evidence, although, by the time they had reached the body, they had had the good sense not to touch it.

  Wendy left them and went over to where the two who had discovered the body were sat. She could see they were young, a couple out for a night, minding their business, looking for a little romance.

  ‘Rose’s father’s going to be angry with me,’ the young man said.

  ‘And you are?’ Wendy asked as she sat down beside them on the bench at the side of the street.

  ‘Brad Robinson. I live in Compton Road with my mother.’

  ‘Your age?’

  ‘Sixteen, almost seventeen.’

  ‘Let’s take this from the beginning,’ Wendy said, looking down at the bag to Brad’s side, seeing the bottle of wine, the two plastic glasses. ‘And be honest with me. You two are in trouble, aren’t you?’

  ‘We didn’t kill the woman,’ Rose said.

  Wendy saw a pretty young woman, similar to her at that age.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen in two months.’

  ‘Brad would have been in trouble if you hadn’t found the body. Lucky in one respect, although you probably won’t agree. First time for you?’

  ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ Brad said.

  Wendy, not unfeeling, could see that Brad and Rose were decent enough, although Rose’s clothes were more upmarket than Brad’s pair of blue jeans and dark blue shirt.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to say any more about it, but the law is clear. Rose is underage.’

  Over to one side, a crowd was forming, a man pressing forward, trying to get under the crime scene tape.

  ‘Your father?’ Wendy said, looking at Rose.

  ‘I had to phone him. He doesn’t know I’m with Brad.’