Little Triggers
Little Triggers
Stephen Larkin [2]
Martyn Waites
UK (2014)
Stephen Larkin is back in his native Newcastle and working as an agency
journalist. To stop himself getting bored, he's fighting greed and
corruption in his inimitable way by blackmailing the powers that be
into keeping their campaign promises. It doesn't help fill the empty
spaces in his life, though. He needs a purpose - which is why he jumps
at the chance to track down a child abuser with friends in high places.
A cynic like Larkin is automatically suspicious of people like Alan
Swanson. A charismatic local chancer and self-styled Minister for
Youth, Swanson is the man behind the "Rebirth of the Region" project.
But is his interest in kids a chance for a photo-opportunity or
something more sinister? Larkin thinks that, as a reporter, he knows all
there is to know about the evil that men do. But nothing has prepared
him for this...
Martyn Waites was born and raised in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He has written nine novels under his own name and five under the name Tania Carver. His work has been selected as Guardian book of the year, he’s been nominated for every major British crime fiction award and is an international bestseller.
Praise for Martyn Waites:
‘The leading light of a new generation of hard-hitting contemporary crime novelists’ –
Daily Mirror
‘Grips, and squeezes, and won’t let go. Waites’ lean, exhilarating prose is from the heart and from the guts, and that’s exactly where it hits you’ –
Mark Billingham
‘Brutal, mesmerising stuff ’ –
Ian Rankin
‘An ambitious, tautly-plotted thriller which offers a stark antidote to PD James’ cosy world of middle-class murder’ –
Time Out
‘If you like your tales dark, brutal, realistic, with a pinch of Northern humour – don’t wait any longer – Waites is your man’ –
Shots
‘Breathless, contemporary and credible, a thriller with a dark heart and guts to spare’ –
Guardian
‘The book houses an audacious energy and if you’re in any way a fan of Ian Rankin or Stephen Booth, this mesmerising thriller will be right up your street’ –
Accent
‘If you like gritty crime noir in the style of Ian Rankin, this is the book for you . . . Waites brings his characters to life with skill and verve, with more than a few nasty surprises. A riveting whodunit you really won’t be able to put down’ –
Lifestyle
‘A reckless energy which demands attention and respect’ –
Literary Review
The Joe Donovan Series
The Mercy Seat
Bone Machine
White Riot
Speak No Evil
The Stephen Larkin Series
Mary’s Prayer
Little Triggers
Candleland
Born Under Punches
The White Room
Also by Tania Carver
The Surrogate
The Creeper
Cage of Bones
Choked
The Doll’s House
Published by Sphere
ISBN: 978-0-751-55785-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Martyn Waites
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
2: Welcome to the Working Week
12: The Ghosts of Saturday Night
14: Sunday Morning Coming down
For Hazel, Harry and Vera
It had just gone eight when the boy finally died.
As he lay there, unmoving, the room was filled with a sudden stillness. But the naked man crouched over the body of the boy was oblivious to every sensation but the deafening rush of blood in his own head.
After the man had paid due homage to what he had done, he stood up and paced the room, flexing the fingers of both hands, then contracting them into hard balls of fist. He breathed steadily and deeply, pushing his diaphragm out to its limits, holding it until his windpipe and lungs started to ache, expelling the air in a slow, smooth stream until there was none left in his body.
He regarded the fragile masterpiece lying on the bare boards. The back of the child’s head, where the initial knock-out blow had connected, was caked with dried blood; blue-black bruises, evidence of their earlier love-tussle, highlighted the skin wounds which decorated the delicate flesh. Streaked tears lay glistening on purple handprints: a final reminder that life had been choked out of him.
Looking steadily at the broken body, all the man saw was the beauty of innocence. The highest beauty. This wasn’t a bad thing that had happened – quite the opposite. Now the child would never grow old, corrupted. The butterfly of his soul had been preserved forever in an amber of innocence. The world would lay no hand on him.
The man turned and smiled at the camera. Perfection.
“Het, look a’ her! Body of a sixteen-year-old, brain of a nine-year-old. Champion. Just what you want.”
Larkin sighed and looked away. Another girl walked past.
“Hey, look at them baps! Wouldn’t mind seein’ them with the gloves off!”
Larkin stared resolutely across the road, promising himself that he would kill the man if he uttered another word. But Houchen, seemingly ignorant of his companion’s dark thoughts, wasn’t about to be put off.
“Wa’s the time?”
The man must have a fear of silence, thought Larkin. “Haven’t you got a watch?”
“Yeah.”
“So why don’t you look at it, then?”
Houchen seemed quite upset by Larkin’s abrupt tone. “Just makin’ conversation.”
Larkin stared out of the window; Houchen looked at his watch.
“It’s half ten. Funny that. It was half ten last time I looked.”
Larkin ignored him.
Houchen nodded, as if that was what he had expected. He fidgeted his bulk in the passenger seat. There was silence again for a few minutes.
“You nervous, then?”
That’s it
, thought Larkin, mentally slipping the boxing gloves on. Houchen continued unabated.
“I am. I mean, when I say I’m nervous, I mean that I’m … you know, keyed-up like. Anxious. Aye, that’s it, anxious.”
Larkin said nothing.
Houchen gave a big elaborate sigh, conveying tension and boredom in equal measures. “It’s just … you know … I mean, how long does it take to get a stiffy, for Christ’s sake? Feels like we’ve been sat here for hours.”
It was no good, thought Larkin: he was going to have to talk to him, if only to shut him up. “Well, you know how it is,” he said, eyes fixed straight ahead on the hotel’s upstairs front bay window, watching the weak light in the room faintly illuminate the shadowy figures behind the glass. “Some people take longer than others. Their erogenous zones are a bit more rarified. Their buttons take a bit more pushing.”
“Aye, you’re right, like,” said Houchen, and settled back into his seat. Larkin turned to look at him. He was big, with an old quayside market leather jacket stretched tight across his flabby frame. His greasy, piggy face made his eyes resemble two raisins thumbed into soft white dough; his hair had the appearance of an ill-fitting black wig that had dropped onto his head from a great height. He wasn’t the sort of man Larkin was used to working with.
Larkin turned back to the window, mainly to escape from Houchen’s raging halitosis. Outside it was a clear August evening. Vehicles moved up and down Osbourne Road, oblivious to the occupants of the battered Volvo. People strolled along the pavement, enjoying the last of the day’s sun. All the while they had sat there, Larkin had been treated to Houchen’s opinion on every single girl who had walked past. That, combined with an almost endless stream of verbal punctuation accompanying his farts – “There you go”; “Have that one on me” – had almost moved Larkin to threaten violence on his new partner. If Houchen hadn’t been so good at his job, Larkin would cheerfully have strangled him by now.
He wasn’t all bad, though. At least he had opened the window. Eventually.
“So Ian,” said Larkin curiously, “what did you do before this?” Houchen’s past was cloaked in mystery; few were sufficiently interested to lift the veil.
“Well, you know. When I went freelance after
The Chronicle
I did a bit of everything. Weddin’s, fetes, that sort of thing. I did a lot of children’s parties for a while.”
Larkin could just imagine screaming kids running for their lives as Houchen lumbered after them, grinning and breathing on them, waving his camera like a club. He smiled to himself at the thought.
“Hey,” Houchen said suddenly, “there’s the signal.”
Larkin looked up. At the upstairs window stood a voluptuous silhouette, with big hair and a generous, hourglass shape. The figure made a surreptitious beckoning motion and then turned back into the room.
“That’s us,” said Larkin, and started to get out of the car. Houchen grabbed his camera from the floor between his legs, which was no mean feat, and began to prise himself out of the door.
They walked swiftly to the door of the hotel, an old converted Victorian mansion which looked like it had never seen better days, hurried up the steps and inside.
The ratty little moustachioed doorman’s smile quickly vanished when he saw Houchen’s camera. He tried to block their path, but Houchen swatted him out of the way without even breaking his stride. The doorman seemed about to protest, so Larkin pushed his left hand over the man’s mouth and shoved him against the wall.
“One word,” said Larkin, with his index finger so close to the man’s nose that it was sending him crosseyed, “one word, and you’ll be wearing your bollocks for earrings.”
The man’s face turned from indignation to fear. Larkin sensed he would be no more trouble. He let him go and followed Houchen upstairs.
Larkin found his colleague standing outside a door at the top of the landing.
“Number nine?”
“That’s the one,” said Larkin.
Houchen got his camera ready as Larkin opened the door for him and then stood aside. The photographer walked straight into the room, clicking away; the couple on the bed looked directly at him as his flashbulb popped.
“Lovely one, that,” said Houchen. “Nice clear face shot. Big smile now.” Off went the flashbulb again.
Larkin studied the man on the bed. His face was familiar from newspapers and the local news; he always seemed to have a response to every situation neatly encapsulated into a smooth, slick soundbite. But anything remotely resembling calmness and collection seemed to be well beyond him at the moment. His face resembled that of a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights on the M1. It wasn’t hard to see why he’d lost his composure. His well-fed, corpulent body was spread-eagled naked on the bed, secured at each
corner by a different-coloured chiffon scarf, with a pastel yellow one around his throat and a pink one tied into a big bow round his rapidly deflating penis. The woman straddling him was wearing co-ordinated scarlet underwear, black stockings and fuck-me high heels. Her hair, immaculately long and dark, could only have been a wig, her perfectly made-up face was smiling at the camera.