With A Vengeance Read online

  With A Vengeance

  Adam Croft

  Contents

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  Books in this Series

  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 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

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  Knight & Culverhouse return in ‘Dead & Buried’

  Dead & Buried

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  To say thank you for buying this book, I’d like to invite you to my exclusive VIP Club, and give you some of my books and short stories for FREE.

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  Adam Croft

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  For more information, visit my website: adamcroft.net

  Books in this Series

  Books in the Knight and Culverhouse series so far:

  1. Too Close for Comfort

  2. Guilty as Sin

  3. Jack Be Nimble

  4. Rough Justice

  5. In Too Deep

  6. In the Name of the Father

  7. With A Vengeance

  * * *

  To find out more about this series and others, please head to adamcroft.net/list.

  1

  Eleven years ago

  The night was still. The four men held their breath. The loudest sound was the the pulse of blood in their own ears.

  The back of the Transit van was dark but for the beam emanating from Footloose’s torch. The other three watched as Footloose’s hand signalled the countdown: five fingers, then four, three, two, one. With a nod, he turned and pushed open the rear doors of the van, the other three men following close behind.

  Within seconds, they were inside the industrial unit. Their inside man had done his job and would be paid handsomely.

  That was always the trickiest part of jobs like this — until it got to this moment, you never quite knew whether your man on the inside was stringing you along or not. They’d all heard of huge plans that had gone wrong because their contact had gone to the law or, worse, arranged to double-cross them. But this was all going perfectly to plan.

  Once they were inside, Headache got to work on the on-duty security guard, pinning him to the ground before he’d managed to grab hold of his radio and sound the alarm.

  The guard was a tough cookie. Much bigger than they’d been led to believe, but it only took Headache a few seconds to live up to his name, delivering a skull-splitting headbutt to the man’s face, knocking him unconscious. With the guard now a little easier to manipulate, Headache and Bruno frisked him down, removing his tools and equipment, before gagging him and handcuffing him to the copper pipework.

  ‘Oi, Footloose. We’ve got a problem here!’ Peter yelled from inside the office. They only ever used their nicknames when on a job. They couldn’t risk blowing their real identities, and they never knew who was listening.

  ‘What do you mean “problem”?’ Footloose replied, seemingly unruffled. Despite the calm tone of his voice, Headache and Bruno knew when Footloose was upset. Their years of knowing him and working with him meant they would realise a couple of seconds before most people. That still wouldn’t give them enough time to get out of his way, though.

  Footloose walked through to the office and looked down at Peter, who was crouched down by the safe.

  ‘It’s not the model he told us it was,’ Peter said. ‘I’m not tooled up for this one.’

  Footloose looked him in the eye and spoke calmly. ‘What do you mean you’re not tooled up?’

  ‘I mean, this needs extra gear. I can’t get into this with the tools I’ve brought. I’m going to need—’

  Peter’s sentence was cut short by Footloose lifting him up by the front of his overalls and pinning him to the wall. He could hear the fabric ripping and tearing as it struggled to hold his weight, his feet dangling a good few inches off the ground.

  ‘You’re a bloody safe breaker,’ Footloose yelled, spittle flying through the mere millimetres that separated their faces. He pulled Peter away from the wall and slammed him back against it with each word. ‘You. Break. Safes. Get it?’

  Before Peter could reply, Footloose’s attention was taken by the distant sound of sirens.

  ‘Footloose! There’s sirens!’ Bruno called from outside the office.

  ‘I can hear that,’ came the reply, as he threw Peter to the ground. ‘Now what the fuck’s going on?’

  He could see immediately that none of the others had any clue.

  ‘They’re getting closer. They’re coming here!’ Bruno said.

  Footloose knew he had to make his decision quickly.

  ‘We need to split. Headache, back out the way we came. You too, you useless prick,’ he said through gritted teeth, picking Peter up and shoving him over towards Headache. ‘Bruno, with me. We’ll take the fire escape.’

  The men nodded and made to do as they were told, before Footloose gave them one last instruction.

  ‘And remember. If there’s even the slightest possibility that anyone’s following you to the safe house — even the tiniest fraction of a chance — you abandon. Alright?’

  The men nodded again, and Footloose gestured for them to get moving.

  It took three shoulder-barges for Bruno to shake the back door free of its hinges, before he and Footloose clambered up the metal stairs, jumped the low wall and ran off into the woods behind the industrial estate.

  Towards the front of the unit, Peter and Headache were ready to break for the exit. As they rounded the corner and started to run towards the van, their attention was taken by a voice shouting from the darkness. Peter carried straight on to the van, but Headache stopped and turned towards the voice.

  A man jogged out of the shadows, clearly almost out of breath, his policeman’s uniform reflecting under the streetlights.

  ‘Get on the floor,’ the policeman said, struggling to talk between breaths. ‘Get down. Hands behind your head.’

  ‘Yeah, as if,’ Headache replied, turning to join Peter back at the van before the rest of the cops arrived. He could see this guy had no weapons, no truncheon, nothing. Just a beat cop who’d heard the
call go out over the radio and been unlucky enough to get here first.

  ‘Wait,’ the policeman called out. ‘I know you. Don’t I?’

  ‘Headache! Get in the van!’

  Headache looked at the policeman for a moment. ‘No. Sorry. You’re mistaken.’

  ‘Yeah I do. You’re—’

  ‘Headache! Now!’

  ‘Yeah. Last September. The Moulson Arms. I know who you are.’

  ‘Headache! I’m going if you don’t get in the van right now!’

  Headache’s jaw started to tense as he stretched out his hand, then quickly dipped it into his inside jacket pocket, pulled out the Makarov pistol and raised it in front of him, the barrel pointed directly at the policeman’s head.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Headache! No!’ Peter yelled, by now revving the van’s engine and beeping the horn to get his attention.

  Headache swallowed, narrowed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

  2

  Present day

  Freddie Galloway took the stairs two at a time, the thick black smoke filling his lungs. Even though his joints were telling him to take it easy, his mind was alive and his heart was pumping, telling him he had to get out of here — quickly.

  He didn’t want to die by being choked to death by the smoke, nor did he want the flames to take him. He’d worked hard enough his whole life, been shat on from the start, and he wasn’t about to succumb like this. The one thing he’d always had was control, and he wasn’t going to give that up now.

  He reached the top of the stairs and crossed the wide landing, before closing his bedroom door behind him. The fire was coming from the front of the house, leaving him with very few options. He paused and turned for a moment, watching the smoke starting to billow under the door and rise, dispersing to fill the room with a thick haze.

  It wouldn’t be long. He could see the light changing underneath the door. The fire had already begun to climb the stairs and it wouldn’t be long before it would consume the bedroom door, the flames licking underneath it, blackening the wood.

  He blinked, and immediately his eyes reverted back to what was in front of him: billowing smoke, and plenty of it.

  The heat was becoming unbearable. If he was going to get out of here, it wasn’t going to be back through the bedroom door: the fire was now too close and the door had begun to radiate immense amounts of heat. He swore he could see the colour of the wood beginning to change as it was charred from behind.

  Almost as if he hadn’t noticed it up until now, he started to become aware of the sound of the fire. Not just the crackling and snapping of his prized possessions succumbing to the flames, but the vast roar of the inferno as it consumed every available molecule of oxygen in the building.

  And it was a big building. Freddie Galloway had worked hard all his life. He wasn’t a grafter in the conventional sense, but at least he’d worked hard at working smart. He knew a lot of people who’d spent their whole lives doing twelve-hour days and who were now struggling to get by on the state pension. You couldn’t expect anyone to do anything for you in this life. Freddie had learnt that early on.

  He had always been proud to tell people he was a stubborn bastard. He made no bones about it. It was what had got him where he was, he’d say. Business was no place for faint hearts. Real men made decisions, and they stuck to them.

  Without thinking twice, Freddie hobbled over to the french windows on the far side of the bedroom and flung them open. Immediately, he could hear the fire roaring behind him, gulping down this fresh, pure oxygen that had just been let into the furnace.

  With the flames now rising up the inside of the door, Freddie knew he had to act fast. Grunting and groaning, he pulled one of his wicker chairs across the tiled balcony and climbed up onto it, his head giddy with the smoke as he peered over the edge of the railings and down onto the grounds of his house below. The fire had started at the front of the house, and looking down now it would be hard to believe there was a fire at all. The patio furniture stood gleaming in the moonlight, the cool, still swimming pool reflecting the profile of the house he’d worked so hard for.

  He knew he couldn’t give his decision another thought. This wasn’t about to be the first decision Freddie Galloway would regret in his long, tough life. The pool was reaching up to him. Unsteady on his feet, he clambered up onto the railings and swung his legs over them, holding on with shaking arms. Pushing his feet off the edge of the balcony, he took one last breath before jumping, watching the image of his falling body reflected in the pool below.

  3

  The overriding thought going through Detective Sergeant Wendy Knight’s mind was that she’d hoped she’d seen the back of these Blackstone’s manuals. The police guidance books were heavy going, and it was at times like this she wondered if a more laid-back career might be good for her.

  Deep down, though, she knew she was kidding herself. She could’ve thrown the copies of Blackstone’s away after becoming a Sergeant, or at any time since, but she’d kept them around for a reason. Probably the same reason she’d kept all the updated guidance that had been issued from above, spiral bound and stored away in her spare bedroom ready for future reference. Because she’d always known, always hoped, that there’d be a need for future reference.

  She wasn’t afraid to admit that the first feeling that crossed her mind when DCI Culverhouse had suggested she go for her inspectors’ exams was overwhelming pressure. At first she thought it was the fear of failure, of having to go through all this extra effort at a time when they were already overworked and understaffed. But she had gradually come to realise that she wasn’t afraid of failing. She was afraid of succeeding.

  Reaching the rank of Detective Inspector would mean she’d have achieved the same level of career progression as her father, DI Bill Knight, before he’d been cruelly taken far too young, trying to intercept a bungled robbery whilst off duty. Achieving parity with her father, the great man that he’d been, felt to Wendy as though she was betraying him. And knowing that DCI Jack Culverhouse was quite likely grooming her as his eventual successor as Detective Chief Inspector would mean she’d ultimately outrank her father — if she chose to do so, that was.

  Many times, people had tried to tell her that she couldn’t let her father rule her career from beyond the grave. They told her Bill Knight would have been proud of her, would have wanted her to go far beyond what he’d managed to achieve in his own career. But that didn’t mean it felt any less wrong to Wendy.

  It had always felt grossly unfair that her father’s career and life had been cut short. Of course it did. But it felt somehow perverse that she should be able to achieve a higher rank than he did purely because she’d been fortunate enough not to die young.

  That said, she knew what her father’s response would’ve been. It would have been the same as her mother’s. They both would have told her to go for it, said they were proud of her and would’ve give her all the support she needed — and more.

  She poured herself another glass of wine and sat back for a moment. If she were to become a Detective Inspector, it would change her life and her career quite significantly. Apart from the pay rise of almost ten grand a year after a couple of years in the job, it would mean more responsibility and more time spent at work. She was already wedded to the job, though, and she saw no reason not to do even more. After all, it wasn’t as though she had much of a personal life to write home about. No partner, no family — other than a brother banged up in prison — and no real prospect of any of that changing any time soon.

  If she didn’t pass the exam, she’d have to wait another year to take it again. Culverhouse, though, seemed confident. He’d already started giving Wendy more responsibility, as if priming her for becoming a DI. As far as Wendy was concerned, nothing was a foregone conclusion. There would be up to one hundred and twenty questions from across the board in policing terms, and that was a hell of a lot to swot up on. She’d always kept across things in general, but then again i
t had been a long time since she was tested on it in an exam situation.

  She took a swig of wine and lay down on her side on the sofa, spooning her cat, who was curled up on the cushion next to her.

  ‘What do you reckon, Cookie? Think I should just forget the whole thing and enjoy the small amount of time I do get off work? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Cookie buried his head further into the cushion and pressed himself against Wendy, as if answering her question.

  ‘Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll just have to work our cuddle sessions around paperwork and personal progress meetings. Or we’ll wait for Bring Your Cat To Work Day. You’d like that. You could eat all the bits of bacon sandwich Steve drops on the floor.’

  Detective Sergeant Steve Wing, one of Wendy’s colleagues at Mildenheath CID, had something of a reputation for not being the fittest or tidiest of the team.

  She kissed Cookie on the head and sat up again.