Published in e-book in 2011
by M P Publishing
Copyright © I K Watson 2011
web-site: www.ik-watson.com
I K Watson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form or binding without the publisher’s prior consent.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Book ISBN 978-1-84982-145-2…
A novel in 31 chapters with a prologue
Fiction:
London Town
Wolves aren’t White
A Little Bit of Previous
It began with the Ice-cream Man. It seemed like a life-time ago. He’d just passed his inspector’s exam and was acting up. Memory played tricks. Memory and bad dreams.
The London streets steamed with the devil’s breath. Red was the predominant colour. Red neon shimmered through the rain. He stood, soaked, staring at the wooden door, its flaking green paint turned to the colour of shit by the light.
He felt numbed, detached, in the ethereal world. He saw himself move forward in slow motion, his hand reached out to wave at the uniformed officer beside him, the double-handed steel ram rise up, the hot rain dripped from the red-painted steel as it came down to split the door from its lock. He only heard the drumming of the rain and the screaming sirens as the door fell open. But that wasn’t really the start. He could go back further than that.
It began two days earlier with a missing girl, Sharon Keaton. A search in derelict buildings where you could come to serious grief. Raw knees and aching backs, moving forward on hands and knees, moving everything that could move, searching for a tiny blonde hair, something she dropped, a footprint. The sergeants and inspectors joined in. Cut-backs had something to do with it, but they wanted to help. When kids were involved everyone pulled out the stops.
The photograph of her still scarred his mind. It had been all over the television. A fresh-faced six-year old looking out impassively over the incident room. She had disappeared in the early afternoon. One minute playing with dolls on the front lawn, the next gone. Into thin air. No witnesses. No strange cars parked nearby. Nothing. Just a hole left by one little girl, and her mother’s screams of panic.
And then the specific things to be done, the screenings, the pulling out of known offenders, the perverts, flashers, paedophiles, interviews, house-to-house calls, searches of waste ground, of empty factories and warehouses, dustbins and culverts and cracks in the earth, any place big enough for a little girl to hide, or be hidden, and all of it urgent because of the creeping feeling, the gut knowledge that experience brings, that the longer it went on, every passing hour, lessened the likelihood of finding her alive. A shit job. Everyone agreed.
And then they had him. The Ice-cream Man, Paul Baker. It was thanks to a list of schedule one offenders spat out by the computer and the sharp eyes of a copper who spotted some magazines under his stairs. The Ice-cream Man. He used to live on Argyle. The place was condemned. He had lived there with his Nan before she died. It was from there that he went out to buy ice-creams for the little girls. The press coined the name. When he got out of prison the council moved him to a one-bedroom flat in Telford Avenue. That’s where the sharp-eyed copper visited him, just to check his alibi. If he hadn’t left the magazines filled with photographs of children lying around, it wouldn’t have been so easy.
His previous was five years earlier. A sympathetic judge had taken his lack of social support into consideration and given him six. After four he was back on the streets. When would they learn that one in four child sex offenders were at it again within six months of their release? With him it took longer, but the result was the same: another missing girl.
If the kozzers had it their way, that judge would now be hauled up to share the new sentence.
Argyle. The green door of the derelict festered and bled and opened into darkness. And the nightmares began.