Little Triggers Read online

  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

  Also by Martyn Waites

  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

  Copyright

  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

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Martyn Waites

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Highest Beauty

  1: Shot with His Own Gun

  2: Welcome to the Working Week

  3: Deep Pools of Truth

  4: Bandits

  5: Old Home Movies

  Iced Glass Memory

  6: Burning down the House

  7: Carte Blanche

  8: Old Friends

  9: True Confessions

  10: The Weekend Starts Here

  Maxwell’s House

  11: Home Invasions

  12: The Ghosts of Saturday Night

  13: Home Invasions II

  14: Sunday Morning Coming down

  15: In Absentia

  Drive

  16: One Fair Summer Evening

  17: Back from Somewhere

  18: The Righteous Red Mist

  19: The Batphone Rings

  20: A Noble End

  Safe

  21: Casting Off

  22: Face Off

  23: Showtime

  24: Cliffhanger

  25: Memento Mori

  … And Justice for All

  For Hazel, Harry and Vera

  The Highest Beauty

  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.

  1: Shot With His Own Gun

  “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 push
ing.”

  “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.

  “Get my good side, boys,” she said in a husky voice and put on a teasing little pout.

  Eventually, after a long struggle, the man found his voice: not his carefully modulated TV voice, the treacly one that he poured over all the ills of society, but an angry, aggressive whine that Larkin suspected was a truer reflection of his character.

  “Who are you and what the fuck do you want?”

  Houchen looked at Larkin. “There you go – fiver to me. The cliché king. Not very original, is he?”

  “They never are,” said Larkin.

  The councillor seemed to be recovering a little of his professional demeanour. “Get out of here at once! Pauline, who are these people? Get my bloody hands loose, damn you!”

  “Oh, Ian’s just come to do my modelling portfolio – haven’t you darling? D’you want me to strip off for you?” And so saying, she quickly whipped off her panties to show a perfectly formed set of male genitals. Pauline straddled the politician again. “Come on – get a good close up,” she said, smiling seductively.

  “Canny set of tackle you’ve got there, pet,” Houchen said as his flashbulb popped yet again.

  “Well,” said Larkin, “this won’t do much good for your reputation as family man and man of the people, will it?”

  The councillor’s face flushed so red, Larkin thought that steam was about to explode from his ears. He fully expected him to let off a high-pitched whistle.

  “Get me untied now! You’ll regret this!”

  His tirade of clichés looked as if it might continue indefinitely.

  “This is entrapment!”

  “You wish.”

  “Why I—”

  Larkin silenced him. “Shut up.”

  The councillor’s mouth audibly snapped shut.

  “Undo him, Pauline.”

  Pauline worked her way round the bed, starting with his feet, untying one scarf after another, with Houchen snapping away, catching every moment. As soon as she had finished the politician sat bolt upright, pulled the scarves from his neck and from his now totally shrivelled penis, and stumbled to his feet to start hunting for his clothes.

  Pauline crossed to Larkin. “Am I done for the night, lover?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Pauline.”

  “Pleasure, love,” the transvestite said, pulling her underwear back on and picking up her skimpy red dress from the floor. As she stepped into it Larkin spoke.

  “Here,” he said and handed her some bills. “Hundred.”

  “Smashing. One step closer to Denmark,” she said, and turned around. “Could you do me up at the back? There’s a darl.”

  Larkin zipped Pauline up. She stashed the money in her handbag and retrieved a fake leopardskin coat from where it was draped over an armchair. Larkin thought she couldn’t have been less subtle about her status if she’d walked round with a neon sign over her head.

  “Well, I’ll be off then.”

  “Er … just a minute.” It was Houchen.

  Pauline sighed, rolled her eyes heavenward and delved into her bag, bringing out a pen and a scrap of paper.

  “What’ll I make it out for? Services rendered?”

  “Anythin’ you like. A receipt’s a receipt.”

  She handed him the paper. “That all right for you?”

  He looked at it, grunted, and put it in his pocket. “Cheers, Pauline.”

  “Don’t mention it, sweetie.” She turned to the politician. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure. But I’d be a lyin’ old cow. Ta ta. Bye, Stephen – Ian. Give me a ring if you need me.”

  They said goodbye and she swept out.

  The councillor had managed to pull on his trousers; his shirt had defeated him. He sat hunched on the sid
e of the bed, a sad sack of humanity.

  Larkin moved to the armchair and sat down. “Well,” he said, “party’s died a death, hasn’t it?”

  “Just say what you have to say and then let me leave.”

  The man’s self-pity was as strong as his sweat; Larkin caught a whiff and almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  Larkin sighed. “That’s the trouble with you people. Money, money, money.” He leaned forward. “There are more important things, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Such as?”

  Larkin reached into his leather jacket, drew out some folded pieces of paper and handed them to the politician.

  “Look.”

  The councillor unfolded them and looked.

  “Familiar?”

  “Well, yes, but … I don’t see how—”

  “Then let me tell you. What you’ve got in your hot little hand is a list of all the companies that you and your cronies have some kind of stake in.”

  “That’s a matter of public record. You can’t—”

  “Let me finish.” Houchen handed him another sheaf of papers. The politician leafed through them, turning so pale it was as if the blood had been drained from his body.

  “You led us a merry old paperchase. But we tracked you down. We got there in the end. The Rebirth of the Region, you lot call it. Your so-called grand scheme to rejuvenate the North East with lots of lovely lottery money. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great idea.” Larkin leaned into the councillor’s face. “But let’s look closer. It’s all the schemes, all the urban renewal projects, that you’re supposed to have been in charge of. And guess what. It’s all your companies that have got the contracts. Look even closer and you can see where you’ve paid yourself consultancy fees to do the job the taxpayer already pays you to do.”