Savage Children (John Savage Action Thriller Book 3), page 1
Table Of Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Savage Children
Peter Boland
Savage Children (John Savage Action Thriller Book 3).
Copyright © Peter Boland 2019.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or organisations is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the author.
Prologue
“I want you to draw a picture for me,” the Archangel says.
The voice is strange and unfamiliar to the girl, as is the room. It’s dark and cramped and smells weird, like that chemical smell in the swimming baths, mingled with something more vinegary. The girl is called Sally and she doesn’t know how she got here, sitting at a desk, staring at a blank piece of paper and a shiny new set of colouring pencils arranged neatly beside it. She tries to send her mind back to the point where she arrived at this place or stopped being where she was before, but the memory has been rubbed out, like her school work when she knows she’s done it wrong.
She squirms in her seat and says, “I want to go home.” A tear makes itself known at the corner of her eye. More quickly follow. Soon a whole procession chase each other down her hot, red cheeks. “Please. I want my mum,” she sobs.
“I want you to draw a picture for me.” The Archangel’s voice is more insistent now. A tinge of impatience colouring every word.
“I want my mum,” Sally repeats, her voice growing smaller with each syllable. She doesn’t dare turn around to look at her captor—she’s too terrified—so she keeps her eyes front, focused on the small pool of light from a lamp next to her; the only light in the room.
Behind her the Archangel exhales, a sigh of resignation. “Yes, of course, you’ll see Mummy soon. But first, let’s draw her a lovely picture. The best work you can possibly do. Better than anything you’ve ever done.”
“I want to go home.” Sally’s fear switches to desperation, her sobs threatening to become screams. “I want to go home.”
“Have another lolly,” says the Archangel.
Over her shoulder, a slender hairless arm places the odd-shaped confection in the centre of the paper. She’s had one of these before. It’s about the only thing she can remember about this place. She liked it a lot. Sally takes it in her small, trembling hand and examines it, turning it over in her soft fingers. Most lollies she buys from the sweet shop have a thin little stick and a big bulbous boiled sweet stuck to the end. But this lolly is the opposite. The sweet part is small and cone-shaped, almost like a tiny lamp shade, while the stick is large, made of flattened plastic. Without thinking she pops it in her mouth. A fruity, syrupy fizz floods her tongue. It’s nice. Comforting. Taking her mind off where she is.
After a few minutes of sucking, she says, “These lollies are funny.”
“Funny in what way?” asks the Archangel.
“They make me feel all warm and tingly inside.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“I feel sleepy,” Sally adds. “And floaty. Like I’m flying.”
“Well,” says the Archangel. “That’s lucky, because I want you to draw a picture of an angel. A very special angel.”
“Why’s it special?”
“It’s special because the angel is going to be you.”
Chapter 1
DCI Nick Sutcliffe wasn’t what you’d call a happy man. In fact, if asked, he’d be hard pressed to pinpoint a moment in time when he remembered the headiness of joy, or the rush of laughter, or the sweet honey of elation. For his was a life defined by degrees of glumness. A scale that ranged from feeling low at one end to total misery or volcanic anger at the other. In recent months, this had been exacerbated by relentless insomnia, the pressures of the job acting like a powerful amphetamine on his frayed brain. Sleep eluded him, and the second he would shut his eyes, images of everything he’d seen and heard from all his years on the job would jam up his head like junk emails. He’d seen the worst humanity had to offer, and his head was a septic tank, overflowing with the vileness that people managed to inflict on each other.
In the past, he’d fed off it, thrived off it. The chance to right wrongs and make a difference, be a force for good, just like the police recruitment ads had promised. But the force for bad had pushed back and was now winning. Like a Dementor from Harry Potter, it’d sucked every last drop of hope or positivity he possessed. Some coppers turned to drink to blot it out. Sutcliffe had refused to be another cliché. So instead he just didn’t sleep, and became a perpetual grump, as opposed to an insufferable drunk.
Sutcliffe swivelled his legs out of bed, picked up his sleep diary and scrawled ‘Sweet FA’ in it, or tried to, but the pen had run out so he threw both pen and diary across the room. The diary had been his therapist’s idea. She’d said it would identify his sleep patterns. But he already knew his patterns of sleep. He never got any. Committing it to paper wouldn’t make a difference.
This time of year didn’t help. Sutcliffe hated all times of the year, no matter what month showed on the calendar, but he hated this one more than most. Late spring. Tormenting for an insomniac. Why the sun felt the need to rise at four thirty in the morning he could never fathom; light spearing through the curtains when it should be dark; bloody birds outside chirping away like winged crack addicts. The dawn chorus, indeed. People got all doe-eyed about it, as if it were designed for humans to serenade us into wakefulness. In reality, it was nothing more than Mother Nature being anti-social; birds showing off how hard they were, warning other birds to get lost—“look how noisy and strong I am, now back away from my branch or you’ll be sorry”. The bird equivalent of strutting around on a Saturday night being loud and obnoxious with your tattooed guns out. No one would put up with it if it were people making that racket. He’d march out there and slap ASBOs on all the trees if some idiot in Whitehall hadn’t done away with them.
He reached for his phone. The screen informed him he’d missed a voicemail from Roberts.
“Godammit!” he shouted.
She’d called forty minutes ago, but his bloody phone hadn’t rung. He kept telling his mobile phone provider that the signal had started dropping out where he lived but all they’d said was they’d tested it, and everything seemed fine. Of course they’d say that. He needed to change phone companies but when would he get the time to do that? And why was Roberts in work before him? He knew why. To make him look bad. The young, female DI, keen and smart, getting the jump on the worn-out old dog. He’d seen that before, he’d been that before. Got promoted by being better than his boss when he was her age. Well, he wasn’t out of it yet, sleep or no sleep.
He hit the play button and his phone’s recorded robotic voice shamed him by reminding him again that he had one missed call. “Yes, I know. Get on with it,” he said to the disembodied voice.
Roberts’ message played in his ear. “Sir, we’ve got another one. Girl by the name of Sally Woodrow. Parents reported her missing two days ago. Disappeared from a park in Tooting Bec on May 22nd. Parents received a drawing in the post. Same scenario. I’ve texted a shot of it to you. The drawing’s at the lab for analysis. Thought it was best to get the ball rolling.”
Sutcliffe swore. Then swore again a few more times. He checked his phone. No text had come through. Bloody rubbish phone company. But he already knew what the image would be. A child’s drawing in coloured pencil, drawn by Sally Woodrow of herself as an angel, complete with wings and halo, her name written in the top right-hand corner.
The serial child abductor they’d nicknamed the Archangel had been busy again. So far, no bodies had turned up, so they were keeping an open mind. But with a person who took kids and made them draw pictures of themselves as heavenly creatures
Chapter 2
Two weeks later
Savage watched the online retail giant, or Lev as he was better known, drive up onto the pavement. Savage called him the online retail giant because of his dimensions—six-foot-six and square as a house—and because he delivered goods for an online retail giant. Savage got excited whenever he saw Lev’s Sprinter van rattling up his road, past the line of handsome Edwardian terraced houses, converted into flats. For Savage there was no greater pleasure of living in the twenty-first century than being able to prod a picture on a screen one day, and have its real-life counterpart turn up on your doorstep the next.
Lev parked his van at a jaunty angle, straddling Savage’s next-door neighbour’s driveway. Something that Savage heartily encouraged him to do because he knew it annoyed the hell out of his neighbour. And Lev was only too happy to oblige.
Lev slid out of the cab clutching a large box and a handheld delivery device. Before Lev even had a chance to knock, Savage had the door open, smiling.
“John, I bring gift for you,” Lev said, smiling back and passing him the box. Savage took it in one hand and made a quick squiggle on the screen of Lev’s device with the other.
“Thanks, Lev. My new T-shirt. Couldn’t have come at a better time. Going to put it on and sit in my garden.”
“Yes, is very nice day.”
Savage tore open the box and delved inside. There was far too much packaging for his liking, especially considering what the box held; three items of clothing, one of which was a T-shirt. But it wasn’t just any old T-shirt. A T-shirt of Savage’s favourite band, The Jam. He fished around, pushing aside the twisted lengths of brown packing paper and pulled out a neat, flat, folded square sheathed in cellophane. Savage put down the box, split open the cellophane and unfurled the crisp white T-shirt, revealing the distinctive logo of the band, a simple spray-painted design. He proudly held it aloft.
“Best band in the world.”
“Meh,” Lev muttered.
“What do you mean, ‘meh’?”
“Jam is good. Clash is better.”
“Oh, no,” said Savage. “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t get me wrong. I love The Clash. But The Jam has the edge on them, easily.”
Lev shook his head. “No, no. London Calling. Is best record.”
Savage could feel one of their doorstep debates coming on, which he relished. Savage liked nothing better than a good, friendly bit of banter about which music or movie was best. And he knew Lev did too, probably to the annoyance of all the people who were waiting for their packages to be delivered.
“London Calling is a sublime record,” said Savage. “I have several copies of it myself. But you can’t compare it to Going Underground. It’s an urban hymn. The youthful anger of the suburbs. Whereas, London Calling is more melancholic.”
“Melancholic?”
“You know, sad.”
Lev screwed his face up. “Is not sad. Is Clash. Is punk rock. Angry too.”
“Yes, but in a different way.”
Savage patiently listened to Lev exploring why The Clash’s lyrics were better, until the portly figure of his next-door neighbour appeared in his field of vision. Frank stood on his doorstep, pot belly sagging over his boxer shorts, stained T-shirt and dressing gown hanging open to let every passer-by see the result of a man who had no direction in life. He held an Xbox controller in one hand, like he always did when he came to the door.
“Hey,” said Frank. “I’ve told you not to park over my driveway, you Polish idiot.” Frank always got up in arms whenever someone parked over his driveway, which Savage could completely understand except that Frank didn’t have a car, unless you counted the decaying Ford Mondeo that sat on his potholed concrete drive, resting on its axles because it had no wheels and no engine. It had an engine once, but they had parted company long ago and the engine now resided in Frank’s back garden, along with several other of Frank’s abandoned projects, which included a conservatory (still in pieces), the carcass of a Volkswagen Beetle, a moulded plastic pond (full of green water) waiting to be sunk into the ground, and mountains of discarded building products Frank had taken from skips because it was “free stuff” and he could make something out of it. The one common denominator all this detritus had was that he never made anything of it, and once it had entered Frank’s garden it was doomed to stay there, the grass growing up around it.
Looking at this eyesore every day had led Savage to grow what he called the “Berlin Wall” in his back garden. An eight-foot-high privet hedge to block out the graveyard of abandoned rubbish that resided next door.
“I want you to move it now,” Frank demanded, waving his Xbox controller in the air.
Lev winked at Savage, then turned to Frank. “I sorry. I move for you. I go now.”
“Lev is working, Frank,” Savage called to him. “You remember work, don’t you?”
Frank nearly threw his controller on the ground. “Hey, I’ve been signed off with stress. Doctor says I’m not allowed to work.” Frank used to be a drill-press operator, making holes in steel all day. It ranked in the top ten of the least stressful jobs you could do alongside being an ice-cream taster and testing cuddly toys for softness. “Anyway,” Frank continued. “Doesn’t look like he’s working. Looks like he’s talking crap with you again about that rubbish music you like. And anyway, Savage, you don’t work either.”
“It’s called retirement,” Savage replied. “It’s what you do after working.”
Frank mouthed the word wanker under his breath and went inside, slamming the door behind him. Savage waved goodbye to Lev, telling him their debate would be continued.
Inside his flat he opened the plastic wrapping of his other package. He had ordered himself what he called some house trousers. Like a person finally accepting they needed glasses, Savage had succumbed to the joyful pleasure of an elasticated waistband for mooching around his flat. Two pairs for twenty quid, both sky blue. A bargain. He slipped out of his jeans and pulled a pair on, then gave a sigh of satisfaction as he stood in front of his bedroom mirror. Then he tried on his new T-shirt and tucked it in. Not the trendy way to wear a T-shirt, but he didn’t care. Both fitted perfectly; roomy and comfortable, though both in a slightly larger size than he would have once chosen. Though Savage was a regular at the gym and liked to keep in shape and watch what he ate, he had to admit that his midriff was increasing, having made some sort of Machiavellian deal with his hair; as his belly got thicker, his hair got thinner. What’s more, as the hairs fled from his head, they had no trouble appearing in places where they really weren’t wanted, like out of his ears or nostrils. What evolutionary purpose this served he couldn’t fathom, other than to broadcast to females that this male was well past his sell-by date, and was best avoided.
Savage shrugged in the mirror. He didn’t care. The only woman he had ever loved, his wife Dawn, had died, taken by that wretched disease, cancer. She was the only woman for him and was irreplaceable. He’d stay single for the rest of his life. Stay faithful to her even in death.
His daughter Kelly had also passed away, on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Blown to pieces by a roadside bomb.
The only two people he cared about had gone, leaving a void he knew would never be filled by anyone else. But it did get filled by something quite unwanted. All the guilt and remorse he’d buried deep in the darkest corners of his mind had swept in like a storm to fill the vacuum they’d left. It grew and grew, threatening to blot out any happiness Savage had left, which wasn’t much. It had grown so strong that it spoke to Savage when he was at his lowest and most desperate. Taking the form of a berating voice in his head, it flung torments at him, goading him to take his own life to atone for all the people he’d killed on his SAS missions. How many had he killed? Savage had lost count. It was definitely in the hundreds. A fact that the sneering voice would remind him of whenever it got the chance.
He’d grown so accustomed to the voice, he’d given it a name—Jeff Perkins. Somehow, naming the voice had made it sound less threatening, and now whenever Jeff Perkins went off on a malicious diatribe, Savage would imagine a stiff, pencil-necked man in a shirt and tie. An uptight creature who hated himself, which wasn’t far from Savage’s own truth, as Jeff was almost certainly the personification of Savage’s self-loathing. Nevertheless, Jeff Perkins was a dangerous influence and had to be managed and corralled to stop Savage wanting to kill himself. Jeff had almost succeeded once, and Savage had put a gun to the side of his head, but had seen sense and got help.
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