Cold North

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

This is the third novel in the Andy North Crime Series. A fifteen-year old girl is found naked and face down in a river in Marshland Woods; an obese Carer is discovered shot in a cheap motel; an deaf old lady is shot dead in her own home; and all these deaths can to be connected to another fifteen-year old girl, Becky Anderson. This is a novel about drugs, about grooming, about sexual abuse and Detective Sergeant Andy North, fighting off his personal demons of rage and depression; with his loyal sidekick, Ellie Tonbridge ever the voice of reason and calm; set out to solve the crimes, to avenge the deaths and possibly bring down the most notorious drug dealer in the County.
Another hard crime novel from the imagination of S.D. Gripton, the man who writes the books you like to read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Oct 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370872541

S.D. Gripton

S.D. Gripton novels and real crime books are written by Dennis Snape, who is married to Sally who originate from North Wales and Manchester respectively and who met 18 years ago. I work very hard to make a reading experience a good one, with good plots and earthy language. I enjoy writing and hope readers enjoy what I have written. I thank everyone who has ever looked at at one of my books.

Book preview

Cold North

An Andy North Crime Novel

By

S.D. Gripton

Copyright © Sally Dillon-Snape & Dennis Snape (2022)

The moral right of the authors is hereby asserted in accordance with The Copyright Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication other than those of fact and historical significance available in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher

If you are reading this novel, or have gifted it to someone else and have not purchased it, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Please think of the dark, cold nights of misery as the authors attempted to put this novel together. Thank you

A Smashwords Edition

Front cover by Mike Evans

Chapter 1

The Leap

A man could set his watch by her. At exactly 2:00am every morning she appeared, seven nights a week without fail; been like that for over a year, appearing like a wraith, a spirit, slim and tall and haunted, looking like a ghost, always dressed in the same long cream raincoat and white shoes come summer or spring, rain or snow or warm autumn nights. Old man Allard was the man who could set his watch by her; at least he could have done if he used one.

She lived in a house down the road from where Allard lived with his own family; where his family had lived since the days of King George III, a time when the King granted Lord Grunwald the right to charge a toll to cross both his land and a stone-built bridge that provided a route across a swift running river, too narrow for a ferry, too deep and fast moving for wading or riding horses through. Over the many years, the grand Grunwald family had died away; sons doing their duty, killed in wars all around the world, no heirs remaining, the family dying off; the large hall falling first into disrepair then into ruin thence to dust, only historians remembering it nowadays. The working-class Allard family though; who were originally given responsibility for collecting the tolls on behalf of Lord Grunwald and presenting the collected coins to his assayer every evening at 8:00pm; continued to manage the toll bridge; old man Allard being the latest patriarch responsible for it. The same family had collected the toll cash for all that time, no Grunwald’s remaining to hand it over to now, not since the Crimean War, when the last of them had fallen; the Allard family keeping the tolls all to themselves. Only once had their right to collect it been challenged; in 1965; when the challenge was thrown out because, technically, the bridge still stood on land belonging to the Grunwald estate. It was not the Allard family’s fault that there were no Grunwalds’ surviving to hand the money over to. Of course, there were conditions, the ones that were laid down during the reign of George III. To maintain the right to collect the toll the Allard family had to be always led by a patriarch, the senior member of the family had to be male; there could be no matriarchs; if no males were left to inherit the toll, the land and the bridge would become common to all and the tolls would cease. The Allards’, therefore, had to breed boys only, and over the many years they had failed to do this on several occasions; they had only girls to leave the toll bridge to, so the family came up with an ingenious and fairly unique plan; when a daughter married, the man, the husband, had to take the Allard name, the generations would all be Allards’ until a boy could be born, a new patriarch in waiting. It had worked for almost three hundred years and it worked today; when a man married an Allard girl, he took that family’s name. In the event of divorce, the man was automatically disinherited from the toll; a couple of fly-by-nights had challenged that ruling once and had failed; and so it was that Sean Allard, who was the son of such a marriage and who was eighty-years of age, was the regular collector of tolls during the night, the quiet period, traffic dying off after midnight, the old man sitting and dozing in the warmth of the booth, lifting the barrier for the occasional car, the bridge too narrow for wagons and trucks; cars and small vans only. Seven-nights a week Allard worked; occasionally one grandson would do a single night shift for pocket money; Sean Allard proud of his family’s history, of being part of the fabric of the country and the county, the family and the bridge featuring in several television documentaries over the years; and he already had several grandsons so there was no need to worry about a new patriarch for some time.

The only thing he worried about was the girl, the ghost.

He remembered her from when she was a chattering girl, an intelligent child, always smiling, walking across the bridge holding her mother’s hand, swinging between her parents, laughing and giggling; Allard watching her on her first day of school, her first day at University, the first time he saw the beautiful young woman holding the hand of her lover and, later, husband, both of them joyously happy; her husband being a policeman in the City, a good man himself, making a wonderful couple, backwards and forwards across the bridge to her parents’ house. The day of the wedding was a marvellous affair, many cars coming and going, old man Allard making the decision not to charge them; raising the barriers to allow them free access, his whole family lining the bridge waving and throwing confetti, everybody happy.

Until that happiness came to a juddering halt.

The girl, Zoé her name was, who was born and bred in a house on the other side of the bridge, the side away from the City; the stone bridge and the Allard house being lifted high into the air when a huge canal was constructed beneath it, a metal bridge being added to the stone one so that, together, they spanned it, the toll still in place; where Zoé now lived again with those same parents. Her husband, the policeman, rarely appeared any longer; the marriage shattered, the cop drifting away into his own life; the girl Zoé, a woman now, being a broken individual; being abducted and tortured, the sensational trial making all the media, crazy people taking her, nutters in Sean Allard’s opinion; only appearing now at 2:00am, the deep dark of the night; a girl who’d loved the sunlight and the daytime; when she moved like a ghost haunting the bridge.

She appeared as usual on this night, Sean Allard watching as she climbed the slight rise from her home and glided past the toll booth, bending around the end of one of the barriers, always walking on the same side of the road, never speaking, never even looking at him, the girl who used to be such a chatterbox now silent, never socialising, never appearing in daylight, walking with her head up, her features drawn and painful, her raincoat fastened as it always was, up to her neck, making barely a sound, a swish of material, a click of a heel, nothing more, Sean Allard turning in his chair to watch her through the grimy windows of the booth, the toll booth still wooden, being updated shortly. He watched as she walked in the half-light, slipping in and out of shadows, more ghostly than ever.

A car came; headlights shining; Sean Allard dealing with it, collecting the toll, raising a barrier, watching it go, turning and looking for the girl, knowing exactly where she walked each night.

And there she was.

No, she wasn’t.

It was only her coat and her white shoes that he could see. There was no sight or sign of the girl, of sad Zoé.

Sean Allard gaped, climbed from his stool and from his booth, hobbled on arthritic knees to where the clothing lay, bending with difficulty and touching the articles as if she might be hiding beneath them though she wasn’t; he lifted his head, looked right, looked left, straightened up, no sight of her.

There was only one way she could have gone.

She could only have gone over the four feet high stone wall that lined the bridge and down into the cold waters of the canal…

…one hundred and twenty feet below.

Oh my God, he said, hobbling towards his home, calling out to his family through the darkness.

Oh my God.

***

The Funeral

Andy North didn’t want to play, he didn’t want to work either, but the women in his life wouldn’t allow him make those decisions on his own. He was broken again, life had become too much for him; he surrendered, he gave up.

The wonderful wife he once had, the one who had been abducted and tortured, had taken her own life; she’d jumped from the toll bridge and dropped one-hundred-and-twenty-feet into the dark cold waters of a canal that connected an inland City with the sea, from where it could market its goods beyond the far horizons. She hadn’t called him, hadn’t texted, hadn’t emailed, she’d given him no opportunity to help, maybe to talk her out of her intended action; at least given him the opportunity. He may not have been able to help but she didn’t give him the chance; she took the decision all on her own; she just jumped, life becoming too much for her, deciding to end it by leaping into the dark. He lived every single one of the feet that she fell; imagining the fear she suffered having made the decision, the fall through utter darkness, lights twinkling in the distance but nothing near; just a long dark silent lonely fall. Then the impact; he knew her, she would have hit the water in such a way as to cause herself maximum damage, she would have hit it flat; when he empathised with her. he could feel it, his stomach stinging, his heart thumping; he was with her all the way down, all the way into oblivion. She wouldn’t have wanted to live, she would have hit the water to hurt herself then she would have slowly gone down into the depths, down and down, her lungs collapsing from the impact, very little water required to drown her; that was her plan, he knew it as if it had been his own plan; his own leap; his own death. She’d waited to see if life became any more tolerant following her abduction and the rescue by her husband when he dived into the same canal to save her from where she’d been thrown by uncaring psychopaths. Once he’d rescued her she never gave him a second chance. She’d obviously given life a chance and it hadn’t gotten any better, worse if anything; isolating herself in her parents’ house, them allowing her to do it, thinking they were helping when they weren’t, not passing on his messages to her, denying him access, allowing her to divorce him, the man who’d loved her more than any other human being, certainly more than her parents. They blamed him for her death; for not rescuing her fast enough following her abduction, agreeing with her opinion that he was neither professional enough as a policeman nor caring enough as a husband to find her, when he had knocked himself out, almost literally, in his efforts to rescue her.

Now she was gone.

His beautiful Zoé gone from this place; the last years of her life being unbearable, unbearable for him, too, except he was beginning to recover with the aid of Ellie Tonbridge, his live-in housemate and colleague, and Astrid Kristiansen, the City Assistant Pathologist, the recent love of his life, both women beautiful, only one of them available to him, Ellie liking her own species for her own lovers.

They nagged; oh, how they nagged, the women in his life. Not letting him sleep in when he didn’t want to rise, almost forcing food down him; only letting him consume small amounts of alcohol, urging him to exercise, making him jog with them, even if he gasped all the way round; not wanting to do it, not wanting to run or talk or return to work or even to continue with his life. Like Zoé, he wanted to end it; he wanted the torture to be over, too. Except they never left him alone, there was always one or more of them, being aided and abetted by Stacy Carrington, Ellie’s current lover, and any other female friend they could drag into caring for him. Andy North cried often, always finding an attractive shoulder to lean on, and so it carried on until the day of the funeral, the one he’d been ordered to stay away from by John and Sheila Parish, Zoé’s parents, Andy ignoring those orders, the women ignoring them too.

They didn’t go to the house and neither did they send flowers, Andy North couldn’t bear the thought that the last message to his wife would be trashed, the flowers stamped on or worse by John Parish, so he waited with Ellie and Astrid and Stacy at the church along with lots of other people, most of the Allard family to begin with, people Andy knew well, people he spoke to and shook hands with, introducing his female bodyguards to them all; Old Man Allard being particularly empathetic, telling Andy he was on duty in the booth when it happened, when she leapt, couldn’t believe it; he raised the alarm, Andy knowing the old man would have done his best, he’d seen Zoé grow up, had a deep affection for her. Andy also knew that Zoé was pulled up from the water by Police Divers; a couple of whom were at the church; riding an inflatable, two of them in the boat, three more on the bank, one of them finding Zoé floating beneath the surface, still face down, grey with death, bringing her up gently, all of them treating her gently.

When the funeral cortege arrived; five cars headed by the hearse leading the family car; as it passed by, John Parish stared from the car window and espied Andy North standing with all the others. He immediately began to shout through the glass and wanted to start a fight, one he would have won as Andy would not have resisted his punches, but his wife, Sheila, restrained him, reminding him why he was here at the church, to bury their daughter, their only child, only thirty-one years of age, a once beautiful woman. John Parish remained restrained throughout the ceremony, throughout the