D.S Proctor

By James Churchill

In the city of Chester it is said to be legal to kill a Welshman in cold blood.

Now it has happened. A Welshman lies dead, shot in the back from atop the city walls.

Tasked with finding the killer, D.S Simon Proctor is painfully aware that, even if he succeeds, there may be no hope of bringing him to justice. This murderer may have committed no crime at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Churchill
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386644651

James Churchill

James Patrick Churchill was born in York, England, but grew up in Greater Manchester. He studied history and archaeology at Bangor University before starting work as a writer and publishing his first book, now called Spawn, in 2012. As well as fiction he writes travel pieces and essays and in his spare time makes videos for the internet.

Book preview

For Hercule,

And for all the others who taught me how to catch a killer

This book is a work of fiction. Although many of the places mentioned are real, the people within them are not. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This Edition ©James Churchill- 2018

The thing about murder, at least when it appears on television, is this: It is never realistic. Even those programmes that claim to be realistic don’t even come close. The writers always overcomplicate things and blow everything up into ridiculous proportions for the sake of entertainment. They throw in a slew of murders (usually three) and include a long, drawn out search to find a killer who, it turns out, was right under the nose of the detective the entire time. That self-same detective always misses a vital clue and he or she won’t find it until right at the end, and at that point they’ll instantly work out who did it, as though it were obvious all along. You can also guarantee that the murderer will also disappear from the story for a while, just so that the writer can throw in a few red herrings to complicate matters.

Real murder investigations are much simpler and far more straightforward, some would even go so far as to say boring. In most circumstances we know who did it within a few hours and most of the time there is only ever one murder. We police also never take our eyes off a suspect until we are absolutely one hundred percent certain that they’re innocent. There is no disappearing for a while in a real murder investigation.

What irritates me most, however, is the way the detectives on television are portrayed. They spend their entire careers solving a never ending stream of insane murders with some dimwitted sidekick always trailing two steps behind, and then at the end of each case their murderer will usually throw themselves under a bus or off a building or something. Nowhere in the world does any detective have that many murders in their career. Most cops are lucky to even get one murder.

There’s always some dysfunction going on as well. The detective is always a maverick or has an alcohol problem or is divorced and never sees his daughter or some such malarkey. Ok, so I do know more than my fair share of divorced cops but that’s to be expected. Policing is a tough job, even at the best of times. I myself, for instance, have been divorced for over sixteen years now. But I (and most others) don’t allow that to play into my work and I’ve always made time for my son, Corwen. I’ve always put him before the job and if there is one thing I can say with absolute certainty it is that I am not dysfunctional. In no way am I dysfunctional. I don’t know anybody else who is either.

I threw the remote down in a huff. After going through nearly five hundred channels I had found nothing I wanted to watch and in the process had come across an extraordinarily large amount of those aforementioned crime programmes, more so than was normal for a Tuesday night, and presumably all variations on the above. I’m even sure there were two different adaptations of the same Miss Marple story playing on two different channels.

I got up to switch the television off at the plug and then glanced up at the clock. It was almost eleven. If I went to bed now then it might be possible for me to drift into a deep enough sleep so as not to be woken up when Corwen drunkenly clattered through the front door with some random girl he’d picked up in a bar somewhere. This would be followed by a sexualised Shakespeare misquote, (usually something cringeworthy along the lines of ‘let me give you the stuff that dreams are made of,’) and soon after would begin at least fifty minutes of loud and raucous intercourse between Corwen and whoever he was with. I was frequently having to apologise to the neighbours for this and, personally, that sound always disgusted me. I’m not a prude or anything like that. Sex is entirely natural and the desire to have sex is only human. In my life I have slept with a number of different women but I just don’t want to hear anybody else doing it, let alone my own son. Sex should be an intimate, personal experience. It should happen behind closed doors and nobody else should know about it. Throughout the years I have had numerous words with Corwen about this unwarranted noise, over the breakfast table, but none of them have ever done any good, alas.

Unfortunately he must get his sexual attitudes from his mother, Anna’s, side of the family. They are all loud and promiscuous and I still shudder whenever I recall the wedding night of Corwen’s cousin, when there were six of them (and their partners) all going at it at the same time. Between them they managed to be so noisy that I thought the building might collapse around my ears. It was fair to say that I hadn’t slept that night and nor, from the sound of it, had anybody else.

Pushing whatever Corwen might be getting up to from my mind I went upstairs, undressed and climbed into bed. I had a book on the sideboard, a Catherine Cookson, but I wasn’t in much of a mood for reading so I just switched out the light and threw myself against the pillow, feeling my limbs ease up and every muscle give their nightly cry of anguish.

I must have surely fallen asleep, I don’t recall doing so, as by the time I lifted my head again it was gone one o’clock and I could hear a broad valley’s accent in the hallway asking ‘are these your tits I see before me, their nipps towards my hand?’ It was far from Corwen’s best line, in fact it was one of his worst, but that wasn’t what had awoken me. It was the phone on the sideboard. It was bleating, calling out that I was probably required to attend a road traffic accident across town. It was either that or someone in Nigeria was trying to defraud me with claims that I had inherited a dukedom. I scrambled for the receiver and placed it to my ear.

If you’ve rang to say I’ve inherited a dukedom I don’t want it, I snatched, leaving the phone by my ear to make sure the call wasn’t important. It was.

Sorry Proctor, no dukedom tonight. Just a dead man outside the Grosvenor. It was my D.C.I, Gareth Thomlinson, and I sat up in bed, pushing my pillow up behind me.

What’s up Gov? I asked, wiping the sleep from my eyes.

Like I said, a dead man outside the Grosvenor. Come as soon as you’re awake. The buzz at the other end told me that Thomlinson had hung up.

I fell out of bed and pulled on yesterday’s work clothes. They would do for the time being and I could change again in the morning when whatever business outside the Grosvenor had concluded. It probably wouldn’t take long.

I brewed myself a quick coffee to perk myself up and after taking it all in one go I left the house and climbed into my Infiniti G37 Convertible, the car I had bought during my mid-life crisis a few years back.

It may not have been to everybody’s taste, even Corwen hated it and derogatorily referred to it as ‘the Nissan,’ but I quite liked the thing. It was a good driver and there was plenty of leg room to stretch out in.

Putting the top down, I set the gear box to manual and was soon on my way to the city centre with the sounds of the Bee-Gees flowing from the speaker system.

It wasn’t far from my home in Boughton Heath to the centre of Chester, only about a mile, and ten minutes after setting off I rolled up in front of the Disney Store with ‘Tragedy’ blaring out from the speakers. Perhaps it was not the best thing to have been playing in hindsight, but I don‘t really care. It was just a song and it harmed no one. As I made my way towards the police cordon set up across Eastgate, just before the city wall, the two uniforms guarding it raised their eyebrows and looked at each other with a coy smile.

What have we got? I snapped at one of them whilst passing under the cordon.

Businessman by the name of Dewi Croft sarge, one of them answered. Shot from behind with an arrow, sometime just after midnight.

Christ! I blasphemed. That was all I needed, an actual homicide on my beat. I passed under the wall and saw the SOCOs buzzing around outside the Grosvenor. Thomlinson waved to me from the nearby pavement and as I approached he silently pointed to the ground.

Lying face down, half on and half off the pavement, was a rotund man in his mid-forties, bald, thick set with a neck of many folds. He was wearing a black business suit and from the small of his back there protruded a large, green fletched arrow, embedded so that the flight pointed upwards, at an angle somewhere around forty five degrees, towards his head. I looked in the direction he had been facing and then turned around. The trajectory of the arrow was immediately clear based on both the direction it had come from and the way it had penetrated the body. Whoever shot this man must have targeted him from on top of the wall.

The man is Dewi Croft, Thomlinson explained. "Forty three, from Wrecsam. He owns a media publishing company down there, Iard-Ysgubor Cyhoeddi. They run Cymraeg Magazine and a few others."

Well I think it’s quite obvious what happened here. Some fool took a dislike to him or something he’s been publishing and decided to take a pot shot at him from the wall.

It’s a little more than that I’m afraid, Thomlinson grimaced. The M.O fits with a certain urban legend.

Urban legend?

You know the one? No? About how it’s legal to shoot a Welshman with a bow and arrow within the city walls after midnight? I had not heard of this before but it sounded ridiculous and quite untrue.

That isn’t true is it? Please tell me it isn’t true! If it were true we were up shit creek. How could we catch a killer who was protected by the law? I didn’t get a direct answer to my question as Thomlinson merely shrugged. I moved on.

Well what about witnesses? Who found the body? I folded my arms, demanding answers from my superior.

There were no witnesses to the murder, so far as we know, but the body was found by a girl who goes by the name of Elsie MacGonagall, a concierge at the hotel. She‘s waiting for us in the lobby.

Good. Anybody been up to the wall yet?

Only to close it off.

We’ll check up there first. Leave the girl to sweat for a bit longer. Could be that she’s guilty. It might have sounded cruel, but even