Bleeding Hearts: DI Steven Marr, #2

By Shaun Edwards

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Join hundreds of others in enjoying this page-turning story from UK crime fiction author SP Edwards.

Andrei Dalca is one of the most exciting young footballers in England. He's young, gorgeous and talented.

And dead.

His body's been found, gutted, at a local Halloween event, leaving Marr with 400 potential suspects and no evidence.

How can he get a result in a case where nothing is what it seems?

BLEEDING HEARTS is a thrilling, dark story with an ending that'll leave you open-mouthed in shock.

About The Author

Shaun Edwards has always had an interest in the darker side of human nature. As a result, he spent most of his late teens nicking UK crime thriller books from his mum's bookcase. Have devoured pretty much everything by Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin, John Harvey and John Connolly, he decided to start writing his own stuff.

Ten years later, he pulled his finger out and actually did it. 'Til Death is the combination of coffee, and a deep love for Banks, Rebus, Resnick, Thorne and Charlie Parker.

Besides writing and reading whodunnit mysteries, crime fiction and thrillers, Shaun's other loves include noodling around on the guitar, going for long walks, eating too much pizza and laughing at pictures of pugs.

He lives in London. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shaun Edwards
• Release date: Feb 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393240297

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

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Andrei Dalca loved dressing up, because it meant that no-one knew who he was. It had become harder, recently, to go shopping or go out without photos being taken or fans wanting selfies.

Even if they denied it, most men wanted to be famous. The desire for status seemed to be hard-wired, probably because status was another way of saying ‘more likely to get laid’. More likely to be the one that men want to be, and women want to be with.

Most of the time, Andrei loved it. He liked the way girls chatted him up; the way photographers appeared whenever he went out. Magazines had started calling too: wanting to know everything from where he bought his suits to when he was planning to pop the question.

Inevitably, though, he’d also started to feel a bit lonely. Once you became famous, you couldn’t be normal. That was the trade-off. Wherever you went, people treated you like you weren’t even human. You were a thing off the TV, and that was all. Once or twice, he'd even found himself asking whether it was worth it.

When he’d come over to the UK, Andrei’s mother had come too. It would have been nice to ask her what he should do about the changes in his life.  The trouble was, he already knew what her answer would be. A few times, he even went along with it: prayers, asking for help from the divine.

Andrei hadn’t really believed since he was twelve. He'd seen a homeless woman, frozen to death by the side of a road. From then it had been obvious: God - the Catholic God - couldn't be real. Like millions of others around the world, Andrei couldn’t square the suffering with the message of love. Not when there was so much more evidence for the former.

So, Andrei decided to work hard and try to chase his dreams. What was the point in doing anything else?

It had been tough, but here he was: about to move to the league he’d loved as a kid. He'd be just like his heroes.

And he’d have the love of his life with him.

Andrei had never been in love before. He’d had the same embarrassing encounters that all teenage boys did. Girls in his class, girls from around the estate where he'd lived. He’d been a good-looking kid, and wasn’t short of offers.

But, none of them had come close to making him feel like this one had.

Being in love - truly in love - was unlike anything else. In one sense, it was simply frustrating.  Andrei's inability to focus on anything but his feelings felt almost weak to him. Control over your thoughts was what made you a man, wasn’t it?

It had been tempting to let it go. To let it drift past. There would always be others. And his life was about to change forever: he couldn’t afford to let his focus dip. Not now.

For a few days, then, Andrei attempted to do without it. The papers loved gossiping about who he was dating; they were always taking photos of him at clubs with different girls. So, Andre stayed away from nightclubs. He even stopped giving interviews, though he enjoyed them. Slowly, Andrei Dalca had disappeared from the world of celebrity. His life revolved around the training ground and the matches and nothing else.

Andrei had been determined to prove to everyone that his dreams mattered most, and that he would sacrifice anything to achieve them.

Inevitably, his attempt failed.

Every night he sat alone, trying to focus on the next game, he found himself almost shaking at the frustration of simply being without. Without the sex and the comfort and the laughing and the sheer contentment that he’d become used to. No matter how stupid it sounded, Andrei had to admit that being in love had begun to feel like, well, being home.

So, he gave up pretending.

And that was how, a few months later, he’d ended up here. A dark path, well away from the festivities taking place in the main area of the park.

It was a strange place to be in on a night like this: a night when he would change someone’s life for the better. But that made it exciting, too. This would be a moment of real intimacy, and the trouble with fame (or almost-fame, in Andrei’s case) was that intimacy could be hard to find.

Andrei shivered, wishing he’d worn more than a t-shirt beneath his costume. The one he’d picked out was pretty obscure - Rorschach from the Watchmen movie - but it covered his face, which was enough.  This was one day where autograph hunters - even the good-looking ones - could go to hell.

There was a crunch to his right, and Andrei turned around to see Death emerging out of the gloom.

His adrenaline started pumping, involuntarily. It was hard to not react: it was a good costume. The face was completely covered by black material woven into the hood.

But then, Death did a profoundly un-Death like thing: it held up a purple feather.

And then Andrei was laughing, because he knew he was about to change Death’s life, as odd as that sounded.

He couldn’t hold himself back anymore - he was sick of waiting. Andrei ran forward to embrace the hooded figure, and as he did so, Death pulled out a knife and drove it into Andrei’s gut.

It was a quick move. Andrei was fast, but the adrenaline had already taken over and so had the shock. His body was reacting with such intensity he could hardly move as Death drove the knife into him twice more: again in the stomach and then a hard blow to the chest.

Andrei found himself sinking to the floor. He looked up at the blank face, wondering what had gone wrong and trying to cry out but unable to find any breath.

There was some pain, but it was far less than Andrei expected. Already, his vision was blurring and a haze was taking over his thoughts.

Death had already gone, and Andrei knew he was alone. He was going to die here, in a park a thousand miles from where he'd been born.

Though he knew it wouldn’t help, he started to recite the Lord’s Prayer, trying not to cry as he did so.

By the time he should have reached ‘Amen’, Andrei was dead.

CHAPTER TWO

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It was impossible to tell which blood was real.

That was the first thing Detective Inspector Steven Marr noticed when he arrived at Castle Park. It was half-past eight, and there were still a fair few hundred people around, at least half of them dressed as vampires, ghosts and other monsters.

The idea had been a good one, Marr thought. Rather than put on two separate events for Halloween and Bonfire Night, the council had clocked that Halloween was on a Saturday, and had decided to just join the two together. Blood and cobwebs were scattered across the main gates, and the path through the part was lined with gravestones. There were carnival stalls, and a small stage on which local musicians blasted through acoustic covers of songs like Pet Semetary and Highway to Hell.

A number of ghosts and vampires were sat on the grass banks on either side of the path.  Marr guessed that they’d been hired as event staff to scare the visitors. Right now, though, they looked like people in desperate need of a cup of tea and a cuddle: their faces were a mix of shock and sadness.

Events like this were perfect for murder. Everyone looked the same, and half of the people in the park were drunk. Finding a witness would be almost impossible.

And, of course, keeping the incident quiet was even harder. Within five minutes of the 999 phonecall being made, the message of a dead body spread across social media. The more tech-savvy members of the undead army had included the event hashtag, #spookycolchester, in their messages. Marr smiled as he thought of the inevitable marketing meeting the next day.

‘What sort of traction did we get on the hashtag?’

‘I won’t lie boss, it was a bit more murder-y than we’d hoped.’

Marr knew the park quite well - he liked to walk here on his days off - but it was a different beast at night. It would be easy to have a few drinks too many and wonder away from the designated, well-lit areas.

Flicking on his torch, Marr made his way past the rides and stalls, and made his way down the dark hill at the back of the park where the fireworks were set-up. He knew the hill was steep enough to require caution: if you tripped and fell, it was a long way down.

The body had been found by a wanderer who couldn’t wait for the toilet, and Marr was glad to see a torch beam shining up towards him to guide him towards the scene. He didn’t quite trust himself to not get lost: away from the main areas, the park was almost pitch black. As he got closer, though, Marr saw police tape.

There were a few people gathered around the tape, though the area was still relatively quiet.   A few repeats of ‘Inspector, anything to tell us?’ confirmed that those who’d found the cordoned-off area were journalists.

Marr showed his ID to the guarding uniform, before following the torch beam another fifty yards through the dark.

Standing by the body were two men, both of whom Marr recognised. One was Craig Steele, a young Detective Constable who’d joined CID a couple of months ago. The other was Dr Eric Yovanovitch, the pathologist.

‘Evening, Bullet,’ Marr said. Steele nodded, smiling slightly. As soon as he’d joined the force, the DC’s faux-macho name had been picked up for piss-taking. Then, DCI Christopher Brooke had caught an episode of Red Dwarf on TV. In the episode, one of the characters was fooled into believing himself to be detective called ‘Jake Bullet’. DCI Brooke had joyously passed the equally faux-macho name on.

‘How’re the wheels?’ Marr asked the doctor.

‘Gleaming, thank you’, came the reply. Yovanovitch’s passion for cars was almost legendary, and outstripped his love of almost anything else.

The body on the ground was face-up, and despite the distraction of the costume, Marr knew who it was.

‘That’s Andrei Dalca,’ he said.

Bullet and the Doctor both nodded.

Andrei Dalca was generally considered the most exciting young footballer in the country. Having moved to the UK from a no-name club in Italy, he’d lit up the Championship with his skills, pace and goal scoring. A move to a Premier League club was a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’.

‘Who found him?’ Marr asked.

‘Anonymous phonecall,’ Bullet replied, ‘From a payphone in town. I thought it might be a prank, Halloween and all. Luckily I was in town anyway: we could have had a bunch of pissheads find it first and wreck the scene.’

Marr nodded, Bullet was a fairly recent graduate from Edinburgh, and hadn’t yet shaken off that air of the student life. It had rubbed a few people the wrong way, but Marr knew it would wear off soon enough. It didn’t stop Marr liking him, anyway: a dose of optimism could be a good thing in a murder enquiry. It wasn’t like there weren’t enough cynics around to compensate.

Marr looked back up the hill to the main carnival, bright against the dark.

‘How long’s he been dead?’ he asked.

The doctor shrugged.

‘Not much more than an hour to an hour-and-a-half, I’d guess. He’s been stabbed three times, but the one in the chest was the lethal one. Right in the heart. Even allowing for his fitness levels, he’d have been dead in a minute or two.’

Marr nodded. It must have been a surprise attack. Even though he wasn’t the tallest player, Dalca was known for his strength. He wouldn’t be easy to overcome in a straight fight, so Marr guessed there probably hadn’t been one.

‘Any signs of struggle?’ he asked.

Yovanovitch shook his head.

‘No. It looks like there’s a bit of dirt under his nails, maybe he scratched some fibres off his attacker’s clothes, too. I’ll leave that for the CSIs to judge when they get here.’

The CSIs were the forensics, responsible for managing the scene of the crime and for picking up any information that could help them find the killer. Not that Marr held out much hope for the material under the nails. If the killer had been wearing a costume, it would have been made of the same cheap manufactured crap as every other costume in the park. Unfortunately, the thin polyester-type material simply didn’t seem to catch the way wool or even cotton did. Even fingernails zipped off it.

‘I know I’m probably not going to like the answer to this,’ Marr began. ‘But any chance any witnesses have come forward?’

Bullet shook his head.

‘We closed off the park as soon as we found the body - one of the good things about these events is that there’s always a few uniforms around – but not yet. This park is full of people dressed like murderers. Anyone could have seen the killer, and they wouldn’t know it.’

Marr sighed. Bullet was right: they were looking for a needle in a stack of needles. Marr looked up to the carnival area, and saw three zombies gathered by the police tape. The looks on their faces were suited more to inquisitive dogs than an army of the undead. Marr knew they wouldn’t be able to see much from up there, it was just too dark. But that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be a ton of speculation around the office coffee machines tomorrow.

The news wouldn’t take too long to come out, anyway. Marr didn’t doubt the club would issue a statement as soon as they were told about the murder. Whatever your moral viewpoint was, there was little point denying that celebrities - and footballers especially - simply mattered to people.

‘Andrei!’

The scream came from behind them. Marr shone his torch towards the noise, and saw one of the PCs who’d been manning the taped-off area hot in pursuit of a