London Stone

By Nick Bydwyn

Private Investigator Drake Sanders is having a difficult day. Not only has he been press-ganged by an old police colleague into investigating a murder that he is somehow the main suspect for, but he's been hired by two different people to search for an ancient artefact that doesn't appear to be missing. 

As business has been slow he effectively agrees to do the same job twice, assuming that he might be able to plug a widening hole in his finances. As he digs deeper into both cases he discovers that his involvement may not have been as coincidental as it had first appeared. His investigations reveal that his employer’s intentions aren't as benign as they claim, that what he is searching for has a significance far beyond being an important historical curiosity. This is borne out when he begins to attract the attention of high-ranking officials, conspiracy theorists, burglars and hired thugs who all seem intent on hindering his progress.

Figuring out he has been used to further some greater plot, he has to unravel fact from millenia-old fiction in order to unearth the truth about about an elaborate scheme that threatens to cost him not only his career, but quite possibly his life as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800465879

Nick Bydwyn

Nick Bydwyn was born in Salford, grew up in Wigan and currently resides in Greenwich. An innate curiosity about what makes the universe tick led to a degree in Astronomy and means that living so close to the Prime Meridian, the zero point of space and time, feels like a dream come true.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Drake Sanders wasn’t sure what hurt more: the pounding inside his skull or the fact he’d been stiffed on yet another job. With a deliberation of breath that was as much to stop himself from keeling over as it was to quieten the pain, he stood by the window in his dressing gown and watched the sheeting rain lash the glass. He stoically observed the rivulets as they made their way to the bottom of the wooden frame. Idle thoughts about the state of his health, the last case and the way the inclement weather mimicked his mood criss-crossed his mind. Of course it was raining. Why wouldn’t the universe drive the point of his worthlessness home by heaping on a huge slab of windy, wet insult?

If the coffee he was cradling didn’t kick in soon, he was going straight back to bed. He knew the black sludge in his cup would do its job as it had so many times before, a concoction made with just the right amount of anger and lack of sophistication that it provided maximum alertness coupled with an almost diabolical taste. Drake had learned long ago that neither sugar nor milk could temper the bite that his creation contained, so he saved on both and took it in its raw form. It tasted like nothing else on earth.

Slowly, he began to rebuild the mental pathways that would allow him to function as a normal person for another day. What was he doing with his life? What had possessed him to even attempt to become a Private Revenue and Investigations Specialist? And that title, why did he ever choose something so wordy and vainglorious? Now he sounded like an entire redundant government department rolled into the body of a single man, but he’d already ordered five hundred business cards and he was damned if he was going to let them go to waste. Fortunately it was very nearly an anagram of PRAISE, if he could get round to figuring out that final word. It hadn’t warranted a massive amount of thought as the main goal of the cards was to get jobs so he could earn money to, ostensibly, buy more liquor. By that criteria it could be said that his random advertisement was successful; nevertheless, his old designation, Private Investigations Specialist had a bit more flair.

He tried to keep his breathing regular as he mused on the fact that his last client had skipped the country. Just took the package and ran, literally ran to a waiting car and drove off, before Drake’s muscles had fully sprung into life. Not that he was any stranger to being double crossed, but in the majority of cases he’d had the sense to ask for a good fist of the money up front. Not this time. This particular time it seemed like someone had sent a heat-seeking missile right into his pragmatic blind spot. The heat-seeker in this case was a redhead; a tall, pouting, tousle-haired demon whose only objective, aside from acting as the right hand of his client, was to use her heels to kick him in his sensibilities until he was so bruised he couldn’t tell when he was being played. Dammit, never get involved. Impartiality was sacrosanct in this job. How had she made him willingly circumvent his own rules?

But this wasn’t the time to wallow. He needed clarity, needed something to do next. Did he want revenge? Go after her, confront her and her boss to demand payment? That would be foolish; they were on their home turf now and without a doubt were envoys to someone much better connected. Probably best to wipe the egg from his face and move on. You’re only as good as your last job; that was how business worked, so by this reckoning the next one needed to be a doozy.

One thing was certain, speculation didn’t pay the bills. The gathering, arranging and presentation of facts did. In principle that was the core of his vocation, the manipulation of available data to reach a solid and provable conclusion. No trickery was involved, despite what some had suggested in the past. The simple truth was that most people didn’t have nearly enough patience to sift through the debris to see what tumbled out and, if he did say so himself, Drake was very good at searching through other people’s crap. The little bits of detritus they thought they had obliterated, the papers they had burned, the items they had buried. By and large, people were sloppy and that’s where Drake was in his element. More than most he knew that it was almost impossible to be completely clean of incriminating evidence, whether physical or the squatting sensation of guilt that takes up residence in the back of a person’s brain. All he had to do was find the thread that had been missed and start tugging.

It was ironic that for all of his sharpness and crisp reasoning, the rest of his life was an apparent mess. He glanced around the room as if to prove the point to himself, and his view settled on the fireplace in his old Victorian loft space. It hadn’t seen any sort of flame in years, but the mantelpiece was an exercise in Jenga-esque stability; the books, the pens, the scraps of paper all supporting each other in an unholy alliance so that just moving or removing one of the items would affect the structural integrity of the rest of the set. By most measures the piled jumble was out of control, and yet it was in no danger of becoming a catastrophe unless unfamiliar hands fiddled with the structure.

Conversely, the things he actually needed to survive: bread, milk, fruit, were always somehow in short supply. The fridge that graced his kitchen was nothing more than a cold light box, rarely containing anything of worth, and yet despite being so rarely used it gained all manner of festering odours.

He wasn’t living in squalor, just a highly engineered mess, one that had a semblance of design to it and was at least a functional part of his life. On the whole he knew where everything was, where the important files were kept, which drawer contained new pens or light bulbs, where the bills were. This was infinitely perplexing to visitors, but Drake had come up with a workable conclusion: his brain liked to create order from the chaos of everyday existence. Whether that meant tackling a puzzling case or figuring out the clues to a crossword, it was all about finding a stable solution that tied everything up into a nice satisfactory ending. To have order there had to be a starting point of chaos to work from, a state with no meaning or reason, a place where common sense hadn’t yet taken hold. This was the essence of his work, rummaging around in other people’s mess in order to rebuild the grand edifice behind heinous acts. It was also the reason why he couldn’t bring himself, no matter how hard he tried, to tidy his small, cramped, musty apartment. He needed the challenge of the unknown to fire his brain cells and the only way to do that in a domestic setting was to induce a chaotic living environment. It was necessary; he had convinced himself of that fact.

He blinked hard and shook his head to try to get rid of these circular and unneeded thoughts. The coffee was having an effect, the synapses were kicking into painful action and instead of just watching the rivulets of water track down the window he was taking an interest in life beyond the pane. The people going about their daily monotony; the cars as they sped past to nowhere and the people scurrying from under one shop awning to the next, caught out by these well-forecast showers. While the headache wasn’t subsiding, it was at least settling. The spiky barbs were turning into dull thuds and it was only a matter of time before it could be wrestled into manageability with some well-placed medicine. To hell with the redhead, to hell with her boss. Now wasn’t a time for vengeance, now was a time for getting into a clean set of clothes and sating the monster clawing at his stomach. How long since his last meal? He’d had some potato chips last night, but before that...possibly thirty six hours since anything substantial had settled inside him. Hunger, much like any other desire, could be overridden and put aside temporarily. If only he’d remembered that with the redhead. Best not to bring that up again, the rent was still a pressing concern and so more proactive steps to find work were needed. After breakfast, though. Definitely.

Chapter 2

A big issue of living in the city was that there was rarely a norm in temperature. It was either too hot, too cold, too sticky, too windy or just too everything. Drake was always struck by how uncomfortable he felt most of the time and how he had no real method for figuring out the mode of dress in any circumstance. After much experimentation he’d settled on his everyman uniform of a shirt, trousers, jacket and loosely knotted tie with slightly scuffed but hardy shoes. The cutting edge of fashion was something he’d read about in magazines but never experienced first-hand. At least the way he attired himself held the advantage of taking the guesswork out of his daily routine, pungent odours aside. His clothing sufficed for the most part but lately he’d noticed that some of his professional contemporaries had opted for a native vibe; jeans, t-shirts, hoodies. However, any seasoned criminal could spot an outsider a mile away and so Drake had attained the look of a dishevelled businessman. In a city of a million browbeaten office workers, his was a canny camouflage.

With his ritual ablutions completed, Drake stood in the doorway to his building and surveyed the world. As the rain was still pouring down, it would be necessary to call upon the services of his ageing umbrella. It wasn’t a nice, large or in any way fancy item; in fact he’d bought it from a flea market over a decade ago, but this cheap piece of junk was possibly Drake’s best investment. It was mid-sized, black, had a wooden handle and was devoid of any remarkable features whatsoever. Being so cheaply made meant it wasn’t as rigid as the designer brands and as such had quite a lot of flexibility. The pliancy meant that when the wind picked up and the inevitable inside-outing happened, nothing broke, nothing tore, nothing fell apart. Of course, it was annoying, but a quick flick and the canopy would pop back the right way as if nothing had happened. Additionally, the small size meant that when it was inverted the wind didn’t carry it away. Perfectly engineered for the vagaries of the British weather, Drake’s umbrella had been hidden away behind some shoes on a back-street stall. This type of thing amused Drake and appealed to his sense of universal order; that in the midst of the mess and uncertainty would be an item that was so well made for a specific job that it seemed as if some external force was acting on it. Not that he believed in the supernatural or any divine intervention, but it was interesting that a whole bunch of wrongs sometimes did make the most spectacular right.

Luckily, the rain was coming straight down today so angling his umbrella into the wind wasn’t going to be an issue, which was fortunate since Drake was also carrying a tatty briefcase that contained a couple of case files. Despite the urgent need to feed, there was no reason why he shouldn’t attempt to occupy his mind with on overview of recent work to ensure he was charging the correct fees. After a dozen or so squelching steps he noticed that a car parked slightly down the street hadn’t moved for over an hour, a small detail that had penetrated his cotton-ball mind earlier when peering out of his window. It was a smoky grey Chevrolet that seemed a little too conspicuous for the neighbourhood. Cars weren’t really Drake’s strong point, a deficiency backed up by his own rusting heap that barely passed its annual service and spent most of its time in a hired garage one street away. The reason this Chevrolet was flicking the edges of his peripheral vision wasn’t that it was parked or that there was someone in the driver’s seat reading a newspaper; what was nagging him was that on this dingy, overcast day this driver was wearing sunglasses. It was noteworthy more than odd, but it was enough for Drake to quickly scan the license plate, create a mnemonic for quick recall and squirrel it away inside his brain. He knew that it’d fade after a day if nothing came of it, but it didn’t hurt to have the information handy.

For now, his focus was almost exclusively on the dubious delights of the cafe hoving into view. The greasiness of the eggs, the rusk-filled interiors of what were laughably called ‘sausages’, the surprising lack of meat on the bacon and the congealed skins of the by-the-gallon beans. It wasn’t cuisine, but it was sustenance and it was exactly what was needed right now. The establishment itself went by the name of ‘Sid’s café’; for some reason he had imagined that most inner city cafes used to be a ‘Sid’s’. Perhaps that was just nostalgia talking. In any event, there was no false advertising here; it was a cafe and it was owned and run by a short balding man named Sid.

Pushing the faded wooden door caused the small but pointless bell that hung over the door to jangle and once he’d stepped over the threshold it was the ruddy complexion of Sid himself that greeted Drake. He shouted towards the counter at the back of the establishment.

Hey, Carl, usual for Mr Sanders.

Tea, one sugar? came a bellow from the depths of the kitchen.

Sid exchanged an affirmative glance with Drake.

Yeah, and clear the plates from four.

Sid motioned Drake to table seven by the wall and with a grunt he levered himself into one of the old wooden chairs that surrounded the mouldy laminated table. This was how a greasy spoon should be: worn, weathered, welcoming. Come to think of it, the place had seemed old even when it was newly opened, almost as if the shop fitters had been working to some prearranged archaic template. Maybe there was a firm of designers somewhere that specialised in creating new-but-old ‘caffs’ as an ironic statement to the upmarket establishments. Whatever it was, it was just perfect and in common with his umbrella, a profoundly reassuring item of stability.

Breakfast arrived. Eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, a tomato that looked as though it’d been tortured mercilessly, mushrooms and fried bread. The strong, sugary tea was the perfect accompaniment and all was delivered with little pomp by Sid himself on a plastic tray.

You alright today? asked Sid, a bridge to get them from A to B.

Can’t complain. Paying the bills, eating the food, staying alive. How about yourself?

With his immediate task complete, Sid wiped his hands on his oily apron and stood up straight as if trying to dislodge a kink in his back. Same as you, mate. Surviving.

Although this sounded a little downbeat, both of them knew that things could be, and had been, considerably worse. The state both of them were in at present was almost blissful in comparison to certain times past. Without doubt, a spare million or two in the bank would lighten the mood, but they’d both learned that complaining too vociferously about the hands they’d been dealt might tip good fortune back in the other direction.

Sid reached over and placed a bottle of brown sauce that he’d plucked from another table next to the plate and turned to deal with the noises that were coming from the direction of the kitchen.

After few large gulps of tea, Drake felt almost normal. Which reminded him; the files. He took a few out and placed them onto the table. These weren’t the main bulk of the cases, just notes and summaries, but that was all he needed. With a few jabs of his finger and a few more scoops of beans, things were becoming clearer.

The work tended to fall into the usual categories: people wanting their spouses followed, murders that the police couldn’t seem to get a handle on, the recovery of supposedly stolen assets, accounting irregularities, simple surveillance jobs to gather information for interested third parties. But there was also something troubling in the type of people who were contacting him recently and he wasn’t yet sure if it was a real trend emerging or simply a blip. When viewed up close it was like a pointillist painting; all you could see were spots until you took a step back and an image started to present itself. It was chaos becoming order, and in this area Drake had an innate advantage.

Whether by choice or coincidence, a smattering of requests appeared to stem from a matter of unsound belief. Due to the cold empirical nature of his work, Drake was sometimes drawn to the more esoteric cases in order to stamp a sense of logical order onto them. People had feelings and these tended to get in the way of their rationality so he’d pick up one of these ‘spiritual’ stragglers from time to time in order to make a point that randomness does not, should not, mean that supernatural causes are part of any explanation. If you just looked hard enough you could start to create an entirely cohesive structure from the evidence available. He wasn’t on some atheist mission to disprove belief, but the ascribing of unexplained phenomena to fantastical entities was something he found counterintuitive. If there was a god, and he tended to doubt it, then he or she wouldn’t design the universe so badly that ghosts or such would be a ‘logical’ explanation for any unfamiliar act. He had a hard time thinking that the creator of atoms and stars would be absentminded enough to leave gaps like that lying around creation.

There was no denying that there had been an uptick of cases in which the client ascribed magical explanations to their faltering circumstances. The wife who thought her loving husband was having visitations that made him act out (drugs), the accountant who thought some unconscious force was causing him to record numbers wrongly in his company’s register (undiagnosed dyslexia), not to mention a ghost in the attic (homeless squatter). These were easily dealt with when viewed with the right analytical mindset. But regardless of outcome, this new pattern was increasingly persistent. Was it because he was subconsciously seeking them out or was it because some sort of word of mouth was springing up, causing people to think he would take their erratic theories seriously? It didn’t really matter on a monetary level, but it could result in him gaining the wrong sort of reputation. To have it known that he was dealing with these flights of fancy could deter the more legitimate enquiries, ones from potential clients with real factual issues and, more importantly, real factual money rather than the scrimpings of a loopy nutcase.

The bias was also bleeding into the larger and more lucrative cases, like his last. Drake involuntarily rolled his hand into a fist at the thought. If he stripped away the rawness of the feelings, the recovery of a three-hundred-year-old medallion to be used in an upcoming Aztec fertility ritual would be classed as one of these anomalies. Unfortunately, the fact that there was no way a trinket that was only three hundred years old could be related to any legitimate Aztec ceremony was a piece of logic that the self-styled high priest and his followers didn’t seem interested in hearing. The payment they offered made Drake shelve his pedantic arguing for the duration. Now he wished he’d persisted; would’ve saved a lot of heartache both professionally and personally. Red-headed priestesses with a penchant for exotic jewellery and skimpy ritual clothing simply weren’t doing his business any good, no matter how fantastically they kissed or how wonderful they smelled after a shower.

The dissection of past mistakes could wait. It would interfere with any rational autopsy. The notes proved an increase in metaphysical motive was becoming apparent and, like the dull but persistent thump behind his temples, it wasn’t something he cared for. That being said, the breakfast was doing