Losing The Plot: Richie Malone #1

By Richard Grainger

"Let me tell you about my day so far. I’ll begin by telling you about waking up in my Marbella villa to find a dead girl in my bed; about being interrogated by the Spanish police – or hombres purporting to be the Spanish police; about learning that I’m going to have my kneecaps shattered

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otterdene Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780956134127

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LOSING THE PLOT

When there’s no one left to trust,

it’s time to change the script

Richard Grainger

No.1 in the Richie Malone series

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Otterdene Publishing

ISBN pbk: 978-0-9561341-1-0

ISBN ebk: 978-0-9561341-2-7

Copyright © 2019 Richard Grainger

Richard Grainger asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Typeset by www.shakspeareeditorial.org

Cover illustration by www.creativeparamita.com

FOR

ROSANNA

AND

CAMERON

I always wanted more – more of everything.

George Best

The Guardian

21 July 2002

PROLOGUE

NINE MONTHS AGO

I leave the Moët Bar feeling mildly pleased with myself.

And why not?

I have a new nickname – ‘Belfast Boy’ – which carries a certain gravitas, swinging precariously between intrigue and decadence.

I can’t remember exactly who it was who called me this, but I didn’t sleep with her, which for me is quite unusual.

I’d been double-parking shitty Spanish beer with equally shitty cheap white wine for several hours and, truth be told, the prospect of sex somehow got shunted down the to-do list.

But I remember she had the deepest green eyes I could swim in without drowning, long, tanned legs that I would gladly die between and an accent that located her somewhere near Belgrade.

I know these things; don’t ask me why. There’s the intrigue bit coming out.

Anyway, the point is that despite the fact that I would gladly have swum up the Lagan to hand-wash her underwear, there were too many other attractive women in my backfield. To cop off with one would have diluted my chances of nailing the others at a future opportunity.

Tip number one: sometimes, amigo, it’s necessary to take a strategic ‘did not bat’ in the interest of the bigger picture.

Anyway, in addition to being a stunner, she had one of those quirky names that stubbornly wouldn’t stick in my mind. I’m pretty good at getting a bird’s name, but I’m struggling here.

I’m thinking maybe Agata? The first and last letters were definitely ‘A’s, so – I’m guessing – Agata would definitely be in the ballpark. Birds love it when you get their name right, when you admire it and show you’ve remembered, but don’t overuse it because that’s just tacky, like sending flowers after the first shag. Or even worse, getting flowers delivered to a bar you know she’ll be drinking in with her mates. That’s stalking, and it’s also tacky.

Okay, so this is how things finished up:

I insult the new waitress – who turns out to be the owner’s daughter – but repair the situation to the extent that I’m given a drink ‘on the house’.

I call a man with a small, bemused-looking dog a drug-dealing homosexual, and he also offers me a drink.

I tell the doorman – who intervened after I had insulted the waitress – that if he continues to look at me in the disdainful manner appropriate for the English tourist, he will have to surgically remove my glass from his anus.

Maybe a little of this is lost in translation, but he also bought me a drink.

And so, all in all, things could have turned out a whole lot worse.

So what is it about me?

You see, I can’t go anywhere where I have an audience and behave anything other than badly.

Especially when young, attractive women scaffold my ego. They accelerate this fucked-up mentality that pushes the ‘twat’ button in my psyche. It’s like a drug – I have attention, but I crave more.

***

My name is Richie Malone. Let me tell you a bit about myself; that is, if you don’t already know me.

I’m fifty-two years old.

I’m incredibly good-looking – think George Clooney-slash-Keanu Reeves. Despite thirty years of depravity, my physical decline has been slowed by a fixation for running and the gym which almost rivals my obsession with women, so I look much younger than my years.

I’m a writer and a sex addict.

Fuck, that was harder to say than I’d expected – I mean, the writer bit. I’ll tell you why in a moment.

I was married for an eternity and then I lived with a woman for almost ten years until last December, when she decided to become a lesbian and moved in with her lover.

So then I moved to Spain; not because I have a love of bullfighting and the peel of church bells, but because even a total, imbecilic fuckwit can pull beautiful women. Which is pretty much all I’ve been doing since I moved here; I can’t beat them off with the proverbial shitty stick.

Until, that is, something went terribly wrong: you’ll know what when you’ve read the next chapter.

But now you know me.

Remember the name: Richie Malone.

Belfast Boy.

ONE

TODAY, 05.45

You’ve got to understand this. No one is what they appear to be. If they tell you that they are, then they’re lying.

And you’ll see exactly why I say this when you’ve read this sorry narrative.

For my money, all women are basically the same. The only ones I tend to remember are the truly dreadful ones. You know, the ones who bite you like some fucking Transylvanian freak or consider it’s witty to text that they don’t do anal on a first date.

And sometimes I get confused between my ex-wife and my X-any-number-of-women I’ve slept with because it all breaks down into that dreadful cauldron of white noise that is the catharsis of any relationship; and doubtless they think the same about me, but that’s not really the issue right now.

The issue right now is the dead girl lying next to me.

Just the bare facts would do for now, like who is she, how the fuck did she get here and, of course, what is she doing being dead?

TWO

EIGHT YEARS AGO

I found my genre somewhat late in life and quite by accident.

For ten years I’d struggled to write passable fiction; you know, the sort of stuff that guys who don’t read would read.

Robert Harris once wrote: ‘In the absence of genius, there is always craftsmanship.’ Genius certainly hadn’t come knocking on my door, so mediocrity would have to do. But please, amigo, by all means feel free to challenge that comment.

I chose for my template the style of James Patterson. If you don’t know him: trademark big print – so no more than three hundred words to the page – plenty of dialogue and page breaks, and no chapter ever takes longer to read than the time you’d need to take a crap.

Before I discovered my genre, I’d had three novels published, two of which sold passably well. The third, written under a pseudonym for reasons I’ll explain later, staggered into the Amazon bestseller list. But I would freely admit that I popped the champagne cork a little too early when a well-known publishing house took a punt on this work of satirical fiction based on the Irish Troubles that just about returned them their advance. It was no Harry Potter; no release from the doldrums of teaching creative writing to wannabe disillusioned undergrads after eighteen years in the Royal Marines.

It was pure coincidence that I started to write filth.

Filth sold. Filth bought me the Aston Martin, the villa in Marbella with the yacht in Puerto Banús and the chalet in Zermatt. Filth was good to me, and I was good at filth.

It is most unlikely that I would ever have penned the word ‘pussy’ were it not for Mandy. We met on a residential writers’ retreat in the frozen Scottish Highlands one January, twelve years ago.

We were instantly attracted to each other. I’d like to say that it was love at first sight but, in all honesty, it was lust. She’d just left her husband, and my marriage was as dull as the fiction I wrote.

But, truth be told, Mandy is one of only two women I’ve ever been in love with; and I suppose, if I’m honest, until this all happened, I still was. Truly, madly, deeply.

One afternoon, bored with the pretentiousness of our fellow residents and the drabness of the workshop, we went for a long walk in the snow. Eight hours and as many pints later, we were in bed screwing each other’s brains out.

Within a year, she was divorced and I’d left home. The sex was terrific; but more than that, Mandy had liberated me.

For years I had unwittingly carried the burden of a repressed childhood: the awful relationship with a despotic mother; the early years at boarding school, being buggered senseless by Twiss, the near-blind music teacher. My social isolation and the introversion that closed everything away behind the locked door of my subconscious mind were in complete lockdown.

The Corps had been the only release from the emptiness of this emotional void; most of my colleagues were as repressed, as cold and detached as I was. It was what made you an effective killer.

Mandy coaxed it out of me, gradually teasing me with a mixture of bluntness and ridicule that no psychiatrist would have even contemplated, let alone practised. But it worked. It was cathartic, and gradually I began to offload the past as my new life brought new meaning; brought new but welcome chaos out of my old, dull order.

My rehabilitation began with the emails, which were, to say the least, pretty graphic, both of word and image. She lived in Hull and I lived in Cornwall, so time together was a challenge. Despite leaving enough clues, it took almost a year for my wife to hack into my email account, discover the relationship and kick me out.

Mandy’s honesty about sex was like a breath of fresh air. She’d had many partners, mostly before she was married, and claimed to be bisexual. Rupert, her husband, had told me he’d considered filing for divorce on the basis that she was a frigid lesbian.

Wrong, Rwoopardo, old boy; wrong on both counts. At least, certainly at that stage.

And anyway, Mandy stitched the fucker up and beat him to it.

***

It began by writing down our fantasies.

She used to subscribe to a swingers’ magazine called Carnal Desire, and she took a few back issues on our first holiday to Antibes. The periodical ran a competition each month for ‘readers’ erotic fantasies’, with publication and the princely sum of fifty pounds for those considered worthy.

‘They’re mostly shit,’ she’d said disparagingly. ‘My grandmother could write better. Most people think that to write erotic fiction you only have to write cunt, jism and spurt enough times on each page, chuck in a bit of woman-on-woman and a splash of anal and, hey presto, you’ve got something that holds the reader. But that’s just bollocks; you have to have a hook, Richie,’ she said, hooking the groin of my Speedos with her middle finger.

‘Oh, go on, Richie, write up last Saturday night. It’d be a laugh.’

I did, but I’m not going to share this narrative with you, amigo. Sorry.

I won fifty pounds, submitted a few more which swept aside the opposition and was then invited to become a ‘contributing editor’.

Within a year I had a five-book deal with Randy House under a pseudonym – a name which you will certainly be familiar with, but again, sorry amigo, that goes to the grave with me – and a six-figure advance on my first novel, A Pussy Way to Die.

I had made it in filth, and nobody even knew my name.

And this should have been enough to make me happy, and doubtless it would have been for lesser mortals. But all I’d ever wanted was to publish a novel in my own name; a novel that stood out, so people would actually know who I am?

Pathetic, isn’t it … but true.

THREE

TODAY, 05.49

By now, amigo, maybe you’re wondering two things?

Maybe even three things, but I’ll come to the third one later.

First, what about the dead girl? Who is she?

Come on, Richie, you write an opener like that and then you take us on a sideshow road trip where the view from the window’s some boring backstory about your past? Cheap trick – even for a porn writer.

Ouch … that hurt. But sure, you’ve got a point.

And by the way, did you kill her?

Well, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t know the answer to either question … who she is, or did I kill her?

And, of course, you’re probably wondering how do I know she’s dead?

Let’s clear up the last one first. She’s dead, all right. You don’t have to have seen eighteen years’ active service – mostly covert shit in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan – to recognise a dead person when you see one. Trouble is, right now I seem to have some sort of short-term memory loss.

Try as I might, I cannot remember where I was or what I did last night. So until I can figure that out, I can’t figure out what to do about the girl I woke up next to.

And the only way I can figure this out is through the shit that I can remember. It’s an old trick I picked up in the Corps; useful after you’ve just witnessed your corporal get his legs turned into toothpicks by an IED and you don’t recall shit about what led up to it.

Trouble is … clock’s ticking.

FOUR

NINE MONTHS AGO

So what happened to me and Mandy?

Nearly twelve years together, then you split up?

Truth be told, she was one of only two women I ever really loved, but maybe I loved her so much because I loved my wife so little.

Your wife?

Okay, my wife? Let’s get that one out of the way first. I met Susie while I was an officer cadet at Sandhurst Military Academy, the toughest forty-four weeks of my life. Occasionally we were granted an exeat, and so one night I’m enjoying a drink with a few mates in the Bird in Hand when I clock her behind the bar. Slender, shoulder-length black hair, intelligent green eyes … an arse to die for – she could easily have passed for Italian, had she wanted to. She was one of those women who you could justifiably describe as ‘petite’. We got chatting.

At Sandhurst, women and alcohol are pretty much off the radar if you want to pass out with a decent commendation, and my goal was the Sword of Honour: top dog.

So, if you ever get the chance to cop off while out with mates who go through hell with you and for you on a daily basis, you have to be pretty certain that it’s going to be worth it.

It was.

Long story short, I passed out as Second Lieutenant, winning the Queen’s Medal: second top dog. Of course, I was gutted it wasn’t the Sword.

Susie completed her law degree at LSE and we got married the following year. Between ‘85 and 2000 I did four tours of undercover shit in Northern Ireland, where I blended in working for the Special Resistance Unit – a unit so secret even the Home Secretary didn’t know it existed.

Then I had a walk-on part in Desert Storm followed by three tours as part of the so-called peacekeeping mission in Iraq, whose role it was to perpetrate and shoot the fuck out of insurgents, or anyone who looked as if they may become an insurgent.

After that, I’d had enough.

But for Susie and me, all this time apart meant that our time together was, shall we say, difficult?

By the mid ‘90s she’d become a senior barrister for a firm specialising in medical negligence litigation. No problem with that. But we both knew by then that children were off the agenda, thanks to her career and my absenteeism. No problem with that, either.

But when she was recruited by a firm who specialised in delegitimising the Iraq war and chasing the ambulances that lads from my unit were shipped out in, the foundation stone of our precarious relationship seriously began to wobble.

Still, we tottered pointlessly on for a decade or so, mainly because I wasn’t around that much.

When I left the Corps, a mate got me a job with a clandestine outfit which ‘stabilised’ warzone situations that were far too delicate for legitimate government agencies to dirty their hands with. You’re thinking ‘mercenary’, amigo, aren’t you? Well, I suppose you’re right.

We were pretty good, too, taking down a handful of big players holed up in caves in the Hindu Kush that the CIA hadn’t even heard of. Trouble was, they were so far off the radar that there wasn’t even a price on their heads.

And then I took a bullet in the chest, three in the gut and one through my arse. Would you believe it … it was the first time I’d been shot? Everyone was so sure I was going to die that even Susie flew out to see me. Said we could patch things up when I got home. Hell … we could maybe start a family.

But I didn’t die, and we didn’t start a family.

When I got back to Blighty around a year later, I somehow managed to get a job on the Holloway Road lecturing on creative writing to undergraduates at a university so dreadful it was ranked bottom of The Sunday Times’ ‘Good University Guide’. No names, no pack drill, amigo. Doubtless I didn’t improve it, but I’d used my convalescence to knock out two very average works of fiction, and that classified me as an author.

Then I got a little too friendly with Amy, my head of department.

So friendly, that when I was caught fucking her across her desk by the vice chancellor, I was invited to take a sabbatical. A very long sabbatical; one endorsed with a P45.

But then I had a stroke of luck.

In fact, I had three strokes of luck.

First, I managed to keep the whole sordid business hushed up.

Second, Susie put in for a transfer to her firm’s Exeter branch, which was a gimme. ‘Transfer me,’ she told them, ‘or I walk.’

We were both tired of London – don’t buy that Samuel Johnson bullshit about when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. Heck, my life was just about to begin.

And the third stroke of luck?

Well, you see, I kept on seeing Amy, at least for a while. She really was a terrific fuck as well as being a pretty good Guardian columnist. And she persuaded a friend at Falmouth University that I was what they were looking for. The whole thing worked seamlessly, except that I never saw Amy again after the move.

Don’t ask me how, because although I claim to know many things, I would never claim to have even a rudimentary understanding of how the female mind works. But I knew that Susie knew, and the bastard who you’ll come to know as Richie Malone wasn’t quite ready to leave her yet.

Yeah, but what about you and Mandy? Isn’t that what this chapter was supposed to have been about?

For sure. I’ll get to that in a bit.

But right now, I’ve still got to figure out what to do with the girl on my bed.

FIVE

TODAY, 05.51

Okay, so how do you know she’s dead?

Let me check back … according to your narrative, you woke up at 05.45, and it’s now 05.51. So, let me see … that’s around six minutes ago. Have you checked her pulse, maybe tried a spot of good old CPR? It’s possible to survive for five to ten minutes – you should know that – before serious and possibly irreversible brain damage and then death occur.

Oh, she’s dead all right.

Sorry – with all my trying to work the intricate details the fuck out, I must have neglected to mention that what actually woke me up was the lake of blood that slicked across the bed and onto my face.

Odd, isn’t it, but for a soldier who’s had to do more than a little bit of knife work in his time, I’ve never been that good with blood.

It was the smell that hit me as I opened my eyes. Like the smell of raw meat: a sweet, metallic pungency that’s always made me want to heave.

I’m covered in it.

I make the mistake of rolling her over, and I see three things.

First, that her throat has been crudely slashed from ear to ear, so death wouldn’t have been quick; and second, lying beneath her head, which for an instant I fear will become detached from her body, is the murder weapon.

My bread knife.

And the third?

Oh yes, the third. Good point. Her face … her face was a face I’ve never seen before. I’d have known if I had. Her eyes were shut, and that suggests to me the likelihood that she’d been drugged before her throat had been hacked open.

She must have been a looker, when she wasn’t dead. Young, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, perfect bone structure with high feline cheekbones that suggested Russian or Eastern European heritage, a straight nose and full lips that would have sealed the deal for me before they turned blue, straight jet-black hair with a bob, a little too shiny to be her natural colour. I don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to confirm this – a glance at her lower abdomen revealed that what little hair she had in this region was blonde.

Oh … you didn’t say that she was naked?

Well, she was.

Height?

Difficult to gauge a person’s height when they’re lying down, particularly when they’re crumpled and dead, but she was tall. I’d say a good five foot nine, maybe even taller.

And her body type?

This sounds a bit pervy. I’m not one for giving marks out of ten to dead women, but she certainly would have been a ten. No doubt there; the body of a model … maybe her breasts were a little too full, so make that a lingerie model. Oh yes, had I come across this one while she still had a pulse, I’d have moved heaven and earth to bed her.

So, what did you do: call the police?

Be patient, I’m coming to that. Okay, this is too much, I think, so I kick myself into action and paddle though a pool of blood that has now seeped off the bed and is spreading across the floor towards the bathroom.

Do you know how much blood the average human body holds?

Eight pints, give or take … everyone knows that.

Actually, you’re wrong: it’s somewhere close to one point two and one point five gallons.

Ever spilt a pint of beer?

Well imagine spilling ten to twelve pints of beer. And then transpose it into the deep red, slippery plasma that we don’t even think about, coursing through our bodies, keeping us alive. And most of this is now either on the bed or on the laminate floor where I’m slipping and sliding towards the shower, leaving a trail of crimson behind me.

I shower, water as hot as I can stand it, then dress and begin to mop up the blood. Christ, this is gross, and it takes forever.

How the hell were you ever a soldier?

Different ball game when someone’s trying to kill you.

I’m sweating and covered in blood once more, so I shower again, bundle my blood-soaked shorts and T-shirt into a bin liner, then look at her one more time – fuck, what a waste, she really was a stunner – and then I cover her with a sheet.

***

So at this point, amigo, a couple of things occur to me.

First, I’m interfering with a crime scene. I’m not just interfering with it; I’m actually destroying it.

Yes, you’re right, what I should have done was to have rung the feds the moment I woke up. For sure, they’re not going to look any further for the murderer. All the evidence they need to convict me is right in front of them: the girl’s on my bed with her blood all over it – or what I’ve not managed to dispose of. And why would I dispose of it anyway, if I’m innocent? She’s been hacked to death by my bread knife and my prints are all over it.

Open-and-shut case.

But what about motive? If you don’t know her, why would you have killed her?

Ah yes … my short-term memory loss. Possible explanations for this: maybe I’ve suffered an aneurysm … maybe even a brain tumour, a head trauma or concussion. The last two are highly unlikely as I have no pain. I’ll rule out the first two, purely because of my machismo: Richie Malone’s still stupid enough to think he’s indestructible.

How about a seizure, epilepsy, heart bypass surgery or depression?

Nope, this isn’t getting me anywhere. So that leaves