Death Hurts

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

John Snead is a Private Investigator, he is also an ex-junkie and dealer from Manchester who is reborn with help from his Detective Sergeant lover. He lives in a semi-luxury caravan with his wife, who is ill, and he trades in the quiet towns and villages of the country of Norfolk, England. Until he happens upon a stink; a stink so great it overwhelms him when he rescues a trafficked female and her baby from the gangs of the city, when both are considered to be expensive additions to gang culture. His error of hiding the female and her baby causes all hell to break out around the county. Jon rises to combat almost everything thrown at him. And exciting crime thriller

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Oct 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005529192

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

Death Hurts

A Jon Snead Crime Novel

By

S.D. Gripton & Sally Dillon-Snape

© Dennis Snape & Sally Dillon-Snape (2024)

The moral right of the author 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

Cover by Snape

***

Chapter One

Six miles south of Berring-Next-Sea there is a coastal town that God is reclaiming for Himself. He gave mankind a chance of survival, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago, when He created them as an experiment in the universe. Something new and unique that had never been attempted before. But mankind missed the chance to better itself, it fucked up, and God is slowly reclaiming all the land that covers the earth. He is cancelling the experiment and starting again.

One of the first places to go is the reasonably pretty town that is six miles south of Berring-Next-Sea. For years buildings have been sliding off the cliffs and falling into the sea; God has no timescale; He will take His own good-damned time and take what He wants, when He wants. Today, it is the turn of Samantha Turnbull to bow to Him.

Samantha is an excruciatingly thin, bony, sixty-year-old who, thirty years ago, abandoned her one-year-old twin daughters and a husband who loved her with the whole of his hearts, to follow her dream. With an inheritance that her father wanted her to share with her husband and children, she purchased a home in Norfolk to become an artist, a painter.

Norfolk, after all, is where the light is, where the high skies are, and where the colour shines and glistens. She purchased a home quite some distance from the cliff-edge and lived there in a state of mild poverty for all of the thirty-years. During these years she sold only five of her paintings; none of them for three figures; but she still holds the dream hard to her chest, the same dream that has taken her all the way from the family she had abandoned to now.

But now, is the end.

She has been sleeping on the cold floor of her home in a sleeping bag for four-months whilst several authorities attempted to remove her permanently from a property that is now minus a garden, minus a parking space, minus gas, electric and water, a road, a front sea-facing wall, a lounge and half a roof. Samantha Turnbull hasn’t seemed to notice as she slept in the cold and cooked on a primus-stove in the rear section of her almost-house.

But today she has to move out, for the cliff, which was once some hundreds-of-yards-or-so away, has come calling. God is taking what remains of the house, which is inching towards its death.

And all death hurts.

Even the death of a cherished home.

Even a death instigated by God, Himself.

Samantha Turnbull has been coaxed out of her property by her tearful best friend; her only friend, really; for Samantha has always been aloof with the locals, all, that is, except for Tricia Fennell, another slim artist who has achieved some local success. Tricia stands with an arm around her friend’s thin shoulders, both of them dressed in long, colourful dresses and flat shoes, with heavy jackets keeping out the cold and the actions of God. The two of them are tearful as the house slides away bit by bit, piece by piece, brick by brick and collapses. Walls that Samantha once decorated with views from her windows and where she once hung mirrors and built shelves that were adorned with trinkets, crashes in on themselves with loud bangs and creaks; the noise resembling thunder to Samantha; as the house slowly disappears and the sandstone cliff falls with it.

Samantha finally screams.

Her feelings of loss at the death of her home are terrible to behold.

It is a painful scream, heart-rending. It is the cry of death, the last breath of the living when they see someone, or something, die in front of them. It is the sound of the end.

All around, several representatives of authorities stand uselessly. Medics, in case of Samantha’s collapse; police in case she refuses to leave the property; social services in case she has another episode, and council workers who will be responsible for removing the remains of the house from the beach. Something for which Samantha Turnbull will be charged. So many houses are expected to fall into the sea along the Norfolk coast that the cost of recovering what was left of them from beaches, far and near, has to be met by owners. Otherwise, there would be widespread bankruptcy of services.

With a final crack, the original footings of the building lift, split and slid away.

Revealing three skeletons, lying side-by-side buried in the concrete.

Amazingly, the skeletons, and the concrete in which they lie, have not slid down to the beach along with everything else. They simply lie there, revealed at last, accusing the past of cruel crimes.

Samantha Turnbull screams again.

This time from fear and horror.

Realising she has lived in a house for thirty-years with three dead bodies beneath her feet.

***

Chapter Two

He knew he was the wrong man in the wrong place.

He knew it.

He knew he was the cuckoo in the nest.

Worse than that; he was the cancer on the gentle landscape; the poison in the on-shore breezes; the harsh word in the land of the softly spoken; a stranger in a strange land. He was hatred and viciousness in a land where kindness went hand-in-hand with community spirit.

Worse still; he was the totally un-woke persona who was employed by the woke brigade to shatter their marriages, to follow members of their family, to lie and to cheat on behalf of those who never eat meat and believe all humans and animals are equal in status and that pretty females cannot be said to be pretty, that statues emit evil vibrations and poison, not only from the past, but in the present, and knives and forks were invented by slavers.

He would take money from anybody.

He was immoral when it came to earning it.

He was not simply a stranger in a strange land, he was an alien on earth. He understood nothing of what was going on around him and, quite frankly, like most of the population of the country, those with jobs, churchgoers, people who believed in God and country, he didn’t want to. He cared not what minorities wanted; shouty, screamy, untidy individuals without jobs, or the ability to know how to hold one down. He did not want to adjust to the modern, he would rather eat his own head than adjust. Intellectuals, the over-educated, the many children of the wealthy who remained in education until they were forty, were the worst type of human, he believed. They always looked down on those less educated or financially poorer than themselves; always badgering, lecturing, informing, telling, changing the rules of life, or attempting to, spouting their knowledge as if they were the only people that God was speaking to, those who believed only they knew the truth. Who thought they were guided by God.

Snead believed it was the Devil’s work.

Though, he wasn’t sure.

And he was not quite sure the woke-mob knew, either. The anti-vaxxers, the lunatic left wing, the lunatic right wing, the screamers and the shouters and the anonymous Internet users, using their anonymity to hurt and to cause pain; teenagers and teachers, doctors and police officers, mothers and daughters, high and low, all stating their anonymous noxious piece. All of them spouting utter rubbish. In his opinion, it was time the Government taxed mouths; people should be fined every time they spoke shit. Or maybe keyboards should be taxed and the idiots who used them.

The country would soon pay off its National Debt if they were laws. Speak shit ten times; go to jail; speak shit a hundred time; be tied to a tree and forgotten about, minus a tongue. Type rubbish three time, have all the keyboards within a mile radius destroyed. See how the neighbours like you then.

He was not liberal in any way.

In fact, he was only keeping his powder dry until decisions were made, when laws were handed down and people were imprisoned for telling a female that she was beautiful. Then he’d think about what it was, what he was. But it wouldn’t be liberal, with a large or small ‘l’.

They were the thoughts that an ex-drug dealer and junkie from the bad side of Manchester (were there any good sides to any city?), should really not be having. If he had followed his destiny, he would either be dead or he would have killed. He almost was dead, attacked twice with a knife, the second time stabbed six times and saved only by the miracle of modern medicine and by the ministrations of its brilliant servants. He was saved for posterity; for the future.

That was the time he decided he wanted one.

A future.

He certainly did not want to be stabbed any further. It hurt more than one expected, and he already had a scar that ran down his face from the right side of his right eye and sort of frightened off any beautiful woman he may have designs on. Not that he was a designer of any kind. It would be better to say beautiful women he lusted after; because they all thought he was a thug and drug-dealer when he looked at them.

But that was his past.

They never got to see the torso scars until he removed his upper clothing, which happened not enough, in his humble opinion.

And now he was a Private Investigator.

He knew how stupid it sounded, stating that. Him, out of school by the age of fifteen, living on the streets; thrown out of the family home by a junkie father and a submissive mother, having to attend Adult Education for months just to be able to understand what all the tattoos he had on his body meant; so that he could understand the phrases both in English and Latin that had been put there by others who knew things; including how fucking stupid he was.

Now he had found his peace.

Of a kind.

He was still angry and violent when aroused, still foul-mouthed almost every day. He still turned the green grass brown everywhere he travelled, or at least, he thought he did.

So, how did a thirty-something drug-dealer and junkie from a bad district of Manchester end up being a Norfolk Private Investigator by the age of thirty-two? Well, the change of name helped. He now used none of the letters he was born under and he kept his new name as short as possible.

Jon Snead.

Short and sweet.

Until you had the unfortunate circumstance of meeting him in a dark alley. Then there was nothing short or sweet about him.

But he only behaved like that now in the pursuance of his occupation. Pursuance; he had no idea the word even existed until he first heard it. Pursuance: the enactment of, the undertaking, the fulfilment of. That was one of the many words he learned during his Adult Education.

Adult Education, once he was signed up, was easy.

Getting off the drugs; that was the hard bit.

He rented a mobile home on a holiday site with money he stole from his fellow dealers back in Manchester, he drew the curtains, locked the doors, and prepared to suffer.

And suffer he did; alone. Unwashed for weeks until he was sure; with a gag attached to his right wrist for those times when he felt like screaming. There was no way he wanted to upset the family on the site next to his home who came and went as normal people would and could. And during those weeks he lost fifteen-pounds in weight from the sweats he suffered, when he couldn’t afford to lose fifteen-pounds. He shook fit enough to unwind all his nerve-ends during periods of delirium tremens he could never have imagined. This was accompanied by diarrhoea, the cramps, the nausea, the vomiting, the runny nose and the hallucinations. He only had an inkling that he may recovering when he began to suffer increased restlessness and anxiety.

And every moment, every second of every day he lived, he expected to either fall back into his old ways, or to be caught by the boys from his past. He expected to be caught and executed, and they would be right to carry it out. Not only was he a dealer and junkie, but to that could also be added, thief. He’d ripped them off before he'd run. Thousands, he’d ripped them off for thousands.

He lived in fear, kept taking the drugs. Ran to somewhere he did not know; Norfolk; because that was as far as he could run without running into the sea. He had no idea where he was going until he passed a sign stating Welcome to Norfolk. He hired a caravan with the stolen money, pulled down the blinds, locked the door and spent weeks suffering.

But one night he slept.

He actually showered and climbed into an unused bed and slept. He knew then that he would never take drugs again.

And he never had.

And he had not replaced drugs with alcohol, just another drug under a different name, as many junkies did.

He simply didn’t drink.

Tea and coffee were his only likes, along with water; sweet local water, chilled in his own fridge. There had been three families in the mobile next door since he’d moved in, the first one was always very wary of him, the second and third liked him and he liked them. It was odd for him; he couldn’t remember a time when he’d liked anyone. Actually, liked them. Certainly, nobody back in the old city, not after the age of ten.

And he had settled.

He had made his home in the mobile. He purchased a newer model three-years earlier, watched as it was pulled up onto his site by tractors, the highest site on the camp, no one to his left, only trees and a footpath, with a good-sized garden either side that he worked on, his van overlooking the roofs of all the mobiles below him, out over the children’s play area and the farmer’s field to the right; the farmer and his family actually owning the holiday site; money to money; rich farmers, rich holiday site owners.

He didn’t mind their wealth.

He was happy there, on the site.

It was his home in all but ownership and the fact that he had to vacate it for a month or so over the Christmas period and find some digs, made no difference. It was part of the contract; no one could actually live full-time on the site; it was advertised as a holiday site, after all.

And it was not his office.

His Private Investigator’s office.

His office stood in Berring-Next-Sea, a place that personified the fact that the people of Norfolk either have a sense of humour or have no idea of the usage of the English language. His office was half-way down Station Road where all the shops were situated, before the street collides with Church Street, on the corner of which the Theatre stands, just a little theatre but with a very large reputation. From there, all roads run down to the sea.

Half-way along Station Road, between an independent Greeting Cards shop and a computer nerd’s place of worship, which did much more business than he, is where his work abode is. He is above both shops, a couple of rooms once owned by the previous Private Investigator who willed them to him when he died.

It was a long story; but he would get to it.

***

Along with the peace he had found; he loved the drive into work every morning; five-miles of country roads that city people had no idea how to drive; passing three or four of the six-hundred-and-fifty churches the county had. He hadn’t been into many; his reintroduction into the world of the living hadn’t extended that far yet, but he was known in the town, known and even liked, by the type of kind, gentle, softly-spoken people he was not.

But he was doing his best to hide it.

To hide who he really was.

If he lived and worked here for fifty-years, he reckoned he might just make it; he might just be fully human by then.

And he did get work. He earned enough to pay the charges on the site and the rent on his office, enough to run a car and purchase food, enough for the occasional meal out. But it hadn’t always been that way.

When he first dragged himself upright, bathed and rested, hungry enough to eat leather, he had no job, no talent, no real education, no ambition, no cogent thought, nothing. All he had was the thousands he’d stolen, which he distributed around several local banks, smiling at bank staff, trying to be friendly, attempting it for the very first time in his life, desperate to fit in, wanting nothing more, his face aching with the effort.

One night, as he lounged in his mobile home, the windows wide open on a warm scented evening, and when he could write without his hands shaking, he made himself a list.

Educate

Work

Smile

Make friends

Help where you can

Take up exercise (this was reasonably easy, as the site had both a fully equipped gym and a swimming pool, which he used regularly)

Smile

Be nice to people

Stay away from trouble

Buy a car

Ride a bike (he had never ridden one, even as a child)

Smile

He pinned the list to his notice board and began ticking lines off.

He bought a car; second hand; he still had it; still used it every day.

He learned to ride a bike and rode it around the camp almost every day.

He used the gym when he could; just as he used the swimming pool.

He stayed away from all forms of drugs including cigarettes.

He stayed away from trouble as much as he could, though very occasionally, his profession brought trouble to him.

He made a few friends.

He smiled.

He breathed easier in the pure coastal air.

He attended Adult Education classes for English and Bookkeeping and had an affair with the married English teacher. It only lasted five-weeks but it was fun; he was not at all hurt when she finished it, he thanked her and kissed her on the cheek. The very first affair he’d ever had; he would never forget her.

Initially, he took unemployment benefit and worked in Charity Shops in Berring until he moved on to the city, the only city the county had, and worked with a drug charity helping those who wanted to walk away. He used another name for that; Call-me-Troy. It became something a siren-song for those who needed his help, and he genuinely helped all he could. A police officer he worked with on the programme fed him the crumbs of ambition.

‘You could do better than this,’ she said more than once. ‘You’re a good man, you should help more people, apply for a Private Investigator’s Licence. I will stand for you, write your recommendations and references.’

He laughed the first time she said it.

He laughed every single one of the next ten times she mentioned it, until he discovered that she was never going to give up. She needed him to become a Private Investigator; he was her programme.

She introduced him to Phileas Hubbard.

He was already a Private Investigator.

And he needed an apprentice.

He had an office in Berring.

And he was eighty-two-years-old.

And that was Jon Snead’s story.

His history.

***

Then the police woman did him a real favour; a genuine favour; a life-saving favour.

There was a fire in an abandoned warehouse in the city. Five bodies were discovered inside it, believed to be homeless drug-users, possibly illegal immigrants; and two of them could not be identified. They were never going to be identified. The police Officer asked if he had anything from his previous life he wanted extinguishing, (he had told her all about that life over coffees in various cafes around the city when he worked with her: she had a way with her, with her soft tones and her ability to listen and to understand; he thought he may love her). He told her that he had written down the name and address of one dealer in Manchester that he had always wanted to kill. He had written the man’s name on a menu from a city restaurant. She asked for it, then charred it and it was presented as evidence at an inquest. When enquiries were made back up North, it was quickly established who the dead body was. It could only have been him; he was the only person who knew the name and address of the dealer. Norfolk was where he had run to with their money and the bastard had died there. Unloved and unwanted. It made dealers in Manchester extremely happy, as happy as miserable drug dealers can be.

And his previous existence died with that evidence. Nobody came to reclaim what was left of the body. He paid for a burial and watched the few professional mourners through the darkened windows of a car, with the police officer sitting next to him, photographing two dealers from back home, including the one he wanted to kill, attend the ceremony. They walked away, laughing and high-fiving each other. They looked so happy. He wanted to kill them all over again when he saw them; but he didn’t.

He owed the Police Officer his life.

Forever.

It was something else he would never forget.

Neither would she.

***

Chapter Three

He didn’t mind the east coast weather.

The occasional blistering heat; the skin-shredding winter winds that numbed the whole body; the floods, the destruction made by torrents of water.

And he quite liked rain.

He believed that rain cleansed, albeit temporarily, the dirty streets of the towns and of the single city, gently flushing away the detritus. It freshened up the air he breathed; it laid noxious farming gases flat to the earth. The sound of its gentle falling lulled him into a sense of relaxation; it kept miscreants from the streets and provided succour not only for ducks but for plants both large and small.

No, he didn’t mind rain.

Downpours though, were another thing altogether.

He hated downpours.

Downpours flooded drains, they formed puddles large and small, some the size of small lakes; especially in Norfolk, where water just did not run away easily. It lay around for days after downpours. The water also provided entertainment for drivers of vehicles who suffered from psychopathic and sadistic tendencies, who hit every puddle they could find in their desire to soak pedestrians. Downpours overdid rain, they overlapped shoes and soaked collars of jackets and fronts of shirts, especially if a person had left his topcoat on the backseat of his car parked around the corner from where he stood, and where he had to remain as a matter of necessity and duty, a place which that person could not leave, even though that person was standing in the deep dark of a shop doorway.

He hated downpours.

He lurked in the doorway, still and silent, unmoving, rods of rain tumbling off the shop roof, making a miniature waterfall that hit the ground like xylophone mallets and splashed back to where he was hiding. The bottoms of his dark trouser suit were already soaked and he could go no further back into the doorway otherwise he would lose sight of what he was viewing, who he was watching. The angle was narrow enough anyway, as he twisted his head to his right for a better view of the door to the house which he hoped would open at any time and release