One Good Deed

By David Jackson

'King of One More Chapter' JOANNA CANNON
'Master of the unputdownable thriller' MICHAEL WOOD
'A stunning read that grips you by the throat' JANICE HALLETT

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED

Elliott has never thought of himself as a hero. Until one dark night he meets Rebecca, a scared and vulnerable young woman who needs his help. There's a man harassing her, following her; would he mind pretending to be her boyfriend, just while she walks home, to put him off?

And that is that - just a favour for a stranger - until there is a knock at Elliott's door. It's the man who was following Rebecca. He claims he's her ex-boyfriend, but it's clear that he's been stalking her. He's obsessed, dangerously so. He wants Rebecca, and he will do anything to have her.

When Elliott eventually tries to tell him the truth, the man doesn't believe him. The only way to save himself is to get Rebecca to explain. There's just one problem: Rebecca is nowhere to be found. And now it looks like one good deed will cost Elliott everything...

A must-read for fans of Adrian McKinty, Steve Cavanagh and Alex North, this is a gripping pageturner from 'the King of One More Chapter'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Viper
• Release date: Jul 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781782839743

David Jackson

DAVID JACKSON is the author of eleven crime novels, including the bestseller Cry Baby and the DS Nathan Cody series. A latecomer to fiction writing, after years of writing academic papers he submitted the first few chapters of a novel to the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Awards. He was very surprised when it was both short-listed and Highly Commended, leading to the publication of Pariah in 2011. David lives on the Wirral with his wife and two daughters.

Book preview

1

This was the third house he had tried today, and his hopes were not high. He expected that this one would lead to just as much disappointment as all the others he had visited in the past week.

The problem was that he didn’t have much to go on.

He knew that Rebecca’s surname was Covington, and that was his biggest clue to help him find Rebecca’s nan. But what if the nan was on her mother’s side? In that case, her name wouldn’t be Covington and he was wasting his time.

And then there was the area. He didn’t even know if he was in the right part of the country.

He knew very little about Rebecca’s family. She had once shown him a photo of her parents, but he’d never met them. Which was a pity. He was hoping one day to do things the traditional way and request permission to marry their daughter.

That could still happen, though, once he got her back.

The recollection of the phone call had come to him after weeks of agonising. Popped into his head as if to say, This what you’re looking for?

He remembered the growing panic on Rebecca’s face as she took the call. Remembered her repeating the details she was hearing. In particular, the words ‘Wetherley Hospital’.

She had told him afterwards that her nan had fallen over on one of her country walks and had been rushed into hospital, and that she had to go and see her immediately. He had offered to drive Rebecca there, but she had refused.

Later, when it seemed that her nan was recovering nicely, the incident was forgotten.

Until now.

And that’s what had brought him to the area around Wetherley, searching for an elderly lady who may or may not be called Mrs Covington. It felt like clutching at straws, but it was all he had.

Rebecca was everything.

He was standing in front of a low rusted gate, staring up the path at a small detached cottage. A cute place, but in need of some attention. He could easily picture an old woman living alone here, and that gave him hope.

The gate squealed as he pushed it open. He stepped along the path to the front door, noting the overgrown ivy, the grimy gnomes, the bird feeders filled with sludge.

Unable to find a doorbell, he rapped on the door and waited.

Nothing at first. Then, as he went to knock again, he heard movement within. A shape appeared through the leaded glass. The door was opened.

She was small and bent, her head tilted to the side to train one dark, beady eye on him, the other eye milky-white. She wore a thick cardigan and a tartan wool skirt. Below, her bare pale legs were marbled with blue veins.

‘Hello,’ he said cheerily. ‘Mrs Covington?’

‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Darren Stringer. I … I don’t suppose that rings any bells with you?’

‘No. Should it?’

His heart sank. Probably another address to cross off his list.

‘I’m looking for Rebecca Covington. Is she your granddaughter?’

‘Rebecca? What do you want with Rebecca?’

The question took him aback. This was the first time he’d got a positive response.

Let’s not be too hasty …

He took out his phone, showed her the photo of Rebecca on his lock screen. ‘Is this her?’

The woman took the device from him and brought it close to her good eye.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s my Rebecca. How do you know her?’

He tried to hide his excitement as he took back the phone. ‘I’m her boyfriend. She’s never mentioned me?’

‘No. No, she hasn’t. What’s your name again?’

‘Darren Stringer.’

‘No, I’m sorry. She’s never mentioned you. What can I do for you?’

There was no softening in her manner. Darren was beginning to fear this would be no easy task.

‘I’m looking for her. She’s gone missing.’

‘Missing? What do you mean, missing?’

‘I mean I can’t find her. She’s not at her house.’

‘Which house?’

‘The one on Arnold Lane. In Fowerby. She’s—’

‘She doesn’t live there anymore. She’s moved out.’

‘Well, yes. That’s what I meant. She’s gone but I don’t know where she is, and I was hoping you could—’

‘You say you’re her boyfriend?’

‘Yes. We’ve been seeing each other for months.’

‘And she left without saying a word?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ever thought there might be a good reason for that?’

He stared at her. A good reason? What was she implying? What good reason could there possibly be for the love of his life simply to disappear, to leave behind everything they had together?

‘I don’t think there is. She loves me, and I love her. I’m hoping we can get married one day. To be honest—’

The old woman made a noise. Almost a snort of derision. He suddenly hated her.

‘What?’ he said.

She sighed heavily. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, dear, but there’s only one reason a woman leaves a man without a word of explanation, and that’s because she wants to start a new life. Without him in it.’

Darren shook his head. ‘No. You’re wrong. I think something must have happened to her. Something awful. She probably needs my help.’

The woman pursed her dry, cracked lips. ‘Rebecca doesn’t need your help. She’s not in any danger. When I last spoke to her, she was—’

‘You spoke to her? When?’

He realised how demanding he sounded when her roving pupil suddenly locked on to a spot between his own eyes.

‘I spoke to her just yesterday. She’s a lovely girl. Tells me everything. If there was something wrong, I would be the first to know.’

He felt his irritation mounting.

‘She doesn’t tell you everything. She didn’t tell you about me, did she?’

‘No … well … Perhaps I should say that she tells me about everything that matters.’

He was convinced he caught a touch of a smile. A hint of satisfaction. He had to force himself not to get mad at her. Tried telling himself it wasn’t unusual for old people to be spiteful. But it still hurt.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I just need to speak to her, find out what’s going on. You understand that, don’t you?’

‘What I understand is that if Rebecca had wanted you to know her business, she would have told you. Goodbye.’

She went to close the door, and Darren knew that, once she did, he would never get her to open it again. He couldn’t let that happen.

Which is why he jammed his foot in the doorway.

‘What are you doing?’ the woman demanded, a note of alarm in her voice. He didn’t want to hurt her, not even to frighten her, but he needed to know, he had a right to know.

‘Just … just tell me where she is, okay? I need to talk to her, and she’s not answering her phone. If you could just give me—’

She opened the door and then slammed it on his foot, and even though she looked light enough to pick up with one hand, the force of it sent a jolt of pain up his leg.

‘Stop that! I’m not here to cause any trouble. I just want—’

She gave his foot another bash. He yelped and then shoved hard against the door, sending the woman reeling backwards into the wall behind her. He saw pain on her face as she rubbed at her hip, and he thought to himself, Got to be careful. Old people bruise easily. They have brittle bones.

He opened his mouth to apologise, but she cut him off with a glare that could stop a clock and then went scurrying down the hallway.

He followed her inside. It was a gloomy, eerie space, with dark wooden floorboards and wall panelling. It had no windows of its own, but relied on the light that trickled through a stained-glass window set high on the turn of the oak staircase.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m asking for your help.’

‘Tell that to the police,’ she said. She picked up the phone from its cradle on a hall table.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t do that.’

He continued towards her, but she began to jab at the phone’s buttons with a skeletal digit, and he knew he couldn’t allow her to complete the call, so he snatched at the phone. But she refused to let go of it, her strength remarkably out of proportion to her frame. He heard a tinny voice coming from the receiver and realised she had got through to the emergency services, so he wrested the phone from her grasp. But even as he did so, she raked her fingernails down the back of his hand, causing him to gasp and drop the phone to the parquet floor. A panel flew off the back of the device and it spewed out its batteries, terminating the call.

He brought his hand to his mouth and sucked at the bloody scratches, eyeing the old woman as she slowly backed away into the corner of the hallway. He hoped that she was spent now, that they could talk calmly and rationally, that it would become obvious to her how he loved her granddaughter, and that she would do the right thing in bringing the couple together again.

‘Get out of my house,’ she said.

‘I will. Tell me where Rebecca is and I’ll go right now.’

‘You’ll never find her. Never!’

She surprised him then. Came towards him, clutching something she’d withdrawn from a cylindrical brass umbrella stand behind her. It was a wooden cane of the type a rambler might use, as twisted and gnarled as she was. She began waving it in front of her.

‘Get out of my fucking house!’

The expletive shocked him as much as her attack. For some reason, old people swearing always unsettled him.

He put his hands out. ‘This is getting ridiculous. I just want to talk. You don’t have to—’

She closed on him then, shrieking as she raised the stick. She whipped it through the air with unexpected velocity, catching him on the wrist with a mighty crack, and he felt excruciating pain.

‘Get out!’ she demanded. She aimed the next blow at his head. He blocked it with his forearm, managed to grab hold of the stick.

‘Enough!’ he said. ‘You have to stop!’

She tugged with all her might, her single usable eye burning into him as she formed angry noises in her throat. Darren held on, his mind racing for a way to end this absurd battle.

And then a surge of anger overwhelmed him and he thrust the stick into the woman’s chest. She flew backwards, immense surprise on her features.

One of her slippers snagged on the runner, and Darren realised what was happening as if it were in slow motion. He watched her topple, her feet going from under her almost comically, but then he saw where her head would land, and he found himself tensing, his stomach lurching as he wished for it not to happen, willed her to fall slightly to the left to avoid the inevitable collision.

The old woman’s skull smacked against the edge of the telephone table with a bang that reverberated throughout the hall. She landed with a thud on the floor, a crumpled bag of bones, trembling and rattling, spittle bubbling onto her parched lips.

He stepped towards her, feeling powerless and at the same time that this must be a dream, this couldn’t really be happening. An address – that’s all he’d wanted. Not this.

He bent over the convulsing figure. ‘Mrs Covington? Are you all right?’ But he knew it was a stupid question. Nobody in that state could be all right.

His suspicion was confirmed when she went still, twitched a couple more times, and issued a final sigh. The glint in her good eye faded, rendering it as sightless as its partner.

‘Mrs Covington?’ he whispered, but he knew the words went unheard. He put his fingers to her neck and wrist in search of the slightest quiver of life. He placed the back of his hand over her nose and mouth, praying for the merest wisp of expelled breath.

But it was all in vain.

She was most definitely dead.

2

Darren straightened up. Tried to get his numbed brain to work properly. How crazy was this?

He didn’t know what to do. He’d come to ask a simple, straightforward question, that was all. Nobody was supposed to die, for Christ’s sake!

He had to get out as quickly as possible. Nobody need ever know he was here.

He started for the open front door.

And then he paused.

They’ll come, he thought. A neighbour. Maybe even Rebecca herself. Then they’ll call the police.

But what if I tidied up? Wouldn’t they think she just fell and banged her head? She has a history of falls, after all. Why would they even suspect foul play?

Slowly, Darren closed the front door and returned to the body.

And then something else occurred to him.

The phone call. She’d managed to get through to 999 just before she died. They would know that a call had been made from this address.

Shit.

It’ll be enough, he thought. They’ll get forensics in here. They’ll find my fingerprints. I don’t know what I’ve touched and what I haven’t. And they can do all kinds of clever stuff these days. They’ll find my DNA.

Her nails!

They’ll find my skin under her nails! And because Rebecca is her granddaughter, they’ll talk to her, and that will lead them to me, and they’ll find the marks on my hand, they’ll match my fingerprints and my DNA, and then I’m fucked, royally fucked.

Shit!

It seemed so unfair. All he wanted was to get Rebecca back.

Okay, he told himself. Deep breaths. Think logically.

First of all, I may have more time than I thought. Rebecca told me her nan doesn’t get many visitors. Also, I don’t have a police record. Even when they examine the scene, they won’t make an immediate connection to me. In fact, it’s possible they may never make a connection to me. Rebecca doesn’t know I’ve been here. She doesn’t have any reason to think I know the address. She might not say anything about me to the police – why would she? And when I find her and explain things to her, she’ll understand that it was all just a horrible accident and she’ll want to protect me.

So, right now, the best thing to do is to buy myself a little more time.

He began to search the house.

Downstairs there was a living room, a dining room and a kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t spacious, but adjoining it was a utility room with a stainless-steel sink and the usual appliances.

Including a small chest freezer.

He lifted its lid. Plumes of white vapour billowed over the edges and curled down the sides as he peered into its depths. There was so little food inside it seemed pointless to keep it going twenty-four hours a day.

But that was good news as far as Darren was concerned.

He went back to the hallway and stared down at the crumpled figure. There was nothing to her. With a bit of judicious folding, she might just fit.

Grimacing, he bent down and scooped the body into his arms. He was shocked at how insubstantial she seemed. It was like picking up a sleeping child.

He carried her to the utility room. The freezer lid was still propped open, and already the room felt noticeably chillier.

As reverentially as he could, he began to lower the old lady into her icy tomb, to rest atop her frozen peas.

She didn’t fit.

Even though she was now creased up like a concertina, her scrawny legs still protruded above the freezer’s edge.

Darren grabbed one of them by the ankle and began to twist and turn it, this way and that. But no matter how much he manipulated the limb, it refused to find a niche. He wanted to scream his frustration at her. It seemed to him that she was being deliberately awkward about this.

Not prepared to let her defeat him, he took hold of the leg again. Put all of his might into forcing it into the chamber. The icy lining on the inside of the freezer turned pink as its rough surface sloughed away the papery skin from the woman’s thigh. As Darren pushed and heaved, he tried to ignore the nerve-jarring sound of ice scraping against flesh, like fingernails being drawn down a blackboard.

When the leg gave way with a sudden audible snap, he almost fell on top of the corpse.

He leapt back, on the verge of spilling his guts onto the tiled floor. It felt as though her whole leg had come away from her body.

It took him a good two minutes of deep breathing before he was able to approach the freezer again. Refusing to look inside, he focused on the other leg. As he started to apply force, he tried to prepare himself for the outcome, but found that it only made the task more unbearable.

When he felt the leg reach the limit of its flexibility, his arms began to quiver, his need to press on perfectly counter-balanced by his reluctance to relive the experience of tearing away the limbs of this woman as though she were a cooked chicken. Only with the release of one final yell was he able to summon up the necessary energy and simultaneously drown out the sickening crack as he drove the leg inside.

Slamming the freezer lid shut, he collapsed on the floor and swallowed back the bile that was rising in his throat. Perspiration poured down his face. Slowly, shakily, he got to his feet and went back to the hall.

He picked up the woman’s walking stick and returned it to the umbrella stand. Then he put the phone back together and replaced it on its cradle. As he did so, he noticed a light blinking for attention on the base unit.

A missed call. A message had been left.

Rebecca had told him that as well as getting few visitors, her nan didn’t receive many phone calls.

So what if …?

He pressed the ‘play’ button, and his heart stuttered when he heard the voice.

‘Hi, Nan! It’s Rebecca. Just checking in. Guess what? I’ve got a new place! It’s right by Cardew Park, where you used to live. It’s really nice, and there’s a gym I can walk to, and—never mind. I’ll tell you all about it later. See ya!’

The recording ended. Darren pulled out his own phone and googled Cardew Park. He found one in Ebbington, only about fifteen miles away.

He smiled. This trip had been worth it after all.

3

Elliott Whiston had a cat. He loved that cat. Didn’t care much for most other cats, though. That, in a nutshell, seemed to him to be a fairly balanced, sensible attitude to the creatures.

What he couldn’t fathom were the people whose views were more extreme. At one end of the spectrum were those who thought nothing of hurting them. If there was one thing guaranteed to provoke his wrath, and therefore his anxiety, since he had never found a quick way of dissipating pent-up anger, it was animal cruelty.

But then, at the opposite end, were people who were utterly obsessed, to the extent that they regarded their cats as their offspring, or, at the very least, more worthy than any human companion.

Mrs Beidecker sat firmly in the latter camp.

She stood in front of the shop counter now, beaming down at Elliott in his office chair. She was wearing a woollen bobble hat that was adorned with a cat’s face, including protruding ears and whiskers. Looped several times around her neck was a scarf that had images of cats of all shapes, sizes and colours sewn onto it. Both items, she had informed Elliott last month when the shop had reopened after the Christmas break, had been gifted to her by Wilberforce Merriman. Who also happened to be a cat.

Elliott suspected that even her underwear was covered with cat pictures, but it was a hypothesis he had no inclination to test.

‘Helloooo, Elliott,’ she said. ‘How are you this morning?’

‘I’m good, thank you, Mrs Beidecker.’

‘And how’s my Billy-boy? Keeping all snuggy and warm in this cold weather, I hope?’

Elliott’s cat was a British Shorthair whose pedigree name was Meadowlark Bilberry. Elliott usually called him Bill.

‘Absolutely. He’ll be hugging the radiator as we speak. Either that or he’ll be under my duvet.’

‘Ah, they do like their creature comforts. I remember when my fluffy little Pom-Pom got too close to the fire once and I thought there was going to be a conflagration. I can’t tell you the panic it caused me.’

‘No,’ Elliott said. ‘I can imagine.’

‘Anyway, to business. I’ve brought you some books.’ She hefted a weighty plastic bag from the floor and set it on the counter. ‘They’re all in excellent condition, because I look after my books as all civilised people should, but I’m running out of room and I was going to throw them out, and then one of my darlings – I think it was Augusta – whispered in my ear and mentioned you, and I thought that was such an excellent idea, so here they are.’

Elliott smiled. Mrs Beidecker always brought something on her visits, and it was invariably at the behest of her cats.

‘Thank you. I’ll put them straight up on the shelves. Books always go quickly.’

‘Lovely. And while I’m here, I need to get a little something for my Missy Brighteyes, who’s feeling left out because she didn’t get a present the last time I came, and you know how jealous she can get.’

‘Oh, I do,’ Elliott said, even though he had no idea.

‘So I’ll take a couple of sachets of those cat treats and the toy mouse, if you don’t mind.’

‘No problem.’

Elliott got up from his chair and fetched the items from the display behind him. He passed them across to Mrs Beidecker, who handed him a twenty-pound note.

‘I don’t want any change,’ she said. ‘It’s all for the charity. Those poor unfortunates who don’t get the same love and care as my little ones. I’d invite them all round to my house if I could.’

‘That’s very kind of you. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the donation.’

As she exited the shop, Elliott was convinced there was a tear in her eye.

For the moment, he was alone again. He didn’t mind. There were always jobs to be done whenever there were no customers. Sometimes he had assistance, but that tended to come from unpaid volunteers whose presence in the shop couldn’t always be relied upon. Elliott, on the other hand, received a salary, along with the grand title of ‘Shop Manager’, and that made him important. There were expectations to be fulfilled.

He carried Mrs Beidecker’s books over to the shelves and slotted them into the appropriate places according to genre. He was slightly surprised to find that some of her collection sounded pretty racy.

When he had done that, he moved