Whisper For The Reaper, Jack Gatland [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

Copyright © 2021 by Jack Gatland / Tony Lee

All rights reserved.

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the author, unless for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, places of learning, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by Hooded Man Publishing

DI Declan Walsh Books

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LETTER FROM THE DEAD

MURDER OF ANGELS

HUNTER HUNTED

WHISPER FOR THE REAPER

TO HUNT A MAGPIE

(Coming June 2021)

BEHIND THE WIRE

(Coming August 2021)

A RITUAL FOR THE DYING

(Coming October 2021)

For Mum, who inspired me to write.

For Tracy, who inspires me to write.

Contents

Prologue

1. Kidnapped

2. Cold Red Cases

3. Disciplinary Dates

4. The Thin Blue Line

5. Rural Crime

6. The Game Is Afoot

7. Functioning Room

8. Organised For Crime

9. First Briefing

10. Par Three

11. Moving Pictures

12. Adding Up

13. Family Feuds

14. Wheeler Stealer

15. Underground, Overground

16. New Leads

17. Dark Before Dawn

18. Berlin Station

19. Female of the Species

20. Javert / Valjean

21. Loose Ends

22. Old Soldiers

23. Glitch In The Coding

24. I Can See Clearer Now

25. Inter-Viewed

26. Change Of Plans

27. Two Minutes To Midnight

28. Midnight

29. Heads Or Tails

Epilogue

Prologue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Prologue

Craig Randall led a double life.

That’s what he told everyone that he spoke to; it made him sound like a secret agent, some kind of exciting, enigmatic hero rather than what he really was; a fifteen-year-old bully with a Walter Mitty fantasy.

Craig’s double life wasn’t fake though; it just wasn’t what you’d expect to see when asking someone about it. During the week, Craig was just a Year 10 loser, picked upon by the bigger, stupider kids in his year because he wasn’t a fan of the same football teams, a teenager who spent a lot of time on his own, and who didn’t have that many friends. He wasn’t that academic; he wasn’t that sporty. In fact, he wasn’t that… anything. If you looked up the words academically average in a school guidebook, you’d probably find a photo of Craig Randall smiling out at you. Or, at least scowling, annoyed that he was being made fun of again.

But on the weekends, oh yes the weekends, he was a God.

For Craig Randall spent his weekends somewhere else. Not in South East London like the other losers in his class, no; Craig and his family would spend every weekend from Easter until October at a camping and caravan park in Hurley Upon Thames.

It’d started when he was eight. His parents, sick of the estate they lived in and desperate to escape from the city, if only for a day or so borrowed a frame tent from a friend, and, with a minimum of camping equipment and experience had muddled their way to Hurley after seeing it mentioned in the back of Camping and Caravanning magazine. They’d arrived late on a Friday evening in May and, as Craig and his dad wrestled with the tent, realising very early in the process that they didn’t have a manual explaining which pole went where, Craig’s mum and his sister Ellie went to visit the camp shop, and picked up some fish and chips from a van that had arrived just outside it.

They’d been cramped back then; eight-year-old Craig and five-year-old Ellie had to share one of the two ‘bedrooms’, nothing more than a cloth divider between their manky sleeping bags on cheap air beds, and their parents’ double air bed, with equally battered sleeping bags.

They’d had a BBQ on the Saturday and cooked from a single camp stove the other days. They’d played football. Although they had a small TV to watch things on, they didn’t really bother. There was a small boat ramp that led into the Thames, which you could get to by following a path from the first field, or by making your way across a rickety, home made bridge created from wooden pallets over a stream beside the third, furthest away field, and then following the Thames back to it.

He played there a lot. And he built the bridge, too.

It had been a break in every sense of the word; a break from the artificial normality of the world, and a return to an easier time. From that day onwards, the Randalls were born again weekend campers, updating their equipment piece by piece while travelling down every Friday evening, often from the moment Craig left school, and returning mid afternoon on the Sunday, just in time for him to prepare for school the following day.

They weren’t the only people who did this and over the weeks and months that they lived this double life, Craig had recognised other people, other families, other children who also travelled to Hurley on the weekends. And, they met new families who were just starting the journeys.

Families and children who didn’t know Craig, and had no context of what he was truly like.

And thus the second Craig Randall was born.

This Craig was a cool one. He was captain of his school’s football team, had a girlfriend who was super hot and two years older than him, and he was doing these new visiting children a favour by hanging out with them. He was the experienced one, the veteran of the camp; he knew the coolest places to play in the woods that surrounded the campsite, the best places to swim, and he always had a story of something amazing that’d happened in the past which was always a story that made him look as equally brilliant. In fact, as the years went on and Craig reached his teenage years, he’d spend the weeks waiting for the weekends, when he