Six Days, Six Hours, Six Minutes
A Brutal British Crime Thriller
Alex Smith
Six Days, Six Hours, Six Minutes
Published Worldwide by Zertex Media Ltd.
This edition published in 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Alex Smith
The right of Alex Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by Hanna Elizabeth
1.1.1
www.alexsmithbooks.com
www.zertexmedia.com
Also by Alex Smith
The DCI Robert Kett Thrillers
Paper Girls
Bad Dog
Three Little Pigs
Whip Crack (Available for Preorder)
Cry Baby: A Novella
The Softley Softley Thrillers
The Harder They Fall
Hard Luck House (Coming Soon)
For Uncle Frank, and Wispy the Dragon.
Thank you for teaching me to breathe fire.
Contents
In six days…
THURSDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
FRIDAY
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
SATURDAY
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
SUNDAY
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
MONDAY
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
TUESDAY
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
About the Author
Check out the DCI Robert Kett Thrillers!
PAPER GIRLS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHECK OUT THE OTHER GREAT BOOKS FROM ZERTEX
In
Six Days
Six Hours
and Six Minutes
I will come back
and kill you
THURSDAY
One
It was the bloody dog’s fault.
If it hadn’t been running around that morning, bouncing off the walls like a crazed gymnast, then it wouldn’t have made the baby laugh so hard he spat up his baby rusk. Then Blake wouldn’t have promised to clean up before he went to work, and he’d be out of the house by now, not hoovering up the living room carpet. And then the dog wouldn’t have gone mental again because it was terrified of the vacuum, and it wouldn’t have run to the front door in a bid to escape. And it definitely wouldn’t have started howling when the doorbell went.
If it wasn’t for the bloody dog, then he never would have heard it.
He never would have answered the door.
And all those people wouldn’t have had to die.
Two
Their doorbell played the Mexican Hat Dance. Julia had bought it from a market stall five years back when they’d taken a long weekend and driven from Norwich to Blackpool. Why she’d thought it was a good idea to buy electronics from a market stall in Blackpool was anyone’s guess. The novelty gift had seemed like fun at the time, even though it had taken him the better part of a day to wire it in and he’d almost fried himself in the process. Now, though, it drove them both crazy. It didn’t just play the first bar, it played the whole first verse. Twice. And it wasn’t some cheap synthesised tone, either, it was a robotic voice with a terrible Mexican accent.
Oh Americans dance on a dancefloor, and the Spaniards they dance on a table, and the Russians they dance on a sabre, but the Mexicans dance on their hats. Oh they dance on hot coals in Calcutta, In Wisconsin they dance on fresh butta, which they squeeze from one cow or anutta, but the Mexicans dance on their hats. Ole!
And to top it off, Connor was obsessed with it. He was just over a year now and the doorbell was his favourite toy. By a mile. He would point a chubby finger at it and you’d have to hold him up to the door for six billion renditions of the song. Take him away before he was done and you’d end up with a Mexican Hat Tantrum, which was infinitely worse.
Blake thought he heard it now, over the roar of their ancient Henry hoover. He couldn’t be sure, though. The song kind of nested inside your brain, like a ghost. You’d swear you could hear it sometimes, but it would just be an echo, an earworm. He swept the nozzle back and forth, leaving trenches in the deep pile. The baby rusk had been half-chewed, which meant it had the consistency of industrial glue. It had already soldered itself into the carpet. He should have soaked it straight away like Julia had told him to before she’d left for work, but he’d figured the vacuum could handle it.
“… they dance on fresh butta…”
Doof’s howl rose, singing along. The dog didn’t bark so much as wail. Like the doorbell, it was cute when they’d first heard it. Like the doorbell, it had worn off after a couple of months. He was a mongrel, part Pug, part Beagle, part god only knew. They’d adopted him from the rescue shelter four years ago, when the idea of children had been a daydream. Doof should have been short for doofus, because there’s no doubt that’s what the dog was. In fact, it was short for duvet, because for the first few weeks they’d had him he’d burrowed himself into their bedding and only come out to eat or poop.
Blake scraped at the rusk some more, trying to ignore the dog’s operatic display of terror. Another line of the song floated through, the first verse repeating itself. It was definitely the doorbell. He stamped on the vacuum, the button stubborn, refusing to switch itself off until he bent down and pressed it with his hand. He threw the nozzle to the floor.
“…squeeze from one cow or anutta, but the Mexicans dance on their hats.”
“Ole,” he said, crossing the living room and giving his dressing gown another tug to avoid accidentally exposing himself. His bare feet protested as they slapped against the cold tiles of the hall. The glass panels in the door were squares of weak light, no sign of anybody on the stoop. Maybe he had imagined it after all. Maybe the song had surgically implanted itself into the flesh of his brain, to be played out endlessly until the day he took a razor to his wrists in order t
o escape it. He squinted through the patterned glass, the world outside fragmented into a dozen tiny, distorted dioramas, each one deserted.
Weird.
He shooed Doof into the kitchen, shutting the stairgate to stop him bolting. Then he opened the front door, the wood sticking the way it always did when the rain started. A couple of tugs got it free, a wave of cool, wet air billowing past him. There was no sign of anybody. Their house wasn’t huge, but it was surrounded on all four sides by garden—the reason they’d fallen in love with it. A long, winding, crazy-paved path meandered the twenty feet or so to the gate, the street beyond partially screened by gnarled apple trees.
Man, it was quiet, the world muted in that weird way it was when everything was wet. They lived in Old Costessey, a quiet, leafy town that had slowly merged with the city of Norwich, and their road wasn’t ever busy, but you could usually hear laughter or shouts or slamming doors or even the gunning of engines from the main road. Now, though, the only sound was the soft patter of rain on grass, the whisper of something in the trees. The goosebumps had risen on his arms before he even noticed he was creeped out.
He took another few steps, his arms wrapped around himself—partly to stop his dressing gown from billowing, partly because he felt suddenly defensive, exposed. He had the weird feeling that somebody was watching him, that he’d stepped out of his door onto a stage in front of a silent, invisible audience.
The garden was flush with bushes and trees, most of which had been there when they moved in. He scanned them, looking for whatever was giving him that feeling.
There, sitting in one of the apple trees.
“I see you,” he whispered.
The magpie cocked its head, a hoarse caw breaking the silence. It flapped its wings hard enough to shake free some leaves, but it didn’t take off. Blake stared it out for a second more then looked hopefully around the garden. What was the rhyme? One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy. There was nothing else in sight.
“Sorrow it is,” he said. “Thanks a lot, you bastard.”
It cawed again and Blake broke into a smile. He took a deep breath of cold, damp East Anglian air and felt a sudden urge to go for a walk before remembering he wasn’t dressed. Maybe he’d grab Doof and take him out into the sticks, call work and tell them he’d be a little late. Which would have been fine except he was on thin ice as it was after dropping his hours in order to look after Connor when the kid wasn’t at nursery. That and the fact that he was always late.
Turning, he hopped onto the porch, the smile sliding from his face like an egg from a greased pan.
The front door had eased partially closed behind him, and on it, just to the left of the number seventy-two, was a picture. Not just drawn but etched into the paint. It was a mark about the size of a coaster, a crude circle—the ends of which didn’t quite meet—and inside that an upside-down triangle. There were three smaller circles on each of the triangle’s faces, all of which had a little tail curling out to the edge of the design, like a trio of tadpoles.
He squatted down, running his finger along it. It was a scar, and it was deep. Whoever had made it had taken their time, Blake could see the lines where a blade had been dragged up and down the wood. It had been done with some fury, too, by the look of it.
“What the hell?” he muttered, his knees popping as he stood.
He looked back into the garden, but even the magpie had gone. So why did he still feel like something was eyeballing him? There was a muted bang from further up the street and Blake’s entire body jolted, as if somebody had plugged him into the mains.
Bloody hell, he said to himself, hearing kids laughing and realising it had only been somebody’s front door closing. Pull yourself together, mate.
He wrapped the dressing gown tight around his waist, making a show of looking into the garden, just in case whoever was giving him ghost chills was still there.
“You owe me a new door, arsehole,” he said.
He stood there for a moment longer, until the silence was so big it seemed to swallow him. Then he retreated inside, slamming the door.
Three
“No, it’s a mark, you sure you didn’t notice it?”
Blake slammed on the brakes as the lights ahead turned red, the car juddering to a halt hard enough to make his phone slide off the passenger seat.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, B,” Julia replied, her voice ridiculously quiet through the Volvo’s speaker system. He’d almost reached the Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital—he could have shouted out the window and she’d probably have heard him better. “I was in a hurry this morning, didn’t look back. A mark?”
“Yeah, a circle, triangle, little things that looked like sperm or something. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe.”
The brake lights in front snapped off and he eased the car forward. The traffic was always bad on the roads out of town, but the rain made everybody and their grandmother reach for the car keys. The entire city, as small as it was, was choked. He checked the clock on the dashboard, already twenty minutes late for his first appointment.
Fuck.
“You sure it isn’t a split in the wood, from the rain, or where somebody knocked into it or something?”
“No way,” he said. “It’s deliberate, it’s a pattern.”
“Maybe somebody is about to take you on an unexpected journey,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. It made him feel better, the way her smiles always did. “You didn’t see Gandalf in the garden? A load of midgets?”
“Dwarves,” he corrected, flicking on his indicator and trying to edge across the lanes. “Okay, well I just wanted to check, babe. Thought it was weird.”
“Sure, it’s weird. I’ll have a look when I’m back. Your turn to cook tonight or mine?”
“You mean you’ve already forgotten that bowl of cold, flavourless pasta I made you last night?” he said. “That’s gratitude for you.”
“Oh yeah, I think Doof got most of it,” she said. “Gotta run, B, see you for lunch?”
“Unless I divorce you first,” he muttered, but it was to a dead line. He pressed the button to end the call anyway, ignoring the horns as he bullied his way through the traffic.
It took another ten minutes—and a whimpering call to his supervisor—before he pulled into the car park of the hospital. By then, the rain was hammering down like it had a grudge, like it was trying to wash the world away. His office was on the other side of the hospital campus to Julia’s department, in a cluster of older buildings, and by the time he’d reached it he was soaked through, as if he’d swum to work up the Wensum. He left a trail of droplets behind him as he squeaked and slipped his way into the lift, pressing the button for the second level basement floor.
Harold Blythe was waiting for him when the doors opened, the old guy’s white moustache twitching so hard that it might have been about to leap off his face. He glared at Blake before making a histrionic display of looking at his watch.
“I know, I know,” Blake said, grappling for an excuse. “I’m really sorry. We had trouble at home, a vandal. It took a while to sort out.”
“Tell that to your nine o’clock, Mr Barton,” Harold said. “Except you can’t, because he left.”
Dammit.
“And your nine forty-five is thinking about heading the same way, so maybe we could try to catch him before he goes? Might that be a good thing for a man in your profession to do, considering the fragile nature of those under your care? A little compassion, perhaps?”
“Yes,” Blake said, adding “Sir” before he remembered he wasn’t at school. It seemed to placate Harold, though, as the old man harrumphed for a second or two more before strolling back down the corridor. Blake ran a hand through his drenched hair then went the other way, heading along the quiet underground hallways until he reached his cramped, windowless office. There was a young man inside, perched on the edge of his seat, his back to the door.
“Hey, hi, hello,” Blake said as he walked in, gently kicking the door shut behind him. The man’s head snapped around, his eyes wide but glazed, like he’d just woken from a trance. He wasn’t one of Blake’s usual patients, but he got new cases all the time, fresh from the oncology department. This guy had the look—the oh shit I’ve just been diagnosed what the fuck do I do now please don’t let me die look. Blake flashed his most reassuring smile, holding out his hand. “I’m really sorry to have kept you waiting, it’s the rain, the roads. Anyway, here I am.”