The Dead of Winter

Stuart MacBride THE DEAD OF WINTER TRANSWORLD UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia New Zealand | India | South Africa Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Bantam Copyright © Stuart MacBride, 2023 The moral right of the author has been asserted Cover design: Richard Ogle / TW Cover images: Alamy and Shutterstock This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental. Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition. ISBN: 978-1-473-59254-4 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. For Victoria Wood master of the non sequitur, maestro of the absurd; an alchemist who could turn mundane life into absolute gold who’s probably had more of an influence on my writing than anyone else 1953–2016 Contents —trust no one— Chapter 0 —the beginning— Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 —a better class of criminal— Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 —don’t move— Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 —detective inspector— Twenty-Four Twenty-Five Twenty-Six Twenty-Seven Twenty-Eight —take a deep breath— Chapter 29 Thirty Chapter 30 —snow, blood, death, pain— Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Thirty-Six Thirty-Seven Chapter 38 —enter the cavalry— Chapter 39 —TRUST NO ONE— (unless you want stabbed in the back) 0 I never really wanted to be a police officer. Thick flakes of white drift down from a low, grey sky, adding their weight to the drooping branches of beech trees. Making the gorse and broom slump in surrender. A burn gurgles, just out of sight behind knotted clumps of barbed-wire brambles. A duvet of white smothers the forest clearing, snow robbing the shapes and colour from everything, leaving only the frozen ghosts of what lies buried beneath. I wanted to be an astronaut, or a football player, or a rock star … Everything is calm and still and crisp, marred only by a line of deep footprints and a smooth-edged scar where something heavy has been dragged through the drifts. Then there’s the noises: the ping-and-clang of a pickaxe, chipping away at the frozen ground – a regular, methodical sound, an industrial metronome, marking out the time of death. Every blow accompanied by a grunt of exertion. My big brother, Dave, he was the one meant to follow the family tradition and join up, but a drunk driver blew straight through the Holburn Street junction, and that was that. The person swinging that pickaxe is tall, broad-shouldered, powerful. Hair pulled back from her flushed face. Mid-forties, give or take a year or two. Her high-vis padded jacket hangs from the branch of a twisted Scots pine, like a flayed skin – one of the sleeves blackened with blood, more smears on the front. A second jacket, dark as coal, and a petrol-blue shirt are draped over another branch. Steam rises from the shoulders of her burgundy T-shirt. You’d think she’d be wearing something a bit more … death-metal-like. You know: a skull and crossbones, or a snake with a dagger in its teeth, but her T-shirt features a cartoon black cat in a bow-tie and eye patch, posing with a gun like it’s from a James Bond movie. The hole’s already waist-deep, a pile of dark earth slumping beside it. A wooden-handled shovel poking out of the heap, like a skeletal flag. Dave swapped his police dreams for a wheelchair, and I swapped mine for a warrant card. Cos that’s what you do when your dad’s a cop, and his dad before him, and his dad before that. A body lies off to one side, partly covered by a stained sheet, curled against the Scots pine’s hungry roots. The body’s high-vis jacket is the twin of the one hanging from the branch, only there’s a lot more blood. Deep scarlet stains the jacket’s fluorescent-yellow back; it’s soaked into the grubby-grey suit underneath too. The jacket’s owner doesn’t look a day over twenty-four, but he does look very, very dead. His skin’s got that waxy, translucent, mortuary colour to it, where it isn’t smeared in dark red. More blood on his shirt, and on the cheeks of his sharp-featured face. Bags under his closed eyes. Short brown hair and a matching Vandyke … Strange the way things turn out, isn’t it? The muscled woman in the cartoon-cat T-shirt stops swinging the pickaxe and stands there for a moment, head back, breath fogging above her as the snow falls. Face pink and shiny. Sorry – where are my manners? The lady doing the digging is one Detective Inspector Victoria Elizabeth Montgomery-Porter, North East Division. Some people call her ‘Bigtoria’, but never to her face. She tosses the pickaxe out of the hole and grabs the shovel instead. Muscles bunch and writhe in her thick arms as she digs, the shovel’s blade biting into the loosened soil,