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Description and First Chapter of

'Last Of The Blood'

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Description

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Last Of The Blood is the first novel in the forthcoming Ali Feysor Thriller Series.

 

When a friend and colleague is murdered in Kosovo, investigative reporter Ali Feysor asks the questions no one wants answered. Single-minded and relentless, she uncovers a dark conspiracy involving multinational criminals, establishment figures and rogue MI5 elements.

 

She falls into the dark world of her own story – a world of dirty tricks, betrayal and murder - and embarks on a deadly game of cat and mouse that takes her across two continents and forces her to face down her inner demons.

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She has a guardian angel of sorts, an enigmatic ex-SAS 'minder', but she can't be sure who he is working for. Amid the twists and turns, she can trust nothing and no-one.

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As she criss-crosses the lines between hunter and hunted, good and evil, love and sexual tension, can she expose the conspirators before they hunt her down? Can she escape the vengeance that is sure to follow their exposure? Or was her fate sealed the moment she allowed herself to be sucked into this ruthless game?  

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First Chapter

 

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Prologue:   A Death in Kosovo

 

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'Unless there's been a reaction, there's been no journalism.'

 

Hunter Thompson

 

 

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MOORHOUSE CAME IN through the glass doors of the restaurant and paused, his face empty behind a pair of old Ray-bans. Mid-forties, lithe and muscled, he wore faded denims, a leather jacket bulky enough to conceal a handgun and ancient desert boots. With his grey, bloodless complexion, shaven head and four-day beard, he looked like a cross between a cage fighter and a street bum. Not a conventional breakfast guest for a grand hotel like the Prishtina. Disdainful patrons turned to stare at this intruder, making plain their disapproval, but they quickly averted their eyes as if to be caught looking might invite trouble.

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Shimmon was seated as far from the door as possible. He sipped his coffee with feigned detachment and waited for Moorhouse to pick him out. He couldn't see the eyes behind the shades but he knew that they were scanning the room for him. His nerves were jangling with anticipation and a cold, fat drop of sweat crawled down his spine. Moorhouse spotted him, gave him a barely perceptible twitch of recognition then turned abruptly on his heel. The impulse to scurry after him was strong but Shimmon controlled it. He took a last mouthful of llokuma, a breakfast pastry with honey and yoghourt, and washed it down with a slug of coffee. Only then did he ease back his chair and pick up his coat and laptop.

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Outside, cold front rain chilled Prishtina's streets, driving morning commuters and beggars alike to shelter. Moorhouse was waiting under the hotel's portico, sharing a cigarette and comfortable silence with a local man. On seeing Shimmon, he flipped the cigarette into a flowerbox and flexed his shoulders. Close to, he seemed time-stretched, like someone living too close to his bones. His razored skull framed a thin, icy smile, and there were holes in his beard, as though he had beamed down a few molecules short. Shimmon sensed similar, menacing scars in his psyche and was glad that Moorhouse was on his side.

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Moorhouse tilted his head towards his companion. 'This is Sken. The best fixer I know. The source we're going to see is Turkish. I only run to Serbian and Albanian, so Sken's going to translate.'

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Sken was stumpy, with black hair, olive skin and murky eyes. He exchanged a perfunctory nod with Shimmon, then led them through the puddles to a battered Fiat Uno. Sken was driving and Moorhouse folded himself into the front passenger seat, leaving Shimmon to squeeze into the rear. The journalist had to sit sideways to fit and, as he struggled with the seatbelt, he caught himself in the mirror. It was an unedifying sight. A man older than his years, breathless, grey and bulky, eyes dull and lifeless beneath unkempt brows, and a two-day stubble that looked greasy, as if it had been painted on.

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An investigative journalist, Shimmon had come to Prishtina to interview Andri Boletini, a middle-ranking Kosovan mobster. It was not an assignment for the faint-hearted. Kosovo might have been cleansed but the ground was constantly in play. Ethnicity, religion or criminality - whatever the cause, for some this area of the Balkans remained a war zone in all but name. NATO might have put the slaughter on hold but Shimmon knew that the killing could return at any time. Which is why he had retained Moorhouse as his security advisor. He had also scheduled a fast return on his fear, arriving last evening and flying out later this afternoon, but half a day contained more than enough time for this place to turn into the wrong place. Perhaps even the final place.

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They drove past the Ramiz Sports Centre, turned north onto Vidovdanska then exited onto the Jug Bogdanova. The city opened out into scrubby parkland which soon gave way to mixed farming country that undulated into steep scarps and woodland. This was Pozderka, gateway to a lost eighteenth century world of isolated hamlets and hill farms. On Google Earth, it had looked like a modern suburb reaching out into the countryside but, on the ground, the only hint of the twenty-first century was a scattering of modern mansions and hotels.

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They carried on in silence for a further forty minutes before turning off onto a dirt road that was wet and sticky but passable. It had stopped raining and a strange mist coated the hillside, bringing shifting patterns of light that flitted like wraiths through the beeches and mulberries. After five minutes, they pulled up outside a two storey house.

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The whitewashed walls and red tiled roof awakened in Shimmon memories of Tuscany and childhood vacations. He could almost taste the vineyards. But there was no time to dwell on the past. Riding a wave of adrenaline, he was first out of the car, first to the house. The front door was yawning a welcome and he stepped inside. Only then did it hit him that something was wrong. No-one came to meet him, no one answered his shouted greeting, no-one demanded to know what he was doing in their home. There was just an ominous silence. And something else. A stifling putrescence. The smell was indistinct, mingling as it did with the aromas of the countryside, but it was there nonetheless. The miasma of the slaughterhouse.

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The stillness of this house was the stillness of death.

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Fear stirred from the pit of his stomach and it continued to rise even when his companions came to stand by him. The sight of Moorhouse gripping a Heckler & Koch P9S pistol, far from reassuring him, brought the bile to his throat.

'Next time, fucknucks,' the BG hissed fiercely, 'you wait until I've scoped the place.'

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Shimmon nodded foolishly. He knew that he should run away but his body wouldn't react. Instead, with slow-mo reluctance, he followed the others as they edged towards the lounge. The stench was stronger here. It was accompanied by a curious droning sound, like an untuned radio. The curtains were closed and it was difficult to make sense of the shadowy shapes in the gloom. The light switch wasn't working, so Moorhouse crossed the room and swept back the drapes.

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A fury of flies filled the air but Shimmon hardly noticed. His eyes were drawn inexorably to the man and woman. Both were naked and both were dead, their faces compressed and leathery, their bodies beginning to swell and their veins standing out green and red. Even as he watched, the blowflies swarmed back over them, feverish in their anticipation.

'Don't look at the eyes!' He recalled the advice of a young Guards Captain when he had covered the early Bosnian massacres. 'The eyes stay with you. You're forever wondering about their dying moments.'

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The woman was sprawled half-in, half-out of an armchair as though she had been flung into it. There were two entry wounds in the middle of her forehead. Tap-tap, you're dead. The bullet holes were surprisingly small, though the surrounding skin was bruised and split, the abrasion collars indicating how close her killer had stood.

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The man's dying had been less merciful. He had been taped to an upright chair and tortured. His face was masked with layer upon layer of agony. His fingers and toes were bloodied, torn and splintered. His tongue had been cut out, blood congealing where it had flowed over his chin and chest, the tongue discarded on the floor like so much trash. And, as if that message wasn't clear enough, patches of the man's torso had been crudely flayed, stripped to the muscle to spell out the word TRATER. There was no sign of a bullet or knife wound that might have ended the man's torment. He had simply died of the suffering.

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'Sweet Jesus!' Shimmon had seen plenty of death in his time but nothing like this. He turned away, struggling for breath, and dry-heaved.

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'They broke him,' Moorhouse said tersely. 'Fuckers know we're coming.'

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The taut edge of contact in his BG's voice quelled Shimmon's retching shock. Moorhouse was poised, senses probing through the buzzing of the flies, alert for a footfall, a heavy breath, or a drift of deodorant, obsessively caressing his pistol and taking reassurance from the chambered round. Sken had shrunk into himself, goose-pimpled and pallid, with a dark circle of fear about his eyes. A pistol had appeared in his hand, an old Czech CZ 75.

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There was a sound out back. Someone, or something. Motioning them to stay put, Moorhouse moved swiftly to the door. A brief listening pause, then he drifted towards the rear of the house. Moments later, there was the unmistakable purr of a mini machine pistol, a deep, slapping grunt, and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

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There had been no answering bark from Moorhouse's P9S.

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Sken reacted with the startle reflex of a cat. Uttering a sound somewhere between a scream and a curse, he flew off towards the front door. Flew into another burst of gunfire.

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There was a shocked interlude, as though someone had accidentally hit the pause button, then panic kicked in. Shimmon wasn't hurt, but that only left more space for the terror. He was trapped and alone. If he stayed inside, they would take him with ease. If he went through that door, a bullet storm would tear him apart. Death faced him at every turn. His heart lodged in his throat and pounded erratically. Maybe - the thought leaped unwanted into his mind - maybe he deserved to die. But not here. Not like this. And, suppose they didn't want to kill him? What if they intended to send him into Purgatory and cut out his tongue?

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The sheer terror of his situation supplanted his fear. He went for it, a power-breaking surge of energy that drove him to smash open the French windows with a chair and race through into the garden. Without a backward glance, he sprinted across flower bed and lawn, leaped over a ditch and crashed into the dense barrier of thorn and branch. The hedge had been designed to keep animals out, not people in, and for an instant he thought that his momentum was taking him through. But the thicket snagged his shoulder bag and brought him down.

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Winded, he tried to make himself invisible, pressing himself deeper into the soggy ground. But the alarm calls of strange birds assailed him, letting him know that this was no hiding place. Oblivious to his torn and bruised skin, he struggled to his feet, only for the hedge to come alive, reach out and drag him back down.

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Then the pain struck, stabbing and twisting like a hot knife from his back to his chest and squeezing his eyes shut. He thought that he had impaled himself on a branch, but the pain leaked through the rest of his body and he knew that he had been shot. With that realisation came a deathly hush, like all the transmitters had gone down. Even the bird alarms were off. 

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Instinctively, he closed his eyes on coming death.

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Strong hands seized him, dragging him from the clutches of the hedge and flipping him onto his back. Surprisingly, he no longer felt pain. It was as though he had been wrapped in a fire blanket. The face of a man stared down at him, his eyes dark and hateful, reflecting only torment and death. He had an Uzi in one hand, a razored blade in the other.

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'You English! You think you own the world!' He spat the words, as though they were the reason for his assault. 'Your time is finished. The devil is coming and he is going to fuck all your people to death!'

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Shimmon was a dead man. He knew that. And yet, the fear that gripped him went beyond his own dying. He had failed. He had uncovered a powerful and terrible secret but he had shared it with no one. Afraid of being scooped, he had kept it to himself, and now the secret would die with him.

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His last thought, as his world faded through a red haze, was the bitter futility of it all. He could summon no clever riposte for his killer, no grand words for the Reaper, only the most trite and terrible of observations:

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No one will ever know!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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