The Devil’s in the
Detail
Matthew S Wilson
Copyright © 2012 Matthew S Wilson
Published by Torwood Avenue
All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Original ISBN: 978-0-9873459-0-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9873459-1-2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With special thanks to Michael Trott and Rowan Prendergast for their invaluable editorial support and passion for the work.
Thanks also to my family and friends for their encouragement and support throughout the journey.
Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court,
lest your accuser hand you over to the judge,
and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison;
truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny.
- Matthew 5:25-26
CHAPTER 1
It was the silence that woke David. After living in the same house in London for the best part of twenty years, he found it difficult to sleep without the Number 19 bus gently shaking the bed as it passed in the street below.
Why was it so quiet? Was it a bank holiday today? The city always seemed to have a collective hangover on bank holidays. All except for cab drivers of course. Somebody had to ferry the hordes of foreign shoppers around the West End. Shopping, excessive drinking and cold weather were a cab driver’s livelihood. That’s what made December his favourite time of year. And then David remembered why it was so quiet. It was Christmas Day.
He swallowed and opened an eye. This certainly wasn’t his bedroom. For starters there was a metal toilet without a seat in the corner of the room. Next to it, a washbasin below a cracked mirror. The bed squeaked as he sat upright and opened his other eye. This certainly wasn’t his bed either. A single mattress rested over a simple metal-framed bed. What would Sarah have said? Where the hell was he?
He swung his feet over the edge to the floor and rubbed his temples, partly to dull the headache he seemed to have woken with and partly to try and encourage his memory. It seemed that once he’d hit 40 a couple of years ago, most parts of his body needed a little more encouragement than they used to.
For some reason he recalled seeing the smiling face of a giraffe. Had he been on the whiskey last night? He remembered sitting in his cab, waiting in the cab rank outside Hamleys on Regent Street. Parking out the front of the city’s largest toy store on Christmas Eve was always a safe bet. He’d been waiting for the obligatory, flustered parent to bundle into his cab, complaining that the shop had ran out of whatever the latest craze was this year and demand they go to Harrods at once.
Instead he got the grinning face of a giraffe in his rear-view mirror. It was quickly replaced with the face of a young woman dressed in what appeared to be every winter garment she’d ever owned. A muffled Australian accent fought its way from beneath her scarves.
‘Do you like my Christmas present for my baby brother?’
‘He’s a beauty, where to love?’
The right to refer to any female between the ages of five and fifty as “love” was one of the few perks of the job; although it did make his daughter Lucy cringe every time she heard him say it.
‘Willesden Green.’
He’d driven down Oxford Street and up past Baker Street, talking to her as they crawled past buses filled with other last minute shoppers. She was from Sydney and he’d mentioned that his Luce was living in Melbourne with her fiancée. Fiancée? He still wasn’t entirely sure if he was comfortable with that. The 23-hour flight to Australia for the upcoming wedding would give him plenty of time to at least try.
The girl’s name was Helen and she was living in London with her boyfriend. Like every other Australian it seemed that Helen and her boyfriend were here on a working holiday. With so many Australians in London nowadays, he often wondered just who was left living over there. She’d been telling him all about their plans for their first white Christmas and offered him Clementines whenever they stopped at the lights.
The bed gave a relieved squeak as he stood up and walked over to the small basin. He tried the hot water. Nothing. He turned on the cold water and cupped his hands, splashing his face to try and elicit what had happened next.
Willesden Green.
That’s right. Now, there were good parts of Willesden Green, but the street where he’d driven this young lady and her pet giraffe certainly wasn’t one of them. She’d been as good as gold though and given him a tip that would have put most City bankers to shame. He’d almost finished his three-point turn to drive back into the West End when he heard the sound of the breaking bottle.
He felt the cold water dripping from his face as he slowly opened his eyes.
The rest was somewhat patchy. He remembered hopping out of his cab and opening the boot. He remembered pulling out the crowbar that he kept hidden underneath the spare tyre. He remembered seeing Helen’s blood staining the snow covered path and walking calmly towards the group of boys, dressed in hoodies and chugging down bottles of Stella. He even remembered his foot slipping on a blood-spattered Clementine.
He strained to remember the rest. As if piecing together a jigsaw, David had the edges and corners mapped out, but the middle was frustratingly empty. There was the crunching sound of the steel of the crow bar on the first kid’s jaw, and he recalled how the sound of teeth clattering upon the icy pavement had sounded like rolling dice. A loud cracking sound that ripped through the night air. And then everything went very, very black.
He looked up into the mirror, his reflection disjointed by the crack in the mirror that ran across his throat. He paused a moment and tried to make sense of the room again. A single bed, a washbasin, a cracked mirror and no windows. Realisation trickled down his spine.
‘Jesus, I’m in the cells,’ he said to himself.
He spun around and walked over to the cold metal door behind him. A ray of hope rising from the fact that there was a door handle. Cells don’t have door handles do they? As he pulled down hard on the handle, he also discovered that this particular door had a lock.
He clasped his hand over his mouth to stifle a series of expletives that could presumably be used against him in a court of law and sat down on the protesting bed once more. Questions fired through his mind in varying levels of importance.
Did British Airways accept “incarceration” as an acceptable reason for a refund? Who would walk Lucy down the aisle? Had he seriously injured one of those boys? Christ, had he killed one of them? No. Surely he hadn’t. He hadn’t meant to hurt anybody. He’d just wanted to scare them. They’d hurt that young girl. Somebody had to stand up to them. He had to explain that to somebody. He needed to make a phone call. He needed to get himself a lawyer.
It was precisely at that moment that he heard the sound of a key being inserted into the door and the metallic click of a lock being slid back. With his mouth still covered by his hand, he sat there frozen as the heavy metal door swung open. He was confronted by a stocky woman, with a scruffy flock of snowy hair, who was dressed in a simple grey gown. She carried a folder and had a pair of bifocals perched on her nose.
‘Mr Shepherd?’
Unable to swallow, let alone speak, he nodded.
‘My name is Olivia, I’ll be representing you in your case’.