Unbound Ties: When the past unravels, all that’s left is death ... A Gritty Crime Fiction Police Procedural Novel (Gus McGuire Book 7) Read online

  Born in Scotland, Made in Bradford sums up Liz Mistry’s life. Over thirty years ago she moved from a small village in West Lothian to Yorkshire to get her teaching degree. Once here, Liz fell in love with three things; curries, the rich cultural diversity of the city … and her Indian husband (not necessarily in this order). Now thirty years, three children, two cats (Winky and Scumpy) and a huge extended family later, Liz uses her experiences of living and working in the inner city to flavour her writing. Her gritty crime fiction police procedural novels set in Bradford embrace the city she describes as ‘Warm, Rich and Fearless’ whilst exploring the darkness that lurks beneath.

  Struggling with severe clinical depression and anxiety for a large number of years, Liz often includes mental health themes in her writing. She credits the MA in Creative Writing she took at Leeds Trinity University with helping her find a way of using her writing to navigate her ongoing mental health struggles. Being a debut novelist in her fifties was something Liz had only dreamed of and she counts herself lucky, whilst pinching herself regularly to make sure it’s all real. One of the nicest things about being a published author is chatting with and responding to readers’ feedback and Liz regularly does events at local libraries, universities, literature festivals and open mics. She also teaches creative writing too. Now, having nearly completed a PhD in Creative Writing focussing on ‘the absence of the teen voice in adult crime fiction’ and ‘why expansive narratives matter’, Liz is chock full of ideas to continue writing.

  In her spare time, Liz loves pub quizzes (although she admits to being rubbish at them), dancing (she does a mean jig to Proud Mary – her opinion, not ratified by her family), visiting the varied Yorkshire landscape, with Robin Hoods Bay being one of her favourite coastal destinations, listening to music, reading and blogging about all things crime fiction on her blog, The Crime Warp.

  UNBOUND TIES

  When the past unravels, all that’s left is death …

  Liz Mistry

  First Published in 2020

  By MB Publications

  Copyright © Liz Mistry

  Liz Mistry Has asserted her right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual person living or dead, is purely co-incidental.

  A CIP Catalogue Record for this book is available from the British Library

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-8381821-0-6

  Dedication

  For my family

  And to everyone out there who is struggling with the world as it is now.

  DI Gus McGuire books

  Unquiet Souls

  Uncoiled Lies

  Untainted Blood

  Uncommon Cruelty

  Unspoken Truths

  Unseen Evil

  Unbound Ties

  DS Nikki Parekh books

  Last Request

  Broken Silence

  Dark Memories

  Praise for Liz Mistry

  'Liz Mistry is a terrific crime writer who knows how to keep her readers on the edge of their seats and frantically turning the pages desperate to find out what happens next.' ★★★★★ Bookish jottings blog

  'Right from the first page the story is hugely entertaining and fast paced.’ ★★★★★ Waycat

  ‘Liz tells a story and makes the characters, places and plot come alive. More please’ ★★★★★ The Glamizon

  ‘Liz Mistry manages to produce books that are not just cracking reads but also a social commentary on life.’ ★★★★★ M Jay

  ‘I hope there's more to come from DI Gus McGuire, in my view he can stand shoulder to shoulder with Alex Cross and Lincoln Rhyme’ ★★★★★Y O’Hara

  Prologue

  Then

  Scotland

  I’m confused. This isn’t right. I know it’s not right. I don’t like it, so I focus on her feet. Don’t need to look up. Not if it upsets me. Chipped red nail varnish on her toenails and a trickle of some liquid moving down her foot, gathering in a drip, ready to join the pool on the floor beneath her. I draw closer, puzzled, wondering what she’s up to now. With my index finger pointing, I capture the drip on my fingertip and sniff it. It smells weird, so I flick out my tongue and taste it – still weird.

  Backing off, I sit on the top stair where I can see her. I breathe in the smell – Lavender.

  ‘Lavender’s Blue Dilly Dilly, Lavender’s Green.’

  I hum because I don’t like the noises she makes or the way her fingers scrape at the rope round her neck and her feet kick out like she’s trying to dance.

  ‘When I am King, Dilly Dilly, you shall be Queen.’

  Why would she put a rope round her neck, anyway? I put that thought out of my mind and open my schoolbag. I have a biscuit leftover from my packed lunch – Chocolate Digestive – my favourite. I hid it from the others in my desk till home time. That way at least the bullies won’t take it – if it’s not in my lunch bag, they won’t know about it, will they?

  Nibbling it, making it last, because I won’t get another – she’ll have scoffed them all by now – I take out my sketchbook. Drawing her is easier now she’s stopped moving about. I start at the puddle beneath her feet. Something else is joining the liquid now. It stinks as if she’s pooed herself. Yuck. Granny won’t like that. Nope, she won’t like that one little bit. Still, I keep on drawing – that’s what life drawing is all about, or so my teacher says. Little snippets of life. She says the more I practise the better I’ll get, and Miss is right. I’m getting better every day – Miss tells me so. I’m onto her feet now, with that horrible polish on the toes. It’s ugly, but she thinks it’s nice. They’re only swinging a little from side to side now. I look hard at them. They’re all veiny on the front and mucky on the soles.

  Up her legs now. Wonder why she’s got no clothes on. Maybe she had a shower. I can see her privates, but I look away. Not supposed to look at those bits or touch them. Not to touch my own privates – last time I got caught doing that, she took a slipper to my bum, and it was sore for days. But Miss says that detail is key, so I half shut my eyes and hope it’ll be all right and shade in the hair that’s there before moving quickly to her hands. The fingernails are all chipped and bloody – the same nail varnish as is on her feet is all chipped too. I draw the blood and move on up her body, past her titties – again I don’t look. Not going to get into trouble for that. Focussing on her face now, I take another nibble of my biscuit. She’s looking at me, a tear rolling down her cheek, and I wonder why she did this if it makes her so upset.

  The front door opens, and Granny comes in. She’s shouting, ‘Bye, Bye’ to the neighbour – old bitch that Mrs Simmons. Always moaning about something. I drop the rest of my biscuit and watch as it falls to the floor under her feet, crumbs all around it. Don’t want to get in trouble for not eating it at lunchtime. She’ll say, ‘It’ll spoil your dinner.’ It won’t though. It’s mince and tatties for dinner, and I love mince and tatties. Nothing will spoil that.

  She’s yelling for me now, but it’s all
muffly because the door at the bottom of the stairs is shut. ‘What are you doing up there? Where’s your mum?’

  ‘We’re up here, Granny, upstairs.’

  She opens the door and starts to climb up. Then, she stumbles, she says, ‘Oh my God.’

  I poke my head round the corner. Granny never says God like that. It’s taking his name in vain. ‘What’s wrong, Granny?’

  But she’s staring at Mum, hanging behind me, the rope stretched from a hook in the ceiling. Granny’s face has gone all weird and white. Her fingers cover her mouth and I want to get my sketchbook out. I want to do what Miss says and draw what I see, but I know that would be wrong. I don’t know how I know it would be wrong, I just do.

  Granny’s eyes move to me and she swallows hard, then waves her hands at me. ‘Come down the stairs. Come down at once and don’t touch a thing. Nothing, you hear me?’

  I duck back to grab my sketchbook and crayons, but she’s yelling now. ‘Right now. Come down right this minute.’

  I grab my things. No matter what she says, I’m not leaving them up there, not with that stink. I dodge past my mum, but my shoulder catches her foot and she swings round. Tears are pouring down Granny’s face now and she collapses onto the bottom step. When I reach her, she pulls me into her lap and hugs me too tight. Instead of the awful stink, I smell lavender. She always smells like lavender, does Granny – Granny and Mummy smell exactly the same.

  I look over her shoulder back up the stairs and as I look, I swear I see a flicker, like a candle, in Mummy’s eyes. It’s only there for a moment, and then it goes. Like it’s been snuffed out and she just hangs there swinging a little from the rope, her neck all scratched and horrid, her tongue bulgy and yucky. I wonder how she ever managed to keep it in her mouth. If my tongue was that size, I wouldn’t be able to speak, or breathe, or eat.

  At last, Granny lets me go. She stands me on the floor, and I wait till she hefts herself to her feet. She doesn’t look at Mummy again, but I can’t take my eyes off her swinging body. I’ve got to remember what she looks like so I can finish my drawing later. Her fingers pinching into my shoulders, Granny turns me round and guides me back out of the house.

  I sit in the front garden and do my drawing and before long there’re all sorts of sirens and people moving about in my house, so I turn the page and start to draw them instead.

  Chapter 1

  Now

  Bradford

  ‘We’ve got to tell him, Corrine. You know we have to. Especially after everything that happened last year. He hates being kept in the dark and we both know why that is, don’t we?’

  Corrine’s lips tightened. Fergus was well aware that Corrine worked very hard to accept the fact that their daughter Katie’s partner, Gabriella, was Angus’s ex-wife, but sometimes, even for Corrinne, it was hard to leave that in the past.

  Shaking her head as if to dislodge the memory, Corrine exhaled. She was adamant. Her lips tightened and with hands cinching her waist in the combative pose that Fergus recognised so well. ‘No, Fergus, not now. We don’t have to tell him now. Let him have some peace of mind, even if it’s just for another few weeks. There’s a lot going on for him at the moment, what with Gabriella and Katie…’

  Her voice trailed off and a furrow spread across her brow. ‘Who knows how he’s going to react to all that when the time comes?’

  Fergus McGuire sighed. It wasn’t often he disagreed with his wife, but more and more often, when they did, the disagreements were about their son Angus. He understood Corrine being protective of the boy. Hell, he was protective of him too, and there was no denying Angus had gone through hell a few years earlier. In the dark of night, Fergus still sometimes wakened with a start, his heart hammering and the image of his blood-soaked son, barely clinging to life, being rushed past him in the corridors of Bradford Royal Infirmary. No father wanted to go through the experience of seeing their child like that – but he’d swallowed his grief, his emotions, and focused on getting his family through the dark times that lay ahead. And those times had been dark. The darkest Fergus had ever encountered, for it wasn’t only Angus’s physical injuries, although those were bad enough, it was the mental images that haunted the lad, dimming the spark in his eyes – the spark that was so similar to Corrine’s. In those months, every time Fergus looked at Angus, he was acutely aware of the absence of that flicker of life, and it frightened him more than anything in his life before ever had.

  They’d almost lost their son that day – not to his wounds, but to the ghosts that occupied his mind. Seeing Greg kill his own wife and then, plagued by the demons that resided in his best friend’s head, go for his own son – Angus’s godson, would haunt him forever. Angus had reacted in the only way he could – had done the same thing that anyone else would have done to protect little Billy – he killed Greg, and in doing so, extinguished a part of himself. That day Angus had lost not only his best friend but a huge chunk of his extended family, and it had taken him to places even Fergus couldn’t imagine.

  Fists clenched, Fergus looked from his wife to the official-looking brown envelope that lay between them on the breakfast bar. Its contents were life changing – traumatising and definitely something they should face as a family. He sighed; his wife would get her own way. Corrine McGuire always did. But it didn’t mean that Fergus had to be happy about it.

  As if sensing his acquiescence, Corrine moved round to join her husband. Placing her arms round his oversized tummy, she hugged him close and, voice muffled by his jumper, she said, ‘We’ll get through this. We always do … besides, we’re not alone, I know where we can get professional help for this. We’ll be OK.’

  Eyes fixed on the envelope that contained a nightmare as bad as the ones he’d once had about his son, Fergus kissed the top of his wife’s head, but deep inside he wasn’t so sure they would survive this. Deep inside, a premonition that the contents of that envelope would decimate his family took hold and no matter how tightly he hugged his wife, it just wouldn’t let go.

  Chapter 2

  Bradford

  Visiting a crime scene, almost always, resulted in a spurt of exhilaration, a spasm of dread, and a healthy dose of resignation; not again, when will these evil bastards stop keeping us in a job? DI Gus McGuire stood on the small square of lino that was placed just inside the front door and just in front of another door leading to the staircase stretching to the upstairs rooms. Hissing Sid, the chief CSI, had told him what to expect and now dread had been replaced by resignation.

  With both doors ajar now, the space Gus stood in was reduced to less than a metre square. His detective sergeant, the diminutive Alice Cooper, attempting unsuccessfully to peer over his shoulder to where the body dangled from the banister while muttering and moaning behind him, was the ultimate distraction.

  ‘How am I supposed to see a bloody thing with your big head in the way? Any chance you could hunker down a bit…’

  Both wearing bunny suits, as Alice called the crime scene overalls they’d donned just before entering the premises, Gus had already nearly succumbed to the cloying claustrophobic sensation that often led to a panic attack and his partner’s wittering was doing his head in big time. ‘For goodness’ sake, Al. Just shut up for a minute. We’ll swap over. Just wait.’

  And with less grace than speed, he edged to the side, narrowly balancing on the foot plates Hissing Sid had deposited on the floor.

  ‘Don’t you compromise my scene, Gus. You look a bit wobbly there.’ Hissing Sid’s words from outside the door were accompanied by the usual noxious fart that he seemed to store up for just such occasions.

  Gus could have throttled the man. It seemed that Sid’s CSI suit wasn’t up to the task of isolating his pernicious trumps, and despite being outside, the stench still seemed to waft indoors. Cursing under his breath, Gus began to breathe in through his mouth, acknowledging that his earlier satisfaction that they hadn’t caught a ‘ripe one’ this time, had been premature. Ignoring the CSI, he shimmied
Alice to the front using a shuffling motion that felt like a parody of some sort of erotic dance, so they could both see the crime scene with the body still in situ. Thank God neither Compo nor Taffy were there to witness this. Bad enough that he could hear Sid’s chortles of amusement. A quick glance over his shoulder told him that Sid had recorded the entire thing on his phone. ‘Don’t you dare upload…’

  ‘Oops, too late.’ Sid, mask pulled down below his neck revealing his most definitely not contrite face, grinned. ‘Only sent it to Compo and Taffy…’

  No time for dwelling on what the rest of the team would make of his and Alice’s shimmy, Gus darted a dark frown at the man and then turned to view the scene. The CSIs, having forensically secured the stairs and the equally miniscule area around the body, had retreated into the bedrooms to allow Gus and Alice to view the scene as it had been discovered.

  It only took a single glance for Gus to realise that their decision was one which he appreciated, for this crime scene was like no other Gus had ever witnessed.

  ‘Is that…?’

  Exhaling long and slow, Gus nodded, then realising Alice couldn’t see him said, ‘Yep. We’ve got some sort of ritual here. No wonder Sid wanted us to view it before they removed the body.’

  He turned to the uniformed officer who had signed them into the inner cordon of the alley leading to the garden of the back terrace and who now stood by the door. ‘Get on the phone to DCI Chalmers and tell her that we need Professor Sebastian Carlton down here asap. Tell her, I don’t care what he’s doing, this is an emergency – get a car to collect him – whatever, but I want him here pronto.’