Sample 1 – Freeze
Barney controlled his breathing as he stepped into the room. Wary of sending shadows across that blind, he shone his phone torch onto the floor and started to step carefully around the perimeter of a worn carpet.

There was a small kitchen area on the wall to his right and a fold-down bed on the facing wall. He stopped and dared raise his torch a tad. The bed was empty and neatly made.

He moved around, past an open toilet door, and relaxed a little in the knowledge that this looked like a studio flat, which meant there were no other rooms to check, no need to risk staying too long.

He continued to step into the pool of light until he reached the third wall. He stopped dead. Why the hell would anyone take up this much space in a small flat by installing a bloody great chest freezer? And how could someone who’d been reduced to living in such mean accommodation afford to fill the bugger anyway?

Barney thought these were very interesting questions. But there was another. Why had he fitted a padlock to it?

Well, of course there was a logical explanation. Maybe the man who lived here made his living buying and selling meat. There were so many food shops and restaurants in the area that the logic was inescapable and Barney wanted to like it.

Breaking into a flat was one thing but breaking into a freezer full of meat would be just plain silly. And he badly needed to be gone.

He flicked the patch of light along the floor to the fourth wall, the one with the window. There seemed to be a desk and chair here. He looked closer. Yes, a desk, or rather a make-up table, with a trio of fixed mirrors. He felt that chill run down his back, the one which knew things before he did. It was the kind of table he’d seen Jack use when transforming himself into a movie legend. The Ghost too was said to be a master of disguise.

Had Barney, by going to an AA meeting then following its worthy Leader to this place, discovered the dragon’s lair? But why here and why had he been a regular at such meetings? Unless he was quite simply hiding in plain sight, where no-one would think to look for him. He could return here as Alec and leave as whoever he chose for his next commission. But if so, why would he let the Leader come and go so freely?

Barney knew he was staying too long. He needed to get out before someone returned. And yet, the mystery of the freezer intrigued him.

In such a room, in such a place, a locked freezer?

He took a big breath and realised how tense he was. But he’d come this far and rightly or wrongly he sensed that the freezer was significant.

The thought made him so cold that he might have been inside that big white box. Was he really going to add this next crime to drink driving and housebreaking?

‘Ach, what the hell,’ he said out loud for courage, then pulled out his lock picks again. Now, all he had to do was lift the lid and confirm the contents as lamb chops and steaks before making his escape and laughing at himself as the complete fool that he was.

He paused. He felt both disoriented and exhilarated; shitting himself and screaming inside with some crazed sense of liberation. He was in the forbidden land, beyond the laws he’d spent his adult life enforcing.

The scariest thing, he realised as he pulled open the lid and rested it against the wall, was that he liked it.

At first glance, it looked like the opaque plastic sheet could very well cover nothing more than the stock products of a meat trader.

He reached across to his left to grab the far corner then carefully drew it towards him so that he could put it back in more or less the same position.

He shone his torch. Shit! His gut clenched. A human face stared blankly back at him from within a clear plastic bag.

Barney pulled the cover all the way to his right.

The man, maybe aged around forty, had no obvious injuries and was dressed like half the world, in faded jeans, denim jacket and trainers. He had clear plastic bags over his hands. 

But it was that stony, bloodless face like porcelain which drew him. For this could, after all, be the face in the sketch, the face which haunted him.

Sample 2 – Edge – Ch1
The body was just as they’d been told. In fact, it didn’t look like a dead body at all.

Barney sensed that Jean-Luc felt as he did about this, as if they were intruding, having just walked into a top executive’s office and interrupted him in the act of signing some document or other.

But this man was dead alright.

Marcel Laporte. Client Acquisitions Director for Modus Universal Bank. A big wheel in the financial world. A high- roller too, by all accounts. But no more. Someone had put a stick in his spokes and stopped him in his tracks.

DI Barney Mains felt a shiver run down his back. He didn’t like that shiver. It knew something he didn’t.

Jean-Luc was behind the man now, bent over, peering at the neck. It appeared that the Frenchman, looking thoughtful in his distinguished silver hair and goatee beard, was one step ahead. ‘We can’t draw any conclusions until we get him back for a closer look.’

Captain Verten of the Police Nationale sounded matter-of- fact. But Barney was already drawing the conclusion which his own instinct had reached before him, that it wasn’t a stick which had done for the man but a needle.

This bizarre scene bore the hallmark of a killer he knew all too well, a killer he’d seen fall to his death from the top of a very high cliff. Except that when the recovery squad arrived in daylight to pick up the pieces, they found nothing.

And ever since then, Barney had woken each morning wondering if that would be the day when he got the call, the one which said that this near-mythical killer who refused to die, the one they called the Ghost, was back in business.

‘Barney, I can see you thinking. Stop it. We don’t know anything yet for sure.’

‘You’re right, of course, JL. But it’s his style. Like the last time. The setup. Posed for us to find. It’s…’

The Frenchman cut him off. ‘Come on. We’re only going to get in the way of the forensics boys here. Let’s speak with this man’s colleagues.’

Why did Barney feel like he was being hurried away, maybe being spared the truth, that there was a needle mark in the back of that man’s neck? He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. The Ghost was back. The elaborate posing of his victim’s body, cruelly frozen in time like some shop window mannequin, was a message delivered by the Ghost, straight to Barney. It said: I’m still here. And you screwed up big time when you didn’t make sure I was dead.

The big Scotsman didn’t need telling. That night, on the clifftop in late summer, he’d charged at the killer, sent him flying over the edge. The rope, the Ghost’s last chance, had vanished along with him, into the void.

If Barney hadn’t suffered from an intense fear of heights, he would have crawled to that edge and looked over. If he had, he would no doubt have seen his prey clinging to the cliff-face below. What he would have done about it was another matter, although based on his lifelong compulsion to do the right thing, he would have tried to help the man clamber back up to safety, to thereafter stand trial for his crimes.

But death had been in the air that night and there had been a moment when that rope momentarily snagged on a rock and Barney paused, just for an instant.

In that split second he had questioned whether it wouldn’t be better just to finish it, to pick up the end of that life-saving rope and flip it free. Yet he did nothing; neither that, nor make a grab for it. He chose to let fate decide. And he’d had to live with that; the shame of doing nothing, but also of feeling nothing when the end of that rope snaked free and disappeared. He’d been content to simply assume that an evil man was even then tumbling into nothingness, to be smashed to a pulp on the jagged rocks far below.

But because of his own weakness, he never checked. And that was what haunted him still, three months later.

As he turned with Jean-Luc to leave the macabre still life behind, he resigned himself to awaiting the official report, which would surely say that this man had indeed died from an injection of deadly poisons, the Ghost’s signature means of Dispatch.

It would confirm his worst fears, fears that had not only plagued his waking hours, but had infested his dreams too and drawn him down into some very dark places.

This man’s death was his fault. How many more would die because of him?