LITMIR.BIZ

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the information on the sheet. Perry Sleet. Forty-one. An animal drug salesman. In the photo, Sleet was wearing a rugby top and a cheeky grin. God’s gift. ‘Déjà vu?’

      ‘Yeah, you might say so. All over again.’

      Riley nodded. A while back he’d been involved in a missing persons case concerning a prison officer from HMP Dartmoor. The man had vanished on his journey home, turning up some days later at the bottom of a mineshaft in a remote part of the moor, a bullet in his brain for good measure.

      ‘Isn’t this one for mountain rescue?’ Riley looked up at Collier. ‘It’s not as if I’m some kind of expert on moorland disappearances.’

      ‘Not an expert, no, but the right man for the job undoubtedly.’ Collier nodded at the piece of paper on the desk in front of Riley. ‘You see, there are problems.’

      ‘Problems?’ Riley said, hoping he’d be able to deflect whatever Collier was trying to push his way. He gestured at his monitor. ‘Only I’m bit stretched for time on this one.’

      ‘All taken care of, mate.’ Collier turned his head and indicated a couple of young DCs three desks over. ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Keen as the proverbial. You can brief them when I’ve finished with you.’

      ‘Gareth, I—’

      ‘Sleet’s car was found yesterday evening up on Dartmoor. Door open, radio still on, a cup of coffee in the drinks holder on the dash. There’s been a cursory search of the area but no sign of the man. This is a guy who, according to his wife, is not an outdoor type.’ Collier nodded over to DC Enders. ‘Not like our man over there. Sleet didn’t have any walking gear. No GPS. No waterproofs. He had some wellies for traipsing across muddy farmyards, but they were still in the boot with the rest of his things.’

      ‘The drugs?’

      ‘Sleet carries samples only. Food supplements, that sort of thing.’ Collier shrugged. ‘We’ve got some right smackheads in Plymouth, but I think topping someone for a mineral lick is beyond even their stupidity. Anyway, if this was about the gear he was carrying, then where’s Sleet?’

      ‘So what’s your hunch?’

      ‘Hunches aren’t my job, they’re yours.’

      ‘Huh?’ Riley looked up at Collier. The man’s eyes narrowed and there was a thin smile on his lips. The office manager was teasing him, of that Riley had no doubt. He’d fed him a little nugget of information. Bait to see if Riley would bite. ‘There’s more, isn’t there? Tell me.’

      ‘Sleet’s married with two kids. Just bought a nice new house in Plymstock. Playing at happy families. Only I’m wondering if it’s an act. See, we’ve found Sleet’s mobile. At just after one o’clock he received a call from a particular number. The name listed alongside the number in his address book is “Sarah”. Just the woman’s first name, no other contact details. The call logs show that was the only call from or to the number.’

      ‘The wife found out then. Blew her top and went a little OTT. Or maybe it was this Sarah’s other half.’ Riley thought of his own girlfriend. Wondered about the kind of jealousy he’d feel if he discovered she’d been having an affair. ‘Do we know who this Sarah is?’

      ‘No. As I said, there’s no other details on Sleet’s phone and all calls to the woman’s number go through to voicemail. The phone is a pay as you go, but we’re working on tracing it.’ Collier shrugged and pointed down to the sheet of paper on the desk. ‘Meantime, see what you can come up with.’

      As Collier strode away, Riley glanced down at the paper and took in the full details. Perry Sleet had disappeared some time on Tuesday afternoon. He’d been up Tavistock way in the morning and kept two appointments. He’d had lunch at the Elephant’s Nest, a mile or so from the village of Mary Tavy – the receipt was in Sleet’s wallet in a jacket on the back seat – but had failed to turn up for a three o’clock meeting. His car had been found at the end of a little-used lane a few miles to the north-west of his lunch stop. A walker, suspicious that the door was open and nobody around, called 101. By six the local policing team had become concerned enough to send for the Dartmoor Rescue Group.

      Riley turned to the next sheet where Collier had helpfully added a couple of photographs harvested from Sleet’s Facebook page. The Sleet family on holiday. Catherine – the wife – with two young kids; Perry himself, grinning as he rode a jet ski. Riley focused on the picture of Catherine Sleet. High cheekbones, brown eyes matching her wavy shoulder-length hair, a see-through shift over a bikini revealing full breasts. This, he thought, wasn’t a woman you’d want to cheat on. Was she, though, somebody you might kill for?

      Jason woke to a night so dark that there was nothing but black. He opened and closed his eyes but it made no difference. If anything, the grey milkiness when he scrunched his eyes tight shut was more comforting than the blackness. If the absence of any light was frightening, so too was the lack of any sound. When he shifted his body he scraped on some kind of wooden floor, but that was the only noise.

      He lay still, listening, His heart thumped, but the thud, thud, thud was a sensation rather than anything audible.

      Silence. Deathly silence.

      Jason stared as hard as he could but the blackness was still absolute. This was a dream, he thought. He’d wake up soon. Then he reached down and pinched himself on the thigh, his fingers slipping on his jeans before he managed to catch a bunch of skin underneath.

      Ouch!

      This was no dream. Even though there was nothing to see, he was wide awake. He quivered slightly. Recently, he’d stayed up watching movies with Ned Stone. Not Disney though. These had been horror movies. Zombies, vampires, dead things which came in the night and dragged you screaming from under your duvet. Now he wished he’d listened to his mother who’d kept telling him to go upstairs to bed.

      He pushed himself up and sat for a moment or two. He tried to recall what had happened. The last thing he could remember was being on the shoreline with his bait bucket. He reached up and touched his neck. Sore. Somebody had grabbed him. Was it Lobster Larry or some other pervert? Perhaps his grandfather’s stories had a ring of truth about them after all. Still, it was no good worrying now. Wherever he was, he needed to escape. He’d watched enough of Stone’s movies to know that at some point they always came back. The perverts, the zombies, the grey ghouls frothing at the mouth.

      Jason tried to stand and promptly smashed his head on something above. Fuck! He tried again, feeling his way with his hands. Shit. He was in some sort of tunnel, probably no more than a metre high. He began to crawl instead, but his hand came up against wood.

      What the …?

      He spun round in the darkness, feeling in all directions. There was a side wall. And there. And there. And there. He ran his hands over the surface. He rapped with his knuckles. Wood. The same as the floor and the ceiling. He was trapped in some sort of box or crate. A metre high by one and a half wide by two long.

      He moved to one side of his little prison and tried kicking at the wooden wall. A dull thump was the only result.

      ‘Help!’ Jason shouted as loud as he could, but his voice came back to him muffled in the same way as his kick had. ‘Help! Heeelllppp!’

      All of a sudden he had trouble breathing. He gasped, but each breath seemed to draw in less and less oxygen. He moved to one side and bashed the wooden wall with his fists. Bang! Bang! Bang!

      It was no good. He was trapped. Trapped in something resembling a coffin.

      A coffin?

      In the darkness he thought he heard some kind of groaning and then his nostrils caught a whiff of decay, of rotting flesh.

      The dead were coming to get him. The zombies, the ghouls, the vampires.

      Jason crawled into one corner of the box and began to cry.

      

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