The Dead of Midwinter: An Oxford Detective Thriller (DI Joseph Stone Crime Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  THE DEAD OF MIDWINTER

  BOOK 1 IN THE JOSEPH STONE THRILLER SERIES

  J R SINCLAIR

  Copyright 2022 © J R Sinclair

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published worldwide by Voice from the Clouds Ltd.

  www.voicefromtheclouds.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Sixteen Years and Five Days Later

  Chapter 2

  One Week Earlier - 21st, December

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  22nd December

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  23rd December

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  24th December

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  25th December

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  26th December

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  New Year's Day

  Chapter 29

  Join the J.R. Sinclair VIP Club

  Pre-Order A Flood of Sorrow

  Chapter 1 of A Flood of Sorrow

  Go Behind the Scenes

  Acknowlegdements

  For Barry, Tom, and Jonathan, for encouraging me to take the plunge into crime and to write this book.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The wipers thrummed back and forth at their highest setting, fighting a losing battle against the waterfall cascading down the car windscreen. Joseph squinted through the veil of shimmering rain at the blurred country lane covered in a veil of darkness. In the growing tempest, the headlights of their SUV could barely cut through the murk. Thank God for the Cat’s Eyes down the centre of the road, like runway landing lights guiding them home.

  ‘If it keeps up like this, the roads are going to be underwater around Warborough by morning,’ Kate said as she peered out at the deluge.

  ‘Definitely not a great night to be out driving, that’s to be sure,’ Joseph replied. ‘Just think how we could have all been safely tucked up at home if we’d had Ellie’s birthday bash there, rather than dragging ourselves all the way to Oxford.’

  His wife raised her eyebrows at him. ‘As we both know, that’s not how the parent mafia works. Hold a birthday party at home, and Ellie would be a social pariah at school.’

  ‘Yes, talk about bloody peer pressure to keep up with the Joneses,’ he muttered.

  Kate sighed. ‘I know, I know. Whatever happened to jelly and ice cream birthdays, complete with the pin the tail on the donkey?’

  ‘You realise that sounds like something straight out of an Enid Blyton book, right?’

  ‘No, that would be lashings of ginger beer.’ Kate gave him a wry smile.

  Joseph laughed. ‘If you say so. Anyway, I’m not sure my hearing is ever going to recover from that many screaming six-year-olds hurtling around the confined space of the play barn. As soon as we get back home, I’m having two paracetamol, followed by a stiff drink.’

  ‘For a policeman, you do realise you have a very low mental pain threshold?’

  ‘Oh, give me a bunch of hardened criminals any day over a herd of demonic kids having a good time.’

  ‘But, Daddy, it was the best party ever!’ Ellie said, piping up from the back seat where she’d been totally absorbed in playing on the birthday iPad that Kate’s parents bought her. In Joseph’s opinion, it was way too expensive a present for a six-year-old, who should be making dens in the garden rather than mucking around with that sort of thing. But when it came to Ellie and Eoin, Kate’s parents wrote their own rulebook, which mostly seemed to involve a huge amount of spoiling.

  ‘I’m glad you enjoyed your party, sweetheart,’ he replied, smiling into the rear-view mirror at his daughter with her ‘I Am Six!’ badge she was proudly wearing.

  ‘It was the best birthday ever, Mummy and Daddy!’ She beamed back at him, all gums, teeth and pigtails.

  Even his hardened heart melted, because how could it not? All Ellie needed to do was just be her usual sunny self, and every time she effortlessly defused his grumpiest of moods.

  Quite how Kate and he had produced this bundle of gorgeousness, born on the twenty-first of December, which also happened to be the winter solstice tonight, seemed like a miracle to him. By contrast, there was their son Eoin and the last thing you could describe him as was gorgeous. There was one word that best summed him up, loud. His default mode was making noise, from yelling to crying, and all of it at volume eleven.

  In his rear mirror, he could also just see Eoin’s head lolling to one side. His mouth was wide open and a line of spider silk drool trailed down from his lip onto the sleeve of his rocket ships onesie. Thankfully, the car had worked its usual magic on him and within a minute of setting off, he’d screamed himself to sleep.

  Despite Eoin’s diminutive ten months—who, much to the delight of his mum, they’d named after Joseph’s long-dead Irish Dad—he still had the lungs to put an opera singer to shame. Certainly, Eoin’s performance back at the party had taken a starring role in the headache that was currently bouncing around inside his skull like an angry wasp trapped in a jam jar.

  The one small blessing was that at least Joseph wouldn’t have to face that hellhole again for a while, otherwise so innocently known as the Play Barn. That name really painted the wrong mental picture. The actual building was a warehouse that verged on derelict, the state of the place barely disguised by the violent primary colour scheme, bright enough to make your eyes bleed. The finishing touch to the unique ambience of the Play Barn was the distinct whiff of leaking toddler nappies that always seemed to pervade the place. And the less said about the ball pit, the better.

  Joseph hadn’t quite left a trail of smoking rubber in his haste to get away from the Play Barn, but not that far off. Maybe the next time one of Ellie’s classmates held their birthday party there, he’d buy a discreet set of earplugs and bring enough paracetamol to tranquillise an elephant.

  Ellie was humming along to some tune on her iPad as they rounded the bend. The lane opened up ahead of them. They were now on the stretch to what had slowly become one of Oxford’s satellite villages and where they called home, namely Warborough. Why they’d chosen to live so far out from St Aldates Police Station in Oxford, where he worked as a constable, seemed crazy to Joseph, especially now when Kate’s journalism job was also based in the city. He had a vague alcohol-steamed memory of being with friends at a barbecue where they’d tossed around the idea. Something about it being a great lifestyle choice for the kids. Then, the next thing he knew, it had become a thing. That was why he was now putting up with a daily slog of a commute to work every day—a twenty-two-mile round trip.

  The things he and Katie coped with for the sake of their family.

  The rain seemed to be falling even faster, and the road had been reduced to a glistening line of tarmac reflecting their headlights. Curtains of rain swirled and spun across the road, a web of shadows surrounding their vehicle on every side, as the world closed in around them.

  It was little wonder that Joseph didn’t spot the flooded pothole right in front of them. Too late to swerve, their SUV briefly slammed down into it, making them all bounce in their seats and sending a wave of water crashing over the car.

  ‘Wheee,’ Ellie said, kicking her feet straight out into the back of Kate’s seat.

  Kate scowled. ‘Please don’t do that, poppet,’ she said, her tone restrained with a forced sense of lightness for the birthday girl, who for this one special day could apparently get away with blue murder. Kate bobbed her head several times, which Joseph knew was her tell that she was mentally counting to three, before leaning slightly towards him.

  ‘Maybe I’ll be joining you in that drink,’ she whispered.

  The grin that had been forming on his lips faded as their headlights reflected off a large torrent of rushing water dead ahead. The entire road had turned into a shallow river running down from the hill to their right, and crossing their path for a good hundred-metre stretch.

  ‘Bloody hell, a flood is all we need,’ Joseph muttered.

  ‘Daddy, language!’ Ellie said in her most prim and proper voice as she looked up from her screen.

  ‘Sorry, bad daddy,’ he replied, as he tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

  ‘We could turn round, but the alternative will add an extra five miles,’ Kate said, gazing out at the water rippling across the road ahead of them.

  ‘It doesn’t look too deep and if I keep my speed down, but revs high, it should be okay,’ he replied.

&n
bsp; ‘Thank God for that, because the idea of that drink is getting more appealing by the minute,’ Kate said.

  Joseph slowed to less than ten miles per hour as they entered the flood, leaning a fraction forward in his seat like a myopic senior citizen staring over the wheel. Thankfully, the rushing water barely came up to the rims of their tyres. Their SUV sent out the barest wake as they crawled through the flood.

  ‘I’m frightened, Daddy,’ Ellie said, her voice suddenly thin and weedy.

  ‘Nothing to be frightened about, pumpkin,’ he replied with his best, I’m an adult and I’ve got this under control, voice.

  The silhouettes of willow trees slid past like gnarled hands in the darkness, their branches swaying in the wind as the rain hammered even harder onto the roof of the car. Joseph felt a distinct surge of relief when he saw the road ahead, rising out of the flood to reveal tarmac again.

  ‘See, I told you we’d be okay,’ he said as he settled back into his seat and pressed the accelerator a fraction to get them out of the water.

  And then it happened, a split second that would change their lives forever.

  It started as a blurred shape at the periphery of Joseph’s vision, nothing more than a fast-moving shadow. Then something large was leaping over the low stone wall from the open field and racing across into the flooded road dead ahead of them. In the next few milliseconds, his consciousness registered that the thing was actually a stag. Its eyes were wild with fear, whites ringing them, its mouth pulled back over bared teeth.

  In the handful of milliseconds that followed, Joseph just had time to yank the wheel hard over as Ellie shrieked. Their SUV responded, but its wheels scrambled for grip in the floodwater.

  It all happened so fast, the stag way too close for Joseph to do anything about it. That’s what he would keep telling himself in the years that followed, trying to cling to it as an excuse for the guilt that was going to eat him up forever from the inside.

  They slammed into the animal with a sickening crunch of cracking bone and bending metal, audible even inside the cocooned cabin of their vehicle. The next moment, the deer was somersaulting off the bonnet and away into the night.

  But even as Joseph started to lose control of the SUV, police training on skid pans was already kicking in. He turned the wheel back to steer into the sideways slide. But there was too much water on the road for the tyres to find any traction. His stomach rose into his chest as he watched helplessly, as much a passenger now as the rest of his family. They skidded straight towards the stone wall, the rocks that topped it glistening like jagged teeth in the rain.

  Ellie screamed, her young voice loud and shrill as the SUV’s wheels dug into the ditch on the opposite side of the road and suddenly they were tipping over. Then the world was spinning past, an alternating kaleidoscope of rain and ground as they rolled again and again. With a massive, ear-numbing bang, the airbags exploded into Joseph’s face, turning the world white. Nylon smothered his mouth as shards of windscreen lacerated his hands.

  Their SUV toppled one last time onto its side, shaking like a rag doll before gravity pinned him to the driver’s door.

  Joseph gasped in shock at the winter air flooding in through the shattered windows. As his senses rebooted, the whiff of cordite from the airbag charges that had just detonated scratched the back of his nostrils.

  There was a moment of shocking silence then, just the sound of wheels spinning down and the creak of metal and the moan of the wind beyond. His eyes focused on the scene framed by their shattered windscreen. A lone figure was picked out by the headlights, at least fifty metres away, crouching by something in the field. The person slowly stood, their face hooded by a black waterproof cagoule, but Joseph got the impression from the build that the person was male. The man was carrying something in his arms as he turned towards them, black gloves covering his hands.

  Joseph’s chest burned as his lungs pushed against what were almost certainly several cracked ribs, as he called out. ‘For God’s sake, help us!’

  But rather than rushing over, the figure instead paused, and then turned. With long, wide strides he headed quickly away into the swirling storm, a dark phantom vanishing into the night.

  Then Joseph saw what had been at the man’s feet—a deer with its head removed. Its neck was a raw bloody stump, severed arteries still pumping blood that glistened in their car’s headlights. Despite the horror of what he was witnessing, his mind was already sliding away from it. Right now, his priority was getting his family out of their car in case it caught fire.

  He turned his head upwards, neck muscles screaming, towards Kate, who was dangling from her belt above him.

  Joseph reached out to her. ‘Kate, are you okay?’

  Her eyes blinked open, and she stared down at him. Then her gaze widened. ‘The kids!’ she screamed.

  And then, the sweetest sound in the world filled their broken car as Ellie began to sob. But any relief that she was alive was short-lived because once again Joseph’s police training was kicking in.

  You always leave the ones making the most noise until last.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows, releasing the belt that had automatically pulled him hard into his seat at the moment of the crash.

  ‘Eoin?’ Kate whispered.

  No cry, no responding decibel eleven shrieks from their son.

  Joseph struggled up into a sitting position and shuffled himself around, the broken glass slicing his palms with burning bursts of pain as he manoeuvred himself so he could look back at his baby boy.

  ‘Eoin?’ Kate repeated, her voice growing louder.

  They say that some images stay with you forever and what Joseph was about to witness would be exactly that.

  Eoin’s car seat had released after its buckle had failed. The buckle that Joseph had clicked into place. The buckle that had never worked properly since they’d bought the car from a dealer. The buckle that he had kept meaning to get checked out by the garage, but hadn’t got around to.

  And now Eoin’s car seat, suddenly released by the failed seatbelt, had been turned into a projectile. Still attached by the straps on the other side, the seat had swung his sleeping son around and slammed his head straight into the passenger window as the car had tumbled over.

  Joseph stared at his beautiful baby boy, his head lying at a sickening angle to his body, and resting against the side curtain airbag like it was a pillow.

  Then Kate’s screaming was drowning out even Ellie’s, as she struggled to break free of her seat belt.

  Joseph watched, his mind numb, as she reached out toward their dead son and wailed.

  SIXTEEN YEARS AND FIVE DAYS LATER

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ellie’s eyes opened into a dim light from a single, bare bulb overhead. But when she tried to suck in a lungful of air, she became aware of a cloth gag tied tight across her mouth. The smell of damp was also clawing at her nose, as raw nausea spun through her abdomen.

  There was a regular drip of water, and the hum of a machine from somewhere beyond the walls, a tickle of its vibration through her feet.

  It was then that Ellie realised how dry her throat was. How long had it been since she’d drunk anything? How long had she been here?

  Her thoughts were like a tumble of threads knotted together. She had a vague memory of someone in a forensic suit turning up on the doorstep of her mum’s house. There had been no sign outside of the officer, John Thorpe, who was meant to be guarding her. Then the man attacked her. But she’d fought back with everything she had before a cloth had been clamped over her mouth. The next thing Ellie knew, the world was spinning as she crashed to the ground, knocking over a table. Then nothing, until now…