Gareth Dawson Series Box Set Read online

  Gareth Dawson e-Box Set

  Books 1-3

  Nathan Burrows

  Contents

  Blind Justice

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Finding Milly

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Single Handed

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  A note from the Author

  Blind Justice

  1

  I jumped as the thick metal door slammed shut. It wasn’t just the sound, but the physical force of it closing that affected me. The pressure changes inside the small cell were palpable. I could feel it in my ears, like that feeling you get on an aeroplane, and my heart thudded in my chest a couple of times before returning to normal. If only the rest of me could calm down, things would be a lot easier.

  I looked around the cell, taking in the four white walls that would be my home for the next fifteen years. They seemed so close, almost suffocating. The cell was maybe six feet by ten. There was a small window high on one wall with a glow coming through it I knew was from the streetlights outside. I’d considered trying to see out, but even if I climbed up to the window, I wouldn’t be able to see anything through the opaque reinforced glass. The only other light in the room was a bright fluorescent shaft of light from the observation window set into the green metal door. Even though it was my first night, I knew in about ten minutes that light would disappear as the prison guards turned off the main lights to the wing.

  Other than the bunk-bed I was sitting on and the bare toilet in the corner, the only furniture was a small table with a chair and a cabinet bolted to the wall near the window. I lay back on the bottom bunk, wriggling to fit myself into the bed. They weren’t made for people my size. That much was for certain. I’d been told that my cellmate, who was in the hospital wing for a few days, had already claimed the top bunk. I couldn’t see any point in making a scene about it. Not on my first day, anyway.

  The events of the last few weeks ran through my mind as I examined the bottom of the mattress above me. Being arrested, being remanded, and being tried. Being found guilty.

  Maths had never been my strong point, but I tried to do the sums in my head. I wanted to know how many times the cell door would slam before I would be eligible for parole. There were three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, so I needed to multiply that by fifteen. When I realised it was over five thousand, I gave up trying to work it out. Fifteen years was a long time, but it was the minimum term for my crime.

  Murder.

  2

  I remember meeting Jennifer for the first time like it was yesterday. God knows I’ve relived it in my mind hundreds of times over the last couple of months. I’d gone to the pub to meet Tommy, my business partner, for a drink and a chat. Calling him my business partner isn’t quite true. He was more my partner in crime. Tommy and I had been what the police would call ‘petty thieves’ since we both left school at fifteen without a single GCSE between us. Our careers, such as they were, had begun ten years ago back in the winter of two thousand and seven. Aged fifteen, we had both clambered over a fence into a builder’s storage yard and relieved the owner of some tools that were lying around. Later that evening, as we sat in the park drink
ing the cheap cider we had bought with the proceeds of our endeavours, I realised that we had earned twenty-five quid between us for what was around fifteen minutes work.

  Our futures started to look a lot different from that point on until here I was in the pub with Tommy, years later. I looked at him now over the top of my pint of lager. He was wearing what he usually did — a threadbare hoodie — even though he was way too old for them. I’d told him many times that blokes in their mid-twenties didn’t wear hoodies, but he wasn’t having it. As I looked at him, he scratched his head through untidy black hair, somehow making it even scruffier.

  It was a cold, miserable night in November. I had just bought us both another pint of lager and was sitting with Tommy facing the door of the pub. We were expecting the third member of our little crew, David, to arrive at any moment. As Tommy talked about a business he had cased earlier on in the day with less than effective security, I took a sip of my pint and half listened to him. We had a few rules we were all happy with — no residential properties, no violence, and only low-risk jobs. Tommy had been in prison twice. They were both short stretches, but still long enough to put him off going back. It didn’t stop him getting prison tattoos, as the dark green spider web on his hand showed. David, the third musketeer, was late as usual.

  “Maybe David’s been nicked?” Tommy said with a smirk as I checked my watch for the second time in as many minutes.

  “It wouldn't surprise me,” I replied. David wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box at the best of times when it came to burglary. His day job was working as a courier, but his real skill was with anything electronic. This made him handy to have around, but he wasn’t good at the more physical elements of the job. He was also the least likely of the three of us to keep to our unofficial rules and often supplemented his income with what he called ‘other opportunities’.

  The pub we were sitting in was a typical drinkers’ pub on the eastern edge of Norwich. It was called The Heartsease after some flower and run by an ex-boxer and part-time criminal, Big Joe. He wasn’t called Big Joe because he was fat. He was known as Big Joe because he was a hard-looking bastard. His main talent, other than the fact he was as nasty as he looked, was his discretion. How the place even stayed open was beyond me as there never seemed to be more than four or five people in it at any one time. Tonight was no different even though it was a Saturday night. Apart from Tommy and I, there were only three other people drinking. I looked around the pub, taking in the yellowed walls which hadn’t seen fresh paint since before the smoking ban had come in years ago, and at the mismatched, battered tables and chairs. It was a depressing place.

  I looked up as the door to the pub swung open, expecting to see David’s greasy-haired head pop through it. It wasn’t David though, but a bloke I didn’t recognise. He looked around the pub as if looking for someone or checking to see who else was there. Behind him was a woman who looked even more out of place than he did. They were both dressed as if they were going for a night out somewhere else, somewhere far posher than The Heartsease, which they might have been. I had no idea. The man was about five feet nine with a runner’s build and smart, freshly ironed shirt and trousers. The pub we were in wasn’t the sort of place where you wore smart trousers, so that marked him out straight away. He strutted his way to the bar and the woman with him followed. My first impression was that the woman, how can I put this without sounding crude, was stunning. She was shorter than him by one or two inches and was wearing a canary yellow short summer dress under a thin coat which reached to just above her knees. The woman wasn’t dressed for the weather. From what I could see, her legs were slim, toned and tanned despite the time of year. I’ve always had a thing for legs, and hers ticked all the boxes.

  As she followed him across the pub rubbing her hands up and down her arms, she glanced around, and our eyes met for a few seconds. She had the deepest, most striking green eyes I’d seen in a woman for a long time. To be fair though, I didn’t spend that much time around women. She looked away almost immediately, and I wasn’t sure if she’d noticed me at all.

  “Gareth?” I heard Tommy say. “Gareth?” I looked at him and caught the smile on his face.

  “What?” I said, annoyed with him for breaking my concentration.

  “You’re staring, mate,” he said, laughing. “With your mouth open.”

  “Piss off, Tommy,” I replied. “I was not.” He picked up his pint glass from the table and took a sip of lager.

  “You bloody well were.”

  “Whatever,” I replied. The door to the pub swung open again, and I looked across to see David walk in. I looked at my watch and frowned. “About bloody time.” He ambled his way across to our table, dressed in a T-shirt advertising a heavy metal band I’d never heard of. The crotch of his trousers hung somewhere halfway down his thighs, revealing the upper band of his grubby boxer shorts. They made him look every inch the loser he was. He ignored the woman in the yellow dress, and she didn’t look at him either. Neither of those things surprised me. I liked David. He was a mate, but he wasn’t a ladies’ man by any stretch of the imagination.

  The three of us sat deep in conversation for the next twenty minutes, Tommy describing the off-licence he’d been having a look at over the last few days. There were CCTV cameras inside and out that Tommy swore were fake, and he and David were talking about the best way of finding out if they were real. As David prattled on about camera feeds and power supplies, my attention drifted back to the smartly dressed couple. They’d moved away from the bar and were sitting at a table on the other side of the pub. Their conversation didn’t look quite as companionable as ours, though. The woman was leaning back in the chair, her arms folded and her legs crossed. My earlier assessment had been correct. She had very nice legs indeed. Her drinking partner was doing most of the talking, punctuating whatever he was talking about with a pointed finger on the surface of the table between them. Occasionally, she would take a breath as if she was about to say something, only for his finger to thud the table and silence her. I’d always enjoyed watching people — I even daydreamed about going back to school and studying psychology — but I didn’t need to be an expert of any kind to tell that they were in the middle of the mother of all arguments.

  That might explain why they’d come here. Maybe it was neutral territory for their discussion? Maybe one of them lived around here, although looking at the way they both dressed, I doubted that. I watched them, wondering what the bloke could be saying that needed such dramatic punctuation. She glanced back in my direction, holding my gaze for a few seconds longer than before. I raised my eyebrows a few millimetres, unsure if she’d be able to see the gesture from across the pub. Her green eyes were something else. That was obvious even from this distance.

  David drained the last of his pint and scraped his chair backwards.

  “Right then, I’m off. Got stuff to do.” He got to his feet and swept his fingers through his hair. I hoped that he wouldn’t put his hand out for us to shake. “I’ll have a look at those cameras tomorrow, Tommy, and come up with a plan of some sort.”

  “That’d be good. Cheers. See what you think,” Tommy replied before finishing his own drink and clunking the empty glass back onto the table. “I’d better bugger off as well.” I looked down at my glass. I was about half a pint behind them.

  “Alright then, gents. I’m going outside for a smoke, so I’ll see you both tomorrow,” I said, raising a hand to them both. “Same time, same place?” They both nodded in unison before heading for the door, and I smiled as I saw Tommy’s unsteady gait. I’d suspected earlier that he’d been in the pub for a while before I arrived, and it looked like I was right.

  I stood outside in the dismal excuse of a beer garden. In reality, it was a small concrete walled yard with a well decorated table and bench set. Well decorated with graffiti, at least. I lit my cigarette and read the clumsy writing, wondering if Jane actually did perform the sexual act the graffiti suggested she did for twenty qu
id a time. Even if she did, I wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole. As I enjoyed my cigarette, thinking not for the first time I should give up, I could hear raised voices coming through the cold night air from the other side of the wall. First a man’s, and then a woman’s. Being a nosey chap, I stepped up onto the bench to look over the wall and see what was going on.