The Whisperers. John Connolly - Softcover

John Connolly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444711180 ISBN 13: 9781444711189

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011

Synopsis

Charlie Parker returns in the chilling new thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of THE LOVERS. The border between Maine and Canada is porous. Anything can be smuggled across it: drugs, cash, weapons, people. Now a group of disenchanted former soldiers has begun its own smuggling operation, and what is being moved is infinitely stranger and more terrifying than anyone can imagine. Anyone, that is, except private detective Charlie Parker, who has his own intimate knowledge of the darkness in men's hearts. But the soldiers' actions have attracted the attention of the reclusive Herod, a man with a taste for the strange. And where Herod goes, so too does the shadowy figure that he calls the Captain. To defeat them, Parker must form an uneasy alliance with a man he fears more than any other, the killer known as the Collector ...

About this title

About the Author

John Connolly is author of the Charlie Parker mysteries, The Book of Lost Things, the Samuel Johnson novels for young adults and, with his partner, Jennifer Ridyard, co-author of the Chronicles of the Invaders. John Connolly's debut - EVERY DEAD THING - introduced the character of Private Investigator Charlie Parker, and swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers. All his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. He was the winner of the 2016 CWA Short Story Dagger for On the Anatomization of an Unknown Man (1637) by Frans Mier from NIGHT MUSIC: Nocturnes Vol 2. In 2007 he was awarded the Irish Post Award for Literature. He was the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award and the first Irish writer to win an Edgar award. BOOKS TO DIE FOR, which he edited with Declan Burke, was the winner of the 2013 Anthony, Agatha and Macavity awards for Best Non-Fiction work.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Whisperers CHAPTER

I

Summer had come, the season of awakenings.

This state, this northern place, was not like its southern kin. Here, spring was an illusion, a promise made yet always unkept, a pretence of new life bound by blackened snow and slow-melting ice. Nature had learned to bide its time by the beaches and the bogs, in the Great North Woods of the county and the salt marshes of Scarborough. Let winter hold sway in February and March, beating its slow retreat to the 49th Parallel, refusing to concede even an inch of ground without a fight. As April approached, the willows and poplars, the hazel and the elms had budded amid birdsong. They had been waiting since the fall, their flowers shrouded yet ready, and soon the bogs were carpeted in the purple-brown of alders, and chipmunks and beavers were on the move. The skies bloomed with woodcock, and geese, and grackle, scattering themselves like seeds upon fields of blue.

Now May had brought summer at last, and all things were awake.

All things.

SUNLIGHT SPLASHED ITSELF UPON the window, warming my back with its heat, and fresh coffee was poured into my cup.

“A bad business,” said Kyle Quinn. Kyle, a neat, compact man in pristine whites, was the owner of the Palace Diner in Biddeford. He was also the chef, and he happened to be the cleanest diner chef I’d ever seen in my life. I’d eaten in diners where the eventual sight of the chef had made me consider undertaking a course of antibiotics, but Kyle was so nicely turned out, and his kitchen so spotless, that there were ICUs with poorer hygiene than the Palace, and surgeons with dirtier hands than Kyle’s.

The Palace was the oldest diner car in Maine, custom-built by the Pollard Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, its red and white paintwork still fresh and spruce, and the gold lettering on the window that confirmed ladies were, indeed, invited glowed brightly as though written in fire. The diner had opened for business in 1927, and since then five people had owned it, of whom Kyle was the latest. It served only breakfast, and closed before midday, and was one of those small treasures that made daily life a little more bearable.

“Yeah,” I said. “Bad in the worst way.”

The Portland Press-Herald was spread before me over the counter of the diner. At the bottom of the front page, beneath the fold, the headline read:
NO LEADS IN SLAYING OF STATE TROOPER

The trooper in question, Foster Jandreau, had been found shot to death in his truck behind the former Blue Moon bar just inside the Saco town line. He hadn’t been on duty at the time, and was dressed in civilian clothes when his body was discovered. What he was doing at the Blue Moon, nobody knew, especially since the autopsy revealed that he’d been killed sometime after midnight but before 2 a.m., when nobody had any business hanging around the burnt-out shell of an unloved bar. Jandreau’s remains were found by a road crew that had pulled into the Moon’s parking lot for some coffee and an early morning smoke before commencing the day’s work. He had been shot twice at close range with a .22, once in the heart and once in the head. It bore all the hallmarks of an execution.

“That place was always a magnet for trouble,” said Kyle. “They should have just razed what was left of it after it burned.”

“Yeah, but what would they have put there instead?”

“A tombstone,” said Kyle. “A tombstone with Sally Cleaver’s name on it.”

He walked away to pour coffee for the rest of the stragglers, most of whom were reading or talking quietly among themselves, seated in a line like characters in a Norman Rockwell painting. There were no booths at the Palace, and no tables, just fifteen stools. I occupied the last stool, the one farthest from the door. It was after 11:30 a.m., and technically the diner was now closed, but Kyle wouldn’t be moving folks along anytime soon. It was that kind of place.

Sally Cleaver: her name had been mentioned in the reporting of Jandreau’s murder, a little piece of local history that most people might have preferred to forget, and the final nail in the Blue Moon’s coffin, as it were. After her death, the bar was boarded up, and a couple of months later it was torched. The owner was questioned about possible arson and insurance fraud, but it was just a matter of routine. The birds in the trees knew that the Cleaver family had put the match to the Blue Moon bar, and nobody uttered a word of blame for it.

The bar had now been closed for nearly a decade, a cause of grief for precisely no one, not even the rummies who used to frequent it. Locals always referred to it as the Blue Mood, as nobody ever came out of it feeling better than they had when they went in, even if they hadn’t eaten the food or drunk anything that they hadn’t seen unsealed in front of them. It was a grim place, a brick fortress topped with a painted sign illuminated by four bulbs, no more than three of which were ever working at any one time. Inside, the lights were kept dim to hide the filth, and all the stools at the bar were screwed to the floor to provide some stability for the drunks. It had a menu right out of the chronic obesity school of cooking, but most of its clientele preferred to fill themselves up on the free beer nuts, salted to within an inch of a stroke in order to encourage the consumption of alcohol. At the end of the evening, the uneaten but heavily pawed nuts that remained were poured back into the big sack that Earle Hanley, the bartender, kept beside the sink. Earle was the only bartender. If he was sick, or had something else more important to do than pickle drunks, the Blue Moon didn’t open. Sometimes, if you watched the clientele arriving for their daily fill, it was hard to tell if they were relieved or unhappy to find the door occasionally bolted.

And then Sally Cleaver died, and the Moon died with her.

There was no mystery about her death. She was twenty-three, and living with a deadbeat named Clifton Andreas, “Cliffie” to his buddies. It seemed that Sally had been putting a little money aside each week from her job as a waitress, perhaps in the hope of saving enough to have Cliffie Andreas killed, or to convince Earle Hanley to spike his beer nuts with rat poison. I was familiar with Cliffie Andreas as a face around town, one that it was sensible to avoid. Cliffie never met a puppy that he didn’t want to drown, or a bug that he didn’t want to crush. Any work that he picked up was seasonal, but Cliffie was never likely to qualify for Employee of the Month. Work was something that he did when there was no money left, and he viewed it entirely as a last resort if borrowing, theft, or simply leeching off someone weaker and needier than himself weren’t available options. He had a superficial bad boy charm for the kind of woman who assumed a public pose of regarding good men as weak, even as she secretly dreamed of a regular Joe who wasn’t mired in the mud at the bottom of the pond and determined to drag someone else down there with him.

I didn’t know Sally Cleaver. Apparently she had low self-esteem, and lower expectations, but somehow Cliffie Andreas succeeded in reducing the former still further, and failed to live up even to the latter. Anyway, one evening Cliffie found Sally’s small, hard-earned stash, and decided to treat himself and his buddies to a free night at the Moon. Sally came home from work, found her money gone, and went looking for Cliffie at his favorite haunt. She found him holding court at the bar, drinking on her dime the Moon’s only bottle of cognac, and she decided to stand up for herself for the first, and last, time in her life. She screamed at him, scratched him, tore at his hair, until at last Earle Hanley told Cliffie to take his woman, and his domestic problems, outside, and not to come back until he had both under control.

So Cliffie Andreas had grabbed Sally Cleaver by the collar and pulled her through the back door, and the men at the bar had listened while he pounded her into the ground. When he came back inside, his knuckles were raw, his hands were stained red, and his face was flecked with freckles of blood. Earle Hanley poured him another drink and slipped outside to check on Sally Cleaver. By then, she was already choking on her own blood, and she died on the back lot before the ambulance could get to her.

And that was it for the Blue Moon, and for Cliffie Andreas. He pulled ten to fifteen in Thomaston, served eight, then was killed less than two months after his release by an “unknown assailant” who stole Cliffie’s watch, left his wallet untouched, and then discarded the watch in a nearby ditch. It was whispered that the Cleavers had long memories.

Now Foster Jandreau had died barely yards from the spot on which Sally Cleaver had choked to death, and the ashes of the Moon’s history were being raked through once again. Meanwhile, the state police didn’t like losing troopers, hadn’t liked it since right back in 1924 when Emery Gooch was killed in a motorcycle accident in Mattawamkeag; nor since 1964, when Charlie Black became the first trooper killed by gunfire while responding to a bank raid in South Berwick. But there were shadows around Jandreau’s killing. The paper might have claimed that there were no leads, but the rumors said otherwise. Crack vials had been found on the ground by Jandreau’s car, and fragments of the same glass were discovered on the floor by his feet. He had no drugs in his system, but there were now concerns on the force that Foster Jandreau might have been dealing on the side, and that would be bad for everyone.

Slowly, the diner began to empty, but I stayed where I was until I was the only one remaining at the counter. Kyle left me to myself, making sure that my cup was full before he started cleaning up. The last of the regulars, mostly older men for whom the week wasn’t the same without a couple of visits to the Palace, paid their checks and left.

I’ve never had an office. I never had any use for one, and if I had, I probably couldn’t have justified the expense of it to myself, even given a favorable rent in Portland or Scarborough. Only a handful of clients had ever commented upon it, and on those occasions when a particular need for privacy and discretion had arisen, I’d been in a position to call in favors, and a suitable room had been provided. Occasionally, I used the offices of my attorney up in Freeport, but there were people who disliked the idea of going into a lawyer’s office almost as much as they disliked the idea of lawyers in general, and I’d found that most of those who came to me for help preferred a more informal approach. Usually, I went to them, and spoke with them in their own homes, but sometimes a diner like the Palace, empty and discreet, was as good as anywhere. In this case, the venue for the meeting had been decided by the prospective client, not by me, and I was fine with it.

Shortly after midday, the Palace’s door opened, and a man in his mid-sixties entered. He looked like a model for the stereotypical old Yankee: feed cap on his head, an L.L. Bean jacket over a plaid shirt, neat blue denims, and work boots on his feet. He was wiry as a tension cable, his face weathered and lined, light brown eyes glittering behind surprisingly fashionable steel-framed spectacles. He greeted Kyle by name, then removed his hat and gave a courtly little bow to Tara, Kyle’s daughter, who was cleaning up behind the counter and who smiled and greeted him in turn.

“Good to see you, Mr. Patchett,” she said. “It’s been a while.” There was a tenderness to her voice, and a brightness to her eyes, that said all that needed to be said about the new arrival’s recent suffering.

Kyle leaned through the serving hatch between the kitchen and the counter area. “Come to check out a real diner, Bennett?” he said. “You look like you could do with some feeding up.”

Bennett Patchett chuckled and swatted at the air with his right hand, as though Kyle’s words were insects buzzing at his head, then took a seat beside me. Patchett had owned the Downs Diner, close by the Scarborough Downs racetrack on Route 1, for more than forty years. His father had run it before him, opening it shortly after he returned from service in Europe. There were still pictures of Patchett Senior on the walls of the diner, some of them from his military days, surrounded by younger men who looked up to him as their sergeant. He’d died when he was still in his forties, and his son had eventually taken over running the business. Bennett had now lived longer than his own father, just as it seemed that I was destined to live longer than mine.

He accepted the offer of a cup of coffee from Tara as he shrugged off his coat and hung it close to the old gas fire. Tara discreetly went to help her father in the kitchen, so that Bennett and I were left alone.

“Charlie,” he said, shaking my hand.

“How you doing, Mr. Patchett?” I asked. It felt odd to be calling him by his last name. It made me feel about ten years old, but when it came to such men, you waited until they gave you permission to be a little more familiar in your mode of address. I knew that all his staff called him “Mr. Patchett.” He might have been like a father figure to some of them, but he was their boss, and they treated him with the respect that he deserved.

“You can call me Bennett, son. The less formal this is, the better. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with a private detective before, except you, and that was only when you were eating in my place. Only ever saw them on TV, and in the movies. And, truth to tell, your reputation makes me a little nervous.”

He peered at me, and I saw his eye linger briefly on the scar on my neck. A bullet had grazed me there the previous year, deep enough to leave a permanent mark. In recent times, I seemed to have accumulated a lot of similar nicks and scratches. When I died, they could put me in a display case as an example to others who might be tempted to follow a similar path of beatings, gunshot wounds, and electrocution. Then again, I might just have been unlucky. Or lucky. It depended upon how you looked at the glass.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said.

“I don’t, and you still concern me.”

I shrugged. He had a sly smile on his face.

“But no point in hemmin’ and hawin’,” he continued. “I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I know that you’re probably a busy man.”

I wasn’t, but it was nice of him to suggest that I might be. Since my license had been restored to me earlier in the year, following some misunderstandings with the Maine State Police, things had been kind of quiet. I’d done a little insurance work, all of it dull and most of it involving nothing more strenuous than sitting in a car and turning the pages of a book while I waited for some doofus with alleged workplace injuries to start lifting heavy stones in his yard. But insurance work was thin on the ground, what with the economy being the way it was. Most private detectives in the state were struggling, and I had been forced to accept any work that came along, including the kind that made me want to bathe in bleach when I was done. I’d followed a man named Harry Milner while he serviced three separate women in the course of one week in various motels and apartments, as well as holding down a regular job and taking his kids to baseball practice. His wife had suspected that he was having an affair but, unsurprisingly, she was shocked to hear that her husband was engaged in the type of extensive sexual entanglements usually associ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1444711180
• ISBN 13: 9781444711189
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 560