Silverweed road, p.1
Silverweed Road, page 1
SILVERWEED ROAD
Simon Crook
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022
Copyright © Simon Crook 2022
Simon Crook asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008479930
Ebook Edition © September 2022 ISBN: 9780008479954
Version: 2022-08-22
Dedication
For Polly
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
No. 31: The Jackdaw
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 3 November 2024
No. 25: The Pool
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 6 November 2024
No. 17: Caught Red-handed
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 9 November, 2024
No. 4: Cuttlefish, Cuttlefish
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 12 November 2024
No. 10: Crash Flowers
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 16 November 2024
No. 16: Darts with the Devil
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 19 November 2024
No. 30: The Vanslow Fox
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 21 November 2024
No. 15: The Mogon
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 24 November 2024
No. 41: Dust
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 27 November 2024
No. 22: Behind the Curtain
Extract from The Silverweed Files, 30 November 2024
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
Prologue
This is a personal statement from former Detective Chief Inspector Jim Heath. The views expressed do not reflect those of Kent Police nor the victims impacted by events.
‘But he looked so normal …’ I’ve often heard it said about killers. No doubt you’ve heard it, too. Perhaps you’ve mumbled it to yourself, about the likes of X and Y. That neighbour across the street from you. The one who waves as they put the bins out. The one who turns out to have a collection of heads in their fridge.
You could say much the same of Silverweed Road. In many ways, it was a nowhere street, no different to any other across the UK. A quiet cul-de-sac on the Corvid Estate where the houses stopped dead at the edge of the Woods. Flanks of mock-Tudor semis built in the 1950s faced one another across the tarmac. Each with a short gravel driveway. Each with a long back garden.
In my twenty-nine years with Kent Police, I’d never had cause to set foot there. It was just a sleepy street in a sleepy estate on the outskirts of Meadway Town. All that changed in 2019, and that cursed November when Death swept the street.
Five years have passed since those wretched events, when I was scapegoated out of my job. Five years have passed like mud in retirement, and not a single case has been solved.
There were forty-one houses on that dead-end road, and a heartbeat was stolen from every one.
NO. 31:
The Jackdaw
Greenfly, aphids, slugs and snails. Beetles, weevils, mildew and blight. Victor Hagman was at war with them all.
It had been a testing year for the long back garden of 31 Silverweed Road. Having battled through a summer that saw Victor’s beloved pear tree struck by brown rot and losing his beetroot to wireworm, there was one last crop before winter cast its cloak over the garden – a final harvest sixty-year-old Victor was determined not to lose.
Shielded in a domed crop cage, nourished by the sun near the high back fence, climbed six canes of late-bloom raspberries – a plump, hardy strain known as Autumn Treasure.
Since flowering in late September, the raspberries had possessed Victor’s every waking thought. On extended sick leave after surviving a stroke, the accountant had come to view his garden, not as a strip of land, but a living spreadsheet of columns and rows, each neat crop to be patrolled and obeyed. Even through the failures, Victor’s stubborn belief remained: that, through organisation and meticulous inspection, nature would be tamed.
The routine surrounding his Autumn Treasure had curdled into a tour de force of neurosis. He fussed with pea stones and straw at the base, checked for root rot four times a day, polished the copper of the crop cage frame, and spritzed the leaves with Evian.
On a crisp November morning at 6.30 a.m., a shy sun blinking between Silverweed’s houses, Victor opened the bedroom curtains and looked out over the long back garden. A tension instantly screwed tight in his chest. A glittering carpet of silver frost had rolled across the lawn – another invader to be crushed. His wife, Patricia, rolled over in bed, shielding her soft green eyes. She focused on her husband’s silhouette and groaned into her pillow.
‘What is it this time, Victor?’
‘Frost again. It’s everywhere.’
Within minutes, Victor was on the lawn, crunching towards the crop cage in his green rubber boots. Patricia watched through the bedroom curtains, eyes rolling at the silent comedy being played out by her husband. Wrestling with a cable that snaked from the kitchen, through the back door and across the frosted lawn, Victor uncoiled an extension reel and unzipped the butterfly netting – the only entrance to his domed crop cage.
Foot snagged on the cable, Victor tripped into the netted dome, batting the raspberry leaves from his face. He fussed and flapped, plugged in his wife’s hairdryer snatched from the bedroom, and caressed hot air over the canes.
Patricia brushed her long silver hair, wincing at the hairdryer’s screams. If she could hear it through the double glazing, what about the rest of the street? When Roy Barker posts another complaint through the letter box, she thought, Victor can deal with him this time. As she brushed and cringed, a distant chattering joined the hairdryer’s screams. Patricia frowned as the sound grew closer. The chattering seemed to circle the house, high above the roof.
Patricia was already making a pot of tea when Victor finally stepped into the kitchen, satisfied the worst of the frost had evaporated. His Autumn Treasure had lived up to its name: ruby-red gems, fit to burst, the berries as fat as his thumb. In two days, Victor’s crop would be ready to harvest: a rare gardening victory in a challenging year.
‘Panic over?’ Patricia asked, keen to get the conversation over with, not much caring for an answer.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Victor. He plucked a cup from the mug tree and placed it by the teapot. ‘Couple of days and they’ll be ready to pick.’
‘Only you,’ said Patricia, ‘would blow-dry a raspberry.’
‘If you’re going to do something,’ snapped Victor, hackles up, immediately set on the defence, ‘do it properly or don’t do it at all.’
Don’t do it at all, Patricia wished. Don’t do it at all. She passed Victor his tea. He’d been so handsome, even in his fifties – now his thin grey hair was in retreat, his earlobes drooped like candle wax, and his chaotic eyebrows reminded her of the dust balls she emptied from the hoover nozzle. And as for the hands that once softly caressed her … Since Victor’s gardening obsession, his fingernails looked like he was farming mud. The black soil was rooted so deep that Patricia half joked he could grow radishes from his fingertips. Victor couldn’t resist correcting her. Cress, maybe. Radishes, impossible.
Patricia watched Victor slurp at his tea. Was it Victor she loved, or the memory of him? The stroke last May had changed her husband. Physically, he’d escaped unscathed, but his internal earthquake had opened new fault lines. With his survival came glimpses of an infallible God complex: when nature didn’t agree with him, there were flashes of temper directed at the garden she’d not seen in him before. Dr Gosden had called it ‘emotional incontinence’, a result of lesions from the stroke, but the explanation didn’t make things any easier.
Whenever she looked at the garden, there was a creeping sense of separation; of losing her husband to the deep, black earth.
As Victor headed upstairs for a shower, Patricia took the hairdryer back to the bedroom. She paused at the window, sweeping her eyes over the garden. The busy birdfeeders she’d so enjoyed had been banished by Victor for the sake of his precious raspberries. Nowadays, she’d be lucky to see a bluetit blur past, but this morning, something had caught her attention. Two jackdaws were perched on a branch, lurking on next door’s silver birch.
Ever since Victor had banned the feeders, Patricia sought solace in bird books, torturing her husband with trivia. While Victor regarded jackdaws as vermin, Patricia had developed a soft spot for them. The females, after all, were bigger and smarter than the males.
Patricia watched the larger jackdaw preen her partner. As his head bowed in submission, her beak sifted through her lover’s nape, feathers rippling in silver waves. Framed by the curtains like a private theatre, the scene struck her as quietly romantic. Didn’t jackdaws pair for life? Till Death Do Us Part?
With a shake of the feathers and without a sound, the female jackdaw glided from her branch and landed on the tip of the crop cage housing Victor’s raspberries. Her beak explored the zip of the butterfly flap. The jackdaw gave it a brief, firm tug – enough to tease open a tantalising gap.
Not yet finished, she released her claws from the netting, cracked her wings and flapped in mid-air, pulling at the slider. A Y-shaped slit began to open, widening with each tug of the zip. Patricia gasped at the bird’s ingenuity.
Across the road, at no. 9, a Mini backfired on the driveway. The startled jackdaw released her grip and quickly abandoned the experiment. Landing on the branch beside her partner, the jackdaw glared at Victor’s cage, then slowly turned towards the house.
Separated by the window pane, Patricia locked eyes with the bird. Its unbroken stare seemed to penetrate the glass, looking not at her, but directly into her. Patricia’s pulse quickened from the sudden connection. Held by the shine of its silver eyes, she pressed a palm to the window pane …
Patricia jolted as the bedroom door opened. She turned to see a half-naked Victor, scrubbing his belly with a tiny blue towel.
‘What you looking at?’ said Victor, nodding at the window.
‘Nothing,’ said Patricia, anxiously stroking her hair. ‘Just daydreaming, Victor. Just daydreaming …’
When she turned back to the window, the jackdaws had vanished, the fleeting connection gone. Patricia smiled a curious smile, closed the curtains and undressed for the shower.
Wrapped in a towel, Patricia padded past Victor, unaware of a mark behind the curtains. Where her palm had smeared the glass, an outspread claw scored the pane outside.
Birdsong, sharp and frantic.
Victor flashed awake. He looked at the bedside clock. 5 a.m. The dawn chorus wasn’t due till March. What were those bloody birds playing at? Victor crashed out of bed. The curtains whipped open. Shadows licked across the lawn. There was movement, towards the rear of the garden. Towards the back fence. Towards the crop cage. Towards his Autumn Treasure.
Shaken from her dreams, Patricia bolted up in bed. The shock of awakening brought a cringe of confusion, heightened by the bite of her husband’s voice.
‘Intruders,’ said Victor.
‘Who is it?’ gasped Patricia. ‘Burglars?’
‘Worse,’ snapped Victor. ‘Birds.’
With a pained moan, Patricia collapsed back to her pillow, cursing each thump as Victor thundered downstairs. Seizing a torch, he marched into the garden.
The birds dispersed in a panic of feathers. The damage had been done. A massacre of raspberries blooded the lawn.
Victor approached the crop cage, torch shaking in his hand. The zip had been lowered from the tip of the dome, allowing a gaping slit – a large, scooping Y, broad enough for the birds to fly in. He wrestled with the zip, yanked it down, and edged into the crop cage.
Victor froze, whimpering at the slaughter within. Even the leaves had been pecked and shredded, hanging like rags from the bending canes. How the hell had the birds got inside?
Stomping from the cage, temper beginning to boil, Victor flashed his torch at a heckling chatter high up on next door’s silver birch. Perched on a branch lurked a pair of jackdaws. Their napes were smeared red, as if dipped in blood. Gripped in their claws was a gore of shredded raspberries.
Victor let rip, arms waving, screaming blue murder. The jackdaws stirred and beat their wings, charging into the sky. They soared towards the deep, dark Woods beyond the dead-end of Silverweed Road. Butchered berries wept from their claws.
The mood in no. 31 blackened like a wake. Victor paced in listless circles. His wife’s attempts to calm him down were met with stiff rejection. Patricia left for her shift at Meadstone Library, shouting goodbye as the front door shut. Victor didn’t reply.
Purging his shock in heaving sobs, he wept alone in the upstairs bathroom. All the power he’d regained since the stroke, the world he’d created, so neat and so ordered, had been wrecked, shredded and ripped to ruins. Wiping his eyes and blowing his nose, Victor felt the force of his grief warp and heat, stolen by a roasting rage.
When he stormed back into the garden, ready to tear down the dome, a cooler voice intervened. Not yet, it said. Wait, it said. Victor zipped back the opening to its drooping Y, leaving the crime scene as he’d found it. There were still scraps of wounded raspberries, dripping half-pecked from the canes. Bait, decided Victor, to lure back the culprits.
Two hours into his garden stakeout, leaning stock-still on the window ledge above the kitchen sink, Victor tensed to a distant chattering. He put down a half-nibbled chicken sandwich and fixed his eyes on the crop cage.
Two black jackdaws landed on the dome. The smaller bird perched on the tip, playing lookout. The larger jackdaw hooked its claws into the butterfly mesh, working its way around to the zip. Slider gripped in its beak, the jackdaw flapped away from the crop cage, pulling down the zip in bumping jolts.
So that’s how they did it. Thieving bloody jackdaws …
Victor ran screaming into the garden, chasing the birds back into the sky. He watched them shrink to jagging dots, confident they’d soon return.
Victor quickly dismantled the crop cage, pulled out the canes, and placed them on the lawn, ten feet from the kitchen window. Juice wept from the wounded raspberries, dripping from the canes and bloodying the grass.
Upstairs in the spare room, Victor snapped the lid from a storage box and rummaged through the bric-a-brac of his youth. During his early twenties, Victor would often spend Sundays with his father, stalking the Kent Downs on Detling Hill, hunting rabbits to cook for supper.
‘Gotcha.’
Victor pulled out the Black Widow catapult that had served him so well back then. After testing the snap of the yellow rubber, he marched down to the kitchen. Silver ball bearings clinked in his palm.
The trap was set. Victor glared out of the window, drooping ears primed, waiting for the chattering to return.
Bluetits now flocked the uncovered canes. Each little tweet and scavenging peck turned up the heat of his temper. Victor’s grip tightened around the catapult. A distant chattering approached from above.
Ack-ack
Alarmed by the sound, the bluetits fled. The jackdaws landed in unison, necks bobbing as they hopped towards the canes.
Victor fed a ball bearing into the catapult pouch and settled into position. He leaned onto the ledge and raised the slingshot to eye level. It had been forty years since he’d used his Black Widow. Muscle memory instantly kicked in.
Victor watched the jackdaws dance around the canes, pecking at the shreds of Autumn Treasure they hadn’t consumed the previous night. A target skipped into view: the smaller of the two.
Patricia was always boring him with bird facts. Most of them went in one ear and out the other, but nuggets of trivia had stuck. Female jackdaws were larger, she’d boasted. This was the male he had in his sights. Victor hinged his elbow, pulled back the sling, and took aim.
Rubber snapped. A bullet blurred. Silver feathers flew like sparks.
A jackdaw fell jerking to the canes.
Victor raced onto the lawn as its panicked partner dashed into the sky. Grin flashing under mean blue eyes, he picked up his culprit, life extinguished to a limp, black rag. The jackdaw’s neck drooped in his tightening grip.
On the silver birch, chattering in shock, the female stared at her lifeless partner.
Alerted to the anguished cries, Victor looked up to the silver birch. The female jackdaw met his gaze, her eyes blazing into his. For an uneasy moment, Victor froze, a prisoner to an unflinching glare. His heart pinched to an eerie sense: that he himself was being studied, his features stored and memorised. Time stopped. The soft breeze sucked from the garden. The jackdaw held its penetrating glare.
