The Dark Horizon

  THE DARK HORIZON

  THE DARK HORIZON

  Simon Hall

  The Dark Horizon

  THAMES RIVER PRESS

  An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)

  Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press (www.anthempress.com)

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by

  THAMES RIVER PRESS

  75–76 Blackfriars Road

  London SE1 8HA

  www.thamesriverpress.com

  © Simon Hall 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary

  and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-78308-2-070

  This title is also available as an eBook

  For Mum and Dad, Joyce and Jackie, Arthur and Gill;

  Lost on the way, but with us still.

  CHAPTER 1

  Of all the ordeals of working life, the torments inflicted in this plasterboard box of a tacked-on room had to be a contender for the worst. Hollow, echoey, white and wan, the modern adjunct to the Victorian edifice could only have been placed on the fringes of the building to keep secret what happened here.

  Dan had expected the ten gathered around the table to be floundering in the same churning waters of dread. But, scanning the faces, he wasn’t so sure. Fearful as the prospect may be, his peers looked as though they were finding the farce entertaining, and perhaps even enjoyable.

  It was a rare meeting he hadn’t found a way to miss, despite all best intentions. Dan had planned to disappear from the radar a convenient half hour beforehand to a mysterious briefing on a burgeoning story. The long length of the shadows and light newsroom rumbled with journalists, producers and picture editors quietly, efficiently gathered around screens preparing the programme.

  It was an ideal cover. He’d been packing up his satchel when a thin and dark presence materialised at his side like an incarnation of the reaper.

  ‘Just on your way, are you?’ Lizzie asked.

  ‘Well, err…’

  ‘Because you know how important this meeting is.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘It’s one of the biggest stories we’ve ever covered.’

  ‘Ok, but…’

  ‘All that bloodshed. The deaths. The controversy, the pitched battles.’

  ‘I know, but…’

  ‘Now coming to a conclusion at last,’ she interrupted once more. ‘After a year of it. There’s no way it’ll go off quietly.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s just…’

  ‘With this massive Finale Friday jamboree. The eyes of the world will be on us. It’s huge.’

  ‘I was just thinking of doing a bit of research on the Cashman,’ Dan ventured, hopefully. ‘It’s such a great story. We’ve got to find him.’

  A stiletto heel ground at the carpet tiles. Of all the desks in the newsroom the area beside Dan’s was by far the most worn from such idiosyncratic assaults, a source of pride to the errant reporter.

  ‘What have I told you about your priority?’ Lizzie snapped. ‘It’s Resurgam, Resurgam and more Resurgam. And then some extra Resurgam. Got that?’

  ‘But…’

  ‘I’m going up to the conference room myself,’ she added, mercilessly. ‘We can walk together.’

  There were no squares left for his battleship to hide. Dan suppressed a sigh and resorted to some rapid improvisation. ‘Of course I’m coming to the meeting. I wanted to be there early so I can be completely prepared and absolutely on top of every little detail.’

  ‘Good.’ As near to a smile as there ever was flitted across the sharpness of Lizzie’s face. ‘I’m looking forward to how you get on with the team-building exercise.’

  The management consultants had left their unenviable mark. A survey of the workings of Wessex Tonight concluded there were weaknesses in multi-faceted human-orientated cohesion. Thus it had been decreed that each meeting would now begin with a bonding session, and today it was the wondrous prospect of the two truths and a lie game.

  With a smile so fixed it could have been the product of a denture grip factory, Dan tried to look entranced while wishing away the precious seconds of his life. Reporters and producers surrounded the plastic, schoolroom-style table, Lizzie at its head.

  ‘I played rugby for England at college level,’ Phil, the newsroom trainee began. ‘I secretly ask my dear departed gran for help on every story I cover, and my hero is sitting in this room,’ the hunk of a young man told the gathering in his boom-bassy voice.

  The windows were filled with the winter’s night, a clear and icy void. Dan stared out at the frozen trees and distant streetlamps and wondered what excuse he could find to avoid going home.

  It was a familiar thought and he was struggling. Too many convenient paths had already been trodden; friends’ emergencies, breaking-news stories, forgotten birthdays, even flat batteries. Perhaps tonight he would just head home and finally they would talk.

  ‘I said – Dan!’ a voice cut in. ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Err, of course. Intently.’

  ‘Then you can answer,’ Lizzie instructed. ‘Which of Phil’s three was the lie?’

  ‘Um… give me them again.’

  ‘You weren’t listening,’ the annoyingly observant editor carped.

  ‘I was. I was just deeply contemplating.’

  Lizzie gave him a glare, but nodded to Phil and the list was repeated.

  The others were grinning. Mouths were forming the word gran, heads nodding in time.

  ‘The rugby,’ Dan said.

  Now heads were shaking, faces adopting superior expressions.

  ‘Correct,’ Phil said. ‘But I did play college rugby for…’

  ‘Wales, judging by the occasional hint of a long-suppressed accent,’ Dan picked up. ‘Not to mention your build. You were a wing forward, I’d say, all speed and strength. But you weren’t quite good enough to make the highest level, and that’s not enough for you. So you found another career instead. At which, incidentally, I think you’ll excel.’

  A silence settled on the meeting room. Phil looked a mixture of stunned and flattered. The clock ticked on to a quarter past six.

  ‘Right, my turn,’ Lizzie announced, with relish. ‘You’ll never get this.’

  Even with the heating rumbling away the room felt cold. It was the lurking influence of this mid-December Tuesday, looming in every one of the run of windows, the frost gathering outside.

  Dan tried to look interested as Lizzie scribbled her words, black bob twitching in time. On his own notepad, he jotted an outline of something far more interesting.

  The Cashman had been captivating the local media and public alike. Over these last four days, the mystery stranger had materialised in four different locations to hand out bags of money containing tens of thousands of pounds to random passers-by.

  The motive was unknown and Dan’s nomadic curiosity had been tickled to try to find out. But there was little hope of any such opportunity when Lizzie was keeping him shackled to the preparations for Finale Friday.

  ‘Ok,’ she announced, looking up. ‘I applied to become Director General of the BBC when I was a kid, I modelled in a photo shoot for Vogue when I was at university, and I’m a secret knitter when I’m at home.’

  Laughter rumbled around the room. ‘That’s the last one defini
tely out,’ Phil ventured, to general agreement.

  ‘I can certainly believe the photo shoot,’ commented one of the reporters, happily confirming his reputation as chief lickspittle.

  ‘Dan?’ Lizzie prompted.

  ‘Director General of the BBC,’ he said.

  ‘Really? she queried, incredulously.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Dan glanced at the sycophant sitting opposite and dug in a dig. ‘Some might say because if you had, you would surely have got the job. But, in fact, it’s because you hesitated slightly, which means you were framing the answer. You also blinked. Plus…’

  ‘Plus what?’

  ‘I can just tell.’

  ‘How?’

  He shrugged. ‘You know me. I just can.’

  ‘All right, then, Mr Smarty,’ she answered, petulantly. ‘It’s your turn. Let’s have some fun guessing your secrets.’

  A strange temptation came upon Dan. It might have been the urge to release the frustrations of the last two months of home life. It could have been the build-up of the years of the way of a loner and all the pressures of the more distant past. Or it may just have been a need to get out of this room and its damn-blast-bloody ridiculous games. But whatever it was, he found himself talking.

  ‘My personal life is a mess. The woman I’m with moved into my flat without asking and I just don’t know what to do about it. I think I want to be back on my own, but I imagine life without her and that scares me too. I don’t know what to do.’

  He clenched a fist, felt knuckles rap on the table, but the mouth kept moving, free from the reins of inhibition.

  ‘I want to be the main presenter of Wessex Tonight. I want to be there in the studio, night after night, under the lights, anchoring the programme. I want to be the cool, calm, controlled one, the face of the news. But no one’s ever even thought to ask me.’

  The room had set very still. People were staring, frowning; uncertain and unsettled.

  ‘And if you think that’s bad, I used to be a spy,’ he continued, defiantly. ‘I was recruited at university because of my brains and perception and I did some pretty bloody horrible things. I even saw friends die in front of me. And you never leave that behind, I can tell you.’

  A silence held the room, long and dense, the kind that binds with an invisible gag. Even Lizzie was quietened.

  ‘Well, um…’ she managed. ‘Ok… who wants to try guessing which of Dan’s list isn’t true?’

  But no one ventured a thought. No one could. And as for Dan himself, all he could do was stare out of the window to the nothingness of the winter night, eyes feeling strangely sore.

  Onwards the clock ticked. The time was half past six, the moment set to put aside the games and discuss the coverage of the opening of Resurgam.

  But before anyone could speak, the door flung open. It was Nigel and he was panting.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ he told Dan. ‘The Cashman’s done another appearance.’

  CHAPTER 2

  The trees and bushes of the garden, the birds, even the road was quiet on this iron winter’s night. The impenetrable cold had forced a stillness upon the land, a hibernation for all in this little nook of the planet.

  Dan hesitated at the doors to the Wessex Tonight building. The quickest way to the street was to the right, across the car park. But it was pitted with ice. That way monsters lay, happy to dart out and effortlessly snap a limb.

  Instead, he picked a watchful route to the green acre that surrounded the studios and charged, fast crumping footprints in the whitened grass. Pulling on jacket, panting into phone, dodging around shrubs, squinting through the blackness.

  The road was ahead, filled with the growing rush of the car’s engine. Nigel had led the way, ready for the off. Dan tumbled onto the pavement, battling for balance, a jumble of arms and legs. He grabbed a lamppost, swung in a manner of which a pole dancer would have been proud and piled untidily inside.

  ‘Go!’

  As unruffled as ever from all his long years of experience, the kindly cameraman went.

  They were heading for the train station, in the city centre. The traffic was light, most cars now leaving town. They were laden with boxes and packages, the spoils of a hard day’s shopping.

  ‘Lizzie wants a phone report into the programme,’ Dan said. ‘We’ve got about ten minutes to get it on.’

  ‘The Cashman again, eh? Of all the stories we’ve covered, he’s got to be one of the strangest. And that’s saying something.’

  Dan didn’t reply. He was concentrating on the phone, a recent gift from the Information Technology Department. In the way of IT, the course on how to use it had lasted a whole morning, but the actual amount of understanding being a hard won quarter of an hour’s worth.

  ‘Smart phone, non-smart operator,’ was Dan’s standard explanation for his failure to master the phone’s astounding range of abilities. ‘I’m a ZX Spectrum kid in an internet world.’

  The one feature which had made it through the barricades of his scepticism was Twitter. And tonight, the virtual world was abuzz with excited tweets.

  He’s handed out thousands, I’ve got a bag of money!

  We love you, Cashman!

  Someone recommend him for a knighthood.

  I’m off shopping tomorrow, bless that Cashman!

  The car sped through some traffic lights, found a straight. Nigel hit the accelerator and they lurched in the seats. Shop windows, buses, the silhouettes of people flashed past.

  The station was ahead. A queue of cars lined the road. Nigel slewed around them and pulled up in a space marked “police only”.

  Time was sharp against them. There were just minutes left of Wessex Tonight.

  Despite the darkness, Dan donned his sunglasses. ‘CID Special Division,’ he barked at a man in a uniform who looked to be readying a challenge.

  Dan rummaged in his bag and waved the Detectives on Inquiries sign, one of the most useful he had borrowed during his various attachments to police investigations.

  ‘We’re filming for evidence,’ he said, and the petty officialdom evaporated in the barrage of nonsense, as is often the happy way.

  A crowd of a couple of hundred people was massed outside the automatic doors of the station entrance. They were burbling, chattering, charged with the lustre of unexpected luck.

  One rotund man was performing a poor attempt at a celebratory jig. The less blessed were ignoring the cold to search gutters and drains, probing the underside of parked cars, scrabbling beneath benches and bins for any booty which may have been overlooked.

  Dan grabbed a well-dressed young woman, perhaps an office worker, who was giggling hysterically.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got some!’

  She opened a handbag, proffered a fistful of plastic money bags stuffed with the unmistakable colours of ten pound notes. ‘A car drew up and he got out and started throwing the bags. There were loads of people round him in seconds. I was right at the front.’

  Dan’s mobile was ringing, but he ignored it. He glanced at his watch. Wessex Tonight was fast running out of airtime.

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘That mask. The one he always wears.’

  ‘Was there anything else in the bags, apart from the cash?’

  ‘Those little notes they talked about on the news.’

  She unfolded a square of paper. Typewritten upon it were the letters A B C D E F G H. In black ink, around the E, was a bold circle.

  The paparazzi were already here, the white strobes of their flashlights firing through the darkness. People were posing for snaps, holding up their gains.

  The dark prince of the pack, Dirty El, appeared around the corner and lumbered over. He stopped stricken upon seeing the other photographers, distress in his sweaty, chubby face. If ever one so devious had a heart, being beaten to the scene of a lucrative snap was a knife through it.

  A police car drew in, then another.
At the sight of the law and the threat to their gains, the crowd began to thin.

  Dan’s mobile rang again. ‘There’s only two mins left on the programme,’ Lizzie yelped. ‘We need you now.’

  He found a corner away from the hubbub, jotted a couple of notes, held the phone hard to his ear. His tight fingers were pallid with the cold, despite his heart hammering hot and hard.

  ‘Finally, tonight‘s breaking news. The Cashman has just staged another appearance in Plymouth,’ came the gruff voice of Craig, the presenter.

  Cue Dan.

  ‘This time, each of his moneybags contained 50 pounds,’ Dan picked up. ‘It seems clear the Cashman’s following a pattern. This is his fifth appearance and each time the sum in the bags has increased by ten pounds. From what I’ve seen here, he must have parted with tens of thousand pounds this evening alone. Again, he said nothing, just threw the bags of money and disappeared. And once more he was wearing that Robin Hood mask. The big question of course, the one so many are asking, and which is still unanswered – who is the Cashman and why is he doing this?’

  CHAPTER 3

  It was strange, Dan reflected, how the door to the flat had changed these past months. Slowly, yet unmistakeably.

  Just a wooden block, utterly ordinary and entirely average, replicated millions of times in the streets and lanes throughout the land. A plain oblong with inlaid panels, albeit newly painted in a smart navy blue.

  Even the hinges had been oiled when it was refurbished, back in the happier days of the summer. It was designed to be homely, offer an easy welcome.

  And it did. Until two months, one week, and three days ago.

  In the yellow lights of the street, at this vacuum time of day, it was a plain and dense black. In the passing beams of endless traffic his shadow ran across it, up and over the walls and away.

  She would have heard the car. Would be waiting, know he too was waiting. Yet another unspoken stand-off, this time in the tar-dark freezer of a dense December night.