The Baby And The Brandy (Ben Bracken 1) Read Online Free PDF

are fucking wasters, it took them long enough to find him, and they can’t tell me a bloody thing’.
    Jack’s request comes as most unexpected. My brain is already spinning. I’d like to help the lad, but getting involved in a messy situation in the city who’s primary prison I have just wandered out of? Not what I had in mind. Plus, I’ve got my own agenda, my own fish to fry.
    ‘Please. Call me.’
    The line goes dead, and robot lady comes back on, asking whether I want to delete the message or save it. I delete it, and pocket my hasty notes.
    I drink coffee and try to make order of things in my head. Jack’s father goes missing but turns up dead - shot - in a warehouse in Manchester airport. That sounds extremely suspect to begin with. The only people with consistent and likely firearm access in the UK are farmers, the police and organized crime. I can’t picture an angry pig farmer losing his shit and heading to Manchester airport to clip someone. Nor can I especially imagine a police officer doing the same thing, although stranger things have happened. And that leaves the last one. Organized crime.
    I was heading down south to tackle organized crime in any case. But the whole point was that it was away from here, with a very specific target. The Turn Up. I most definitely don’t want to get involved in something up here yet. But I feel a nagging. That familiar tug of duty. In the services, I’d always feel it. I carry it everywhere with me now. I am bound by it.
    I feel protective of Manchester, after my hazy youthful days studying at Manchester University. I found myself in this city. And if there are bad things going on in Manchester’s streets, I would rather that they were stamped out. And I have to ask, if I’m not going to do it who is?
    No, I’m getting muddled. I’m letting my heart rule my head. But... I feel for Jack. And he did do a very good thing for me, in safeguarding my money - far more than me straightening out two drunkards just so he could get home safely.
    My problem, has always been this inflated sense of duty, not to mention by brittle and carefully arranged moral compass. My idea of good and bad is very black and white with great streaks of grey smeared straight across the borders between the two - the zone in which I usually take matters into my own hands. I feel I owe Jack some assistance, even if it is outside of my self-imposed remit.
    I get up, and walk out of the restaurant into the main reception. And despite my better judgement, I find myself asking the receptionist if I can stay an extra night. My train to London leaves at the exact same time tomorrow. Let’s give Jack 24 hours and see what I can turn up.
    *
    I take the stairs two at a time, eager to get started. I take the key card from my jeans pocket, and open up my room.
    My room is dark. I’m pretty sure I’d left the curtains open, but it may be an error on the housekeeper’s part. I head straight across to the window to open the drapes, but something makes me pause. It feels like I have a frayed edge of my instinct caught in a jagged nervous point by the door, and with every step it is unravelling, tugging tighter and tighter. I stand still, and listen.
    I feel as if a series of tiny disturbances, that only my subconscious can decipher, alerts me to the nasty notion that I am not alone. On reflection, when this has happened in the past, I have marveled at my own honed senses, as my sensory neural system processes the changes in the environment from what I remember the last time I was in the room. My skin sensing the tiniest increase in temperature, as another person’s body heat shares the four walls. My ears detecting the slightest audio signature, given away by a hint of hushed breath. The capillaries in my lungs acknowledging that there is fractionally less oxygen than previously, due to someone else filling the hotel room with concealed exhalations of carbon dioxide.
    All adding up, and sending a subconscious