THE DOMINO BOYS (a psychological thriller) Read Online Free PDF Page B

muttered, taking up his drink again. ‘He thought he owned this town.’
    ‘Anyhow, that’s what I heard,’ said Duncan. ‘But nobody had any proof, and Pete refused to do anything about it, even when I asked him whether it was true or not. He was scared not only for the pub and his job, but for his wife and kids. You’d think he’d have moved away, started up somewhere better away from Craddick, but he never did. My guess is Mickey had some other hold over him. That was his modus operandi , something Mickey Craddick was a dab-hand at, blackmail and intimidation. So like a lot of folks hereabouts Pete just went along with it.’
    ‘Thought he looked a bit more cheerful,’ said Alfie. ‘Now I know why.’
    ‘Let’s not let that son-of-a-bitch spoil our game,’ said Duncan, sharing out the pieces. ‘I’ve put my house up for sale…’
    ‘What?’ said Alfie. ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘Moving abroad.’
    ‘To that villa of yours in Spain? The one you go to every year on holiday?’
    ‘That’s the one,’ he replied. ‘This place – this country – it’s got nothing to offer. I’ve nothing left to stay here for. Not since Sophie died…’ He paused with the flat of his hand on the dominoes. ‘Now I’ve finally retired, got my pension, I can sell the house and do something different with my life.’
    ‘That was Sophie’s house, too,’ said Barry dully. ‘She loved that house.’
    ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I realise the house is all that’s really left of your sister, but she was my wife, too, and I know she wouldn’t have wanted me to spend the rest of my days moping about the place unhappy.’
    Barry Stocker grunted. Nobody in the Stocker household had been keen on the idea of one of their girls marrying a copper. That was back in 1979. Had it been a few years later, in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, it would never have happened. There had been clashes, inevitably intense and ugly, often turning violent, between striking miners picketing the colliery gates and the police, the two primary careers suggested to decades of kids leaving Overthorpe secondary school. The two professions had been sitting together, if not easily then in begrudging toleration, for decades, but finally came together in a tragic, hate-fuelled cocktail of politics, brute force and mutual loathing during the bitter strike. It split the community and the wound had never really healed. In parts of Overthorpe, the police were hated almost as much as the blacklegs, most of them eventually forced to leave town by an unrelenting, uncomfortable heat wave of contempt.
    But Duncan Winslade hadn’t been living in Overthorpe then. Just before the strike he left the town to go to work for the Met in London. So he was mostly immune to the contempt felt for the police in Overthorpe. The disease of fulmination that still permeated the dead shops, empty back alleys, the rundown streets had infected, by turn, the younger generation who in these tough times were also looking for something to rail against. The fact the town turned out a thousand-strong on the day of Maggie Thatcher’s funeral burning a crude effigy of her outside the Job Centre and singing, ‘ Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead… ’ showed that it would be a while yet before any wounds were likely to heal. And it never would, thought Barry Stocker, unless something was done about the fact that the North was being sidelined.
    Even though he knew Duncan was a decent bloke, there was something that burned like acid inside Barry whenever he talked about his bloody villa in Spain. Or his damned pension. Christ, to be fifty-five and retired, that was a damn luxury these days. What the hell would my pension be worth when I get to retire in ten years? Barry’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Duncan.
    And he never saved his sister Sophie from drowning. He said he tried, but who knows really? Had he played chicken, refused to swim out and drag her back as the