God’s Fist

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook edition published by HarperCollins Publishers 2016

First published in paperback in A Walk on the Darkside by ROC Books, 2004

Copyright © Paul Finch 2016

Cover design © Debbie Clement 2016

Paul Finch 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.

Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008173739

Version: 2015-12-18

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

God’s Fist

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Skelton didn’t know which one of the photographs he found the most disturbing.

The first depicted the aftermath of a brutal lynching in Serb-occupied Kosovo; a man who had been murdered by being hacked and disembowelled, had been hoisted into the air on a metal pole – several children, presumably that same man’s children, were screaming and crying and trying to console each other around his dangling feet. The second featured a murder actually in progress; it had been taken during the atrocities in Rwanda, and showed a child – perhaps no more than two or three years old – naked and curled in the dust, but shrieking with pain and terror as two men in baggy jungle fatigues and big, heavy boots, stamped it to death. The third picture was an odd one, but was explained by the rough caption someone had handwritten on the back of it: Congenitally-deformed prostitutes, Rio. It displayed a hellish backstreet slum, where two women waited idly amid the trash. One wore a very short dress and high heels, the other a halter top and tight shorts. There, the charm – if ‘charm’ was the correct word – ended. The woman in shorts had both her legs in callipers; the right one ended in a hefty clubfoot, the left tapered down to a stump at the point where the ankle should be. The woman in the dress and heels had a nice figure and shapely legs, but bizarrely, her face had sunk inward – scrunched like a deflated football. Presumably, they’d both got used to their disabilities; by their shoulder bags and saucy postures, they were touting for business.

Skelton assessed the pictures for several minutes, his heart thumping. He’d seen a lot of nasty in his time, especially during his ten years as a beat cop in one of the city’s most rundown districts, but never anything quite like this. He laid the pictures to one side, and continued to empty the filing cabinets, shoving files and folders into the various cardboard boxes. When he’d been told the narrow, dusty room was a library, the least he’d been expecting was reams of heavy books – probably video tapes and microfilm cans as well. Of course, newspaper libraries were slightly different. He should have realised that when he’d first found out where they’d be working today. Not that this operation was a newspaper as such. The Catholic Echo was a hefty broadsheet that came out weekly, but it catered exclusively to the Catholic communities of Britain and Ireland, detailing the latest developments in Church affairs, plus world news of interest to the religious-minded. The majority of the photographs in the drawers reflected this, showing groups of monks and nuns smiling, priests posing beside their altars, celebrities launching charity events, or landscape views of St Peter’s Square, Knock and the Holy Grotto at Lourdes.

Skelton looked again at the three horrific photographs.

Even a Church newspaper had to cover the real world, of course, the downside of life. There’d also been shots of dismal ghettos, discarded syringes in gutters, nervous British troops on the bombed-out Bogside streets – but these three particular images had an unsettling quality all of their own. He gazed at the prostitute with the head like a kicked-in football, at the mangled remains of the Bosnian father, the weeping, wailing children gathered beneath him. Again, he placed the photos to one side. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t throw them into the boxes with all the rest – at least, he wasn’t sure yet.

“Ray!” Jervis said, sticking his tousled head through the door. Jervis was Skelton’s foreman. “How you doing, pal?”