The Follow
Danger is never far behind…A fast-paced and riveting crime novel and the first in a new Brighton-set police procedural series featuring PC Gareth Bell. Perfect for fans of Peter James.He knows the man is guilty. And he will do anything to prove it…PC Gareth Bell watches Quentin Davey – the psychopath who stabbed Bell’s partner – stroll out of court a free man. Somebody on the inside tampered with the evidence, and now one of Brighton’s most dangerous criminals is back on the streets again.Determined to bring Davey’s campaign of terror to an end, Bell begins a personal mission for revenge that takes him onto the other side of the law and into the dark, violent underworld of the glamourous seaside city.But the deeper he goes, the more his loved ones are targeted and his career spirals out of control. Soon he faces a horrifying choice: risk everything he holds dear, or let the man who tried to kill his partner walk free…
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First published in Great Britain by Endeavour Press Ltd 2011
Copyright © Paul Grzegorzek 2011
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
Paul Grzegorzek 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 authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008329976
Version: 2018-11-02
In loving memory of Inspector Andy Parr and WPC âAuntyâ Sue Elliott. Lost but not forgotten.
Iâd been a copper for eight years the day I became an accessory to murder. But before I tell you about that, I need to go back to the beginning, back to that day in the summer of 2008 that Quentin Davey walked out of court with a grin on his face and the blood of one of my colleagues still on his hands.
The day started much as any other as I left my house on Wordsworth Street in Hove and drove to work, enjoying the morning sun streaming across the seafront. Early summer is my favourite time of year in Brighton, it makes it feel alive with the promise of things yet to come. I hummed along to the Snow Patrol track my MP3 player had selected, my Audi darting through the traffic as if it wasnât there. In no time at all I was in the underground car park of John Street police station, trading jokes with people who were leaving from the night shift, their white shirts crumpled and their faces sagging as they finally shucked off their paperwork for another twelve hours.
I bounded up the stairs and through the locker rooms, then up two more flights of stairs to the first floor reserved for the CID teams and headed through into the DIU office.
The Divisional Intelligence Unit, in my opinion, is where the real heart of policing in Brighton sits. Intelligence from everywhere across the division, from coppers and the public, comes through the office and is sorted for relevance before being passed on to the Intelligence Development Officers: us, the IDOs. Everything involving the police is reduced to a three-letter code.
I strolled into the office, past the picture of our five-a-side team from last year that was still pinned up on the door, and the tension hit me like a slap in the face. The room holds about thirty people, officers and researchers with not a uniform in sight. Weâre the ones who sneak around town and chase drug dealers, car thieves, rapists and burglars, and itâs hard to do that if they can see you coming, so the office was full of jeans and T-shirts, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the building. That morning all of them were muted as if waiting for something bad to happen.
The tension was for a very good reason, a reason that I had been trying hard not to think about. Six weeks earlier, Iâd been on a surveillance job with a few others from the office, trying to catch a big-time heroin dealer called Quentin Davey, who lived in Hollingdean.
What we didnât know at the time was that he had just blagged a load of heroin on tick, and that, if he didnât get the money sorted out, he was in big trouble. So when we jumped him, instead of putting his hands up or running away, he pulled a knife and stabbed Jimmy Holdsworth, my partner of three years, piercing a lung and putting him on life support for two weeks before he began to recover.
Of course weâd taken Davey down, but it looked like Jimmy wasnât going to get a payout, as he hadnât been wearing a stab vest â everyone knows you canât wear one on surveillance. Nothing screams copper like a covert vest; you look like the Michelin Man and move about as fast too.
