Available on Amazon at: https://mybook.to/kmtR

The Edge:

A Gripping Thriller of Obsession and Murder with a Fiendish Twist

Nice, France, Saturday, December 20

The body was just as they’d been told. In fact, it didn’t look like a dead body at all.

Barney sensed that Jean-Luc felt as he did about this, as if they were intruding, having just walked into a top executive’s office and interrupted him in the act of signing some document or other.

But this man was dead alright.

Marcel Laporte. Client Acquisitions Director for Modus Universal Bank. A big wheel in the financial world. A high-roller too, by all accounts. But no more. Someone had put a stick in his spokes and stopped him in his tracks.

DI Barney Mains felt a shiver run down his back. He didn’t like that shiver. It knew something he didn’t.

Jean-Luc was behind the man now, bent over, peering at the neck. It appeared that the Frenchman, looking thoughtful in his distinguished silver hair and goatee beard, was one step ahead.

‘We can’t draw any conclusions until we get him back for a closer look.’

Captain Verten of the Police Nationale sounded matter-of-fact. But Barney was already drawing the conclusion which his own instinct had reached before him, that it wasn’t a stick which had done for the man but a needle.

This bizarre scene bore the hallmark of a killer he knew all too well, a killer he’d seen fall to his death from the top of a very high cliff. Except that when the recovery squad arrived in daylight to pick up the pieces, they found nothing.

And ever since then, Barney had woken each morning wondering if that would be the day when he got the call, the one which said that this near-mythical killer who refused to die, the one they called the Ghost, was back in business.

‘Barney, I can see you thinking. Stop it. We don’t know anything yet for sure.’

‘You’re right, of course, JL. But it’s his style. Like the last time. The setup. Posed for us to find. It’s…’

The Frenchman cut him off. ‘Come on. We’re only going to get in the way of the forensics boys here. Let’s speak with this man’s colleagues.’

Why did Barney feel like he was being hurried away, maybe being spared the truth, that there was a needle mark in the back of that man’s neck? He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. The Ghost was back. The elaborate posing of his victim’s body, cruelly frozen in time like some shop window mannequin, was a message delivered by the Ghost, straight to Barney. It said: I’m still here. And you screwed up big time when you didn’t make sure I was dead.

The big Scotsman didn’t need telling. That night, on the clifftop in late summer, he’d charged at the killer, sent him flying over the edge. The rope, the Ghost’s last chance, had vanished along with him, into the void.

If Barney hadn’t suffered from an intense fear of heights, he would have crawled to that edge and looked over. If he had, he would no doubt have seen his prey clinging to the cliff-face below. What he would have done about it was another matter, although based on his lifelong compulsion to do the right thing, he would have tried to help the man clamber back up to safety, to thereafter stand trial for his crimes.

But death had been in the air that night and there had been a moment when that rope momentarily snagged on a rock and Barney paused, just for an instant.

In that split second he had questioned whether it wouldn’t be better just to finish it, to pick up the end of that life-saving rope and flip it free. Yet he did nothing; neither that, nor make a grab for it. He chose to let fate decide. And he’d had to live with that; the shame of doing nothing, but also of feeling nothing when the end of that rope snaked free and disappeared. He’d been content to simply assume that an evil man was even then tumbling into nothingness, to be smashed to a pulp on the jagged rocks far below.

But because of his own weakness, he never checked. And that was what haunted him still, three months later.

As he turned with Jean-Luc to leave the macabre still life behind, he resigned himself to awaiting the official report, which would surely say that this man had indeed died from an injection of deadly poisons, the Ghost’s signature means of dispatch.

It would confirm his worst fears, fears that had not only plagued his waking hours, but had infested his dreams too and drawn him down into some very dark places.

This man’s death was his fault. How many more would die because of him?