Read Stark Contrasts (An Adam Stark novel Book 1) for Free Online Page B

shove that mobile up the arrogant bastard's arse!”
    “Yeah,” replied his companion, “too right, mate.”
    They chuckled quietly and headed back to the restaurant.
    I left my message and hung up.

10. A House Call
     
    Ernie Martin's house was just as Stark imagined it might be: a hovel. The estate it sat in was thoroughly depressing and depressed. A congregation and aggregation of the discarded and forgotten, the ill-educated, poorly raised and all manner of other unfortunates. There were a million different hard luck stories within the confines of this place. So many flats and houses ending up as containers full of broken dreams, misery and disconnection: the poverty extending far beyond what cash people had in their wallets. You could add to this mix the parasites and the chancers. The ones who were exploiting the desperate or bucking the system. If you didn't have to live in a place like this, you would never choose to. It was like his old home in Alloa but on steroids - whatever problems the Bottom End faced, multiplied a thousand times. His desire to help the good people drowning in such seas of inequity was undiminished but, sometimes, he would feel overwhelmed by the scale of his task when he visited an area like this.
    Mildred Martin was a mess. Face ruddy and bloated; like she'd been crying and drinking for a week - and not necessarily in that order. Her shabby clothes, bloodshot eyes and trembling hands, aptly offset by her bird's nest hair. A middle-aged woman whose life had panned out very badly, and she knew it. Once upon a time, Mildred had been a pretty, little girl with hopes and dreams and a future. But now, little more than a cypher; one of the walking dread, shuffling around the estate, alive in strictly biological terms only.
    She chuffed feebly on a succession of cigarettes, each allowed to burn to the point of depositing ash on her carpet between puffs. Not that it made much difference to it's dirtiness. The place would probably have made a cockroach nauseous. A glass of neat vodka was topped up periodically throughout their conversation and alternately glugged or sipped as the mood took her.
    “He was a good man,” she slurred, “and he worked hard and I loved him.”
    “I'm very sorry for your loss, Mrs Martin, but I need to ask you a few questions about Ernie and what happened to him.”
    She slurped her vodka again but he hadn't the heart to force her to desist.
    “You need to find them two boys what scared the livin shit out of 'im the other week!”
    Stark, knocked right out of his stride by this, shot a look at Katz. She seemed equally rattled.
    “What do you mean, Mrs Martin?”
    “He was taken hostage by two men. They tied him to the front of his truck and played chicken with their car. He was terrified. He told the local bobby but that fat tub o' lard never did nothin about it. I never thought they'd come back and finish him off though.”
    Her shoulders hunched and she let out a sob, quelling her fragile emotions with a quivering draw on her cigarette and a glass-draining gulp.
    “Are you saying that two men did this to him a week before he was killed?”
    She wiped snot from her top lip with the sleeve of her blouse and sniffed.
    “Yeah, that's right! And I want you to catch them evil bastards and throw away the key for what they done to my Ernie!”
    Stark and Katz looked at each other and, without consciously planning it, raised their eyebrows in unison. It was very rare for vigilantes to work in pairs or teams. You could expect that kind of thing more often when gangs or drugs were involved. Not only that, but the notes left at the scenes so far made no reference to there being multiple people involved.
    “Mrs Martin, I need you to tell us all the details you can remember but can you please do me a favour?”
    “What's that, son?”
    “Can you stop drinking? We need to be sure you can recall this properly and not miss anything out. Every detail you can give us might be