Sound
Can you hear it?
A professor of psychoacoustics is found dead in his office. It appears to be a heart attack, until a second acoustician dies a few days later in similar circumstances.
Meanwhile, there’s an outbreak of mysterious illnesses on a council estate, and outbursts of unexplained violence in a city centre nightclub. Not to mention strange noises coming from the tunnels underneath Liverpool. Can it really be a coincidence that death metal band Total Depravity are back in the city, waging their own form of sonic warfare?
Detective Inspector Darren Swift is convinced there are connections. Still grieving his fiancé’s death and sworn to revenge, he is thrown back into action on the trail of a murderer with a terrifying and undetectable weapon.
But this case cannot be solved using conventional detective work, and D.I. Swift will need to put the rulebook aside and seek the occult expertise of Dr. Helen Hope and her unlikely sidekick, guitarist Mikko Kristensen.
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Excerpt
Excerpt
It has been three
months since his fiancé’s death, and Detective Inspector Darren Swift is
struggling to cope with his grief. But his solitude is about to be disturbed by
a very unusual night out…
As he drove home
that afternoon, his hangover finally abating, Darren’s state of agitation was
compounded by the intolerable traffic. It was only four o’clock. What did they
expect him to do with the rest of the day? The last thing he wanted was to be
on short hours, and this case was exactly what he needed to keep him busy.
Whether it was linked to Shawn Forrest or not. He wished he had held back on
the sonic weapons theory. Colette and Canter hadn’t been ready for it. He might
have had a chance of being put on the case, if only he’d kept his mouth shut.
As he finally
crossed the flyover and approached Waterloo, he began to dread the empty house
that awaited him. He supposed he would go to the gym, or jog along the beach to
Formby. But there were only so many hours you could spend exercising, pounding
away your grief.
He spent much of his
spare time on the beach now. Not that he hadn’t before; it had always been his
favourite place. But now he hated the gym, where he would have to look at
himself in the mirror. The vast drama of the beach invoked a loneliness so
profound that it approached something equal to his grief. Or perhaps it was the
opposite; the smaller and less significant he felt, the lesser was his grief.
If he were just a speck on the edge of the void, maybe Matt’s death didn’t
matter that much. Sometimes he would go down to the beach twice a day, three
times, loitering there with no self-consciousness, because there was no-one to
see him, in this liminal space. He would run along the sand all the way from
the Waterloo docks to Hall Road car park, dodging the Iron Men, and then feel a
grim satisfaction when he turned back to see his tracks in the sand. Sometimes
at low tide he would dare himself to step out onto the mudflats near the
water’s edge, ignoring the danger signs, wondering if it were really possible
to sink. Then he would head slightly inland and dash up and down the dunes,
ankles wobbling on clumps of plant matter, the wind whistling through the
marram grasses as if they were strings in a giant harp.
Sometimes he would stay
until it was so dark that he could barely see his way back, and would use the
red lights on the tops of the distant cranes to guide him. At night-time the
Lumina building sparkled constantly in the background, taunting him. The whole
structure flashed in rainbow colours, and from the roof an infinity-shaped
searchlight roamed the sky, as if looking for him. Even without his kitchen
table incident board, there seemed to be no escape from Forrest; there were
constant reminders of him, all over the city. Darren had thought of leaving
Liverpool, requesting a transfer, but he didn’t have the energy. The roadworks
seemed to be fencing him in. And anyway, the only other time he had left, on
secondment to the Met in London, it hadn’t exactly worked out. He had been
inexorably drawn back. This was where he belonged.
Looking out into the
void, out towards the horizon marked by wind turbines, he felt closer to Matt
than at his grave or looking at his photo. He pondered questions he had never
pondered before. Where was Matt now? Was he out there? If only he could believe
in something. He thought about Mikko’s ridiculous new album, and belief being
more important than truth. What could he believe that could make him feel
better? Could you make yourself believe?
He had a strange urge to
speak to Andrew Shepherd again. Suddenly the issues that had consumed
Shepherd’s life, that had seemed so pointless before, now seemed to him urgent,
immediate. He knew that madness was not far away from his current state of
mind, and he didn’t fight it.
Darren pulled into Abbott
Road in Waterloo and, to add to his irritation, his usual parking space outside
his house had been occupied by a large black van. There was someone in the
driver’s seat. Darren was about to go over and tell him to move when he realised
that the driver was a monstrous figure with a long beard and a thick black
cross tattooed on his forehead. It was Knut. And then Darren saw Helen, wearing
a Total Depravity hooded sweater, jeans and wellingtons, knocking on his door.
Shit. Hazy memories of the previous night… he remembered that he had absurdly
agreed to go to North Yorkshire with them in search of a secret black metal
concert. Shit. It was too late to avoid them, because Helen had seen him now,
and was approaching his car, waving.
‘Darren, there you are. Come on, if we get to
Yorkshire while it’s still light we have a chance of finding the place…’
He was about to begin making his excuses when Mikko
hopped out of the back of the van. ‘Dude, you need to get changed first.
There’s no fucking way you’ll get in wearing a suit.’
Darren wavered for a moment. Fuck it. Tonight
he would forgo the sweet torture of the beach and the empty house. He had got
himself into this, and didn’t have the energy to extricate himself. He went
inside to get changed.
Author Bio –
Catherine Fearns is a writer from Liverpool. Her novels Reprobation (2018) and Consuming Fire (2019) are published by Crooked Cat and are both Amazon bestsellers. As a music journalist Catherine has written for Pure Grain Audio, Broken Amp and Noisey. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Toasted Cheese, Succubus, Here Comes Everyone, Offshoots and Metal Music Studies. She lives in Geneva with her husband and four children, and when she’s not writing or parenting, she plays guitar in a heavy metal band.
Social Media Links –
Twitter: @metalmamawrites
Giveaway to Win a signed trio of Catherine Fearns books plus merchandise (Open Internationally)
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