Free The Dragon's Tale: A Jack Lauder Thriller by Clive Hindle

his life was slipping away. He was well set up, okay, but what did he do at night? He ate alone, prepared the case for the next day. Sometimes he went out for a drink with a few pals, all of them visibly ageing and getting more depressing by the minute. They were all married but that didn‘t seem to make them any happier. He wouldn’t know because he’d never found the right person. He was a loner. Anyway, whatever it was, there was something missing. He thought about it, knew he shouldn’t but he ended up buying a bottle of Chablis from the Off Licence and walked the pavements home.
     
         The house was silent. He liked it enough but somehow tonight he felt lonelier than ever. He tried the answer-phone to see if there were any messages, thinking Lowther might have been on about the dead man, but it was still early doors and now he had his hands tied with the fallout from Peter’s case. There was one message but it was from Johnny Kwok. He wanted Jack to ring him at 23.00 prompt. Prompt? He had an in-built aversion to commands: even if his conscious mind didn’t always decide to ignore them, sometimes his subconscious one over-rode it.
     
         Around 11.15 he looked at his watch. Cursing his forgetfulness, he walked into the sitting room and reached for the phone, which, for some reason, he hadn’t replaced on the table but had left on the floor. He knelt down. Telepathy or what, the phone must have been about to ring because, before he had finished dialling, someone was on the other end.
     
         " Wei, hello," the voice said. Jack recognised it instantly as Chinese.
     
         "Who's there?" he replied.
     
         "Ah, Mr. Jack," came the familiar tones of a slightly bewildered Johnny Kwok, as if Jack’s picking up the phone so quickly had taken him by surprise, "I was wanting to talk to you about our mutual friend, Mr. Ma. Sorry to bother you at home. I hope you don't mind."
     
         Jack had no time to reply. A blinding flash at the window made him duck as the glass caved in. A dark figure outside was caught momentarily in the light of the moon, then something whizzed through the air, missed Jack’s head by a shave's width and struck the wall. He jumped up and made for the window, shouting at the top of his voice. He could see car headlights in the lane behind the house. Jack gave chase as the intruder legged it over the hedge, jumping it Fosbury style. He ran through the gate to see a car making off down the lane, it's passenger door swinging drunkenly as the driver tried frantically to pull another person in while keeping the vehicle on course. "Blast!" he said, and returned to the house. He picked up the receiver. It was dead. Quickly he grabbed his mobile and dialled 999. Returning to the broken window, he drew the curtain and put the light on. He began searching the wall close to the telephone for the missile. Even as the doorbell rang he discovered it.
     
         Lowther stood outside with the troops. "What's going on, Jack? " he asked. Jack led him into the breakfast room and showed him the throwing star embedded in the wall. "Nasty," Lowther said, looking at it carefully, "but leave it there until the crime scene people get here." He bent down to examine the glittering, silver star, which had crunched into the wall through three quarters of its diameter. "I wouldn't have liked my head in the way of that," he added.
     
         "It was meant to take me out." Jack mentioned Johnny Kwok's phone call and the odd command to ring him at 23.00 on the dot, something he‘d forgotten to do.
     
         "Well, you lucky beggar," Lowther said, "He‘d see you through the window when you picked up the phone. As soon as you did, bingo! Hole in one. He must not have had his sights right. Maybe because you didn’t do it on time and he wasn‘t prepared when you did. You caught him off balance." Lowther left a Police guard at the house overnight. By the time Jack climbed the stairs to