Free SENTINEL: an exciting British detective crime thriller by JOHN STANLEY Page A

and fever as the smack strengthened its hold on him. The dark haired one, a little younger, was Jonathan Farron. A university drop-out once destined for a successful career in business, just like his parents, but now a stranger to them, stick-thin and waif-like, wasting his days away injecting heroin from dirty needles into arms that were covered with scars. Like Roper, he was not destined long for this world. Lives in freefall.
    Neither man acknowledged David’s presence as he walked over to the window and drew the shabby curtains, peering out through one of the jagged holes, fearful lest the police had followed him on the tortuous route that he had taken to the house. David knew only too well what awaited him if they caught up with him. His father had been a police officer, a beat bobby, something the local paper’s headline writers seized on with glee whenever his son appeared before the magistrates on drugs charges.
    Recalling events in the church, David knew how the police pressure ratcheted up when one of their own was injured. It certainly had when his father received the blow to the head during a pub brawl that eventually led to him being invalided out of the force only to die three years later. David remembered one of his father’s shifts, recounting with intense satisfaction how the man who assaulted him ended up in hospital for six weeks after an incident in the cells following his arrest.
    ‘We look after our own,’ the officer had said. ‘Of that you can be assured.’
    The attack on his father had happened around the time that David started taking drugs. Cannabis at first, bought from a spotty kid at college, then the harder stuff, crack and heroin from street dealers. When his father, by then just weeks from death although no one realised it, discovered that his son was taking drugs he refused to talk to him. Father and son never spoke again and two months later the father was dead. Heart attack, the doctors said, probably unconnected to the assault, but David knew that some of his ex-colleagues blamed it on the stress brought on by what they saw as his son’s betrayal. They had made that clear enough on the many occasions on which he had been subject to a stop and search in the months since his father died.
    To David’s relief, the street was deserted.

Chapter eight
    Radford drove through the night-time streets until he reached a set of park railings a couple of miles from the city centre where he got out. Glancing round to make sure that he had not been followed, the inspector walked through the gates, using the light from nearby streetlamps to pick his way along the deserted paths, past the dark waters of the lake and the dilapidated snack kiosk, then round by the play area with its vandalised equipment. Finally he reached the bandstand, the swirls of graffiti just visible in the half-light. Gazza in red, Pocky in bold blue. Memories flashed.
    Just look at this place. I remember it from when I was a kid. Mum and Dad used to bring me here on Sunday afternoons, Dad still with his Saturday night hangover, head like the proverbial, Mum timid as ever, not speaking lest she spark his anger again, her black eye covered by sunglasses, more often than not, even on the gloomiest of days, and me in the middle. Always in the middle. Like now. Nothing changes. What would she think of what I’m doing? Always a big one for authority figures, was Mum. Looked up to them. No questions asked. What they said goes even if it makes no sense. Me, I reckon that you have to earn respect every day you’re on the planet, face down your critics. Be prepared to doubt even those closest to you. It’s why Connor and Gaines are right to ask questions about me. Why they are so disappointed.
    Radford shook his head to banish the thoughts – England had always told him to clear his mind of all distractions. Thought of the man made him turn his attention to the burly figure that had emerged from the shadows and was approaching the