Read Online Deadly Friends by Stuart Pawson - Free Book Online Page B

enlisting together to form what were known as Pals Battalions. Brother trained and fought side by side with brother, father with son. They escaped the drudgery of mill or coalmine to take the King’s shilling and fight to make the world a better place. They yelled blood-curdling war-cries as they stabbed bags of straw with their bayonets and imagined they were killing Germans. The only difference, they were assured, was that the real thing would be running away from them. Nobody told them that their enemy was probably a blond-haired Adonis who’d grown up in the fields and mountains of Bavaria, not stooped over loom or shovel breathing foul air for twelve hours per day.
    Nobody told them about machine guns.
    Nobody told them about the Military Police whofollowed behind and shot anyone who turned to run, even though their comrades were falling around them like over-ripe plums in the first autumn gale.
    And nobody ever mentioned the firing squads that were waiting for the frightened or the feeble or the ones who simply saw more suffering than anyone could bear.
    When it was over, when the politicians saw the opportunity to save face, when Satan himself was sickened by the carnage, those that remained limped their way back towards the Channel, towards home. They left behind their friends, their sight, their youth and, some of them, their sanity.
    For the East Lancs, a ragged remnant of their former selves, luck changed. They regrouped and billeted at Fecamp, in Normandy. Centuries before, the Benedictine monks who lived there had devised the medicinal brew of grape and herbs that now bears their name. It was offered to the soldiers of the East Lancs to soothe the pain, and, being fifty per cent proof, it worked. They asked for more. To men who were still young enough to remember every pint of weak beer they’d had, it had a kick like a field gun.
    They brought the pestle-shaped bottles home with them, to stand on the sideboard alongside the shell cases, the uniformed photograph and the framed message from the King. And they brought a taste for the contents with them, too.
    Like the gene for brown eyes, or cystic fibrosis, or thebelief in God, it passed down the generations. Eighty years later a handful of pubs and clubs around Burnley still do a thriving trade in Benedictine, serving it to the great-greatgrandchildren of that ragtaggle army that left its dreams ‘hanging on the old barbed wire’.
     
    Sparky had joined us. ‘You know some stuff,’ he said, when I’d finished.
    ‘It doesn’t win quizzes,’ I admitted.
    ‘So you reckon he comes from Burnley,’ Maggie said. ‘I’d bet on it.’
    She was picking at her fingernails, absent-mindedly removing imaginary dirt from under them with her thumbnail, a faraway expression on her face. ‘It’d be nice if they could come up with something,’ she said. She wanted Darryl behind bars.
    ‘Day after tomorrow,’ I told her. ‘We’ll have a word with him then. Put it in your new diary.’
    Sparky was pulling his coat on. ‘I’ll get down to the squat, Boss,’ he said. ‘See if they need any help.’
    ‘OK. I’ll probably be here if you want me, but try not to.’ I didn’t envy them, having to cope with all the residents, plus children and animals. It’d be a pantomime.
    ‘What are you doing tonight?’ he asked.
    ‘Not sure. Haven’t thought about it.’
    ‘In that case, come round. See the New Year in with us.’
    ‘Aren’t you going out?’
    ‘No. Sophie’s going to a party, so Daniel would be left on his own. We’ll stay in with him.’
    ‘Right, thanks. I’ll come round late on, if that’s OK?’
    ‘See you then. I might have to tear myself away to fetch Sophie. The joys of fatherhood,’ he added, making a face.
    A copy of The Sun was lying on Jeff Caton’s desk, with the headline ‘5,000 New Cops’. I picked it up and read the story.
    It didn’t take long. The streets were about to be reclaimed for the people. The PM’s new