Out For Revenge by Tony Bassett Blog Tour! @tonybassett1

 

Out For Revenge

When notorious gangland boss Tadeusz Filipowski is released from prison, several people start looking over their shoulder.

A volatile character, not shy of picking fights, Filipowski plans to expand his drugs empire and put his competitors on a backfoot. That’s until he turns up dead. Very dead.

DS Sunita Roy of the Heart of England police is handed the case but it’s a challenge to find the killer of a man with so many enemies.

DCI Gavin Roscoe would lend more support but he is busy nailing down suspicions of corruption plaguing the force.

Soon, however, the investigations will bump into one another. And unless Roy and Roscoe can get to the bottom of the mystery, they could well become the next victims.

OUT FOR REVENGE is the fourth gripping standalone mystery in the Detectives Roy and Roscoe crime fiction series by Tony Bassett.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BK9PJLHK/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BK9PJLHK/

OUT FOR REVENGE BY TONY BASSETT

Corrupt detective Seymour Trent has lost patience with his business partner Tiff Filipowski, who runs a criminal gang called the 101 Crew. The drug baron is prone to outbursts of rage and his deliveries have become irregular. Trent makes a phone call to an associate and tells him it’s time to take action over their “mutual problem.”

 

It was just after midnight four days later when a black Volkswagen Touareg gently drew up outside an unremarkable mid-terraced house in the village of Balsall Common. The tall man with close-cropped hair spent a moment loading his Glock 17 with several rounds of ammunition.

A full moon bathed the street in a dim light every so often as it emerged from behind the clouds. As he had expected, there was no sound from the red-brick house, although the presence of a silver Porsche Boxster on the forecourt signified the householder was at home.

The man, dressed in dark clothing and wearing gloves, took a can of petrol from his car-boot and opened the garden gate. Blinds had been drawn in all the front windows and no light was visible.

‘Good,’ he muttered to himself.

He walked silently across the forecourt until he reached the front door. There, using a key he’d had cut a week before while the occupier was in a drug-induced stupor, he let himself in.

The house was as still as a nunnery at prayer. He knew where his quarry would be. Spark out – probably spread-eagled – in the middle of his bed. On his bedside table would be the remains of a line or several lines of cocaine. He may be snoring. The intruder would be careful in his every movement, but, even if he made an accidental sound, it was likely the householder would remain comatose.

The uninvited guest passed through the sparsely decorated hallway and pushed the living-room door. It opened with a creaking sound. Newspapers were scattered over the settee. A laptop computer and some books lay on top of a low-level sideboard. Three packets of cigarettes had been placed in front of the widescreen television.

Assured no one was sleeping downstairs, he returned to the hall and mounted the stairs.

Nearly every step squeaked. Now and then, he paused to see if his presence had been noticed, but the house remained silent. He would have to have an excuse ready in the unlikely event that his associate was awake and lucid.

However, the only noise came from a ticking clock in the hallway. The intruder reached the top and placed the can in the middle of the landing floor.

Then he took his loaded pistol from his bag and stealthily pushed against the bedroom door. It creaked open, brushing against the dark-red patterned carpet.

He peered into the darkened master bedroom. Nothing stirred. He could not even hear the sound of breathing. But he could see the householder lying in his bed with the top of his head just visible on the pillow. Lying motionless. Oblivious to the peril that awaited.

A china plate, holding the remnants of a drugs binge and a narrow tube that had been used for snorting the powder, rested on a dressing table. He took three paces into the room and pointed the gun at the tufts of hair. He fired. The victim’s head seemed to twitch and then lay still.

‘Job done,’ he muttered.

After searching around upstairs, he found three duvets in one of the other bedrooms and piled them up outside the door to the master bedroom. Then he sprinkled petrol over the heap and struck a match.

The mound of material caught alight at once and, within seconds, the whole landing was engulfed in flames.

The intruder retraced his steps to the hallway, where he found a black refuse sack in a cupboard. Then he hurried into the kitchen and filled the bag with packets of cocaine, which he knew were concealed inside the oven.

After picking up the laptop from the sideboard, he left, firmly locking the white double-glazed front door behind him.

He was glad to see the darkness closing in. The moon had dipped behind some clouds. Soon the house would become an inferno, destroying any evidence of his midnight mission.

Moments later, his car drew away and the cold-hearted assassin headed off into the night.

But without him knowing, his actions had been monitored. A figure with short, light-brown hair had, sometime earlier, parked his black BMW a hundred metres away along the street. On seeing the Volkswagen disappear into the distance, he turned on his lights and his engine. He too drove away.

I am a semi-retired journalist who was born in West Kent. While growing up, I spent hours reading and writing, and, from an early age, nursed an ambition to become first a journalist and then novelist. My theory was that, in order to write novels, one had to have life experiences to colour one’s writing and one could obtain those experiences through journalism.

I was fortunate enough to be named Time-Life Magazine Student Journalist of the Year in 1971 in a competition organised by the National Union of Students. At the time, I was editing the student newspaper at Hull University, where I gained a BA Honours degree in History and Political Studies.

After six years working on provincial newspapers in Sidcup, Worcester and Cardiff, I became a freelance journalist in London. For 24 years, I was a reporter on the staff of the Sunday People (now part of Reach plc, formerly Trinity Mirror). Over the years, I sold tens of thousands of stories to the national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard. I helped cover the Jeremy Thorpe trial at the Old Bailey for the Evening Standard. I broke the news in a Sun newspaper exclusive in April 1989 that Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones guitarist aged 52, was to marry 18-year-old Mandy Smith. I bought 200 blank MOT forms to expose a trade in fake certificates.

My speciality was tracking people down. For instance, I found evidence about Rod Stewart’s secret love child Sarah Streeter by tracing a retired adoption agent through a library ticket. On one occasion, I took an escaped gangster back to prison. Some of my stories can be read on my website (see below); others are generally available online. For thirty years, I was also employed as a birth and marriage researcher mainly for the Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday People and The Sun.

I have a grown-up son and four grown-up daughters who all live in South Wales.

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