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.
www.facebook.com/tony.bassett.92505
