Youll get yours, p.1
You'll Get Yours, page 1
You'll Get Yours
Derry Murder Mysteries
Gerald Hansen
Published by Mint Books, 2023.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
YOU'LL GET YOURS
First edition. July 21, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 Gerald Hansen.
ISBN: 979-8223856757
Written by Gerald Hansen.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
You'll Get Yours (Derry Murder Mysteries)
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
Further Reading: Death in Small Measures
About the Author
In memory of my fantastic dad, MCPO Jerry Hansen. We all miss you so much.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is a solitary process, but I’ve been fortunate enough to have had some help along the way for this, my first venture into crime fiction. I’d like to thank everyone who helped me. These wonderful people are:
My lovely Maddie, who had the thankless task of reading each chapter I finished, and then having to read it again when I realized I’d made some mistakes and maybe let slip a clue or two she shouldn’t have read until later. What would I do without you, Maddie?
Mark Gondelman, who kept telling me I was on the right track when I wasn’t sure if I was. I appreciate all our very long conversations.
Anatoly, who told me about ‘the secret.’ Hopefully, it will help as I work through the series.
Anna, who helped urge me on when I was wasting time with other things.
Marina, for helping me with the plot.
Omar, for a fantastic suggestion. What a great idea!
Andre and Rosa, for the suggestion about the chapters.
Gosia, I hope you have looked at those chapters by now, ha ha, but you know you helped me so much that night in Nepal that...well...would I have even been alive to write this book if we hadn’t chatted? Ha ha.
My lovely mammy, I wouldn’t know Derry if it weren’t for you! I hope everyone loves their little mentions in the book!
A very special thank you also to RetroChartsRadio.co.uk. When I’m writing, it’s just me and the characters and the plot there at the computer. That’s what I always thought, but there’s something else, and that’s the music I listen to when I’m writing. I can’t write without it. Throughout the years, I’ve always struggled to choose what music I would listen to as I sat down at the computer to write. The music needs to fit my mood. It was always problematic. But then I discovered RetroChartsRadio, and I fell in love. Every single UK Top 40 hit from 1952 to 1999, with no repeats until they are all played? Yes, please! My dream station, and it will be what I listen to for every future book I write! You guys rock!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SCANDI-NOIR? WELCOME to Derry-noir!
Thanks so much for getting this book. When I wrote Static Cling, the fifth of my dark humor Derry Women series, little did I realize that a few years later two of the minor characters in that book, DCI Liam McLaughlin and DS Nancy D’Arcy, would end up becoming the stars of a mystery series. I didn’t know back then that I would write a series of crime novels. With this book, however, their time to shine has now come. Poor DCI McLaughlin seems to have been demoted, as he is a ‘mere’ DC in this book.
If you enjoy this book, why not see where McLaughlin and D’Arcy came from? Have a look at Static Cling.
CHAPTER 1
SHE’D DEAL WITH KYLE when the film was over. She needed a few hours alone to think things through. She’d been counting down the days until this film was released; she loved sci-fi, always had. She’d seen the first two on some streaming service online, and now the third had come out two weeks ago. It had taken her that long to work up the nerve to go to the cinema.
Cramped and dingy her flat might be, but at least it was safe. And ever since she had come back home to Derry, she was supposed to be keeping her head down.
She didn’t want anyone to know she was back. There was work, of course, but the bills had to be paid somehow. The easiest thing would have been to get something online, but she couldn’t stick the thought of being holed up in her flat alone in front of the computer. She wanted to avoid certain people, but she wasn’t a hermit.
When she was working a shift she literally kept her head down, thankful for the big caps they had to wear. Those caps had been a deciding factor in choosing the job. Of course, here at the cinema, she wasn’t wearing her work cap, but nobody knew who she was, who she had been. She’d taken steps to avoid detection.
She took her place in the queue to the snack bar a few steps behind a young teen bathed in cheap scent. The lobby was heaving. When she’d thought of coming to the cinema, she’d envisioned lurking in the darkness in some seat far away from others, safe and alone. She hadn’t thought about the throngs she’d have to push through in the lobby to reach that solitary seat.
Maybe just skip the popcorn and scurry down the hall toward the comforting darkness?
But no sense depriving herself of a simple pleasure. She was going to enjoy herself if it killed her.
She hadn’t been able to help coming back home. The moment she’d left Derry, the city had kept calling to her like the song of a siren calling sailors to their death on the rocks.
Now she was skulking around her hometown incognito, dead to those she’d loved, those she loved now dead to her. She’d come home, she had no home anymore. They say home was not necessarily where you come from, more where you are wanted. But nobody wanted her here.
Ungrateful bastards! They were in the past. She wasn’t like them. There was Kyle, of course, but now he had—
It was like a punch in the gut when the brash girlish yells of that song burst from the sound system surrounding her.
Hey! You! Yeah, you!
It was a song of its time, and the time wasn’t now.
The past had come back to haunt her.
She gasped in her mind, feeling like a spotlight was suddenly focused on her in the queue.
She clutched her handbag to her side, wrapped her cardigan more firmly around her bulky frame. Her fingernails dug into her palms. Her eyes darted from one cinema-goer to the other. Punters were laughing and chatting, enjoying their night out. Nobody was paying her any mind.
And why should they? She was nothing but an unremarkable middle-aged woman with a too-tight perm and large red-framed glasses. Lumpy and starting to sag. Decades older than most of the cinema-goers.
Heart pounding against her breastplate, she closed her eyes and forced slow breaths in and out. Her fists relaxed. She tried to blank out the frenetic synths and the boom of the drum machine, the half-yelled, half-sung vocals.
She’d only heard the song once before since returning to Derry, at work a year or so ago. That had been torturous, especially as it had forced her to stare down at the price gun in her hand and realize how much had changed, how low she had fallen.
She tried to ignore all the song brought up, focusing on the long dark hair of the girl before her, the hunch of the teen’s shoulders as she texted furiously on her phone, the plush carpeting beneath her slightly sticky and strewn with spilled popcorn. She glanced toward the door.
A man stood there grinning inanely at her. He lifted his hand and gave her a little wave. She snapped her head away. She dared not look at him directly, couldn’t be recognized. Not after all this time, all the effort. She chanced a little glance out of the corner of her eye. Looked behind her, relaxed. She couldn’t be sure, but the smiles were just fading on those two over there. The man must have been waving at them. She was embarrassed she had almost reacted, almost waved back out of reflex.
And, just as the song was ending and she could relax, she saw the three lads approaching from the right, fifteen years of age or so.
Trouble.
She saw it in their hairstyles, in their piercings, in their gray sweatpants, tracksuit bottoms and matching hoodies, in their goggled and glazed eyes, saw it in their nudges, heard it in their snickers.
They barged into the queue before the teen.
“Oi!” yelled the girl. “Can’t you see there’s a queue? Get to the back of it and wait like everyone else, you mingers!”
“Did you hear something, lads?” sneered one.
“Aye, I did,” smirked another. “Sounded like a cow in heat to me.”
“Needs a good rogering up against a wall, sounds like.”
“Aye, on the end of my knob.”
“You’re joking! I wouldn’t touch that scabby mare with the tail end of my bollocks.”
“What’s that even meant to mean, you gobshite?” sneered the teen, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re as thick as you look.”
“Aye, I’m thick indeed. You’ll feel every throbbing—”
She couldn’t let these lads humiliate the girl like this.
“Give it a rest, would you!” she called out to her own surprise. It must have been the gin she’d downed before leaving the flat. “You’ve had your fun. Now clear away off out of here.”
She had no fear of them. She’d dealt with the likes of them all her childhood, growing up as she had on the mean streets of the Moorside, Derry’s toughest neighborhood. Indeed, they were like the new generation of her three younger brothers. And as she had always put her brothers in their place, she did so now, all the while her brain yelling at her, “Don’t! Don’t!”
“You can't cut in line like that, you cheeky wee gits!”
The girl scowled at her—I can fight my own battles, you know—as the hooligans looked at her in surprise, their grins widening at having found a have-a-go hero. Their next victim. Two of the thugs flipped her off.
“Och, wind your neck in, granny.”
“Give over. Bloody pensioner.”
She seethed. “Granny? Pensioner? Sure, I'm young enough to be your ma.”
“Your ma? She's probably shagging the whole town.”
She teemed with rage, her face hot. “You flimmin little scutters. I ought to box your ears in.”
“Go on then, granny. Give it your best shot.”
She took a deep breath and stepped back. And then it was the hooligans’ turn at the concession stand, so the altercation petered out as they ordered their popcorn and nachos.
“Bloody do-gooder,” muttered the old woman behind her. “Sticking her nose in where it’s not wanted.”
She deflated. Nobody in the lobby dared look at her now. In a way, it was a result.
Clutching a box of popcorn, which would be the last thing she ever bought, she made her way down the aisle of screen three, marveling at the state of the cinema. She’d read the plush leather seats actually reclined. All very different from when she and her group of girlfriends had gone to the Savoy decades before. But, no. She couldn’t think of her friends back then.
As she was choosing a row, she felt like someone was watching her. She turned around, but nobody was there. Not many people were in the cinema hall as the film was so old. Suited her fine. She sank down in a seat, a few corkscrew curls visible over the back of the seat.
Halfway through the film, her mind started to wander. It wasn’t as riveting as the critics had made out. She was aware of some commotion behind her but disregarded it. Until she felt the breath on the back of her neck. The kicks on the back of her seat. The snickers of the—she whipped her head around—those three yobs from the lobby.
Her hands curled into fists. Calm yourself down, she said to herself. Don’t give them any ammunition.
“What are you watching this film for, hi?” said one.
“It’s a bit too violent for grannies, I would’ve thought,” said another.
“Give us some of your popcorn, hi. Christ knows you don’t need it. Looks like you’ve shoveled enough fast food down that gawping beak of yours through the decades, like.”
“Is she not giving you any of her popcorn, mate?”
“Why’s she not giving you any?”
“Fat cow wants it all for herself. Selfish slag.”
“Why don’t you give her some of yours, then?”
“Aye, right you are.”
She stiffened as she felt something land on the back of her head. They were throwing popcorn at her. She simmered with rage for a moment, refusing to turn around. Then she stood up, walked down the row and took measured steps toward the cinema door.
“Don’t go, hi!”
“More entertaining than this crap film, so you are.”
They jumped from their seats as she pushed through the door. They followed her out.
FIRST DAY
CHAPTER 2
RAIN LASHED DOWN ON the roof of the paprika-red Ford Fiesta SE.
Inside, Detective Chief Inspector Liam McLaughlin’s ample 50-year-old frame, wedged into the close confines of the driver’s seat, trembled slightly as he tore at the grease paper wrapped around his bacon bap. The smell alone was sending him into raptures.
He had a bushy ginger mustache that was paired with an unruly thatch of snowy white hair that brought to mind Boris Johnson. More than one interview suspect, one solicitor, had done a double take when meeting the head of the investigation for the first time. Had the UK’s former controversial prime minister taken on detecting after stepping down?
McLaughlin swore to himself he’d never wake up late and forgo breakfast again. It was only the knocking of the contractor on the door—he was having the kitchen refitted—that had gotten him up. After dropping off his surprisingly young daughter, 13-year-old Catherine, with a banana at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow Secondary School in the Moorside, his stomach pleading to be filled, he’d double parked outside a greasy spoon cafe. The car was still parked there now, and he paid no mind to the honks behind him. A man needed to eat.
Just as McLaughlin was opening his mouth, his phone rang.
Och, for the love of...
It was his boss, Detective Chief Inspector Sean Nix, head of the Major Investigation Team. He’d better pick up.
“Hello, si—”
“McLaughlin!” DCI Nix bellowed. “Where the bloody hell are you?”
“I’m just—”
“I don’t give a bleeding toss where you are! We’ve been trying to contact you.”
“Sorry, boss, my phone was—”
“Get a wriggle on and get yourself down to the city walls. Chop chop!”
“Sir?” McLaughlin was getting hangrier. “The city walls? They’re not in our jurisdiction. Why hasn’t Strand Road been sent—”
“Too busy with a bomb scare at the Top-Yer-Trolley in Crescent Link.”
“A bomb scare? In this day and age?”
“Ours not to reason why. The city’s flimmin alive with crime today. So DSU Golightly from Strand Road asked if we could take on this homicide.”
Nix’s voice was filled with glee.
“But surely DS D’Arcy will expect—”
“She can expect all she wants. From what I can piece together, this homicide’s a shocking one, so I’m assigning you as SIO on this case.”
“D’Arcy will be put out.”
Detective Sergeant Nancy D’Arcy was McLaughlin’s second-in-command. She was a slender no-nonsense bright young thing who had joined the force recently, being fast-tracked to greater heights than McLaughlin, though he didn’t hold this against the woman. Good luck to her, McLaughlin thought.
D’Arcy had been at his side for many investigations, and he appreciated her strict adherence to procedure and protocol, sometimes keeping the occasionally slapdash McLaughlin in check and out of trouble with his superiors.
D’Arcy was twenty-eight, though she looked seventeen and had the demeanor of a forty-five-year-old librarian. She wore chic pantsuits in inconspicuous shades of gray. Her brown hair was usually scraped back in a severe ponytail. Her oversized tortoiseshell glasses gave her an intellectual air, though if you listened to McLaughlin’s third-in-command, DC Tom Lyons, the way D’Arcy peered over the tops of those glasses made it seem she thought she was superior to everything she surveyed, whether victim, witness, suspect or especially Lyons himself.
McLaughlin understood why Lyons might think that. D’Arcy and Lyons were like chalk and cheese, and it had nothing to do with the fact that the two came from different sides of the community. D’Arcy was from the Waterside, and Lyons was Catholic, one of the few on the force like McLaughlin himself. But times were changing and more Catholics were joining the force; the sectarian specter of the former RUC was gradually being erased by the modern Police Station of Northern Ireland, the PSNI, and resentment and sectarian violence seemed to be at a historic low.
