Read an extract of The Burning Fears by Katy Massey

The gripping new novel from Katy Massey, a fresh, northern, Black British voice in crime fiction with endorsements from Bernardine Evaristo and Louise Doughty.

Leeds 1982. As a city struggles to break free of the past, evil finds a new place to hide.

DS Mick Hunniford, tired and tainted by the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation, is yesterday’s man, his career hanging by a thread. Maureen, owner of Leeds’s leading brothel, struggles to recover from a horrendous attack three years before. When notorious escort Lynda Brown is killed in front of Maureen’s eyes, she and Mick find themselves drawn together once more. The pair must face a new killer, with new appetites, one which dwells among the city’s elites. Can they put the past behind them once and for all, even if this investigation proves to be their last?

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EXTRACT:

Prologue: Day 1,

2 February 1982

The car grinds forward. Eating up the road. Snow, slush. I am a driving Valkyrie. Or stone. Love calcified. Godforsaken. Like this bloody city.

Where am I? Gone too far? Too far. I didn’t want this drive. Be this driven.

Watching for her. Red hovels reel past. Bricks dripping. Narrow pavements. Sad tickertape. Snow comes down. Pristine sheets. I see people. Bundles of fabric. Heads are a frown. Mittens grasp shopping bags. Cheap boots. But none are her.

Years, it’s been. Thought I was free. From her. From Lynda Browning. Now she’s back. Turned up. The bad penny.

I streak past. Tyres see me. Roll their eyes. They know me. What I do.

Can’t help it. Am overtaken. An inferno.

And I feel her now. She is close. Creeps again into my blood. I press down. The roar meets my foot.

She will see me. Through a shroud of ice. Pennies for her eyes.

DAY 1

1: A marionette

She had to go out into the snow, had to. But at least there was a weak hint of sunshine to cheer her as she pulled on old wellies, threw stilettos in her handbag, and shrugged into her big blue mohair coat. Now where was her scarf? She was readying herself for Rio’s, Leeds’s leading brothel since she’d opened it nine years ago. There, she was a boss. Time flies, now Rio’s had been her life for almost a decade and she’d barely taken any time off since that first day, until she was forced to, of course. Never even had a holiday.

Stooping, a twinge in her back meant she felt every day of her almost- forty years. She groped around the bottom of her bursting wardrobe until she found one of Betty’s scarves. Her mother had had a grand eye for clothes, always managing to dress above the family’s budget. In life, Betty’s outfits belied their station. In the decades since she’d passed, these poor scraps were all that remained.

The scarf Maureen pulled out was a square of real silk, dark pink and edged with a pattern of burgundy paisley. It had once been beautiful, luxurious. But, as she tied it over her head and under her chin, Pat Phoenix- style, she noticed how thin and faded the fabric had become.

You and me both, she told the drawn, bloodshot reflection in the mirror. Her voice echoed around the empty flat’s walls as if lost, and she noticed that her usually deep- brown face had taken on a yellow tinge. It poked through the blood- coloured silk like an apology. How could something as ordinary as time passing so decay and diminish her looks? Even Betty wouldn’t recognise her once- glamorous daughter now.

These sad thoughts mocked her. An indulgence she could ill afford. One idea, one memory led to another and then . . .

She was suddenly keen to escape her little flat’s barren air, its fug of failure mixed with the chemical smell off the gas fire. Hurrying, she scraped on some make- up, more for necessity than pleasure. Now, a painted ghoul greeted her in the glass. Still, it was better than an unpainted one.

Wrapped up and ready to brave the street, she had to hunt around for her keys. She found them lying next to a bar of melting Dairy Milk on top of the telly. Benji, her little dog, looked at her with his head cocked to one side and his expression full of sympathy and useless hope.

‘Later, love,’ she told his uncomprehending brown eyes.

It is these thoughts she carries into the snow- covered streets of Chapeltown, intending to take a taxi from the rank near the bus stop to Rio’s. It is quiet on Reginald Terrace, even for a Tuesday afternoon. Despite the numbers of unemployed, the cold has kept most people indoors and there are few folk about. The ones who have ventured outside are muffled against the cold, anonymous in hats and balaclavas. The snow is soft under foot, her tread almost silent, apart from a tinny, gritty cracking of ice crystals marking each step. The sparkling whiteness is spread across every pavement, road, wall and roof, and its light reflects onto the red- brick terraces giving her the impression she is walking through a temporary grotto, a soundless otherworld.

As she heads from the Terrace into the main road and towards the taxi rank, a few cars drift almost silently by. Stepping out from her side road, she notices a woman. She looks sort- of glamorous – black patent knee boots, a silver fox- coloured fun- fur jacket and matching beret – but her outfit is working a bit too hard.

This woman turns her pale, powdered face to look at Maureen and after a second’s thought adopts an expression of astonishment, painted eyebrows raised, her crimson lips forming into an ‘o’. This face is familiar, but instead of trying to place it, Maureen is distracted by her outfit.

She stands out a mile in that get- up. That hat! It’s inappropriate. Like Garbo herself, caught loitering outside Jim’s Chippy.

But this woman is staring at her as if she, Maureen, is the answer to all her questions and she has finally found the thing she has been seeking. And it isn’t battered fish.

Disturbed by this attention, Maureen angles her head down, down into the biting February air. Ignoring the woman in the silver fur, she continues up the main Wetherby Road. Mohair coat collar pulled up around her scarved head, she kids herself she can barely hear the woman shouting.

‘Maureen . . . Mo! Hiya! It’s me, Lynda!’

But the memories start to form despite herself.

Lynda . . . Lynda . . . Didn’t she go off to work in London few years ago? And there were a scandal. It were in the papers, weren’t it? A married judge or summat like that. Now, here she is in the bloody flesh, all fur coat and no shame, waving across the street like we’re old muckers, when we were never anything like. We were never friends.

Her annoyance rises as she takes one leaden step through the snow after another and the woman on the pavement opposite matches her step for step. Their paths had crossed in the old days – the memories were flooding her mind now – and how they had crossed. This woman is trouble.

It were handbags at dawn. Lynda’s a loudmouth. Punters pay you to keep your mouth shut, for God’s sake.

Glancing up, while trying to avoid being noticed, Maureen accidentally catches Lynda’s wide, brown eyes, notices her scarlet mouth. Those kohl-rimmed eyes are locked on hers. Maureen hurriedly looks down again.

This is typical. Never had any class did Lynda.

When, inevitably, Maureen looks up again, Lynda is fishing something out of her pocket. She separates a small piece of what looks like cardboard from some folded, thinner paper, and gestures towards Maureen holding the card with one hand as she stuffs the folded sheets back into her coat with the other. Her eyes are pleading and her smile is set, as if her jaw is stiff from teeth- grinding. Even at a glance, worry leaks from the seams of her fur jacket, her siren- red lips. Maureen drags her eyes off the woman once again and hurries her pace towards the taxi rank.

After a couple of steps she steals another glance. On the oppo-site pavement, Lynda raises her arm from the kerb and looks as if she is setting out to cross, to engage in unwanted chat. So, more reason to avoid her then! Bloody woman!

Until.

A car approaches almost noiselessly along the white- covered street. Snowfall has quietened the roads, and there are no other vehicles as the car rushes towards them like a giant low- flying crow. The few pedestrians on the icy pavement turn to look. The black vehicle is moving too quickly, risking a skid, churning up ribbons of sleet and sludge from its back wheels.

It is almost past the two women just as Lynda raises her foot to step into the road. A fraction of a second later, the car blasts between them in a rush of air.

It takes only an instant. Maureen hears a solid bump. In the same split second, Lynda seems to have disappeared.

Maureen’s brain begins to slow down the scene before her. She has time to notice that the space Lynda occupied on the white pavement opposite is now empty, as if she has been taken by an unnatural force. Then the woman’s carcass is falling before her eyes. It twists in the air and lands dully, leadenly, into the white road behind the vehicle. For several seconds, Maureen is hypnotised by the sight of the woman lying there. She barely notices the ghost car disappearing into the frozen mist.

Maureen drops her bag, runs to the broken woman, falls to her knees besides her. She looks for life, but Lynda’s Betty Boop face is frozen in surprise, her brown eyes still wide open, lips parted in shock. She is utterly transformed, like a marionette with her strings cut. Her only sign of life is a strangely distant, rattling moan from her open mouth. Before Maureen can think about reacting, the silver fun- fur lying beneath Lynda’s head begins to redden, soaking in her life blood, before the rest drains into a vermilion pool on the eerily quiet, white street.

‘Lynda! Lynda! Say something, love!’

But there is only a throaty gurgle in response.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Lynda. I knew it was you but . . .’ Maureen whispers urgently, and there seems to be a chance as Lynda’s head turns slowly, stiffly towards her pleading voice. There is a hubbub of voices shouting behind Maureen. The odd word breaks through their intimate eye contact – ‘ambulance’, ‘blanket’ – but the help the onlookers are summoning will arrive too late.

She reaches for the broken woman’s nearest hand, but it is fisted, closed around something small, pliable. Lynda’s eyes focus on Maureen’s as she releases the small piece of card into her palm. For a second, it looks like she is going to try and speak. But instead, her gaze clouds over and her body stiffens, then her eyes roll back and her whole form relaxes into its final rest.

Soon, heavy male arms gently raise Maureen onto her feet, and in a murmur of condolence relegate her to the role of onlooker, witness. There is little that can be done now, as they lift what is left of Lynda onto a stretcher without urgency, placing her untouched fur beret on her chest before covering what is now her corpse with a sheet.

Maureen loitered at the scene long after the ambulance left for the mortuary, and the rubberneckers and bystanders dispersed and went about their business. Like them, she shivered with the knowledge that she had seen the life pass out of a woman. Unlike them, her fingers tingled with the reminder that she had already survived a brush with the scythe. Not poor Lynda though.

But still Maureen stood, fascinated and horrified by the crim-son stains Lynda left on the whiteness, and the spread- eagled indentation made by her body in the snow. It was near- perfect, even if surrounded by the scuffs, foot-  and knee- prints of herself and others who tried to help, and carried on doing so, even when helping turned into just cleaning up. But the shape would soon be covered, as another flurry of star-l ike crystals began to fall from the frigid sky.

But for now, the snow bore the stamp of a fallen angel who had ascended with her last breath. She left the earthbound Maureen confused, bombarded by too many emotions, shocked and bereft, guilty and grateful, all at once.

When her fingers cramped with the cold, she remembered the small piece of card that had passed, deliberately or not, from Lynda’s hand to hers in the woman’s final moments. It was rum-pled now and streaked with rusty smudges of blood but was still clearly readable. It did not say much but what it did contain was beautifully set out and deeply engraved. Even numb with cold, her finger could feel the expensive indentation of the text as she read:

The Leeds Club

Albion Place

Leeds

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