A Matter of Honour Read online

  A Matter of Honour

  Harry Nichols: Investigative Journalist, Volume 2

  D M Macdonald

  Published by D M Macdonald, 2022.

  Also by D M Macdonald

  Hannah Tree

  Long Shadows

  Harry Nichols: Investigative Journalist

  When Yesterday Comes Calling (Coming Soon)

  A Matter of Honour (Coming Soon)

  Standalone

  No Place to Run

  Loaded Legacy

  In the Dark Alone

  Mission Murder

  A MATTER OF HONOUR

  IT’S THE LAST ROUND THAT COUNTS - NOT THE FIRST

  D M MACDONALD

  Copyright © 2022 by D M Macdonald

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. The characters and incidents are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  WEB SITE: https://www.dmmacdonaldauthor.com

  CONTENTS

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by D M Macdonald

  1

  It had been a miserable evening. Apart from anything else I'd failed at the one thing I'd come for. My face ached from constant smiling. My neck ached from constant nodding. I had bruised shoulders because they'd been slapped so often by people I didn't know. My ears rang and my feet hurt. And all for nothing I told the young waitress as I slid off my stool.

  Sometime later I woke up. Or became aware. More or less. It was pitch dark, it stank and I was being shaken apart. Through the fog in my brain I recognised those smells. Farm smells. Dog, horse, oil, diesel. Ah, I thought, Anna's taking me home. I smiled. Trust her to make it as uncomfortable as possible. That would teach me to talk to pretty young girls the moment I was away from her. I drifted off happily.

  Sometime later I woke again. The shaking was far worse. I diagnosed major road corrugations. It was worse even than the goat tracks up the mountains in Kashmir. The fog in my brain lifted a little and confusion moved in. There were no corrugated roads between the city and home. Anyway, Anna knew I was staying at the hole in the wall city pad, so she had no reason to come and get me. Then who had?

  And what was this? A moving vehicle. Yeah right, dummy. Maybe the fog hadn't cleared. I shook my head. Bad idea. I was instantly swamped by nausea. I waited while my stomach descended back down my gullet which took a while because the bumps in the road kept bringing it back up again. When it was reasonably stable I started concentrating on the outside of my body.

  The pitch blackness was because I was blindfolded. The discomfort was because my hands were tied behind my back. I twisted to relieve the pressure and struck a cramp across my shoulders and back. Gasping in pain I tensed and immediately cramped my legs as well. I screamed with pain and curled up into a ball. Then I found that if I rocked I could unclench my teeth and breathe in short gasps.

  When the cramp finally faded I tested how much freedom of movement I had. I'd been tied up like this once before, by Anna's malevolent cousin Luka Mladenovic, and got out of it. This time, maybe not. As well as my hands and feet being tied together I seemed to be tethered to the walls of the van or truck or whatever it was, as well.

  The vehicle wasn't new or in good nick either. The bloody thing had no springs and everything rattled. It had holes in it too. I could hear the wind whistling through…what? A partly open window? A poorly sealed door? That might account for the rattling which was enough to wake the goddamned dead.

  My mind continued to clear but my last memories were still hazy. I remembered talking to Greg, my boss, and the team. We all sneered at the food, the wine and the executives who took off as soon as they could. But the others had gathered up their partners and friends and gone home. Only I was alone. Anna always avoided functions like this. Too much like her mother's unbending social compliance, she said.

  `Mother despised the people at those things too. She always said they were like trash beneath her feet. Even though she needed to be there as much as they did. But I don't, so unless you win an award I'm not going.'

  So rather than go back to the hole in the wall alone I'd stayed at the bar.

  And now I was here, wherever that was. Why? Who? What next? I reached into my memory. The celebration was my film launch. The one I made in Kashmir. Finally about to hit the airwaves. Cheap champagne and soggy savouries. Then when you turned around the people who nodded, smiled with their mouths and patted you on the back in the first ten minutes were nowhere to be seen.

  They'd gone off to glamorous after parties leaving you, the poor sods who made the bloody thing, half drunk, tired, hungry and figuring out how to get home without getting cold, wet, mugged, or arrested.

  Normally I avoided these functions like the plague but not that one. I'd planned a series of filmed exposés on the corruption of multinational companies. The ones whose experiments in remote places literally sacrificed the locals for profits. But the money people had pulled the purse strings tight after this first one.

  So I abased myself in front of them. To beg. They were kind and congratulatory and suggested that maybe, sometime in the future they might consider, possibly, thinking about the next step. If Mr Nichols could write an outline…

  Except Mr Nichols already had. He had in fact already written the complete script for the second one and detailed outlines for the other two, completing the series of four. One for each continent. The corporations didn't discriminate. The poor and ignorant were all fair game.

  But taking it up to the huge conglomerates that funded them and their corporate mates was against their religion. I suspected the only reason they let me do this documentary was because the company involved, RS Holdings, was already on the ropes and wouldn't fund them anyway.

  That was only thanks to me and my beloved, Anna Felby. My boss, Greg, said I should be grateful that we got to expose even one of these rapacious, amoral bastards. Great. Anna and I nearly died getting RS to face the law. Did we have to do it again to get the others?

  `What about the poor bloody victims?' I'd told the young and friendly waitress. `Brain damaged kids in Kashmir, dead farmers in Guatemala. My own sister.'

  If she was bored she hid it well and seemed to anticipate my alcoholic needs with the aplomb of a much older person. I suppose that should have alerted
me but it didn't. After far too many drinks and far too little food my eyelids began sticking together. I told the little waitress that she should go and look after some of the other customers.

  I reached out to tap her arm and fell forwards. My head fetched up against her chest. I rebounded and almost toppled backwards off my stool. Obviously I was far drunker than I thought. Drunker, in fact, than I should have been. I tried to apologise but couldn't manage the words. Someone steadied me as my legs turned to jelly and folded under me. I didn't see who.

  I remembered thinking vaguely that maybe I'd been drugged and that I really shouldn't have shit-canned my superiors. Had I exposed a nerve? Maybe this time I'd lucked out. Then even that thought slid away and I knew no more.

  Now I saw that the girl must have been a decoy. My paranoia notched up to full alert. But was it paranoia? I really did have enemies. The main players in RS Holding's collapse were in the caboose but there could well have been plenty of others who stood to lose a lot of money. People I didn't even know about. With revenge on their minds. It was only a year and the court case was only now in full bloom.

  Then there was the Serbian Mafia. Anna and I had been instrumental in the demise of the scions of one of its most powerful leaders, her previously unknown cousin, Vlado Mladenovic. But considering they were plotting to overthrow him, I didn't think he'd come calling.

  My contemplations were interrupted when the vehicle lurched suddenly, throwing me across the floor. And though I was lying on what felt, and smelt like, old feed bags and horse blankets, there were gaps and the floor was metal. I rolled around uncontrollably, cracking my hips, elbows and shoulders on it.

  As we drove on I could have sworn we'd left any kind of road and were now driving over open paddocks. Then as I was thinking about what to do when my captors came for me, there was a grinding sound and something rolled across the metal floor. There was a sharp pain as it slammed into my head.

  My next thought was, If it hurts like this, I don't want to wake up. But I was awake and there was no rattling or lurching or shaking. Slowly my mind began to form proper thoughts. I wasn't in a vehicle anymore and there was light through my closed eyes. So no blindfold. That was a start. I stretched my legs and arms. Nope, I was still tied up but I wasn't lying on a hard floor or on smelly bags. It was a bed.

  I heard a slight movement. My captors were in the room and watching me. I opened my eyes. The sun speared through a high window straight into my face and I instantly shut my eyes again as tears flooded them. But not before I saw two figures sitting on the far side of what looked like an old barn. They were dressed in black from head to foot including ski masks.

  I opened my eyes again, slowly, and turned away from the direct sun rays. The barn was large and tumbledown. The sole other window, directly below the high one, was filthy, covered in cobwebs and cracked across both its panes. The walls were rusting corrugated iron with entire panels missing and many gaps between the ones that remained. Weeds grew through the spaces where the cracked concrete floor and the rusted edges of the iron failed to meet.

  The high roof, where there was one, was sagging and some panels of corrugated iron hung down like curtains and waved in the breeze. If there was a doorway, I couldn't see it. The place was a wreck. Apart from a screeching flock of cockatoos in the distance and the creaking of the swaying iron, there was silence. That included the two black clad figures who sat perfectly still, staring at me.

  `Well, now what?' I asked. I waited.

  Hopefully that would get them going, I thought. They kidnapped me so they must have a reason. Let them tell me what it was. But they didn't. After a while one of them got up and left. The other sat and stared. I started to get angry. I figured that if they had evil intent they could have despatched me any time in the last—certainly many hours, maybe days. And they hadn't. But if I showed any aggression they might, so I kept quiet.

  The first one came back in with a bottle of water and a chocolate bar. I took a close look at the figure's hands. They were small, female and young. It was a woman, maybe both of them were. That was good. Women were more compassionate than men. Then I remembered Anna's mother. Not always.

  The girl stuck a straw in the bottle and held it up to my mouth. I hadn't realised until that moment that I was desperately thirsty. I dragged at the water like there was no tomorrow. I hoped that wasn't an omen as I bolted down the chocolate bar pieces she fed me as well.

  The woman sat down again as I swallowed the last of the chocolate. The two of them looked at me, then at each other. I got the impression they didn't know what to do next. That all their plans involved just getting me here and now they'd run out of ideas.

  `Do you think you can tell me why I'm here?' I asked. They stared on. `Or…who you are? I don't mean names or anything but…your organisation, maybe?'

  One of them snorted. I couldn't tell if it was a disgusted snort or a laughing one. The one who had brought to water and chocolate stood up again and came over to the side of the bed.

  `You're Harry Nichols, right?'

  Her voice was very young. I said nothing. I needed her to speak again because I thought I recognised it.

  `Answer me. You are Harry Nichols?'

  `You know I am.'

  `And you have a sister called Margot.'

  2

  Fear sent cold sweat down the back of my neck. I knew where I'd heard the voice. It was the young girl from the launch. But that wasn't what terrified me. The years fell away. The pain, the loss and the fear from long ago rose up, sending a mist across my eyes. I swallowed hard. How did these women know that? Were they sent to find her? To kill her and her family even after all this time?

  `No, I don't.' I sent a silent apology to my lovely sister. That I had to deny even knowing her tore my heart in two.

  `You also have a sister named Eve,' the high, light voice continued. `Don't lie. We know you do. And you have two nieces called Kayla and Zoe too. Don't you, Harry Nichols?'

  I swallowed again and my voice came out as a croak. `I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know these people. Now if you just let me go I promise I won't say anything about—' I nodded at the broken barn.

  `You're not going anywhere and neither are we until you admit it. All of it.' The two of them looked at each other and nodded.

  `Why? I'm terribly uncomfortable and I need to pee so if I knew these people don't you think I'd say so? But I don't.'

  `Why can't you say you know them? Is it because they're in witness protection?'

  I must have twitched or jerked or something. Of course she was right. So she must think I knew where Maggie and the girls were. That's why they were holding me. It was time to call it.

  `You’re right. I do have a sister called Maggie and two little nieces called Kayla and Zoe, and yes, they are all in witness protection but hear me, and hear me well. I don't know where they are. That's because they're in witness protection. So you can hold me here as long as you like, you won't get to them no matter what you do to me. That's why it's called witness protection.'

  `Even from a brother.'

  `Even from a brother. I don't know how you found out all of that but you can stick it up your arse and take it back to whoever hired you.'

  These two little crooks didn't deserve any quarter at all. They were clearly far older than they sounded.

  They stood as one and walked out leaving me with a full bladder and a cold sweat that failed to dissipate as I contemplated the past that had come roaring back because of them.

  I was nineteen when my brother-in-law Evan was killed outside the court where he was about to give evidence in a high-profile corruption trial. Because of threats to his family in the lead up to the case, the whole family had been put under police guard. He was surrounded by his legal team and police officers when a hit man walked up behind him, shot him in the head and melted away into the crowd.

  As a result my sister Maggie and her two little girls were immediately placed into witness pr
otection. I was away playing football in Western Australia so I didn't see Maggie and the girls, who were then six and four, before they were whisked away.

  I was told not to attend Evan's funeral but I did and that was the last time I saw my family. I told Maggie then that I would avenge Evan's death but she begged me to leave it alone. One death in the family was one too many. So, swallowing my rage I vowed to her that I would leave the case alone. And I had. But the pain and rage over Evan's death, and my impotence in the face of the destruction of my family, fuelled my need to expose injustice wherever I found it.

  The evidence that Evan was supposed to have had against a raft of career criminals, businesspeople, politicians and senior police, was never found and was thought to have died with him. That these two had come looking for Maggie meant that not everyone believed that.

  The women returned about quarter of an hour later. They stood at the end of the bed and the bigger one said, `Who do you think we are?'

  `I don't know who you are,' I snapped, `but I can guess who you represent.'

  `Oh yes, who?'

  `People who fear my sister and her family. A crooked politician called Curtis Tennent, perhaps? Or a bent copper or two. How's that for starters?'