Deadly Burial Read online

  A fight to the death…

  When DI Chris Sigurdsson is assigned a grisly murder case on remote Salvation Island, he knows that it might be his strangest yet.

  A forgotten wrestling star of the 1980s has been poisoned whilst in the ring, and amidst the slippery lies of his dangerous opponents, unravelling the victim’s murky past is almost impossible.

  And as a storm threatens to cut Salvation Island off from the mainland, the race is on for Sigurdsson to find the ruthless killer before he strikes again…

  A gripping debut crime thriller novel from Jon Richter, perfect for fans of Peter James, Stuart McBride and Leigh Russell.

  Deadly Burial

  Jon Richter

  ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Title Page

  Author Bio

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Excerpt I: Whatever Happened to Vic Valiant?

  Sunday

  Excerpt II: The End of the End

  Monday

  Excerpt III: Making a Monster

  Tuesday

  Excerpt IV: On Immortality

  Wednesday

  Excerpt V: The Gravy Train

  Thursday

  Excerpt VI: Vic Valiant, Unmasked

  Friday

  A Different Friday

  Loose Ends

  Excerpt VII: Peace

  Endpages

  Copyright

  JON RICHTER

  lives in London and spends most of his time in the guise of his sinister alter ego, pretending to be an accountant. When he isn’t doing this, he is a self-confessed nerd who loves books, films and video games – basically any way to tell a good story. Jon writes whenever he can and hopes to bring you more stories in the very near future. If you want to chat to him he can sometimes be found running around East London in an attempt to fend off his diet of ready meals and gin, or spouting nonsense on Twitter. You can follow him @RichterWrites.

  This book could not have been completed without the help of all of the friends and family members that read and gave feedback on multiple drafts, including in particular Ashley, Liam, Haydn, Dave, Lucy, Ciara, my mum, my dad, and my siblings Faye, Natalie, Amy and Sam.

  I would also like to thank Charlotte for her patience and insight as she helped a first-time author through the editing process, and Lisa for believing in such a weird story in the first place.

  Finally, I would like to thank all of the professional wrestlers that have sacrificed their bodies to entertain us over the years, many of whom are now sadly missed.

  This book is for my parents, Karen and Peter.

  Thank you both for all of your endless encouragement and praise.

  Excerpt I: Whatever Happened To Vic Valiant?

  My name is Victor Schultz, and I’ve written this book because I’ve had an interesting life.

  You know me as Vic Valiant, the former two-time SWA champion. Maybe I was your childhood hero. Maybe you know a little about my problems with alcohol and drug addiction. You might be a big fan of professional wrestling and think you know what goes on ‘behind the curtain’.

  Well, I can tell you that there’s a whole lot you don’t know about our business – and there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know about me. A lot of it is dark and despicable, and by the end of this book you most likely won’t like me very much.

  But I don’t care, because I suppose I’ve also written this book as a kind of confession. I’m going to tell it like it is, and like it was, and if that means I upset my fans, and my so-called friends, and anyone else in this crazy industry, then so be it.

  I don’t precisely know why I’ve decided to write this now. It isn’t because I think it’s going to sell a million copies and make me a ton of money. A bunch of wrestlers much more famous than me are all getting in on this book-writing thing, and their books are probably much better, because they can afford to hire ghost writers and editors and all of that shit. I can’t, because I’m broke as fuck, so what you read here are just old Vic’s thoughts, just like my old promos used to work – words tumbling out.

  Maybe it’s because I feel like I’m on the final downhill stretch. Yesterday was my forty-eighth birthday, and my body is starting to break down, and I’m not even sure I’ll be able to drop the big elbow for much longer. My kids haven’t spoken to me for years, the rest of my family for even longer. I’m living in England, of all places, touring with All Action Wrestling, and living with a woman who I won’t name because she’s one of the few people who’s been good to me and done me a favour with no strings attached, letting me stay with her and her kid for free while I try to get myself clean and straight.

  We travel around shitty venues and wrestle in front of tiny drunk crowds, then I stand at the merch table grinning like a fucking goon at all these limey assholes who want to tell me about how great I am and how they’ve always been a huge fan and can they get a photo on their phone please, but evidently they’re not a big enough fan to actually cough up any money for a fucking T-shirt. I’m wrestling guys half my size, some of whom are young and talented but the majority of whom are just stupid kids or fat old wrecks – and even the talented ones are heading for the scrapyard way faster than me, because these days it’s all about triple somersaults and 450 splashes and taking chair shots direct to the skull. One of the young kids here is going to be a cripple before he’s twenty-five if the boss keeps putting him in hardcore street fights and cage matches.

  The real irony is that most of time I’m jobbing out to help put people over, and I don’t even care any more. That’s a bit of wrestling terminology for you, in case you don’t know the sport. When we’re booked to lose a match it’s called ‘doing a job’. ‘Getting over’ is getting the fans to like you, or believe you’re a big deal, or if you’re a villain it’s getting them to boo the shit out of you every time you set foot in the place. The point is that for every guy getting billed as a legit championship contender, there’s another guy having to lie there and get pinned and pretend he just got his ass kicked. Anyway, the kicker is that I used to be booked to win, and that used to matter to me. A lot. If Lance wanted me to do a job to some kid, some Next Big Thing, he’d damn well better be good enough, otherwise I’d throw a tantrum and refuse to wrestle, or I’d agree but then I’d work stiff, and the kid would go home with a busted nose and broken ribs.

  Now, I’ve realised that you get paid, either way. The results don’t matter for shit. The fans don’t care if you lose every week – it doesn’t hurt your character, or your mythos, or your reputation, because they don’t believe any of it’s real in the first place. Kayfabe is dead. There’s some more lingo for you: ‘kayfabe’ is what we call the alternate reality that professional wrestling presents. It’s the reason that bad guys and good guys (we call them heels and babyfaces) aren’t supposed to be seen in public together, doing shots in a bar when they were fighting to the death just three hours before. It’s the reason people went crazy when Hulk Hogan was the first man to bodyslam Andre the Giant. It’s the reason kids like me used to go to the Sportatorium and watch the greats flying off the top rope, seeming to move in slow motion through the air, and dream of being just like them.

  These days the fans just want to find out what’s going on backstage so they can one-up their friends in the chatroom with their fucking insider knowledge. They want to ask you about your broken marriage when you’re trying to smile for a picture. They want to talk to you like you’re on their level, even though they’re a fat fucking teenager who’s probably never even seen a girl naked, except online.

  So if you’re one of those overweight nerds, and you’re a little sore reading
this, I don’t apologise. Go outside. Get a girlfriend. Join a fucking gym. But if you are one of those people then I know you’re dying to hear about the Milwaukee Meltdown, because that’s what you all ask me about most of the fucking time, those that have the balls.

  So I’m going to get straight to it.

  If you’re a pro wrestling fan then you already know about what happened. But I’ll explain it anyways, because it’s important, because it’s the reason I got fired, although it’s not the reason my life turned to shit, because my life had already turned to shit way, way before that.

  The Milwaukee Meltdown was when I reached rock bottom. When everyone found out just how far Vic Valiant had fallen.

  Sunday

  Sigurdsson recognised the feeling. It settled so gently around his shoulders, like a lightweight cloak, familiar and barely perceptible at first. Then, slowly, it would begin to cling to him, like a cold damp sheet sticking to his flesh. Then it would tighten, closing insidiously around his throat and chest until he couldn’t breathe, as though he were embraced by a nightmare creature. A parasite, feeding upon his fear.

  He felt it now, as he sat inside the little passenger ferry, trying to calm his breathing even as the vessel bobbed and lurched on the irritable sea between North Devonshire and the island of Salvation, his destination. Maybe it was the pressure of the investigation he would be spearheading, the prospect of dealing with a distrustful local police department that resented the interference of ‘mainlanders’ like him. Maybe it was the fear of his career continuing to spiral down the toilet as his DCI sent him on yet another joke assignment… professional wrestlers for god’s sake! He’d taken a load of stick from his colleagues, especially those who hadn’t forgiven him for his formal complaint against Townsend, which was pretty much all of them. Maybe it was the pressure of grinding out a living surrounded by colleagues who despised his attention to detail, his determination not to cut corners or sacrifice his professionalism for anything. Townsend had been a corrupt bastard anyway, as well as an utterly incompetent policeman.

  But he knew it was none of those things. It was his own mortality that drove DI Chris Sigurdsson to suffer from panic attacks.

  He was afraid of death.

  He rode the convulsions of the modest craft, envisaging his own freezing and watery demise, a bloated corpse floating facedown into an anonymous harbour somewhere. He imagined another mortuary, another human being reduced to an assemblage of guts and meat on a sterile table in front of him, organs extracted and laid out like the pieces of a grisly board game.

  He thought about strychnine poisoning.

  The sort of thing that only happened in films, or Agatha Christie novels. A drug that caused the muscles to spasm uncontrollably, twisting the victim into excruciating contortions, lips peeling back into a grotesque grimace as their heart was strained beyond breaking point and they literally died of exhaustion.

  Apparently it had happened while the ageing performer was in the ring. The crowd had thought it was part of the match. The paramedics had thought it was a massive heart attack… until a post mortem had been conducted and revealed a filigree of injection scars in his rump, upper arms and lower abdomen, and enough of the drug in his system to kill off a horse.

  A pro wrestler, his body failing him, using steroids to cling on to his musclebound physique, or maybe to simply make it through another show… somehow he had contrived to instead pump himself full of a substance that would ensure nothing but an agonising suicide. But was it an elaborate self-destruction, or just a tragic blunder? Or… had someone deliberately switched the syringe?

  DCI Wells had anticipated some media interest, given the victim’s fame in pro wrestling circles, and had dispatched Sigurdsson to assist with the investigation. He would liaise with Inspector Carin Mason, who at thirty-four was a few years younger than him, having also progressed rapidly within the force, although she hadn’t yet taken the CID exams to become a fully-fledged detective.

  Sigurdsson’s fingers drummed uncontrollably against his thigh, a pulsing blob of nausea gyrating in his stomach. He needed something to distract him. He thought about striking up a conversation with the ferry’s other passengers, a group of young lads sitting opposite him. Maybe they could tell Sigurdsson a few things about the island. The detective had never visited Salvation and knew very little about it – Wells had called him earlier that day and he’d had scant opportunity to prepare.

  He knew from a Google search that the place was five square miles in size, with a population of under two thousand people. He knew that it used to house a convalescent home for soldiers, which had closed down decades ago; today it was a privately owned seaside resort. He knew that its main attraction was its enormous wild rabbit population; with no natural predators to regulate their numbers, the creatures had spread all over the island, attracting hundreds of tourists each year to pet and feed and photograph them. There was a rabbit-themed amusement park, a rabbit-themed gift shop, and all manner of rabbit-themed merchandise. People even called it ‘Bunny Island’.

  He also knew that in the 1990s a serial killer named Leonard Spitt had terrorised the small community, brutally killing six young women. Whether because of this incident, or simply because of the rising popularity of foreign holidays and the gradual decline that had affected all British seaside resorts, he knew that the island’s popularity had dwindled, and that today it was rundown and dilapidated.

  He decided against making small talk and instead glanced around at the boat’s shabby interior, looking for anything to occupy his racing thoughts. He thought about disease, about the germs and bacteria scuttling invisibly across the grubby surfaces, across his legs, ascending his torso to crawl into his nostrils and his eyes…

  He shuddered and knotted his fingers together, wringing his hands painfully to try to focus his mind, watching as his fingers turned in some places red, in others white. The colours of blood and bones.

  ‘Are you here to see the show, mate?’

  One of the boys had addressed him, a skinny youth with dyed black hair swept severely across his face, almost hiding his eyes.

  ‘The show?’

  The teenager looked embarrassed as his friends sniggered.

  ‘Oh, sorry. I thought you might be here for the wrestling too… just wondered if you wanted to share a taxi there with us. Never mind.’

  ‘Is the wrestling on tonight?’

  ‘Yeah, bell time was seven o’clock. We’re running late because of this knobhead.’ He playfully smacked his friend’s shoulder, and received a blow back in return. ‘We had tickets for last night’s show too, but it was cancelled.’

  ‘That’s a shame – why was that?’

  One of the other boys, with a chubbier frame and a shaved head, interjected.

  ‘Vic Valiant had a heart attack in the ring! It sounded fucking intense. The show got called off and an ambulance turned up and everything.’

  A suspected heart attack was how the papers and internet had thus far been reporting Schultz’s death.

  ‘Will be weird tonight to see if they mention it,’ the boy continued.

  ‘Do they often have shows on the island?’

  ‘No, this is a special double-weekender – AAW is doing like a cross-promotional thing, and they’ve got some proper big names over from America. The winner of the tournament gets a shot at the title next weekend!’

  ‘AAW?’

  ‘All Action Wrestling,’ grinned the lad in response.

  ‘The island seems a strange place to hold a big tournament.’

  ‘Not really,’ said the third member of the group, as though keen to get involved in the discussion. ‘The promoter was born here, so it’s like a sort of coming-home show for him. They normally tour all around the south west, and we try to get to as many shows as we can. Plus the island’s got a really cool history anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I’m a tourist myself,’ Sigurdsson lied. Much easier than trying to ex
plain that he was a policeman investigating the death of one of their heroes, and that the gathering storm was too severe for air travel to the island, and so his DCI had thought the passenger ferry would be quicker than trying to organise a speedboat. Sigurdsson suspected Wells just couldn’t be bothered. ‘I heard about the rabbits and thought it would be an interesting place to go.’

  ‘Yeah man,’ said the third boy. Sigurdsson realised they were all wearing T-shirts that were something to do with the wrestling promotion, bearing names and slogans he didn’t understand. This boy’s said ‘Maniac’ in blood-dripping letters above a stylised AAW logo. ‘You know the story about those, don’t you?’

  Sigurdsson shook his head, and the lad’s face lit up with malevolent glee.

  ‘The story goes that the island used to be a secret poison gas development site during the war. That hospital? They weren’t just rehabbing old soldiers, man. They were testing fucking gas on ‘em, nerve toxins and all sorts.’

  Sigurdsson felt the noose of anxiety slowly tightening around his neck as the youth continued.

  ‘The rabbits were all kept there for the testing, underground. Then when the place got bombed in the forties, the rabbits escaped and overran the island, and bred like… well, you know.’

  He sat back smugly, as though he had just unveiled an ingenious conspiracy theory.

  ‘You’re full of shit, Joe,’ the shaven-headed boy responded, and they all laughed.

  Sigurdsson forced a smile too. His forward view was obscured by the ship’s wheelhouse, but through the window he could see the swirling mists ahead of them begin to darken, as if giving form to some imagined horror.

  ‘Well, have a great time at the show, boys.’

  ‘You should come and check it out, honestly, you’d have a great time. Wrestling’s making a big comeback, I’m telling you.’

  The shadow was solid now, and Sigurdsson realised that it was Salvation itself looming out of the fog. He could see the sprawling outlines of buildings along the promenade, crowned by the tree-lined hilltop at the island’s centre. The silhouette of a Ferris wheel looked like the skeletal remains of some giant sea creature.