In Too Deep

Chapter 1

1

Tanya Henderson let the last drop of red wine fall from the glass onto her tongue, before stopping for a moment to consider whether or not she should open another bottle. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea. She knew that a glass or two of wine — and no more — often helped her to think more clearly, to put all of her stresses to one side for a few hours and concentrate on the task in hand. And what a task it was.

Her job as an investigative journalist meant that she was used to having to deal with some real shits. It was her responsibility to dig down into the murkiest depths of criminality and corruption, exposing those people who used their money and their power to create more money and more power. In her time she’d uncovered some big scoops: a billionaire American computer software tycoon who’d been siphoning off money that was being put into a charity foundation and a married Premier League footballer who’d been sleeping his way around half of London and paying off the women to keep them quiet. It wasn’t anything that had particularly surprised anyone who’d paid attention to the news stories when they came out: it was an unfortunate fact that most people just accepted this sort of stuff went on.

As much as she loved her job, Tanya got frustrated sometimes at the amount of work that had to go into each investigation, not to mention the depressingly short odds that meant most of them wouldn’t end up in a story. More often than not, there just wasn’t enough evidence to go on. If people were going to commit a major fraud, they tended to cover their tracks pretty well. But even so, Tanya Henderson was there, ready to pounce on any tiny loophole they managed to leave. It wasn’t high turnover ‘churn’ journalism — she might only have a story published once every couple of years — but she knew that when she did it would make her some big money and give her the satisfaction of exposing some of society’s biggest crooks.

And she knew the case she was working on right now could potentially blow a hole in the entire system of local government. It was something that had come to her attention as a local resident, but which she was planning to expose using her position at a national newspaper. The Inquirer didn’t have the biggest circulation of all the national newspapers by a long shot, but it enjoyed a steady readership of around 50,000 a day — more when they broke a big story.

The story she was working on right now was going to have to function a little differently. Locally, she knew the story would be huge, but for a national scandal she was going to have to dig deeper and find other instances of the tentacles of corruption creeping into local government around the country.

A lot of journalists she knew tended to form teams, getting younger, less experienced journalists on board to help gather information, speak to witnesses and generally try to build a bank of evidence from which they could form a story. But for every time that had been successful, Tanya knew of at least five occasions where one of the juniors had majorly f****d up and blown the whole story before it had even begun. That wasn’t something she ever wanted to risk. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

Before she could decide whether or not to open another bottle of wine, her mobile phone began to vibrate next to her on the wooden desk. As the phone skidded gently across the surface, she looked down at the bright display. It was a withheld number. Nothing unusual in her line of work. She picked up the phone, swiped her finger across the screen and lifted it to her ear.

‘Yep?’ she said — her regular greeting. Giving nothing away as usual.

There was silence at the other end of the line. She gave it a few moments before speaking again.

‘Hello?’

Tanya heard a light click, and then the phone went dead. She pulled the mobile away from her cheek and looked at the display. It had reverted back to her smartphone’s home screen. She was used to getting some abusive phone calls every now and again — it went with the job, and was one of the reasons why she changed her number every few months — but she’d never had a silent call before. She hoped it would be the last, but made a mental note to give her mobile provider a call in the morning, just in case she needed to get her number changed again.

Sighing, she leaned back in her chair. Christ, the mountain of data seemed to be growing by the day. That was one of the downsides to keeping your work to yourself, she realised. Still, it was better than risking the alternative. As she’d come to learn, you couldn’t trust anyone but yourself.

She considered calling it a night. It was already gone midnight and her brain was getting to the point where it wasn’t going to be doing her much good to stay up any longer. But those files, the gigabytes of documents — deeds, agreements, financial records — all needed going through. It all needed going through. And the sooner it got done, the more likely she’d be to have her scoop.

Before she could decide what to do, she heard the faint sound of her doorbell — a soft bing-bong, just loud enough for her to hear it from this side of the house but not too loud that it made her jump. When you’ve got your head stuck into investigating some of the biggest crooks in society, anything can make you jump.

She yawned, locked the screen on her computer, stood up and pushed her desk chair out behind her before making her way through to the hallway. She enjoyed living here. It wasn’t a small house by anyone’s standards — the kids had plenty of space and Tanya was very grateful to have her own home office — but it seemed a whole lot bigger and emptier when John, her husband, was away with work, as he was this weekend.

As she got to the front door, she could see the blurred figure behind the glass — big, burly, black. But then again, everyone looked that way when they were standing the other side of that front door. It was a trick of the light, the frosting on the glass. Backlit by the glowing orange streetlight at the end of the driveway, a five-year-old girl would look menacing from the other side of that door.

Sliding the brass chain across and unlocking the latch on the door, Tanya froze for a moment as it swung open and she registered what was in front of her.

A man — probably — dressed head to toe in black, except for a pair of piercing green eyes that looked at her from two of the holes in his balaclava. The first time she registered the crowbar was when it flashed it front of her eyes, the steel reflecting the light of the streetlamp just before she felt the impact on the side of her skull.

She felt instantly sick, an enormous wave of nausea rising from the pit of her stomach as her brain released a huge surge of adrenaline to deal with the trauma. She staggered to her side, crashing into the door and hearing it clatter against the wall. She felt another blow come down from above, this time on the back of her neck, just above her shoulder blades.

The dizziness grew, beginning to overwhelm her, and she felt her vision and hearing start to blur and cloud. In the moment before she lost consciousness, she could just about make out the soft, unfocused smudge of white and pink at the top of the stairs and the faint voice that faded away into the distance.

‘Mum? Mummy?’