A Place To Bury Strangers (Atticus Priest Murder, Mystery and Crime Thrillers Book 2) by Mark Dawson

Author:Mark Dawson [Dawson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unputdownable
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

43

Atticus walked back to the office. Bandit greeted him at the door, and Atticus ruffled the dog’s fur before going over to his chair and waking his computer. He navigated to the folder where he had stored the information that he had gathered about Alfred Burns. He had obsessed about him for so long that he had memorised the details of his life, but he wanted to refresh himself.

It was all there: transcripts of the interviews that he had conducted, photographs of Burns’s photographic studio where Atticus suspected that he had conducted most of his crimes, and a detailed biography that he himself had written. He clicked through everything until he found the pictures that had been taken of Burns on his arrest. He flicked through the mugshots, photographs of the suspect staring into the camera with the smugness of a man who was confident that his wit and guile would be more than a match for the provincial officers who would try to prove his guilt. Atticus recalled that contemptuous sneer; he had managed to wipe it off Burns’s face during the interrogation, but it had only been temporary. Burns’s disdain had returned after he had been acquitted, and his scornful expression had haunted Atticus’s sleep ever since.

Because he knew: Burns would have been emboldened by his escape and would have returned to his perversions with the confidence that he was beyond the reach of the police.

But now he was dead.

Atticus had to find out what had happened.

He opened the biography. He had written ten pages following Burns’s arrest and had continued to add to it as he had discovered additional information after the acquittal. It was thirty pages long now.

Burns was born in Surbiton in 1957, one of a pair of illegitimate twins who had never met his father. His mother was religious and had been so ashamed of her boys’ birth that she had tried to have them adopted before emigrating to Australia to escape the stigma. The adoption never took place and, instead, Alfred and Derek were placed with foster parents.

The young Alfred was a loner who showed aggressive tendencies with the few friends that he had. He was bullied by children who were older than him, and reflected that behaviour onto those who were younger. Both twins had been abused by their foster parents and, after their deaths, the boys had been transferred to a children’s home, where Alfred had subsequently been abused by a male member of staff. Derek Burns was less intelligent than his brother, but, lacking Alfred’s inflated opinion of himself, was more apt to conform and at least leave school with qualifications. Alfred decided that school was beneath him and left with nothing and no prospects. There had been the idea of getting into photography, but without the money to set himself up, and with nothing else available to him, he had joined the Royal Green Jackets in 1976.

His first tour of Northern Ireland was in 1979, patrolling the streets of Ballymurphy.

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