Missing things a daniel.., p.1
Missing Things (A Daniel Dayton Thriller Book 2), page 1
Shaun Baines
Missing Things
Copyright © 2022 by Shaun Baines
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Missing Things was originally published as Pallbearer.
First edition
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter One
The curtains of his bedroom weren’t just closed. They were stitched together with gardener’s twine in a crude series of crosses. The lightbulb that had once hung from the ceiling was gathering dust under his bed. There were no ticking clocks. No creaking floorboards.
Daniel Dayton was six foot eight inches and barely fit into the bed he was trying to sleep in. He wrestled with his sheets, throttling them in large hands, neither asleep nor awake. Instead, he was by the shore of his father’s man-made lake playing football with Scott. Daniel was ten, his brother a little older.
Scott swept the ball from between Daniel’s legs, knocking him to the ground again.
“Watch out,” Daniel said, pulling shingle from his palms.
The ball was kicked into the sky where it splashed down on the lake, drifting to the shoreline of an island they were forbidden to visit.
“That was my football,” Daniel cried, scrambling from his knees and rounding on his smirking brother. The sound of his heart drowned out the sound of the lapping waves. “You have to get it.”
Scott flipped him the finger and walked up the grassy slope to the double doors of their home.
Daniel launched into a run and tackled his brother at speed. They fell into a tangle of thrashing arms and legs. They struggled, kicking up grass and spitting out curses. Daniel fought for the upper hand and his bony elbow whipped across Scott’s nose. There was a crunch and he froze. Daniel’s eyes widened at the blood turning his brother’s face into a crimson mask. Beneath the red, Scott’s skin went white.
That was the tell-tale sign. The one he’d grown to fear. Red didn’t symbolise danger for Daniel. It was always white.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said.
His limbs were rubbery, useless against his brother. He ran, but Scott clawed him to the ground, flipping him onto his back. A hand clamped over Daniel’s mouth and nose.
Daniel tried to scream, tried to breathe. His lungs were bursting. He stared up at his brother, a chill washing over him, his world darkening. Tears coursed down his cheeks. He kicked impotently, but he was too weak and his brother was too cruel.
“What are you doing?” The voice came from above and Daniel searched frantically for its source.
Their father loomed over them, a frown on his handsome face. Ed Dayton sipped from his whisky and ice, fixing Scott with a stare. “I asked you a question.”
His brother scowled, but withdrew his hand from Daniel’s mouth. “We’re playing.”
Drawing air into his lungs, Daniel coughed and spluttered. “He kicked my ball into the lake. It’s on the island.”
Scott folded his arms. “You shouldn’t have been playing with it anyway.”
“Enough,” Ed said, dismissing Daniel with a wave.
His father crouched down and Daniel smelled the whisky on his warm breath.
“You’re not allowed on the island, so what are you going to do?”
Daniel looked at him blankly.
“Don’t be a fool all your life, son. You have to fight back.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Daniel said between sobs, his eyes clenched shut. “You have to help me.”
There was a moment of stillness where Daniel hoped his father might rescue him. He opened an eye to see Scott raising a fist.
His father swirled dark whisky around his glass. “I am helping you, son.”
Daniel woke to the clink of his father’s ice cubes hitting glass. He massaged his aching chest, as if his brother still had him pinned to the ground, but Scott was dead. He had been killed in the house where Daniel now lived, murdered by a man called Bronson, Daniel’s best and only friend.
Turning on his side, he forced the nightmare to the back of his mind. Daniel had barely slept since the day of Fairbanks’ death; the mastermind sociopath who had brought his family to near collapse. Fairbanks had been dealt with, as had many others, on Daniel’s quest for vengeance.
But there had been more to those fateful days than simple murder. In his struggle with Fairbanks, Daniel had learned he and his brother Scott had been adopted, though their birth parents remained a mystery.
His own child had been with him on that rainswept day. Eisha had beaten Fairbanks with a stick, thrashing him like a cowering dog. She’d saved Daniel’s life, but if he hadn’t stopped her, Eisha would have killed Fairbanks and her existence would have been changed forever.
Of all the horrors Daniel had performed in his life, it was that which scared him the most.
Lying in his uncomfortable bed, he traced shadows on the ceiling, listening to the warnings he hadn’t heeded at the time. Eisha was willful. Stubborn. Tempestuous. But no one had prepared Daniel for her true nature. He had been coached in cruelty by a man who had used him as a weapon, but why did it come so easily to Eisha? What had he passed on to her? And what had his real parents passed on to him? The questions taunted him night after night, feeding a hungry guilt.
Rubbing his tired face, Daniel kicked the bedsheets from his legs, swinging them to the floor.
He jumped at the shape in front of him.
“Are you awake, Daddy?” Eisha swayed in the darkness, her slender form darker than the night. In her hand was her favourite doll. Eisha had cut its hair into clumps and painted the lower half of its face in red.
Daniel glanced at the bedroom door. “Of course I’m awake, darling. Do you want something to drink?”
She shook her head and Daniel remembered he was naked. He quickly covered himself with his bedsheets. He looked to the door again. “How did you get in here?”
“The way I always do.”
“You walked in?”
Eisha stepped forwards, her bare feet slapping on the floorboards. “I want to leave the house.”
“We’ve talked about this,” Daniel said. “It’s not safe.”
With the death of his father and brother, Daniel was all that remained of the Dayton criminal empire. They had been made vulnerable and Newcastle’s underworld knew it. His enemies would be lying in wait for a chance to end the Daytons once and for all. Daniel was a target, but so was his daughter.
Eisha ran her doll’s head along the wall. “I’m a prisoner here. Why don’t we go see someone?”
They lived in Five Oaks, their family’s home. The people who visited worked for Daniel and they were dwindling in number. The only person he wanted to see was Lily, Scott’s ex-wife and Daniel’s only love, but she wasn’t returning his calls, which was no surprise given what had happened between them.
“Let me get some clothes on and I’ll take you back to bed,” Daniel said.
Eisha went to the door, opening it with ease. For a moment, Daniel saw her captured as a silhouette as she studiously checked the lock.
“Uncle Bronson is waiting for you downstairs,” Eisha said.
Daniel frowned. “How do you know?”
“I’ve been watching him,” Eisha
She glanced back at him before disappearing down the corridor.
Daniel leaned over to his bedside cabinet and pulled out the drawer. Inside was the brass mortice key he used to lock his door. It was part of his night-time routine. He couldn’t settle unless it was done, fearful of what might creep into his bedroom.
But had he done it last night? Daniel was exhausted. He wasn’t focused. He might have forgotten. He might have left the key in the door. Eisha could have let herself in and returned it. He searched for the key and found it was cold. No one had held it since him.
His fingers grazed the Heckler handgun he kept close for the same reason that he locked his bedroom. He touched the gun and squeezed his eyes shut.
The handle was warm.
Chapter Two
Dressed in jogging bottoms and a T-shirt he’d found on the bedroom floor, Daniel checked his daughter had returned to bed.
Eisha’s bedroom was next to Daniel’s. Her bedside lamp was on when he arrived, shedding light over pale pink walls. The carpet was thick, flattening under his broad feet. On one side of the room was a television, DVD player and a computer console he didn’t know how to work. On the other was a toy chest he had painted blue. In a fit of artistic licence, he’d drawn a storm of clouds, but the paint had run. White spidery legs dribbled to the base of the chest, turning his clouds into monsters.
Eisha watched him from under a pink duvet. “I like my toy chest, Daddy. Don’t feel bad about it.”
“I was a bit ambitious,” he said, sitting on the side of her bed. His weight compressed the mattress and she rolled into him. He pulled her into his arms and she lay her head on his stomach, her chestnut hair covering her face.
“I need to ask you something,” Daniel said.
“I told you. The door was unlocked.”
“But I lock it every night.”
“Well, you must have forgot,” Eisha said.
Bracing himself against the wooden headboard, a carving of a unicorn jabbed him in the back. He tried to get comfortable, but everywhere he moved, something rose to irk him.
“Did you touch my gun?” he asked.
“I’m getting very tired of this, Daddy,” Eisha said, brushing hair from her face in an angry swipe. She grabbed her mutilated doll and pointed it at him. “I heard you screaming in your sleep and I was scared, okay? I came in to help.”
She threw herself into her pillows.
“I want to see my family,” Eisha said, holding onto her bedsheets.
Daniel waited until her breathing slowed and he was sure she was asleep. With a second glance at the doll staring at him from the bed, Daniel walked out of the room, down the oak stairs to the great hall.
It was the first room visitors to Five Oaks encountered, designed as an ode to the splendour of the Dayton empire. The split-level staircase had been carved from an oak tree killed and blackened by a lightning strike. A vast chandelier hung like a crystal teardrop from the ceiling and the walls were decorated with oil paintings in golden frames.
Daniel shuffled through the hall, careful to avoid the dirt tracks on the parquet flooring. The silver thread of a house spider brushed against his face. He batted it away and continued to a painting he had removed from the wall in the early days of his occupancy.
The frame was gilded with roses studded with thorns. Ed and Liz Dayton stood in the centre holding hands. At either side of them were Daniel and Scott. They were in their teens and already taller than their adoptive parents. Where Ed and Liz wore their finest clothes, Daniel and his brother wore awkward smiles.
The painting leaned against a wall and Daniel folded his arms as his shadow fell among its inhabitants. He was there and not there, part of the family and not. Eisha hadn’t been born when the painting was commissioned and he felt her absence.
There was one other person in the painting, inserted later after a family spat. Ma Dayton was his grandmother on his father’s side. She sat on a chair, her legs too old to support her for long, or so she’d claimed.
She was what remained of his family. The others had moved on, whether in this world or to the next. Daniel inched backwards, better anchoring his shadow to the painting, his monochrome self slotting behind a family that wasn’t his.
“Is that you, Daniel?”
Bronson’s voice came from the kitchen and Daniel followed it to find him sitting at the breakfast bar. The flooring comprised of slate tiles, turned sticky by a tsunami of spillages. The sink was filled with dirty dishes and the bin overflowed with pizza boxes. The counters were made from stainless steel, though Daniel had somehow found a way to stain them.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Bronson said. “Your dad used to have cleaners. Why don’t you hire a housekeeper or something?”
Daniel filled the kettle. “I was going to, but Mrs Doubtfire was busy. Besides, we don’t have a lot of money right now.”
“I would help tidy up, but I left my Hazmat suit at home,” Bronson said.
He was short and stocky with unruly ginger hair. He had grown a handlebar moustache to mask the twitch in his cheek, which came to life whenever he was stressed. It didn’t work and only served to draw attention to his busy face.
“What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” Daniel asked him.
“It’s six o-clock in the morning and some of us have early starts,” Bronson said, bracing his hands against the breakfast bar. “After the Fairbanks thing, I thought it best if I do an inventory of our current interests to see where we stand.”
The kettle finished boiling and Daniel searched for a mug. The cleanest one he could find had a mushroom in it, forcing him to abandon his idea of a coffee.
“I know the protection rackets have dried up,” he said.
Bronson nodded in agreement. “We don’t have the man power to make the collections. We’ve had to sell the Glitterball and we can no longer afford bribes to the police. On the upside, I’ve bought a stake in a scrapyard so we can offload stolen cars.”
Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’re stealing cars now? That’s teenager stuff.”
“Our only other asset is Five Oaks so unless you want to sell up and move to a retirement facility, then yes, we’re stealing cars.”
“This is Eisha’s home,” Daniel said. “This is the only place I can keep her safe.”
“How is she? Have you told her you aren’t Daytons?”
Daniel hung his head. Bronson was one of the few people who knew Daniel had been adopted and he’d sworn never to tell Eisha, but Daniel hadn’t told her either. He didn’t know how to. Eisha was so enamoured by her family, she had never questioned why she was so different from them.
“I’m struggling to keep her mood level,” Daniel said. “Telling her she doesn’t really belong…well, I don’t know what she would do.”
“That’s the other reason I’m here,” Bronson said, fishing a file from his jacket and dropping it on a counter. “Don’t bother opening that. It’s empty. The man you sent me to look for doesn’t exist.”
Despite what Bronson had said, Daniel opened the file anyway. Inside was a note reading I told you not to open this.
“You couldn’t resist, could you?” Bronson asked, standing from his stool and tiptoeing through the pizza boxes on the floor. “Ranta Munstonen – the man behind your adoption – he’s a ghost. I’m sorry. I don’t know where he is or where you’re from.”
Daniel intended on asking Munstonen some difficult questions, like who were Daniel’s real parents? Why had he been taken from them? And what was Munstonen going to do to make it right?
If Daniel could solve the mystery of where he’d come from, maybe he could solve the mystery of his daughter. But clearly those questions would have to wait.
“Do you have any more good news? Not that I don’t enjoy your visits, but I could do without the rain cloud you’ve brought to my door,” Daniel asked.
Bronson grinned. “Just doing my job, boss.”
With a wink, he sauntered to the door, turning at the last moment. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.”
The rising sun spilled through the kitchen window. It caught the mess and the dirt, and the small package in Bronson’s hand. He threw it at Daniel, who snatched it from the air.
“What is it?” Daniel asked, examining the package of white powder with a blue-ish tinge.
