The lodge, p.1
The Lodge, page 1
Other Novels by Paul Finch
Detective Sergeant Mark Heckenburg
Stalkers
Sacrifice
The Killing Club
Dead Man Walking
Hunted
Ashes to Ashes
Kiss of Death
Rogue
No Quarter
Detective Constable Lucy Clayburn
Strangers
Shadows
Stolen
Standalones
Crime/Thriller
One Eye Open
Never Seen Again
The Island
Fantasy
Stronghold
Dark North
Writing as PW Finch
Historical/Adventure
Usurper
Battle Lord
The Devil’s Knight
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2026 by Paul Finch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781662526343
eISBN: 9781662526350
Cover design by Dominic Forbes
Cover image: © Marko Aliaksandr © blackboard1965 © Angela N Perryman / Shutterstock
For my mum, Margaret,
who was always there for all of us
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Acknowledgements
Preview: The Island
Five
Six
Seven
About the Author
Follow the Author on Amazon
Prologue
Harry was prone to walking out on his wife. Not in a permanent way, and not even spectacularly. There was never any door slamming, no throwing of ornaments. Not any more. These days, when things got to be too much, Millie becoming unbearable, their financial woes stacking up like millstones on top of him, the easiest option was to get up from his living-room chair, pull on whichever coat or jacket was closest, walk into the hall, grab his car keys, and drive.
Just that, drive. Whatever time of day or night it was. Drive.
He was aware that this wasn’t a manly response to abject despair. But screaming arguments rarely resolved anything; he and Millie had had plenty of those and probably weren’t much the worse for them in truth, though it was dispiriting in the long term and both physically and emotionally exhausting, plus there was never a constructive outcome.
No, it was better just to vacate the premises for a short cooling-off period.
On occasion, when it was especially bad, he tended to find himself behind the steering wheel with tunnel vision, literally not knowing where he was or where he was heading for. And being honest, it was easily done. He and Millie had lived in central Lancashire for the last thirty years, but it was still a landscape of villages and small towns, extensive farmland and hilly, wooded countryside, so, once darkness fell, it was easy to find yourself navigating solely by your own headlamps, following unmarked, unlit lanes and seeing only the dark humps of nameless hillsides where the horizon should be.
On this occasion – an uneventful midweek night in late September – he’d travelled a significant distance from home before his nerves had settled sufficiently for him to try and work out where he was. He must have taken half a dozen turns at random and had been on the road a good forty minutes before he reached a small crossroads, a single signpost on the grassy hummock in the middle pointing one way to Claughton and the other to Inglewhite. Even Harry was surprised by that. It meant that he’d been motoring along obliviously for five miles or more. Still, at least he now had his bearings, and happy ones they were, seeing that the Coach and Horses pub was located on the other side of the crossroads.
He drove around to the pub’s rear, finding room in the car park, and entered through the back door into a traditional interior – horse brasses, gnarly beams and the like – where various small groups and couples were dotted around at different tables.
Harry didn’t hold with drinking and driving. But on this occasion he needed something a bit stronger than a diet cola.
He waited at the bar for a couple of minutes, enjoying the friendly atmosphere, made fleeting small talk with a nice-looking blonde lady, and when it was his turn to be served, ordered a single measure of Chivas Regal.
It wasn’t that Millie was obstreperous by nature, he told himself, making his way to a seat close to the fire, but she had to understand that the economic chaos into which their life together had descended was not purely down to him. Okay, she never actually said it was, but he was certain she believed it.
So many years ago, when he’d left that secure job to start his own business, things had never looked brighter. But the perks of being his own boss, working his own hours, he and Millie able to take holidays whenever they chose rather than having to bow and scrape for permission, had paled as the many stresses of life as a one-man band set in. Millie, formerly a teacher, though she’d left that profession long ago to raise their family, had gone the whole distance with him. And she’d been supportive. She’d taken various part-time jobs, sometimes several at once, to see them through sticky patches, but ultimately, they’d never made it to those sunlit uplands where life, if not prosperous, was at least comfortable. And he was sixty next year, so what chance of anything changing now?
He sipped morosely by the pub fire.
Maybe he was projecting his own sense of guilty inadequacy on to his wife? He’d wondered about that several times. She’d stuck with him, which surely indicated that she believed in him, or had believed in him once. But there was no disguising the disappointment in her eyes whenever they went over their accounts together, the heartfelt sighs when she thought he wasn’t listening (or perhaps when she thought he was), her failure to laugh or even smile when he tried to make light-hearted comments.
It couldn’t be easy hiding it, of course, when your partner had proved himself a loser time and again. ‘But perhaps,’ he muttered, ‘you could try a bit harder.’
He glanced at the clock over the fireplace, seeing that it was almost ten-thirty.
Even if he’d been inclined to have another one, which he wasn’t, he’d have recognised that it was time to head for home. They wouldn’t be able to patch things up tonight. Millie would be in bed when he got back; it was early for that, but she’d need a sulk of her own to get the latest row out of her system. Hopefully, they could talk over breakfast. But in the meantime, he didn’t want to frighten her by making her think something bad had happened to him. Before finishing his drink, he went out to the rear of the pub, where he popped into the Gents. When he returned, he tugged his coat on, threw down the last of his whisky, took the tumbler to the bar, thanked the barmaid, and breezed out to his car.
He was halfway home, on another of those lengthy, unlit stretches, when he began to feel odd. Initially, it was as if the vehicle’s interior, even with its air conditioning blasting, had turned stuffy; breathing had become a chore. He tried to power his driver’s window down, but his fingers felt heavy and clunky, and he couldn’t find the switch. Attempting to turn the internal light on, he almost veered off the road.
Perspiring hard, Harry tugged open the collar of his shirt, yanking the V-neck of his sweater down. Try as he may, he couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen into his chest. In fact, he was turning dizzy, his vision blurring, the road twisting and turning. The next thing, his car had mounted the kerb and plunged deep into the luxuriant mass of leafage on the left, where it stalled.
Thankfully, he was uninjured. At least, he presumed he was. He’d been securely belted in, and the Volvo hadn’t collided with anything heavy. But it was still a struggle to breathe, especially as he swam in and out of consciousness, unable to focus his thoughts.
It took far more effort than it should to fight his way out into the fresh air, shoving his shoulder against the driver s door, pushing it through leafy twigs. With senses fogged, he stumbled along the Volvo’s bodywork towards the road. Another vehicle cruised past but made no effort to stop and offer assistance.
At the car’s rear end, he lacked even the awareness to distinguish how much of the vehicle was buried in the undergrowth and how much still on the carriageway. The only light to discern anything by was the blood-red glow from his taillights. With legs like rubber, he slipped down from the kerb. Only toppling backward against his car kept him upright.
‘You all right, mate? Had a bump?’
Harry had no idea who the man was, or where he’d come from.
One minute there’d been no one there, and the next someone was holding his arm. Even then, his impression of the man was misty and undefined. A huge wedge of a body, big strong arms. A hard-angled face shimmering with crimson light.
Spittle bubbled from Harry’s puckered lips.
‘Hell, you’re in a state.’ The man grinned. His eyes seemed huge. ‘Good job it’s me who’s come along and not some copper, eh? You hurt?’
No reply was possible. Harry’s neck gave out, his chin hitting his chest.
‘Whoooaaa!’ the man said, catching Harry under his armpits. ‘Bleeding hell, mate. How much you had? Listen . . . don’t worry.’ Gloved hands gripping him firmly, Harry was eased back against the Volvo’s boot. ‘Here you go, mate.’
There was something about his voice. His accent, maybe? It wasn’t local. But his tone too. Did he find this funny? Harry didn’t, but he couldn’t indicate that. It was like being dead-drunk, only minus the enjoyable process of having got there.
‘In you get . . .’ the man said.
He lowered Harry backward on to some kind of flat, yielding surface. Harry tried to resist. But it was futile, his thought processes too muddled . . . it seemed an age before he realised that he was inside his own car. That was all right, then. Wasn’t it?
‘Drive you home, mate, don’t worry. Let me check the damage first.’
Harry realised that he was lying on the back seat. His thoughts drifted sluggishly. Until, with an echoing thud, the driver’s door closed.
‘All good,’ the man said from the front. The engine growled to life, the car reverberating. ‘Think I can get us out of this mess easy enough. Where do you live, mate?’
Harry tried to reply that he didn’t want this, that he wasn’t drunk, that he needed an ambulance rather than a Good Samaritan, but none of it came out coherently.
‘Don’t worry,’ the man said. ‘Tell me on the way. Be there in a jiff.’ Harry sensed motion. Initially, they’d reversed, but now they were travelling forward. ‘Park in your drive, if you’ve got one . . . have a word with your missus, Bob’s your uncle . . .’
For countless minutes, the world passed Harry by in a dance of flickery shadow.
‘Tell you what, mate,’ the driver said over his shoulder. ‘Going to take a shortcut I know. That all right with you? Course, no need me asking really. Because that’s where we’re going. Whether you like it or not.’ He chuckled. ‘Nothing to say about that? Funny . . . I reckon you’ll have plenty to say in a few minutes. Though no one’ll hear you.’ He chuckled again. ‘No one who cares.’
One
‘Harry Anderton was the Night Monster’s fourth victim,’ Nick said, steadying himself in the bus’s central aisle. ‘And the first who was male. Harry was a struggling small businessman whose financial affairs were going off the rails. That was typical of the sort of person the Night Monster preyed on. Who else would be out and about, worried, weary, travelling aimlessly so late at night? Only people with problems . . . folk who were beaten down by life. His other eight victims were much the same. But all of these troubled existences came to a very brutal end right . . . here.’
On cue, Clara swung the bus to a halt, and applied the handbrake.
Liz stood up from the front passenger seat. ‘Okay, everyone. Hope you’re ready for this.’
The six passengers stirred, checking they had their phones, cameras and such. Outside, though cool, it was bright and clear for mid-November, the mellow sun embossing the remaining scraps of leaves with gold.
‘Again, you can leave your valuables on the bus,’ Liz said. ‘Clara will stay with it.’
One by one, the passengers disembarked via the vehicle’s front and rear nearside doors.
There was a faintly detectable air of nervousness about them, as if what they were about to witness here would challenge even their resistance to true-life horror. In so many ways, they were hardened to this sort of thing; they’d even paid for it. This was the Murder Tour, after all. That was its actual name, and it did exactly what it said on the tin: took in one site after another where terrible acts of inhumanity had been performed, not just in the distant past but relatively recently, and in this case, very recently. Though perhaps that was the reason why this particular spot, the location of the Night Monster’s torture chamber, was already getting under their skin. The past was a distant country, but the present was reality.
Their hosts on the tour, screenwriter Nick Thornwood and his rather lovely girlfriend and business partner, Liz O’Hara, were in a buoyant mood, as they had been throughout, remaining cool and unaffected at every stop. They were even more used to real-life ghastliness than their passengers, of course. Despite their wholesome, youthful appearance, they’d already made quite a name for themselves guiding eager-beaver sightseers along this grim and ghoulish trail of cause-célèbre unpleasantness.
‘This is the closest we could get in the bus,’ Nick explained. ‘As you can see, the landowner’s bollarded off the actual entrance to the site.’
There was a break in the hedgerow at the back of the lay-by, which might once have been broad enough for a vehicle to pass through, though now it was blocked by a single concrete post.
‘If the building’s not here any more, what’s the site used for now?’ asked Roy Southerby, a guy in his late forties with a hulking physique and dense black beard.
‘Nothing,’ Nick replied. ‘It’s not like they can build on it again. No one’s going to buy a house here and, having already got rid of one unsightly industrial unit, the owner doesn’t want another.’
Roy Southerby looked sceptical. ‘So, he prefers a patch of wasteland?’
‘Given what happened,’ Liz said, ‘I think he’d just prefer that everyone forgot this place even exists.’
‘There’s nothing left of the original building at all then?’ asked an elderly, white-bearded gent, whose name was Darius Brant.
‘Nothing whatsoever,’ Nick said. ‘It got demolished after the trial. But you can tell where it once stood, because the grass doesn’t grow there.’
‘Is that true?’ the youngest of the guests enquired. His name was Jordan Pugmire, and he was somewhere in his early twenties, his youth evidenced by the black T-shirt he wore, which carried an image of Freddy Krueger grinning behind his splayed, knife-like fingers. ‘I thought it was a myth.’
‘I’m sure there’ll be a scientific explanation,’ Freya Swanson replied. She was a slim, pretty woman in her mid-thirties. She had short, very blonde hair – there was something Twiggy-like about her – yet her humourless manner and rather severe outfit of black jeans and black leather jacket suggested that she liked to distance herself from the herd.
Nick, meanwhile, glanced at the bus and received a thumbs-up from Clara Kershaw in the driving seat, which meant that everyone had got off. He strolled past the bollard into the narrow lane beyond. It was made from packed dirt, but deep in brown weeds, as if no one ever came here. It veered leftward as he roved along it, thick autumnal foliage on either side. The tour party scurried in pursuit.
‘Most likely, nothing grows here because the topsoil was so badly damaged,’ Liz said, walking at the rear. ‘You’ll remember that before Travis Monkton, the Night Monster, started making use of the building, it was a storage facility for farm chemicals. All sorts of nasty stuff.’
The lane veered right again, the entrance to the wasteland appearing fifty yards ahead, delineated by two mossy gateposts standing one to either side. They could already see that the barren earth beyond was grey rather than that rich black-brown you normally found in this part of the world. The few straggles of vegetation poking through it were wiry and desiccated.
