Hello I’m Harry Riley

This is the first chapter of my new novel

‘The Laird of Castle Ballantine’

A follow on novel to my ‘Sins of the Father’

In 1964 a young reporter stumbles on a strange mystery that will involve him personally. His efforts to uncover the truth are thwarted by the government’s fifty-year secrecy rule. Then a voice speaks from the grave.

Chapter 1.

“This is a total waste of time!” insisted the young flaxen haired woman at his side.

“I agree, but we have to be here…you know we do!”

“I can’t think why, it’s pretty obvious nothing’s going to happen and I’m absolutely freezing.”

Another muted voice cuts in from the darkness at the edge of the crowd, from someone who’d apparently been listening intently: “I’ve got my cameraman with me just in case.”

It is bitter cold and the mist is swirling up from the flooded river by their side. Leonard Mcfadden thinks he’s got a chill coming on so he pulls his coat collar higher to protect his bare neck. Enviously he turns round and glares at the chap standing behind him who had the foresight to be wearing a woolly hat.

‘He was going to come down with the flue, he should be tucked up in bed with a glass of brandy, snug in his room at the Towers Hotel back at Berwick Upon Tweed.’ Raising a hand to his mouth he tries vainly to stifle a cough that has been desperately keen to burst out; watching as his exposed breath lingers visibly in the cold night air. He could be waiting on the other side of the heavy wrought iron gates, in the old Singer Gazelle with the engine running, and the heater going full blast, after all, nothing’s really going to happen?’

There are over a dozen journalists, each of them rubbing their hands together and thumping their feet heavily on the sodden ground, trying frantically to stamp some life back into their ice cold toes as they cluster together in this churchyard, making an untidy circle around the grave, with it’s large white winged angel. The feeble light from the vicar’s lantern picks out the raw edges of the cracked and broken, base-slab, marking the boundary of the burial plot. The wind picks up and it’s starting to rain again, big sticky globules splashing on to bare heads and dripping down their collars. The weather is definitely taking the mickey!