Author: Luke Gilfedder

A series of suspicious deaths has devastated the elderly elite of Alderley Edge, compelling playwright Quinn Roseblade to unmask his former star actor, Falin Mac Naught, as the elusive ‘Silver Killer.’ Yet as the lines blur between guilt and innocence, murder and suicide, Quinn must decide whether to save his friend from the manhunt he unleashed—suspecting that an even darker villain lurks in the wings of the North’s glitziest village…

An extract from ‘Die When I Say When’, previously published on the Decadent Serpent as ‘The Venatio.’

Extract: Nether Fear

Falconer hung up, and Raina—half scared, half shyly pleased—shot Quinn a coquettish look he would have sworn her incapable of ten minutes ago.

“Are you happy Falin’s escaped?” 

“In a way,” he said distantly.

She smiled, teasing a finger along the berries glittering on the pergola’s vines, each one a small globe offering a miniature planet to catch colour from the now almost lateral rays of the sun.

“Well, there is one thing I forgot to mention…” 

“What?”

Her gloved hand struck her lips in a devilish mea culpa, “Sir Rafael has got a car dealership near Prestbury.”

“Are you serious? Why didn’t you tell Falconer—?”

“Because I thought you’d want me not to.”

“Raina…” He changed his mind about whatever he was about to say. Instead, he pushed the damp straw hair from her eyes and said: 

“Thank you.”

“Do you want to go there right now?”

“To Prestbury?” He shook his head. “There’d be no point. Falin could be anywhere by now if he’s taken a car. No — we need to figure out where he’s headed, and I’d bet Mordkine knows. Didn’t you say Sir Rafael has a house in Alderley?” 

“Yes. I’ve been there before. Once.”

She looked up at the Edge, where the sun lingered above the cold castles stacked ziggurat-style on its wooded slopes. Quinn followed her gaze and saw, high up in the ascending greenery, a southern plantation-style white mansion perched eyrie-like, as from some estate agent’s fantasy. 

 “That’s it, right there. But you need a code to get through the gates.” She smiled, letting out smoke sideways, her mouth awry. “I can show you, if you’d like. That is, if you trust me again.”

Well, he had little choice in the matter. But, as he had trusted her so far, it would be no hardship to trust her again now, not if it could help him bring an end to this real-life Venatio. So, with a touch of her furmittened hand on his, they left the curious-knotted gardens, crossed the groomed golf course, rounded the lake and walked down the lindened drive towards the wintry country. There came a sound of an announcer’s velvety voice from the award ceremony, and Quinn, hearing his name, glanced back at the manor. Down there, at the bottom of the drive, diminutive dark silhouettes swarmed as they emerged from bright doorways onto the semicircular layers of illumined porch steps, a motley of gallerists and theatre entrepreneurs and rosy bantering Cheshire girls. Aping gentry, he thought, taking Raina’s hand and turning: it is no life.

They passed beyond the gates, shaded by the gloom of ancient yews, their feet muffled on a thick carpet of shed needles. The lanes through Mottram St Andrew grew silenter still, all the mists and cobwebs natural to a Cheshire noon in this season being brushed away by the sun, which, nevertheless, already seemed to be embering, so that every stone and oak and dying, gilded leaf took on a hue of deeper and decaying gold. Through the tops of trees, they caught glimpses of the Edge, whose topmost houses carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of their gables—their lighted windows and gilt weathercocks visible even at a good mile’s distance. 

By the time they reached Nether Alderley, the day had grown dim, the sun visible only as a wan glow over the high woodlands. But the snow provided an indirect, gentle light—a milky lustre that matched their mood. Early winter’s dusk veiled their feet, and mist rose in the hollows. 

“Oh, Quinn, I’ve made such a mess of it all,” Raina said, stopping to catch her breath. “I was all swept up, thinking I was Sir Rafael’s golden girl.” With a gust of emotion, she looked up the dark sweep of the Edge. At its peak, the electric hearths of new-build villas glowed with the sad eminence of old fairy tales. And it must have looked to her then like a fragment of fairyland, but probably the headquarters of some evil magician. “I can’t believe I was used like that. Oh, poor Doyle. Maybe I’m not the professional I thought I was.”

“Never mind that now,” Quinn took her hand and urged her on, picking up the pace as the shades lengthened under the bare-branched trees. “Let’s get some answers from Mordkine before the police arrive.”

Her fingers tightened suddenly in his, feeling like cold twigs. 

“Quinn, whatever happens, I want to know you’re on my side…”

Her cryptic words clung to the duskening air, but she seemed hesitant to say more, and he was hesitant to press her. They reached Whitebarn Road, and Quinn looked up from his troublous thoughts to be shocked by the steepness of the climb. The road curved steeper uphill than he thought possible on this side of the Edge, which only added to his unease. He could almost feel Sir Rafael’s prodigious shadow slithering down the cobbles and silently slipping into the swimming pools. 

“Come on,” he said, “Let’s not stand here drawing attention to ourselves.” 

Dark, snowy cypress blades pointed the way uphill. Whitebarn, Raina said as they walked up the cobbles, was the most exclusive road in England outside of Kensington Palace Gardens—exclusive in the one remaining sense that didn’t just mean expensive. These great, silent villas were the apex of Cheshire’s golden triangle, with their twelve-foot walls and louvre-bladed gates and privet hedges; and inside—if you could get inside—the finest views of the old palatinate, very panoramic, framed in frameless verandas just for the upper classes. The sale of any one of these houses could swing the ceiling price of the entire county.

Raina shivered suddenly and closed her camel coat closely about her. 

“Can you see any police?” 

“No, but we’d better hurry.” 

The air was still—too still. The light thickened, and the crows were already winging their way up to the rooky wood. They climbed higher towards Sir Rafael’s manor, but even on Whitebarn, the old Victorian houses were now awash with black granite water walls, security cameras and smoked-glass SUVs. A small sigh escaped Quinn. The wistful, elegiac elegance of rustic summerhouses, reeded pools, and weeping willows he once knew in Nether Alderley was gone—gone, really gone, gone as Greta Garbo and Scott Fitzgerald. 

“Well, this is it,” Raina said, taking breath. The road curved up to the highest of the high-walled estates and slipped under its iron gates like a snake in a crevice.

Quinn stared at the stone satyrs and stone wolves, and an image of Brogue with his fat revolvers flashed through his mind. What if those damn pistols weren’t simply the old chief’s passages of paranoia? What if they were, in fact, a real reaction to a true threat? They halted beneath the shadow of the gates, and Raina brushed snow from the keypad set in a marble niche.

“Let’s see if I can remember this….”

She tapped in the code with almost exaggerated care. There was a beep and a blink, and the gates folded back as though moved by phantom slaves. At the end of the drive emerged a vast white mansion of the Old South style—white if you call mussel meat white— with at least six columns rising from its porch to its lofty portico. It was set in a quincunx of Louisiana palms, struggling in vain to appear indigenous. Despite occupying pride of place atop the hill, this antebellum mansion was modest for Whitebarn Road, with only three stories and a helipad—no swimming pool. 

Opening her bag, Raina rapidly retouched her lips and eyebrows, then climbed the porch steps and rang the bell. When no one answered, she cupped her hands and yelled:

“Sir Rafael? Sir Rafael, are you in there?”

They looked both ways along the wrap-around porch; there were hanging swings on both ends and several wooden rocking chairs. Quinn rapped on the lightless window, and Raina rang the bell again. Just as Quinn said, “Perhaps he’s in the village,” there came a shuffle of slippers, a clink of keys, and the door opened a little way, on the chain. A voice crawked: 

“Ah, it’s you, little woman, what are you doing here?”

The door groaned open, sending foreboding shivers through Quinn. Reality outran apprehension; the old baronet stood stooped and black in the doorway. He looked marvellous ill-favoured in his knotted silk scarf and red-satin dressing gown—draped with scrupulous informality over his evening clothes—but his face, under the silvered toupee, looked like a death’s head in a ring. The whole hideous effect was thatof a pissed dandy having dolled up a corpse. Mordkine blinked his pale-dead eyes and waved them inside.

“Come in,” he said, leaving them with entire indifference to shut the outer door. Raina did so, whispering to Quinn in alarm, 

“Either he’s been drinking or had another stroke.”

“Or both.”

They followed Sir Rafael as he shuffled into his dining room. It made Quinn feel like Jonah— so much did the room resemble the red-plush stomach of a whale—with its fading velvet drapes, red-gilded chairs, and a claw-footed mahogany settee. With the selective skill of an old man, Sir Rafael settled himself on the overstuffed Chesterfield, his rheumaticky joints creaking with the leather, then pointed them to the penitentially hard chairs.

“Jus…just there, if you will.” 

Quinn sat, his gaze flitting across the travel scalps adorning the room. They could have been the private spoils of some merchant prince: the Springbokhide rug a flayed South African republic; the crocodileskin cushion a decapitated India; the red glass hamsa, a stillbleeding portion of Morocco; a stuffed fox the very pelt of Alaska; and a damascene cigarette case—most pitiful of all—the entrails of a disembowelled Japan. Mordkine fiddled with that for a moment, then rested his chin on his tallowy hands and his hands on the headof his cane.

“Are you altogether comfortable?” he asked. Quinn shifted in his seat.

“Good,” he wheezed, and his eyes drooped, filmed in a kind of abstruse, slumberous melancholy. It was a melancholy where the gap between long-gone nobility and the present was subtly confused, out of focus. He looked, Quinn supposed, like any dying aristocrat might look, but with an additional twist given in a funhouse’s distorting mirror.

“How are you, Sir Rafael?” Raina asked in a small voice. “If you don’t mind me saying, you’re looking kind of thin.”

Mordkine’s heavy underlip trembled.  “Oh, one c-can never be t-too thin, my dear, just as one can never be too rich.”

“You shouldn’t joke about things like that, under the circumstances.” Quinn noticed her shiver, ever so slightly. “God, it’s like a morgue in here.” 

The baronet lifted one finger like a shepherd’s crook and pointed it at the travertine fireplace. Quinn rose and threw a new log on the pile, then poked the rest with a jab as if waking an old stubborn hound. The fire coughed up a mingled odour of creosote and burnt figflesh. With his back still turned, he heard Raina say, 

“We’ve all been worried about you, Sir Rafael.”

“Why, m’dear? Oh, a s-spot of g-gin, would you? Dear old mother’s ruin.”

His devastating stutter, in its intensity, was almost like a fit. Still, it held a low, melodious command: an art that had died but not surrendered. Raina said, 

“You’d better get some rest. You don’t look too good.”

“Stop spouting poppycock. The d-drinks cabinet’s over th-there.”

She rose, as if hypnotised, unlocked the cabinet, and took out a flask. When she handed Mordkine a glass with a thimble of vodka, he swallowed, gulped, and dribbled it down his front. Pathetic, like a child, he stuttered:

“Chin chin.”

Raina ran to wipe the collar with his cambric handkerchief. “Oh Rafi…. What has that boy done to you…”

“I’ll… t-tell you…” he mammered, “but I need to lie down first. Go sort the bed, my dear.”

She left with a hurried step. Quinn stayed kneeling by the fire, glancing but once at the baronet’s venerable profile, as at a mummy’s. He did not relish being left alone with Sir Rafael Mordkine. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, Quinn was all too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil, and he detected something sinister in the old roué. Not in the way everyone has evil in them, but a particular concoction that was eerily attractive and repellent. It was like being in some grand place – say, the Duomo in Florence or the Palatine Chapel – when the drains have gone wrong…

Luke Gilfedder is a writer from Manchester, set to launch his debut novel, Die When I Say When, in 2025. Previously, he worked as a playwright, with scripts produced at The Royal Exchange Manchester, the Lyric Hammersmith, and in London’s West End. He has recently completed a PhD on the life and work of Wyndham Lewis.