A Taste Of Freedom: A Blake Langford Short Story

After twenty-five years behind bars, William Barnes steps out of HMS Drummond Prison in London, finally a free man. But his freedom lasts mere seconds. As he takes his first breath of free air, a car screeches past, gunfire erupts and Barnes collapses, dead before he hits the ground. Meanwhile, in Oxford, Special Branch Agent Blake Langford pushes open the doors of All Saints Church, expecting quiet solitude. Instead, he finds a lone figure crouched at the altar, clutching a wine glass filled to the brim with blood. As Blake steps closer, the man offers no explanation, only a cryptic stare and trembling hands. With no immediate source for the blood and no apparent crime, Blake begins to dig into the man’s connections within Oxford’s academic and religious circles. What he discovers leads him back three decades to William Barnes, his violent past and a hidden secret that someone was willing to silence forever. As Blake pieces together a conspiracy buried for over thirty years, he finds himself caught between those seeking the truth and those determined to keep it buried no matter what the cost. But the deeper he goes, the clearer it becomes that Barnes wasn’t just killed for his past, he was killed to prevent what comes next.