Shadows. Paul Finch

       Chapter 1

      The trouble with a really successful pub crawl – in other words, if you manage to hit all the hostelries on the proposed route – is that the team inevitably falls apart before you reach the end.

      Oh, it’ll start off in the usual high spirits, with much yahooing and backslapping as you excitedly barge your way in through the first few sets of doors. But as the evening wears on, and the decibels rise, and the golden nectar flows down gulping throats, heads become progressively muzzier and one by one, as the team weaves ever on to the next establishment, members will drop by the wayside. Usually they end up lingering behind because they haven’t quite finished their pint, or because they’ve met a girl they know, or because they’ve lost track of where they’re supposed to be going next. Or quite simply, in that mysterious way of pub crawls the world over, they’ve simply vanished from the face of the earth – at least for the remainder of that night, no doubt to show up the following morning in a garden or on a park bench or maybe slumped in a shop doorway, rain-sodden and with head banging.

      Either way, by the end of the night, only the hardy quaffers tend to remain; that small band of iron-core loyalists who will always see things through.

      Tonight, oddly, even though the rest of his mates were well-known on campus as big-time boozers, Keith Redmond had somehow found himself at the last port of call alone.

      It was called