His shoulders dropped. The bow hung limply at his side. “Why not?”
“Because you can’t get me if I’m hiding behind this tree?”
He seemed to consider that for a moment, before coming to the quite correct conclusion that it was stupid and that I’d be dead if he came any closer. “That’s stupid,” he said.
But that wasn’t the real reason.
I stepped out into the open, and faced him. Took a step toward him, and another. “Actually,” I said, “the reason I’m not running is that I’m coming for you, not vice versa.”
Still, he didn’t raise the bow. I took another step, and another, and then I didn’t stop. “You don’t get to hunt me,” I said, trying hard to ignore the fact that, unarmed and alone in the woods, I didn’t have a leg to stand on, either figuratively or, to all intents and purposes, literally. “I get to hunt you. It’s my job. I’m the fucking hunter here, not you.”
He was looking at me with increasing bewilderment, the bow twitching at his side. “Stop,” he said. “Don’t come any closer, Ali Green.”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“What are you going to do?”
It was a good question. I didn’t know the answer. All I knew was that I was twenty yards away and the bow was coming up from his side.
And then, Annie answered the question. She appeared from behind a tree already at full tilt, homing in on him with terrifying purpose.
I knew she wasn’t going to make it. I saw the change in his face as he heard her, and broke into a run as he started to turn. We were twenty feet either side of him when he released the arrow, and I was on his back with my arm clamped tight around his neck before she’d finished spiraling to the bracken carpet, two feet of shaft protruding from above her right breast.
I attacked his face with my free hand, pushing my fingers hard into his eyes; he dropped the bow, clawing at my arms, spinning and bucking with a primal roar. I squeezed his throat tighter, my bicep burning, nails locked into my own shoulder. I didn’t know what the fuck else to do but squeeze the life out of him.
And then he reached back and grabbed a fistful of my hair, and he pitched forward and twisted and pulled, and I was airborne, his face whirling past my eyes as I headed for the ground, landing on the back of my neck with a crack that I thought for a second signaled Game Over, but my arm was still tight around him and he came down with me, headfirst into my belly, punching the wind right out of me as he collapsed across my body with his belt in my face.
I couldn’t breathe. I felt bile rising in my throat and knew that I was going to throw up, and that if I didn’t move I’d choke on it, and I dug all of my nails as deep as I could through his shirt into the small of his back, and broke three of them off in him as I dragged a tortured wail out of his throat.
Then he elbowed me hard between my legs, and I was all but done. He knelt on the side of my face as he scrambled over me, and I grabbed for his leg and missed, and then he was crawling for the bag that had fallen from his back and was up on his knees and that thing was in his hand—the thing I’d seen a picture of, the knife, the one that had killed Lowry and Diaz and Carla’s husband and God alone knew who else, and I knew that if I didn’t get up right now, I was dead.
I rolled over, gritted my teeth, pushed myself up and got a foot underneath me. The pain thumped up through my body and I retched, a thick string of bile spilling from my lips, but I was moving, scrambling to my feet, knocking That Man into the dirt as I ran over him to Annie’s side. She was conscious, back arched, face bathed in sweat, teeth grinding in agony, but it was either one or both of us and I had to do what I had to do. I heard the scrape of the machete as he drew in his arms to push himself upright. I said, “Be brave, Annie.” I planted my foot on her collarbone and pushed it flat to the ground, and I took the shaft of the arrow in both slippery hands, and I locked my elbows and heaved with my back and pulled the arrow out of her chest and flipped it in my hands and turned to meet him as he came at me, machete poised to swing right through me, to take my head clean off my shoulders. I ducked and charged and pushed up with all of the strength I had left, and we collided, me and That Man, the arrow piercing the top of his throat and where it stopped, I didn’t know, but my fist was under his chin and the machete was spinning uselessly to the ground and as my leg gave out and I twisted and fell away, he collapsed beside me with little more than a grunt.
Annie’s scream was loud in my ears then, and I crawled to her side and took her face in my hands. Her pulse was racing, her breathing shallow and ragged, her pupils dilating and constricting in time with the blood throbbing out of her chest.
“Don’t panic,” I said. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you out.”
She put a hand to my head, pulled me closer to her. “Fucked up a bit, sorry,” she rasped.
I nodded. “Saved my arse, though.”
“Yeah.” She winced and groaned as a spasm tore through her shoulder. “Totally worth it, th—”
A shot. I jumped, spun around, fell back on my tail.
Erica stood beside That Man, the gun in her hand, a wisp of smoke drifting from the barrel. She looked at Annie and me, her face as calm as the breeze that tickled her hair. “He moved,” she said. Glanced down at him, at the rapidly expanding pool of blood at her feet, and back to me. “I’m pretty sure he moved.”
An alarm bell rang somewhere in my head, but I was past caring. “Fucking hell, Erica,” I said.
“She alright?”
“Not really.”
“Need some help?”
“Yeah, ten minutes ago.”
She shrugged, and tucked the empty gun into the back of her jeans as she stepped over to Annie’s side. “Sorry,” she said. “Better late than never, eh?”
Chapter 36
The house was fully ablaze when Erica and I carried Annie out of the woods, her shirt torn into strips and tied tightly around her chest.
Erica’s instruction to “Follow the smoke” hadn’t really registered over the effort it took just to put one foot in front of the other, so the wall of flame that greeted us stopped me in my tracks.
Erica didn’t notice, and carried on walking until Annie loudly reached the limit of her extensibility, whereupon she stopped and looked over her shoulder and said, “What?”
“Erica, what did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“The bloody house is on fire.”
She glanced across the field at the plume of acrid smoke, the sagging roof, the flames leaping from the windows and doors. “Yes,” she agreed. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Erica, what the fu—”
“To be fair, it was like that when I found it.”
“You can’t j—”
“God, this is typical of you lot, isn’t it? You blame me for bloody everything.” She tugged on Annie, forcing me back into step. “Next you’ll be telling me it’s my fault your DCI’s dead.”
I dropped Annie’s feet, my own cry drowning out both hers and the wail of approaching sirens. “Jenny’s dead? Where?”
Erica stopped again. “No, I just wanted to see if you’d be sad about it.”
“You fucking arsehole. Where is she?”
“In the back of that van over there, the one on top of your car.”
I looked over to the van, and my car, and the queue of ambulances and armed response cars forming behind it. “You didn’t let her out?”
“Nope.”
I glared at her incredulously, despite knowing that in Erica’s shoes, I probably would have done the same thing.
“I was busy,” she said flatly.
“Ali, this really hurts.”
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said, and picked up Annie’s legs, and together we carried her to where a trio of paramedics were clambering through the unde
rgrowth amid a horde of armed officers.
We laid her out in the grass, and I knelt beside her, and squeezed her hand, and put my lips to her ear, and said, “You never met that man before today.”
* * *
There wasn’t a lot else to say. Kevin was unconscious by the time the medics got to him, but get to him they did. He wasn’t going to be at work for a while, but he’d be back eventually, and with a badass-looking scar to show off about.
In the meantime, once I’d personally brought Kerry Farrow’s body home from Emily’s Wood, I’d have six women’s funerals to attend, six new stories to learn—of hard times, or hard choices, or just plain hard luck. I’d write them down and file them away. Others would write them down and, if they thought them interesting or salacious enough, or their subjects worthy of remembrance, they might print them for the morbid and the curious to enjoy over cozy breakfasts in cozy homes untouched by violence or tragedy.
For me, though, the trivia of those stories would remain just that, the details an irrelevant distraction. They were six different women, with six different names, and with dreams and fears and loved ones and lives, and all of it stripped from them at the whim of a man who never once questioned his right to do so.
Well, fuck that man. Reed, or Faulkner, or whatever other bullshit name I had written down in this infernal book of mine. He was finished, and if anyone bothered to find him before the animals did, then I’d be washing my hair when they laid him to rest.
“I’ll drink to that,” Erica said. “Annie definitely would. She’ll drink to anything.”
I looked down at my hands, my shirt, my jeans, my shoes, all of them dyed shades of red. I imagined my face was the same. Annie had made a hell of a mess, in more ways than one. “I wish I was drunk right now,” I said.
Erica smiled. “The night’s still young.”
I smiled back at her as we sat in front of the house, letting the flames bake the blood into our skin. It would be hours before they moved the wreckage from the driveway. There’d be nothing more than a smoldering shell by the time the fire brigade got to it.
“What are you going to do now?”
I shrugged. My mind was pleasantly blank. “Go home and have a bath,” I said. “Then I’m going to go see your lawyer, who probably can’t be my girlfriend now, and figure out how we’re going to get you out of this big old mess.”
She looked back to where Jenny was being fussed over by medics, having finally been released from captivity. “What are you going to tell her?”
“Well, not that you set fire to the house, Captain Chaos, that’s for damn sure.”
Her face was a picture of practiced innocence. “I told you, I didn’t go anywhere near the house.”
“You wrapped Kevin in a curtain.”
“No, you’re remembering it wrong.” She smirked, shot me a wink. “And anyway, what if I did? I’ve been so careful lately, but accidents are accidents. We all have them.”
“You are an accident.”
“That’s what my mum always says. I don’t think she likes me much.”
I laughed. “Your mum was ready to go to jail for you, and don’t you forget it.”
“Fair point,” she sighed, and looked over her shoulder again, and said, “Shit.”
I followed her gaze. Jenny was looking our way, breaking off a conversation, waving away a clingy paramedic.
“We’d better get our stories straight,” she said, “or else you’re going to be in a shitload of trouble.”
“Me?!”
“Just saying. Think fast.”
I glanced back; Jenny was heading our way. I sighed, and looked up at the sky. It really was a beautiful shade of blue, somewhere, behind the billowing cloud of thick black smoke. I hoped that, of all things, it would stick in my mind.
I pulled the notebook from my pocket. Flipped to the most recent page and said, “Emily’s Wood.”
Erica looked at me, puzzled. “Emily’s Wood?”
I nodded. “Remind me later,” I said. “And help me up.”
Erica stood and held out a hand for me. I grasped it and groaned to my feet. Took half a dozen steps closer to the house. Took careful aim at the kitchen window. Tossed the notebook into the fire.
“Let me do the talking,” I said.
Erica looked me up and down, wide-eyed. “You think that’s a good idea? What are you going to do?”
“Dunno,” I said. “Just make up any old shit. I won’t know if it isn’t true, will I?”
Erica gasped, as though the answer hadn’t occurred to her before it was even a question.
I smiled. “Between you and me,” I said, “I can’t remember a goddamned thing.”
* * * * *
If you enjoyed DEAD GIRLS,
be sure to pick up Graeme Cameron’s
internationally bestselling first novel,
NORMAL.
He lives on your street,
in a nice house with a tidy garden.
He shops at your local supermarket.
He drives beside you on the highway,
waving to let you into the lane ahead of him.
He also has an elaborate cage in a
secret basement under his garage.
The food he’s carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman
he’s holding there against her will—one in a string of many,
unaware of the fate that awaits her.
This is how it’s been for a long time.
It’s normal...and it works.
Perfectly.
But this time it’s different...
Keep reading for a thrilling taste of
NORMAL...
Acknowledgments
Writing a novel is a long and stressful task at the best of times. When that novel is more successful than you could have hoped or imagined, figuring out how to follow it up can be quite nerve-racking. So, firstly, to everyone who read and supported Normal, thank you for making my life simultaneously so much easier and so much more difficult!
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole city to produce a book, and Dead Girls would not be here if it weren’t for the amazing group of people I’ve been fortunate enough to have around me. I owe heartfelt thanks to:
My long-suffering editor, Sally Williamson, whose patience may never regain its former elasticity.
My improbably dogged and supportive agent, Amy Moore-Benson, who’s never yet left me to die in battle.
Tim Cooper, for turning Champagne into gold.
Emily Ohanjanians and Erika Imranyi at Harlequin, for having faith. Sophie Calder, Alison Lindsay, Cara Thompson, Joe Thomas and the rest of the team at HQ HQ.
Derek Burke, for being the thorn in my side. James Spicer, for being a great friend and bossing being a boss. The team of orange superheroes at Snetterton for keeping me earthed and mostly not on fire: Andrew Davey, Darrin Chalu, Dave Ovens, David Wick, Dennis Jackman, Gerald Pearce, James Ledford, Jamie Thompson, Lee Pearce, Marcus Bowyer, Mark Thompson, Martin Bowley, Neil Howes, Phil Keen, Richard Rogers, Sam Cross, Simon Thomas, Stan Burton, Tim Cook and the eighth natural wonder of the world, Tom Scheving.
Domenica De Rosa, for allowing worlds to intersect and for numerous other indulgences.
Elizabeth Haynes, for half-remembered information on computer systems, which I then half remembered. Any mistakes in that regard are probably someone else’s.
Dan Rayner of Thetford CID, for being the kind of copper Kevin wants to be when he grows up.
Leila Solomons, whose cameo appearance earned her a generous charitable donation, or vice versa.
The amazing community of bloggers, book groups and superfans, many of them authors and industry professionals in their own right, whose tireless enthusiasm has an immeasurable impact on readership and
keeps the rest of us in a job—including such luminaries as Liz Barnsley, Tracy Fenton, Anne Cater, Rebecca Bradley, Margaret Madden, Sumaira Wilson, Timea Cassera, Alex Golding, Ayo Onatade and many, many more.
Lee Child, Jamie Mason, Michael Robotham, Fiona Cummins and the several dozen members of the British crime writing community I’m contractually forbidden from mentioning but who know who they are.
Chris Rushby and the very much above-average Annie at Jarrold’s.
The collective staff of Jack Daniel’s distillery and the Norwich North branch of Domino’s, for the all-nighters.
Everyone who took the time to share their thoughts about Normal—some of which had a profound effect on me and on the direction of my writing. That’s what this game is all about.
Mum and Andrew, for all the questions. Dad, for all the listening.
My children, Oscar, Lewis, Sophie and Eve, for lighting up my life, and thereby illuminating all the extra gray hairs they’ve given me.
My wonderful partner, Claire, to whom at least one character owes their survival, for her unwavering support and for ten pages worth of other things I couldn’t have managed without.
Helen Cadbury, whose generosity and encouragement I’ll never be able to repay, and to whose memory this book is dedicated.
And of course, perhaps more than anyone: you, for still being here. Thank you, and please come again.
Normal
by Graeme Cameron
Chapter One
I’d learned some interesting things about Sarah. She was eighteen years old and had finished school back in July with grade-A passes in biology, chemistry, physics and English. Her certificate stood in a plain silver frame on a corner table in the living room, alongside her acceptance letter from Oxford University. She was expected to attend St. John’s College in the coming September to commence her degree in experimental psychology. She was currently taking a year out, doing voluntary work for the Dogs Trust.
Dead Girls Page 23
