Truly Deadly: The Complete Series: (YA Spy Thriller Books 1-5)

by Rob Aspinall

  “Oooh,” the girl in the corner shuddered.

  Same again, I thought. Ginger Bun batted it away easy, back in the game. The tempo rose as we traded moves at close quarters, faster than the eye could see.

  This was all Philippe. At first I was blocking, staying with it. But I started to counter-attack at the end of each flurry she threw at me. I got her once, twice, three, four times in her stupid fat face. And once in the sternum, making her wheeze. She kicked out. I blocked off with the sole of my foot. Next came an elbow. I reversed it into a hold. Must have been a good one from the way she snarled through gritted teeth. She pulled my head down with her free hand, threatening to rip out a chunk of my hair.

  Patchy hair would have been a fate worse than death. I had to give up the hold.

  Ginger Bun wrapped an arm round the back of my head and pushed a karate-chop hand up hard under my nose. Snot and tears streamed onto my tongue. She walked me forward towards the mirror.

  “Take a good look at yourself,” she said in a Russian accent, a lot like Ranger Rover Bitch’s. Had I killed her friend? Her sister?

  “This is how it ends for you,” she said.

  Like I cared what I looked like right now. I’d died a thousand deaths already, looking like pan-fried puke in front of the mirror. Still, I couldn’t resist a jab back.

  “Well,” I said, “your hair’s shit and those shoes are awful … I just thought you should know.”

  There was zero wriggle room out of the hold. It hurt like hell, but I hadn’t done all this surviving just to give up now. They say all this fight or flight stuff scrambles the brain. Lucky for me, all the skill sets that mattered belonged to my heart.

  The girl in the corner was trying to make herself as small as possible, her back exposed, along with her bra strap. Fast as a flash, I unclipped the strap with finger and thumb, whipped the bra off her boobs and pulled it tight in both hands. With the core strength of a jungle monkey, I pushed my weight against Ginger Bun and ran up the wall.

  Yup, I ran right up that bad boy and kicked off, twisting upside down out of the bitch’s grip, wrapping the strap around her throat and pulling tight.

  Her spine cracked and she gurgled as I leaned back, like a rider pulling on the reins of a horse. She had a few inches on me, so I jumped on her back and dug both heels into her side, pushing them up under her ribs. I clung on like a baby koala as she rammed me backwards against the mirror, the wall, the opposite wall, out through the curtain, back into the booth. She flailed with her arms, but couldn’t get a grip. I had her now. She dropped to her knees in front of the mirror, watching herself go. She fought it some more, flipping me round onto my back, her weight on top of me. Still I hung on.

  She grasped at thin air. I tightened my grip. She went quiet, then stiff. And that was that. I pushed her limp body off me and got to my feet, bra dangling in hand.

  This time I got a proper eyeful of myself in the mirror.

  Jeezus. No wonder the turds in the mall were laughing at me. I looked like a sweaty, homeless meth-head who’d just spent the night in a bin. My hair was wind-tunnel wild, my lips painted in dried sick stains, blood-spattered gown torn at the shoulder, feet black as coal, with random bruises up my legs and arms. Oh, and a lovely red band around my neck where the world and his wife had taken turns trying to choke the life out of me.

  The girl in the corner clutched her naked boobs and shook.

  “You’ve got a killer bod,” I told her, breathing like I’d been running.

  “Oh, um, thanks,” she said, straightening up a little.

  I held her bra up against my chest, followed by a top she’d hung on a rail.

  “Hey, what size are you?” I asked.

  29

  Identity Theft

  No one noticed the girl in the charcoal pencil skirt and chiffon black blouse walk out of the store with her chin up, a designer handbag perched daintily on her wrist. Security were too busy ushering me out of the door while armed police jack-booted in towards the fitting rooms, looking for a crazy rampage chick in a hospital gown. Hallelujah for the changing-room girl. She’d come out armed with everything from scented wipes to a chic fedora hat, bug-eye sunglasses and lip gloss that tasted of peach. Even chewing gum and bottled water to nuke the pong of stale vom chunks.

  A break at last.

  She was near enough my size to be my body double. And while the Coca-Cola-red heels were a little loose, I rocked them anyway, swaying along like the richest, cockiest diva in the universe.

  “It’s all about the way you walk,” Becki once told me. “Shove out your tits, stick out your bum and let everything wiggle.”

  By the time they found a naked changing-room girl wandering out of the booth clinging on to her lady bits, I’d be halfway down the mall, melting into the crowd.

  I’d offered her my gun-smoked knickers, of course, along with my blood-stained rag of a medical gown.

  “Ooh, God no,” she’d said.

  I’d also told her that if she raised the alarm before I was out of the store, I’d kill everyone inside the mall, then come back and kill her too.

  As I wiggled along, I had a quick strategy meeting with myself. First, I had to get out of here, but what then? I had the girl’s phone, but didn’t know anyone’s number.

  I could dial 999, but who knew if the police were in on it? If Club Murder were MI5 or MI6, they’d have to be working with them. Heading home was also out of the question. And if these people knew about my hospital appointments, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to put grab teams outside the school gates or friends’ houses. I couldn’t even use my bankcard. They’d track it. Then there were all the cameras.

  I’d read somewhere that the UK was the CCTV capital of the world. And let’s not forget the Brits and Yanks spying on emails.

  No, the only way to survive was to keep moving. Avoid anything familiar. Right now, I had to act like I was just another shopper. The offer of a free makeover in a nearby department store could only help. And if I didn’t make it out of here, at least I’d die pretty.

  In my new outfit, with my hair pinned up maturely inside my hat, I must have looked like the perfect candidate to the bored cosmetics girl hanging around the front of the store. I took a seat on a high stool between beauty counters. I removed my hat and sunglasses as the deliberately overdone girl checked my skin tone.

  “Ooh, that’s a nasty bruise,” she said, pointing to the shiner on my cheek. “In fact, you’ve got a couple of them. Your neck is red too.”

  Like I didn’t know.

  “I got attacked,” I said. “Jumped me from behind.”

  “Really? That’s terrible,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ve got just the thing to cover that up. Then we’ll have you looking amazing … Love the outfit by the way.”

  “Thanks,” I said, watching her bend over to lift some products out of a drawer.

  After she concealed the bruises, applied the foundation and showed me how to contour my features to look older and more exotic, she went to town on my eyes. One of the mall security guards approached, bow-legged and bald.

  I tensed up on the stool as he held out a photo and asked the cosmetics girl if she’d seen the police suspect in the photo; a grainy black and white print of my badass self running into the clothes store.

  She shook her head. “No, Geoff.”

  Geoff fixed me with eyes too big for their sockets. “What about you? Have you seen this girl?”

  I glanced briefly at the picture, in the process noticing my medical bracelet peeping out from beneath the cuff on my blouse. Shit, I forgot to take it off.

  “Sorry, Geoff,” I said, subtly pulling the cuff forward over my wrist so that it covered the bracelet.

  “I think I would have remembered,” I said, embellishing needlessly. “She looks crazy.”

  “What did she do?” asked the cosmetics girl.

  “You don’t want to know, love. Trust me.”

  My makeover was finished. The gi
rl stood back, admiring her handiwork.

  “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” she said.

  “Stunning,” said Geoff, face creasing into a smile.

  “Unlike this one,” he said, flicking a finger against the A4 print.

  Look who’s talking, Cueball.

  “Thank you, ladies,” Geoff said, showing the photo to other staff in the store.

  My right hand relaxed out of a fist.

  I walked out of that store feeling like a cool billion, rather than the usual two-quid book token. With the posh silk knickers and push-up bra I’d stolen from the girl, I felt invincible. Yet now it was time to leave, I also felt a pang of sadness. I wanted to stay here forever. Try on clothes, get more makeovers, go bowling, catch a movie and eat junk food. Normal stuff that didn’t involve any of the three S’s: Shooting, Stabbing and Strangling.

  I took the escalator down to the bus station, where police in neon-yellow jackets were waiting, checking faces. I wanted to shit, but I kept riding the escalator, playing it cool.

  “Remove your sunglasses please, madam,” said one of the two officers at the foot of the escalator – he was one of those forty-something guys who looked like, well, a forty-something guy.

  “Excusez-moi?” I asked in my best French accent.

  He pointed to my face.

  “Sun-glass-es,” he said loud and slow, like he was talking to an old person.

  “Ah, pardon moi,” I said, removing the shades and fluttering my made-up eyelashes. “My English not good.”

  I flashed him a driven-snow smile, as he looked at his photo, then at me, really hoping he couldn’t hear my heart thumping or notice my legs shaking.

  “Okay,” he said, waving me through. “Have a good day.”

  I slipped my sunglasses back on and wiggled off.

  “Wait!” he said.

  I stopped dead in my tracks and half-turned as he stomped over. Whatever happens, a voice inside me said, don’t get cuffed.

  As he reached out to put a hand on me, I was all set to put him down.

  “Here,” he said, grabbing a clothing tag still attached to my bra strap, peeping out of the arm hole of my blouse.

  He snapped it off and handed it to me. “Don’t want this ruining your look.”

  He chuckled to himself. “You probably have no idea what I’m saying.”

  I shrugged and smiled. “You’re a complete idiot,” I said in French. He smiled and waved me away before returning to his post.

  I turned and walked. And like a fart in the wind, I was gone.

  30

  Bonny Scotland

  The waves rolled in against the rocky shores of the tiny fishing village. I was stiff all over after the fighting, and the National Express coach and the two local bus journeys I’d spunked the last of the changing-room girl’s cash on had taken hours and hours. Yet, as far as I knew, I’d managed to give the powers that be the slip.

  I stood next to the Lavistock Welcomes Careful Drivers sign, which someone appeared to have crashed into by the way the metal legs were bent and prised out of their concrete base.

  Across the main road that swept through the village, a path ran up a small hill to a house behind a scattering of trees. The metal swing gate to the property was shut.

  I sucked in a lungful of fresh sea air and listened to the bell ring-a-ding-dinging on the harbour, the gulls shooting the gull shit while circling on the breeze. I crossed over the road and stopped at the metal gate. Padlocked. The uneven wall either side was carpeted with moss and topped off with rusty spiked railings, a wire wound around and stretched across the top of the gate.

  Yellow and black lightning bolt signs on either side of the wall told me it was electrocuted. Plus, the large oak trees skirting the property had been shorn of their branches, leaving no way of climbing and jumping down the other side without breaking a leg or two.

  As I walked back to the gate and wondered what to do, a sparrow plopped out of the sky and landed cockily on the wire.

  Fly, little bird. Fly, little bird, or you might get fried.

  But birdie didn’t get fried. Birdie merrily chirped away in a two-feathered salute to the shock signs. Philippe’s heart told me the sparrow wasn’t grounded. That’s why birds could sit on power lines without getting cooked. It gave me an idea. I hurled changing-room girl’s bag over the gate, then stepped out of my shoes and slipped my hands inside, wearing them like gloves. A double precaution in case my science was off.

  I backed up a little, grass and soil crumbly under my feet. With a short run up, I leapt forward into the air, planted the soles of both shoes down hard on the gate, sandwiching the wire in between. I front-flipped over like a gymnast, minus a couple of points for the wobbly landing. Voila!

  No shocks and over the other side. I slipped my shoes back on, picked up the bag and started off along the winding dirt track up the hill. The blustery wind coming off the sea was filtered by all the greenery. It was quiet, calm and smelled of fresh pine and garlic herbs. Grey squirrels darted up and down trees, and more of those little birds danced in the air around the driveway, thick and cracked like sore lips in the sun.

  It was a bit like a nature trek, except with a hint of trespass and a pinch of impending doom, not helped by the security cameras fixed not so discreetly in the trees.

  The climb steepened as I got closer to the house. Better than a bum, tum and thighs workout, but doing nothing for the growing fever I felt throughout my body, like the coming on of a head cold. I was out here in the land that time forgot with no medication, way past pill-pop time.

  The house was a large, grey stone cottage with ivy crawling all over the front. It was ragged and leaning to the left. I knocked on the oak door, then ran my hand over its rough surface where the red paint was peeling off, year on year.

  Nobody answered, so I tippy-toed to peer through a window. Too dim to make anything out. I knocked again. I turned and took in the panoramic view. The village. The lighthouse. The main road, a straight mile either way. The harbour, the bay, distant hills and the spot where the cold North Sea met the sky.

  I walked around the side of the house – another camera mounted on the wall, the fixings rusty and bound in cobwebs.

  A dented metal sheet blocked entry to the back. I threw my stuff over again, before scrambling up and over the other side. Where my house had a concrete yard you couldn’t swing a tadpole in, this one had a long strip of patchy grass ending in dark, spooky woodland.

  I knocked on the back door of the house. Tried the handle. It was open.

  A trap?

  This was how horror movies started.

  I ventured inside anyway – a traditional country kitchen with thick wooden tops, a gas hob range cooker and a circular table under a white and blue check cloth. Everything old and dusty.

  Auntie Claire would have gone mental at the sink full of dirty dishes and empty, congealed ready-meal trays piled up on the tops.

  “Hello?” I said. “Anyone home?”

  I moved deeper into the house, greeted by a wide hallway with dusty wooden floorboards and a tocking grandfather clock. There were two rooms to my right and a white wooden staircase to my left. It was musty. Everything smelled of old library books. I felt a presence. I heard a noise. A low grumbling. Every hair on my body stood to attention. I turned around slowly.

  It was just a skinny black cat, peering at me through the staircase struts. I reached out to stroke it, but it lashed out with a paw and a yowl, shooting off up the stairs. At least the guy liked animals. Unless he liked to cut their heads off and drink their blood.

  I crept into the living room – a giant open hearth full of ashes. A mishmash of furniture an old person might die in. A stag’s head on one wall. Newspaper clippings pasted along another.

  And, weirdest of all, no TV.

  I crossed the room and got a better look at the clippings. UFO sightings. Abductions. Company mergers. Crop circles. Natural disasters. Military tech. War. Famine. Suicide. Pol
itical corruption. The UK, the US, the world. Paragraphs were circled in red marker pen. Question marks squiggled. Arrows drawn from one clipping to another. No thought given to messing up the nobbly cream wallpaper.

  I figured this was the place.

  Suddenly, a chair scraped on the stone floor in the kitchen, as if someone had bumped into it by accident.

  I slowly, quietly moved towards the hallway, cringing as a floorboard squeaked beneath the green seventies spiral carpet. I hung half an eyeball around the corner. The hallway was empty. Kitchen too. I was about to tiptoe out of the front door and knock again, when I realised I’d left my shoes and changing-room girl’s (correction, my) bag on the living-room floor.

  Oh, Lorna, you daft cow.

  As I stepped backwards along the hallway, I heard heavy breathing down my neck. Who needed an electric wire? Panic shot from tit to toe like a lightning bolt. I spun around to see a young mixed-race guy in a hoodie towering over me, an axe in the air with my name on it.

  I jumped back and screamed. The guy in the hoodie screamed back.

  After a few more seconds of the same, he broke off and said, “Can we stop screaming now?”

  I stopped too. “Yeah, okay.”

  He lowered the axe to his side and pulled the hoodie down off his unruly afro hair, revealing a harmless, puppy-fat face you couldn’t help feel a bit sorry for. He pushed a pair of square, thick-rim glasses back up the bridge of his broad nose.

  “God,” he said in a posh-boy London accent, breathing heavy and clutching his chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”