Page 7 of The Black Trilogy

The last time I cried was etched vividly in my mind. At eight years old, I’d just had a run-in with my mother’s latest boyfriend, a skinny man everyone just called Dog. I always found that odd because he smelled perpetually of fish and looked like a rat. That evening, he’d just taken his belt to me for the heinous crime of eating the last tin of baked beans.

“Those were mine, you little brat. You don’t take what’s mine.”

“I-I-I didn’t know.”

I’d felt sick with hunger, and there wasn’t any other food in the house, but he lifted up my top and thrashed me, anyway. One, two, three, four, five lashes. My back burned, and I started to cry.

That only made him angrier.

“Shut up. Shut up! You’re always snivelling. If I hear you do that again, I’ll take more than my belt to you.”

With every word that passed his lips, I shrank back further into the corner. I knew he meant what he said.

So, I never cried after that.

Emotions like hope and happiness were foreign concepts to me. At school, I’d always been the outcast. A memory of seven-year-old me flitted through my mind, rushing out the door at the end of another day in the fun factory. Or rather, St. Joseph’s First School. I’d almost made it to freedom when a foot across the threshold sent me sprawling. A dainty foot encased in a pink patent pump with little bows. I followed the leg upwards and found Katie Mitchell sneering at me. As her little gang of cronies looked on, she’d raised her heel and ground it down on my Mickey Mouse pencil sharpener. I’d coveted that thing in the newsagent’s for weeks before I finally plucked up the courage to steal it.

Katie’s pretty shoes were no match for my ugly second-hand lace-ups, and when I kicked her in the shin, the teacher came running at her wail. I got sent to the headmaster’s office. Again.

Even now, I could still feel the condescending looks of those kids, and their cruel taunts would forever play in my head. I never got invited for play dates or to birthday parties, and even if I had been, I could never have reciprocated. My mother resented being lumbered with one child without having to care for somebody else’s for the day as well. Not that she did much caring. I’d been fending for myself for as long as I could remember while also looking after my mother as best I could. She’d never kept a job for long, and money was always tight. A good weekend for me meant finding enough food to have a meal on both days and managing to stay out of range of whichever waste of space boyfriend she’d installed in her bed that month.

The one emotion I became overly familiar with as a child was fear. Fear is a choice. An important lesson and one I learned too young. First, I worked out how to hide it, and then how to conquer it. Succumbing to fear never helped my situation, but acting scared encouraged people to take advantage of me. Standing up to the school bullies meant they left me alone, even if it did get me labelled as a problem child.

At home, the most sensible option was to avoid my mother’s boyfriends. The best of them ignored me back. Others took their anger out on me, shouting for every perceived wrong before they raised their fists, but they weren’t the worst. No, those were the men who had a special spot reserved in hell, the ones who started out nice, too nice, but then touched me in ways that even at that age I knew were wrong. I’d spent a lot of time hiding under my bed, and when I outgrew that, the wardrobe became my refuge. By the time I got too big for the wardrobe, I was old enough to keep out of the house altogether.

As an eight-year-old girl, I’d perfected the art of the blank face and still body. A faultless mask. It served me well as a child, and it continued to do so as an adult. Nick, one of the few people who knew anything about my upbringing, took a good look at me and understood I’d shut down.

He wrapped me up in a hug and leaned over, dropping a soft kiss on the top of my head.

“Okay, baby, I’ll see you soon.”

Please, just leave me alone. If I hid myself away like the scared child I once was, nobody could touch me. Not the hordes who thought they were helping and not the cops, either.

We’d given them a chance to do their thing in the fortnight since my husband died, but they hadn’t made a whole lot of progress. In fact, they hadn’t come up with a single line of enquiry other than to question me, and I knew I didn’t kill him, so I was already one step ahead of them there.

I also had access to my husband’s files, which the cops didn’t, and with his line of work, there might be a link in those to whoever murdered him. My investigators were better than the police anyway, of that I was sure. If the killer was going to be found, it would be by us, not them.

Nick closed the car door, and I started the engine. As I pulled forward, my foot on the throttle giving a warning growl, an explosion of flashbulbs lit up the grey sky. Thanks to my illegally tinted windows, the reporters weren’t going to get much, but I still wanted to jam their cameras into their mouths and force them to chew on the jagged remains. Death by telephoto lens.

Teeth clenched, I showered the rabble with gravel as I pulled out of the parking lot then floored it towards the highway that would take me home.

CHAPTER 4

MY HOME, ONCE my sanctuary but not anymore, lay a half-hour drive from the church. Two weeks ago, I would have enjoyed the journey, but today I barely saw the road. My thoughts kept coming back to how I was going to get through the rest of my life without the man who’d been a constant in my life for the last fourteen years. We may not have spent all our time together, but barely a day passed without us speaking. My husband had been the one person who truly understood me.

He saw my frustrations and failures when they got me down, but made me get back up and try again until I succeeded. He had confidence in me when I had none in myself. He was the one I let off steam to when I got home at night, and he took my grumpiness with good humour, most of the time at least.

He wasn’t only my husband, he was my best friend. I might have taken his name, but I’d given him my heart.

For all that, our marriage wasn’t what people thought. Our relationship had evolved over the years, but it never became a traditional husband and wife arrangement, that was for sure. Yes, I wore his ring, but there’d never been any sex, and we’d had our fair share of disagreements. At the end, the trust between us was absolute, but it took us a while to get there.

For three months after we met, I hated him, then that hostility turned into a grudging respect and over the next year, friendship. Fast forward two years, and I’d found out just how awkward it was to get permanent residency in America. Going back to England wasn’t an option, not when the company I’d helped my beloved tormentor to build was taking off. Then one drunken night in Vegas when I was moaning about all the paperwork and interviews to get a green card, a friend had jokingly suggested we get married and bypass most of it.

We both had enough alcohol in us that it seemed like a reasonable idea, and two hours later we left the Little White Wedding Chapel as Mr. and Mrs. Our prenup was written on a cocktail napkin—he kept his guns; I kept my knives—and we’d tipsily agreed that if either of us got serious about somebody else, we’d get a divorce. Somehow, that never happened, and nearly twelve years later we’d still been hitched.

Except now he’d gone, and I missed him more than I’d ever imagined I could when we tied the knot all those years ago.

I’d driven a couple of miles down the road when my phone vibrated in my jacket pocket. Carrying three phones was standard procedure for me and the key people I worked alongside, and each of these phones was designated as green, amber, or red.

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