Jane Renshaw - Watch Over Me

First published as “Risk of Harm” by Jane Renshaw (2019)

ALL SCOTTISH SLANG TERMS ARE EXPLAINED IN THE GLOSSARY AT THE BACK OF THE BOOK.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Free Thriller

From Jane

Glossary of Scottish Slang

Rights Info

She thought at first that it was a cruel practical joke. That the blood must be tomato ketchup from the kitchen cupboard. That the shaft of the arrow must be a stick-on plastic fake from Bonzo’s, that awful shop in Edinburgh, just off the Royal Mile, where you could buy itching powder and whoopee cushions and disgustingly realistic dog mess.

Her daughter lay on the grass in the orchard, on her back, her arms flung out to either side. Her favourite yellow T-shirt was spattered with red spots and the collar area was saturated – that was going to need a good long soak. Her hair, especially at the left temple, was sticky with the stuff, and it was streaked all down her face. They’d really gone to town with it around the eye, presumably to hide the place where the fake arrow was meant to penetrate. The whole of the socket area was concealed under gloopy red goo, which was very silly and dangerous. She hoped they’d covered the eye with something first.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ she exclaimed.

The girl who had summoned her was still sobbing convincingly. The other sat on the grass, ignoring the bow lying next to her, watching a blackbird that was hopping about on a coil of old rope under a tree. She didn’t say a word. Didn’t make a sound.

And the first, sickening shiver of doubt ran through her.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ she said again, briskly, dropping to her knees in the long grass, clutching her daughter’s upper arms and shaking them a little. ‘Come on now! This really is going too far.’

The thin arms flopped in her grip like a rag doll’s.

She recognised the arrow. It was made not of plastic but of splintery wood, with green flight feathers slotted into the end. Her husband, against her wishes, had bought six arrows and a bow last Christmas. It had been the only one of the presents he’d wrapped, sitting at the kitchen table complaining about the awkward shape while she fumed inwardly. A bow-and-arrow set, for a child?

How stupid.

How irresponsible.

But she hadn’t stopped him. She hadn’t snatched it from him, ripped the paper away, snapped the bow in half and put the arrows in the fire.

It was blood.

The red gloop concealing the eye was blood, starting to clot in the fierce July sun.

With fingers that did not, miraculously, shake, she carefully wiped it away so she could see what was underneath, all the time repeating, steadily, ‘All right, darling, all right.’

The splintery wooden shaft had gone straight into the open eye. Watery jelly had leaked out with the blood, and she thought suddenly of the bull’s eye she had had to deal with in physics class, long ago.

Okay.

Okay.

All her mother’s instincts screamed at her to get it out, to get that thing out of her daughter’s eye, but she knew that that would be the wrong thing to do.

Only maybe two-thirds of the arrow shaft was visible.

The rest of it was inside her head.

They needed a doctor. They needed a surgeon.

They needed an ambulance.

She shouted, finally, she emptied her lungs, she roared at the bright blue summer sky that was just a sky, a wide, bright, indifferent sky, because there could be no God. She roared until her husband came, until he came running, with the awkward gait of someone who never ran, to where their daughter lay dead in the orchard.

Ruth stood at the gate looking up the path to the cottage, trying to see it with Deirdre Jack’s eyes. Deirdre would be here in forty-five minutes. She was only maybe a decade or so older than Ruth – early to mid fifties – but Ruth was always conscious of a great gulf between them, like the gulf that had separated her from the teachers at school when she was a child, a great moral gulf that she had no hope of ever crossing.

No.

No .

Ruth had been a quiet little mouse of a girl at school. A sweet little mouse who scuttled about the classroom doing good deeds, like helping the slow ones with their reading, and slipping her pocket money and toys into poor children’s desks. Sweet little Ruth had been conscious of no such gulf because none had existed. And adult Ruth was completely at ease with Deirdre. They had a lot in common.

But it didn’t help that Deirdre looked like a Botticelli angel. She had a long delicate face, a full bottom lip and pale, wistful eyes. Short, neat, greyish-gold hair that curled a little on her forehead.

A Botticelli angel in crumpled linen and Fairtrade cotton scarves.

Hopefully she would like the idea of a cottage in the middle of nowhere, just a mile from the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, with half an acre of garden and a paddock crying out for a pony. Hopefully she would like the rather unkempt garden, with its long grass and lichen-covered apple trees, its tangle of hawthorn and wild roses, dotted now with glossy red hips. Ruth would have to remember to say that they left it wild to be ecofriendly.

And she would have to prime Alec so he didn’t guffaw at this and say something like, ‘It’s called wilful neglect.’

Alec, of course, wasn’t in the least overawed by Deirdre. Deirdre was an idealist-by-proxy, he’d decided, having discovered – by simply asking straight out – that she didn’t have any adopted children herself. Her excuse, as Alec called it, was that one of her own children had Asperger’s. He said Deirdre was the type who banged on about the state of society but assiduously avoided her neighbours; who bewailed the fate of the rainforest but hadn’t a clue where her garden furniture came from; who shook her head over the lack of adoptive parents but had never for one moment contemplated becoming one herself.

Okay, so maybe he was right, and maybe there was no reason for Ruth to be at all worried, but she couldn’t help it.

Deirdre scared the shit out of her.

And she was so tired, her brain dangerously sluggish. She’d lain awake most of last night while Alec had slept like a baby next to her and high winds had howled round the cottage, groaned in the chimney, whispered in her head:

They’re going to find out. They’re going to find out.

But why should they?

How could they?

Deirdre wouldn’t be coming at all today if Ruth hadn’t passed their suitability tests with flying colours. All the screening had already been done. Every time she’d stepped into that aggressively cheerful little room at the Linkwood Adoption Agency, all red walls and big Impressionist prints, she’d braced herself for Deirdre to greet her not with a smile but with a look of barely concealed disgust and a cold ‘I’m sorry, but something has come up in the background checks’ – but that had never happened.