Mark Sennen - Two Evils - A DI Charlotte Savage Novel

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2016

Copyright © Mark Sennen 2016

Cover illustration © Andrew Smith 2016

Mark Sennen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007241460

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007587896

Version: 2016-03-08

For M

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Creepy, creepy, creepy-crawlies. Little black ticks running over my naked skin. Flies swarming in the air. I slide onto my front, burying my face in the softness of the pillow, but it’s no good, I’m awake now and can’t settle. I roll over. I realise there’s only one fly, not a swarm. Just one fly buzzing against the window. One too many. I don’t like flies. They give me nightmares. Flashbacks. I can recall every last detail. The smell of the sea. The sound of the surf. The blood on my hands.

I blink. The fly is still hurling itself against the window. I stare at the insect and wonder. Something isn’t right. I push myself up from the bed and swing my legs down onto the rough wooden floor. I walk out onto the landing and down the corridor. I knock on the door.

No answer.

I knock again and then turn the brass doorknob. The hinges creak as the door eases open. Inside, the window is unlatched, swung wide, the white net curtains billowing like waves breaking into a sea of foam. Sunbeams flicker in through the window and across the floor to the bed where she lies unmoving. I creep to the bed and where the sunlight strokes her face I bend and brush her cheek with my lips.

Nothing. I try again, this time pressing harder against the dry, cold skin. No reaction, not a twitch. Her eyes remain resolutely shut as if she is determined not to be disturbed by anyone ever again.

This time the creepy-crawlies are real. A dozen flies swarming in the air. I open all the windows hoping they’ll go away. No such luck. More come, following their noses, the promise of decay drawing them in.

She’s begun to smell now, the weather warming, the summer heat growing by the day. Pieces of flesh lie loose on her face and her bare flabby arms and her room is full of insects. Droves. Swarms. Hordes. An odour of rotting cabbage, urine and meat gone bad permeates throughout the house. I sit at the foot of her bed and cry.

The next day I rip up a dozen oak floorboards in her room. I fashion a coffin from the ancient planks. I’m good with tools. Woodworking. Metalworking. I kiss her on the lips one last time, aware as I do so of her cheek twitching and rippling. Maggots beneath the skin. Consuming her.

I roll her in a sheet and pull her from the bed and into the coffin. Slip, flop, thud. The coffin is heavy and I slide it from the room and down the stairs. Outside, I balance the coffin on a wheelbarrow and weave my way out to the orchard. Then I dig down into the soil and rock and bury her beneath the apple trees. A leaf flutters from above and falls into the grave like the first flake of snow in winter. Inside my chest my heart has turned to ice.

Breakfast is a gruel of cold porridge served with a wooden spoon in a cracked bowl. A drop of honey sweetens the goo, but not the day. On the table beside the bowl is a notebook. My diary from years ago. I found the book in her room. Why she kept it I don’t know, but perhaps in some small way what was within helped her to understand where things went wrong.

I stare down at the book. I know I need to relive the events inside, but not now, not here.

I knew I would return. The place has too many memories for me to stay away. I park my car and walk across fields, the notebook clasped tight in my right hand. There’s a copse in the distance. Green leaves in a sea of waving corn. I wade through the corn and reach an old fence which hangs between slanted posts. Within grows hazel and scrub and a huge tangle of laurel.

I step over the fence into another world, wandering the woodland until I find my secret place. As a young man I used to come here to meet my best friend. I’d talk to him about my problems, speak of my hopes and aspirations, tell him of my sorrows.

As I grew and matured I gradually weaned myself from my obsession. Life went on and I forgot about my secret place.

And yet here I am, looking for my friend, once more seeking help.

I kneel in the shadows, place the notebook on the ground, and begin to scrabble in the dirt. The brown covering of dead laurel leaves gives way to mulch and soil. My fingers reach down, pushing into the soft material and scraping away until I’ve dug a shallow hole. There it is, shining in the light. A hemisphere of bone, long ago cleaned of flesh and polished to a gleaming white. I pull the skull from the ground and hold it in front of me. In the right eye socket a large marble twinkles. A double cat’s eye whopper. There used to be a marble in each eye, but one dropped out and was lost.