BooksBarbecue
Back Dying to Sin
Chapters (43)
  1. Dedication
  2. Epigraph
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. Chapter Thirty-Five
  38. Chapter Thirty-Six
  39. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  41. About the Author
  42. Also by Stephen Booth
  43. About the Publisher

It was one of the saving factors about farming that you were always looking to the future – anticipating the next harvest, or the next lambing season. The work you did today would bear fruit in five months’ time. It was quite different from living on a day-today basis, when every week was the same and nothing was likely to change.

But if that optimism about the future was taken away, then farmers like Matt would have nothing to keep them going.

‘Are we going to have another drink?’

Matt thumped his empty glass down. ‘Why not?’

Ben drained his Towns and got up to go to the bar. After a day like this, he did start to wonder who the sane ones were. Maybe, in the end, it was the likes of Diane Fry who could see the future most clearly, and had it all worked out. Fry’s attitude was the real sanity. Well, perhaps.

With mounting, irrational rage, Fry stared at the contents of the box she’d lifted from beneath the loose floorboard. Diamorphine hydrochloride. Pharmaceutically prepared heroin, freeze dried in glass ampoules for injection into the wrist.

She’d heard about this use of diamorphine. Low-profile trial schemes had been taking place around the country for some time. Because it came in measured doses, you knew exactly how much you were taking, and you could function perfectly well. That was the theory, anyway. It was heroin on the NHS. And at a cost to the taxpayer, she’d heard, of about ten thousand pounds a year per addict.

Fry knew there were very few pure, one-drug addicts. Heroin users took crack, and vice versa. No one had suggested prescribing crack on the NHS yet, but she supposed it could happen. On the street, women could earn between a hundred and two hundred pounds a night. And in many cases, it all went on gear. A heroin habit took a lot of feeding.

She sat down suddenly on the bed, feeling a powerful surge of guilt at having invaded her sister’s privacy. She wanted to weep at the destructiveness of the emotions that had driven her to do it. Jealousy, bitterness, and fear. Their relationship couldn’t be founded solely on a shared set of genes, could it? There had to be more to family than this endless anger and suspicion.

But Fry looked at the boxes on the floor. And immediately the fury swept over her again in a stomach-churning tide, too powerful to resist.

To her certain knowledge, there was no diamorphine trial taking place in Edendale for local addicts. So where had her sister been going? Where was Angie obtaining her supplies?

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Saturday