The Innocent Dead
Contents (77)
The
Innocent
Dead
are always the first victims . . .
LIN ANDERSON
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Three months later
Acknowledgements
DRIFTNET
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For my father
DI Bill Mitchell
The past is what we decide it to be.
1
Karen had been feeling odd for days. Her current world consisted of vivid, insistent and disturbing memories, some of which she would rather not revisit, others that she couldn’t believe had happened to her at all.
The mind played tricks, she reminded herself. Especially at her age. Like the recurring dream she’d had over the years.
In it she was ten and visiting a house with her dad. The house was near a railway line and there was a garden with raspberry bushes. She’d climbed up onto a footbridge to watch a train chug past.
Yet when Karen had asked her dad who’d lived in that house, he’d told her that she must have imagined it. That they’d never had friends or relatives with a house like that.
It was just a dream, he’d said.
But the current memory wasn’t a dream.
It featured Karen’s older sister’s wedding day. Eleanor, all in white, looked beautiful dancing round the floor with her new husband, who was tall and handsome, but . . .
Karen shuddered. There was something about his eyes. The way he would stare at Karen, before leaning down to whisper in her ear.
The memory suddenly switched to another white dress. This time the wearer was small, Karen’s height but with dark hair. It was her childhood pal, Mary McIntyre. She too wore a veil just like a bride.
The image almost made her heart stop.
No, she thought. I don’t want to think about that day. Not now. Not ever again.
It was then she heard a cawing sound coming from the hall or the far sitting room. She tried to recall whether she’d left the porch door open. Could one of the garden birds be trapped inside the house?
Opening the kitchen door, she found the hall empty and the porch door shut. So nothing could have come in that way.
She was about to check the sitting room, when the next memory swept over her like a tidal wave, halting Karen in her tracks.
In it she was walking along the path to the den that she and Mary had built in the woods. Suddenly a crow, disturbed by her approach, abandoned the blood-splattered body of a lamb to rise squawking in front of her, furious that she’d disturbed it at its feast.