BooksBarbecue
Back The Kill Call
Chapters (46)
  1. Dedication
  2. Chapter One
  3. Chapter Two
  4. Chapter Three
  5. Chapter Four
  6. Chapter Five
  7. Chapter Six
  8. Chapter Seven
  9. Chapter Eight
  10. Chapter Nine
  11. Chapter Ten
  12. Chapter Eleven
  13. Chapter Twelve
  14. Chapter Thirteen
  15. Chapter Fourteen
  16. Chapter Fifteen
  17. Chapter Sixteen
  18. Chapter Seventeen
  19. Chapter Eighteen
  20. Chapter Nineteen
  21. Chapter Twenty
  22. Chapter Twenty-one
  23. Chapter Twenty-two
  24. Chapter Twenty-three
  25. Chapter Twenty-four
  26. Chapter Twenty-five
  27. Chapter Twenty-six
  28. Chapter Twenty-seven
  29. Chapter Twenty-eight
  30. Chapter Twenty-nine
  31. Chapter Thirty
  32. Chapter Thirty-one
  33. Chapter Thirty-two
  34. Chapter Thirty-three
  35. Chapter Thirty-four
  36. Chapter Thirty-five
  37. Chapter Thirty-six
  38. Chapter Thirty-seven
  39. Chapter Thirty-eight
  40. Chapter Thirty-nine
  41. Chapter Forty
  42. Chapter Forty-one
  43. Chapter Forty-two
  44. About the Author
  45. Also by Stephen Booth
  46. About the Publisher
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Chapter Eight

FRY WOKE WITH a fuzzy head, and looked around her in confusion. She’d only lain down on her bed for a few minutes to rest, but she must have dropped off to sleep almost straight away. It had been a busy day, but not that bad. There had been many days when she’d put in much longer hours, when the time to go home never seemed to arrive. There could be a few of those days to come, depending on the course of this new enquiry. But not today. Today had been . . . well, average. There was no reason she should feel so tired and groggy, unless she was coming down with something. And that was the last thing she needed.

She sniffed. The smell of soy sauce was drifting up from the flat downstairs. It was one of those smells that seemed to be able to penetrate floors and carpets with surprising ease, as if its spicy aroma could wind its way through the cracks of the floorboards like wisps of smoke.

One day, it had dawned on her that she had plenty of money in her savings account. A police sergeant’s salary was perfectly adequate, and there were hardly any major expenses in her life, except for her car and the rent on this flat. Not exactly a lavish lifestyle, was it? Fat chance of that. She ought to be able to think of something she could do with her savings.

Fry made her way into the kitchen and looked at the washing up. There wasn’t much of it, not now that she was on her own again, her sister Angie having headed back to Birmingham and whatever sort of lifestyle she led there. So those few plates and pans shouldn’t look quite so daunting, sitting there in the sink in that squalid, disapproving way.

What to do with a few thousand pounds? She supposed she could put a deposit down on a house and take out a mortgage. It was the sort of thing that everyone else seemed to do. They’d all tied themselves up in property and debts by the time they got to her age.

Fry hissed between her teeth. A mortgage? She’d rather be chained in purgatory, with eagles pecking at her liver.

She showered, changed her clothes, then pulled on her coat and went out for a walk to wake herself up. The clouds had cleared now, and a crescent moon was shining on the wet street. Music played behind curtained windows as she passed. Tunes that were vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite hear enough of to name.

She felt like the only person out in the streets tonight. The rest of Edendale was shut up behind its doors and windows, people enclosed in their own little worlds. Sometimes she wished she had a world of her own that she could enter that way, instead of always standing out in the cold, feeling so small and vulnerable under a vast, moonlit sky. At times like this, she craved the crowded intimacy of the city.