Cover

Dedication

For Marie and Alec.

Your enthusiasm is infectious.

Prologue

The smell sticks in his nose, cloying and alien. It hangs in the air; he feels it down the back of his throat. It’s something he’s never experienced before. Instinctively, it makes his heart race.

He opens his eyes. His vision is blurry. All he can see is a grey tinge of moonlight and he gropes around to try and find his glasses. He’s aware his hands feel dirty, a layer of something sticky on his skin.

He’s seeing double. He blinks and pushes his fingers into his eyes, until a kaleidoscope of colour dances on his retinas. The fuzziness persists. But even through the darkened haze he can see his hands are stained a deep red. The stuff is everywhere, under his nails, all down his arms. Some of it has started to dry, and he rubs at his palm with a finger.

He glances down at his T-shirt; it’s stained and filthy. He can sense damp patches under his arms and down his back. He feels cold, his body starting to shiver.

He squints to force his eyes to focus. He is sitting on a hard, rough floor, slumped against a metal cabinet. He is in a large vehicle – what appears to be the back of a truck or a van.

His mind feels like pieces of a wet jigsaw: soggy and fragmented, unable to fit together. He can’t remember what he did to get himself here.

He puts his hands either side of him to push himself up, recoiling as he touches a puddle of something wet. He looks frantically around the small space. He can just make out the indistinct edges of cupboards, the side of a table. Papers scattered across the floor, some soaking in patches of the same stuff he is sitting in.

And then he knows what it is. It’s blood. Blood is everywhere. Pools of it across the floor. Spatters across the cupboards and ceiling and windows. Covering his jeans and T-shirt and skin. He tastes it in his mouth: metal and rust. The smell of it in his nose. It is hideous, and bile rises in his stomach.

He starts to panic, his heart racing, adrenaline jolting his body into action. But then he freezes. He sees it now. Something in front of him, lying in the middle of the floor, half hidden under the table. Something more horrifying than the blood.

He jumps away, the back of his head hitting a corner of a cupboard, sharp and painful. He pulls his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them, his body locked in fear.

He pushes his eyes tightly shut. His hands ball into fists. He starts to rock.