Dana Simmons lives a privileged life. The father she loathes provides her with an obscene income, and she divides her time between volunteer work and doting on her wild boyfriend, David Gibbons. Life should be sweet, but David has a secret, and its unspoken shadow chills their every encounter.
Belinda Carmichael is David’s ex. She lost a baby eleven years ago when David flew into a rage and accidentally fist-pumped her tummy whilst she was pregnant. Ever since Belinda has been a vestige of her former self. Exhausted, emaciated and barely surviving on the breadline, a chance encounter brings David back into her life. She still wants him, love forgives everything, and she is prepared to wait any length of time to get him back.
Kamala Grover is used to picking herself up off the ground. Not so long ago she was homeless, a pretty young girl sleeping rough, fearing every night the impending footsteps of an opportunist robber or rapist. Now she works for her aunt as a carer and lives with her son, Rohan, and her window cleaner boyfriend, Harry Miller.
Harry is okay. There’s worse out there, and Kamala would know. But there has to be more to life than the daily grind of wiping flabby old arses clean all day, doesn’t there? When a client, a famous artist living incognito, offers to paint her nude, Kamala eventually accepts, not at all sure if the wealthy septuagenarian is a pervert or not. She doesn’t tell Harry. She doubts he would take kindly to a dirty old man painting and gawping at his nude girlfriend. And she is right.
Three women, strangers to one another but whose worlds will soon collide in a dangerous lattice of lies, misconceptions and misguided suspicions. In this wild world, it seems someone must always suffer, and Kamala, Belinda and Dana are each determined it won’t be them.
Chapter 1
To see a man on his knees, a no-good piece of shit, ready to face his sins without the pageantry of absurd wigs or the opera of self-inflated legal dupery, feels strangely appropriate. It's still not completely dark. The sky has stretched the gloaming hour to what feels like an age, but the woods are deserted. All I can hear above his heavy breaths and pitiful sobbing is the patter of rain against shrivelled leaves and ankle-deep brushwood. I can hardly see his face, only his tormented eyes and pallid skin. Everyone deserves a fair trial. Justice is important. I don't want to kill someone who doesn't deserve it, and even though I feel like a monster right now, this handcuffed young man on his knees in the mud before me, waiting for his end, I am not without humanity. But I am not mad. Physically and emotionally exhausted, yes, but the senses that remain are fully functional and correctly tuned to what I witnessed an hour ago, when I saw with my own eyes what this man did to the only decent man I have ever come across in my short time on this Earth. There is no mistake, no optical illusions, no extraneous circumstances to factor in leniency. The man bowed before me, shuddering with fear, cold, disgust, and defeat, is guilty of his sins.
'What's your name?' He wheezes. 'If you're going to hurt me, kill me, then at least give me that?' He gave me some bullshit in the car on the journey here about how he never meant to do it, but he has had time now to reflect. He cannot doubt my credentials. The handcuffs, the taser in my hand, the ease with which I took a fit, ninety-kilo man down with one swing of a chair.
'Dana.'
'Dana,' he says under his breath, as if he wants to take the name with him to wherever he is about to go and maybe avenge me from the grave. There's no doubt someone will find him in the morning. We haven't strayed far from the main trail. We are only a few minutes from where people park their cars at one of the gated entrances to the woods. A dog walker will find him, and the police will arrive in numbers, followed by detectives and forensics, but eventually he will be lifted into a body bag and taken away for an autopsy, and in a few weeks he will meet his final resting place. And piece by piece the police will put it together and come looking for me. The nude girl got a good look at my face. They will quickly work out that I'm a relative of the deceased, and within days not only will I have a mad ex looking for me, but half the nation's police force, too. 'I'm Harry.'
Fuck.
I don't want to know his name. But smart. He's trying to make a connection with me, trying to make it harder for me to do it. It won't work. For months I have lived in fear, but now all I feel is desire, to get this done and face the next inscrutable obstacle in my life. I was on the run anyway. I'll need the night to get as far away from here as possible. The car is no good to me now. I might as well leave a map behind and circle my destination in red. I must hide it somewhere, so they waste time looking for it. I'm already thinking like a criminal. I've never done anything wrong in my whole fucking life. I don't go faster than eighty on the motorway, even though my Mercedes can supposedly go over one hundred and forty miles an hour. I've never stolen anything. I've never hurt anyone.
Yet here I am, about to kill someone.
My arm begins to ache. I'm holding the taser two feet from his face, and he keeps blinking at it, perhaps knowing it won't kill him alone but that it will incapacitate him and leave him completely at my mercy.
Which is the wrong word.
There will be no mercy.
I'm surprised he hasn't tried to make a move on me. Harry. He's a young guy, not a pound of spare flesh on him, he must have some fire left inside that shivering frame, one last throw of the die as they say, but so far all he has done is whimper like a bitch, and damn it, he does look and sound like a reasonable guy. But the same could be said for me. People think I'm a nice person. They would never dream I could kill someone like this.
Yet, here we both are.
One that has just done so, the other itching to do it.
The wind pushes against my back as if bullying me to get on with it. A sliver of moon hides behind a cloud as if it can't bear to watch.
'I'm sorry, I... all I did was...'
'I saw what you did, so save your breath. You know I was here a few months ago, in these same woods not far from this very spot? I was running through the dark trying to hide from someone I thought I loved and loved me, and after what you told me tonight, I think love has a lot to answer for. It makes us act and think in ways that sane people never would, and the more powerful and wonderful it feels, the more desperate it leaves you afterwards when the illusion disappears. Tell me, Harry, for what it's worth to us both, if you could change one thing that could have avoided this moment, what would it be?' He thinks for a minute, and I start to wonder if he's going to answer, if he's trying to buy time and hoping for a miracle, but then he finally whispers a name.
'Kamala.'
Kamala?
It's the same for me, a one-word answer.
David.
'Kamala, is that the nude woman back at the house?' He nods. Drops his head to the ground and leaves it there, and he's not sobbing anymore, and he's so still, and I realise he's waiting for me, that's he's seen the madness in my eyes and heard the calmness in my voice, and realised his fate is sealed.
And he's right.
But as I stand over him, judge and executioner, now that the moment has arrived, I'm not even sure how I will do it.