The Girl Who Had No Fear. Marnie Riches

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СКАЧАТЬ criminology tome. She’d have to make straight for the station if she were to catch the train to London. Aunty Sharon was expecting her before she went out to work. The bed in Tinesha’s old room had been made up as usual, making George’s regular scheduled early-morning journeys to HMP Belmarsh to conduct her research among its violent inmates that bit easier.

      The cycle ride along Trumpington Street was uneventful, with the Fitzwilliam Museum, spotlit in the darkness, the only thing of note, apart from the couple making for Browns restaurant. George ploughed on to the left turn at Lensfield Road, pedalling past the three-storey Victorian houses that comprised student accommodation, mainly owned by Downing College. It was only once she had reached the junction with Hills Road, where she paused to get special fried rice from the Chinese takeaway opposite the big Catholic church, that George felt certain a car had been following her. A VW Golf that she had noticed pull in as she had pulled in.

      Was that the long-haired rocker behind the wheel?

      She blinked. Blinked again and peered with narrowed eyes into the darkness. Considered approaching, throwing her scalding rice into the driver’s face.

      But what if she was wrong, as she had been with the motorbike on Burrell’s Walk? What if she was going mad and merely imagining that Bloom, the now-incarcerated transnational trafficking crime boss, known by his contemporaries as ‘The Duke’, had sent someone after her? As if he hadn’t already tortured her enough.

      ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ she muttered under her breath.

      With her foil container of food swinging in its plastic bag from her handlebar, she pedalled with as much haste as her out-of-shape legs could muster to Cambridge train station, praying the busy, brightly lit main road would afford her some safety.

      Finally, leaving her bike locked in the overcrowded bike racks, she boarded the train to King’s Cross. Two minutes to spare. And she even found a seat with a table.

      When persistent beeping heralded departure and the doors slid shut, George’s body was flooded with almost jubilant relief.

      ‘Jesus, man. This is bullshit,’ she told her laptop as she booted up. ‘I’ve got to calm down.’ She breathed in deeply; breathed out slowly. Conjured an image of her missing mother, Letitia, imagining her happily ensconced in a high-rise somewhere, maybe in Den Haag or Bruges or Southend-on-Sea, using some gigolo as a sticking plaster to nurse the wounds left by having been given a bad prognosis by that Dutch consultant. For all George knew, Letitia was bending this younger lover’s ear about her ‘pulmonaries’ and ‘sickle cell anaemics’ while she pounded his body with her middle-aged bulk. George reassured herself that the enucleated eye in the gift box in Amsterdam’s Vinkeles restaurant had just been a prank, care of Gordon Bloom, designed to freak her out and make her think that her mother was dead. Somehow, he’d got hold of Letitia’s phone. People got mugged all the time, didn’t they? She reminded herself that the emails from her father were crap, sent as a wind-up by one of Bloom’s lackeys, no doubt. She hadn’t genuinely heard from her father in over twenty years. Mommie Dearest, Letitia, had seen to that. Why would he start contacting her now?! This was the stance George preferred to take when she could feel herself being pulled into a downward spiral of nihilism and anxiety: Brush it under the carpet. Hope for the best.

       Good. Let’s crack on, you paranoid arsehole.

      Clicking her emails open, chiding herself for being so foolish and uptight, George scanned the new arrivals in her inbox. But in among the late essays from second-year undergrads and correspondence from her editor about the forthcoming book and some bullshit about having to reapply to the Peterhulme Trust for research funding, there was one unread email that made her curse out loud; an email that caused the coursing, hot blood in her veins to slow to an icy trickle – another missive, ostensibly from her estranged father.

      From: Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno ([email protected])

      Sent: 30 March

      To: [email protected]

      Subject: I’ve still got my eye on you.

       CHAPTER 1

       Amsterdam, an apartment in Bilderdijkkade, 25 April

      The naked, dark-haired man dropped the tiniest amount of liquid into the drink using a syringe. He flung the syringe down onto the granite kitchen worktop. Treated him to a smile that was loaded with promise. Lips, a little on the thin side, perhaps. But his kindly eyes were long-lashed, at odds with his almost gaunt face and bull neck. Floris tracked the thick cords of sinew that flanked the man’s Adam’s apple down to his collarbone, beneath which the curve of his pectoral musculature began. He had the ripped torso of a body builder. This dark-haired stranger was everything he desired at that moment, all right. Floris anticipated how he would feel inside him. Tried to remember where he had put his lube and condoms.

      He took a deep breath. Was he ready for this?

      He peered down at his almost painfully erect penis. Half an hour since he had taken the Viagra and he was good to go. Yes, he was ready.

      The man winked. Pushed the drink into his hand.

      ‘Go on, then. Get a little Gina down you,’ he said, caressing Floris’ navel hair. Starting to kiss his neck.

      Floris stared into the bubbles of the now-narcotic lemonade, fizzing upwards to greet him. Rising and popping. Rising and popping. Like the men at this party. G wasn’t normally his drug. Sex parties weren’t normally his thing. It had been Robert’s idea. Robert, who had earlier been full of assurances that he’d have his back. Now, Robert was elbow-deep inside some big blond bear, off his face on mephedrone.

      ‘I’m not sure,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve already taken a couple of things.’ He closed his eyes to savour this stranger’s touch. Nagging doubt started to creep in. Should he have stayed at the club? Familiar turf. Familiar faces. Familiar routine. He could stick to his boundaries there. Now, he was in uncharted territory, wondering if he should drink from this possibly poisoned chalice.

      ‘Go on. Everyone else has had some. It makes you horny as hell. And more relaxed.’ The stranger pointed to his own sizeable engorged cock. ‘You’ll need it.’

      Floris batted away encroaching thoughts of the end-of-term marking that was sitting on his kitchen table in his apartment. Pushed aside the stress that came with disgruntled parents who couldn’t quite believe their perfect progenies could perform so badly in their tests. Nearly the holidays. Fuck them.

      ‘Drink!’ the other man said. Insistent. Excited. ‘I want you.’

      What the hell was his name? Hell, it didn’t matter anyway. Abs. That’s what he would call him, on account of the six-pack. Abs.

      Floris drained the glass. Started to reciprocate the man’s sexual advances, feeling suddenly bolder and wanton, though he knew it would take longer than that for the G to kick in. On the worktop were four lines of mephedrone. His new mate broke off to snort two. Gasped and grinned. Indicated that he should follow suit.

      ‘Why not?’

      Not the first time for Floris. Not with miaow miaow. That, at least, was his regular weekend СКАЧАТЬ