LOST SOULS
Sometimes the worst nightmares happen in broad daylight…An utterly gripping novel for fans of Peter James and Mark Billingham, from a rising star in the crime genre.A woman is found brutally murdered on a quiet housing estate, her tongue and eyes ritualistically gouged out.Children are being abducted and then returned to their families days later without a scratch and with no knowledge or where they have been - or with whom.If DC Laura McGanity thought moving from London to sleepy Lancashire was taking the easy option then she can think again. Already worried about uprooting young son Bobby to follow her reporter boyfriend Jack Garrett back to his hometown, she must quickly get a handle on these mystifying cases terrifying the people of Blackley - without putting the local officers' noses out of joint.Meanwhile, restless Jack is itching to get back to his writing and the cases provide the perfect opportunity to do so. But as he delves deeper into them, he finds murky connections between the two crimes and skeletons buried in the most unlikely of closets.Most astonishing of all, he meets a man who 'paints' the future - terrible events come to him in vivid dreams which he then puts onto canvas. This 'precognition' is not so much a gift as a curse and to Jack it becomes terrifyingly that many people, including his own family, are in danger…
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NEIL WHITE
Lost Souls
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
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Copyright © Neil White 2008
Neil White asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9781847560186
Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007328987 Version: 2018-07-25
To Alison
Contents
The old man turned away and closed his eyes, clamped his hands over his ears, but the images were still there, searing, sickening. He tried to shut them out, screwed up his eyes and started to pace. It was no good. He ended up where he started each time, next to her.
She was tied to a chair, her arms behind her back, her wrists strapped tightly to the thin spindles. Blood covered her face and painted her shirt in splatter patterns. He looked at his hands. They were sticky with her blood.
He closed his eyes again, but the sounds were harder to shut out. Wherever he paced, whenever he couldn’t see her, the noises were still there, like echoes, constant reminders.
He stopped to take some deep breaths. The woman he wanted to remember was the one he had known in life. She had been fun, vibrant, a face full of smiles. That was the image he wanted to keep, not the one in this room, her face a grotesque mask, nothing left of the person he’d known.
He couldn’t shake the image away. He had seen her face in life; and now he had seen it in death. And it was worse than that, because he had seen her die, her eyes wide open, in pain, in fear, the knife getting closer. She had known what lay ahead of her.
He started to walk around the room faster, tears running down his face. He clenched and unclenched his fingers, looked up and then covered his ears as he walked, as he tried to stifle the sounds that once again crashed through his head. He had heard her last word, forced out through clenched teeth. It had come out as a guttural moan, but he had known what it was. It was no. She had tried to say no.
He took a deep breath and stopped pacing. He turned to look at her. She was still the same. He put his head back and sobbed, and then he sank to his knees.
He stayed like that, rocking slightly as he sniffed back the last of his tears.
After a few minutes he stood up and slowly walked over to the chair. He put his hand on the woman’s cheek and gently stroked it, her skin soft under his fingers. But she felt cold. He leaned forward and kissed her on the top of her head.
‘I’m sorry, so very sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I tried to warn you. I really tried.’
The old man stepped away and looked down at his feet. He could feel the tears trickle down his cheeks, his skin parchment-thin, and as he touched them the blood washed away from his fingertips. He muttered a few words to himself, a private prayer, before reaching for the telephone.
