Blood Loss
FBI agent Ren Bryce takes on her most heart-wrenching case yet when a father’s work places his young daughter in terrible danger…OUT OF SIGHTWhen a teenage girl is found beaten and raped in the grounds of a derelict asylum, FBI agent Ren Bryce is called in to assist. But she is soon diverted to a missing persons’ case when an eleven-year-old girl and her teenage babysitter vanish without a trace from their hotel room.OUT OF MINDFaced with conflicting evidence and inconsistent witnesses, Ren works obsessively to unravel the dark family secrets at the heart of the case, before it’s too late…OUT OF CONTROLDetermined to uncover the truth, Ren’s behaviour becomes increasingly reckless. Putting her own safety at risk, she enters a world where innocent lives are ruined for profit … and kidnap, rape and murder are all part of the deal.
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ALEX BARCLAY
Blood Loss
Copyright
This 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.
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Alex Barclay 2012
Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © David Chilvers/Alamy (landscape);
Shutterstock.com (girls, sky & birds)
Alex Barclay 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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Source ISBN: 9780007383436
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007420629
Version: 2016-05-04
Praise for Alex Barclay
‘The rising star of the hard-boiled crime fiction world, combining wild characters, surprising plots and massive backdrops with a touch of dry humour’ Mirror
‘Tense, no-punches-pulled thriller that will have you on the edge of your deckchair’ Woman and Home
‘Explosive’ Company
‘Darkhouse is a terrific debut by an exciting new writer’ Independent on Sunday
‘Compelling’ Glamour
‘Excellent summer reading … Barclay has the confidence to move her story along slowly, and deftly explores the relationships between her characters’ Sunday Telegraph
‘The thriller of the summer’ Irish Independent
‘If you haven’t discovered Alex Barclay, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon’ Image Magazine
To Grainne and to Melanie
Contents
PROLOGUE
It was an imprisonment, twice over. Minds captured first by insanity were captured a second time by Kennington Asylum for the Insane. Built in 1904, it was a dignified structure on a salvaged tract of Denver city parkland; mental wellness forged from red bricks and green grass. In appearance, it stood for its promises. But until it became the hollow shell it is today, it never truly reflected them.
In contrast, the grounds were overrun, choked by nature untended, as if the twisted roots of madness, ignored for over a century, were finally unbound.
People had been sent to Kennington to be healed, but when they were captured a third time – by a camera’s lens – they stood in doomed herds, their faces blank, their brains looted. It was clear that the asylum was not a pitstop on a journey to wellness, it was the endpoint of a descent. Their clothes were soiled, their limbs atrophied, their bodies swept into corners like dirt, like something to be thrown away.
CONDEMNED. Even the sign was. The boy stared at it. The Kennington photographs had been taken in 1950, but they had resurfaced sixty years on to be laid bare across eight pages of a Sunday supplement. They had made grown men cry. But the not-so-grown, the high-schoolers … well, the photos made them want to go to that fucked-up place and party with ghosts.
The boy climbed onto the perimeter wall and took a thick black marker from his coat pocket. He gripped the sign with a gloved hand, crossed out the C-O-N and drew an A through the E. DAMNED. Just like a century’s parade of lunatic patients … just like the people inside the building that he had come for tonight. He was yet to know that he would leave without seeing them. And his inadvertent victim, laughing and throwing back shots, dancing through the abandoned wards this Hallowe’en night, was yet to know that her bright ethanol eyes would be haunted hollows by the time the music died.
The boy made his way through the woods that bordered the drive. It was a tangled mess of trees and bushes, and he moved blindly until his boots hit stone. He looked down. There they were – the signs painted onto the ground to lead the way: small, yellow lightning strikes. He followed them around to the back entrance where a huge timber door had hung until its hinges had been unscrewed, until it had been thrown to one side.
