Killing Kate
From the author of ebook No. 1 bestseller and Sunday Times top ten bestseller AFTER ANNA.A serial killer is stalking your home town.He has a type: all his victims look the same.And they all look like you.Kate returns from a post break-up holiday with her girlfriends to news of a serial killer in her home town – and his victims all look like her.It could, of course, be a simple coincidence.Or maybe not.She becomes convinced she is being watched, followed even. Is she next? And could her mild-mannered ex-boyfriend really be a deranged murderer?Or is the truth something far more sinister?
Читать Killing Kate онлайн беплатно
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © Alex Lake 2016
Alex Lake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design by Cherie Chapman © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Mark Owen / Arcangel (girl); Neil Holden / Arcangel (bridge); Shutterstock.com (all other images)
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 written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008199715
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008199722
Version: 2018-11-02
To TMC-G
Contents
They had once been four.
Kate, May, Gemma, and Beth. The Fab Four, their parents called them, with an affectionate nod to the original Fab Four from Liverpool and a wry nod to the fact that their teenage daughters happened to agree that they really were, after all, pretty damn fab.
Four best friends, from their first days at infant school, through the wide-eyed years of junior school and the drama of high school and then on to university and their fledgling careers. Along the way there were fashion fads and music crazes, first kisses and last kisses, tears (lots) and laughter (even more). All of it added layer upon layer to their deepening and – it seemed – eternal friendship.
And then, without warning, it all changed.
Looking back, Kate could pinpoint the night she noticed – they all noticed – that it was going wrong. She had no idea at the time quite how wrong it was going, or how quickly, but she had known that something was not as it should have been.
When she fully understood what it was, however, it was too late.
Beth was already lost.
She had to get out of there.
There were many thoughts going round in her head – confusion, regret, shame – but that was the overriding one.
She needed to leave. That instant. Kate Armstrong wanted to be anywhere other than where she found herself.
Leaving, though, was complicated by the fact that the man whose bed she was in – what was his name? Rick? Mike? Mack? Shit, she couldn’t even remember that – was not there. His side of the bed was empty. Which meant that the option of sneaking out quietly was not available. He was up and about, somewhere in his Turkish holiday apartment, and she would have to face him before she could flee.
Unless there was a window. She knew that leaving that way was unorthodox, maybe even desperate, but she was desperate. He might think it was odd when he came in and she was gone, the window wide open, but she didn’t really care.
She sat up in the bed, making sure that the sheets were pulled up over her naked torso – God, she was naked, naked in a stranger’s bed – and looked around. Her vision was milky – the result of leaving in her contact lenses overnight – and her eyes itched, but she could see through a window that the apartment was not on the ground floor. There were branches of a tree of some kind she did not recognize right outside the window.
