Perfect Silence
When silence falls, who will hear their cries?The body of a young girl is found dumped on the roadside on the outskirts of Edinburgh. When pathologists examine the remains, they make a gruesome discovery: the silhouette of a doll carved in the victim’s skin.DCI Ava Turner and DI Luc Callanach are struggling to find leads in the case, until a doll made of skin is found nestled beside an abandoned baby.After another young woman is found butchered, Luc and Ava realise the babydoll killer is playing a horrifying game. And it’s only a matter of time before he strikes again. Can they stop another victim from being silenced forever – or is it already too late?
Читать Perfect Silence онлайн беплатно
PERFECT SILENCE
Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2018
Copyright © Helen Fields 2018
Cover photograph © Getty images
Cover design © www.blacksheep-uk.com 2018
Helen Fields asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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.
Source ISBN: 9780008275174
Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008275181
Version 2018-11-26
For Gabriel
When I look at you, I see the man you will become.
That man is kind and loyal, strong but gentle, steadfast and principled.
He is a leader.
I am more proud than you could ever possibly know.
Table of Contents
Zoey
Skin scraped stone. Gravel lodged in raw flesh. Still Zoey crawled.
Death was a ghoul in the dark, creeping up behind her one rasping footstep after another. Soon its freezing fingers would land on her shoulder. Then she would stop, but not until there was no blood left inside her. She was grateful for the pitch black of the autumn night. It meant she could not see the grotesque mess of her own body. What little strength remained in her upper arms deserted her. On her elbows, she dragged her body forward, hope still pulsing through her veins where plasma had once flowed.
Bad girl, she thought. The man had promised she would live if only she confessed. âBad girl,â Zoey whispered into the dirt. She did so want to survive.
Agony claimed her, planting her face down at the roadside, humbled by the devastating scale of it. Until that day, she had believed herself to be something of an expert on pain. There had been broken bones, a burst ear drum, a busted nose, but none of it had prepared her for how much torment the human body could withstand before death descended.
Picking her face up off the hard ground, she forced her unwilling right knee forward a few more inches. Someone would come, she thought. Soon, someone would come. But sheâd been thinking that for days. Where were those movie-screen nick-of-time rescuers when you needed them?
Ripped from her normal life on a Sunday afternoon, it had been a week since her nightmare had begun. Time had transformed as if in a fairground mirror, bloating grotesquely with slowness as she waited pathetically for her imprisonment to end, and splintering into nothingness when the end â her end â was finally in sight.
Zoey had lain for days on a cold, hard table in low light. The cruel joke was that she had been kept fed and watered, relatively unharmed until the end. The sickness was that she had allowed herself to believe she might survive. Years of watching horror movies, of smugly knowing which victim would die and which would live, and still she had fallen into the age-old trap. She had allowed herself to believe what she was told in order to get through the next second, the next minute, the next hour without terror consuming her.
Zoey had a new perspective on fear. There was plenty she could teach the other women at the domestic abuse centre now, not that she would ever get the chance. A bolt of pain shot from her spine through to her stomach, as if her body had been pierced by a spear. The scream she let out sounded more animal than human as it bounced off the asphalt and echoed down the country road. No one was coming. With that thought came a new clarity. She hadnât been dumped at the roadside in the middle of the night to give her a chance for survival. This was her final punishment. It was her grand humbling.
