The Intruders
Now a major BBC TV show starring John Simm. Taut, menacing, sinister, gripping, intelligent, action-packed – everything you could want from a thriller.When ex-LAPD patrol cop Jack Whalen’s wife goes missing on a routine business trip to Seattle, his world is shaken.Meanwhile, a ten-year-old girl vanishes from a beach in Oregon after an encounter with a sinister stranger – but it gradually becomes clear that she’s very far from defenceless.Searching for answers in the shadowy secrets of a past that still haunts him, Jack discovers that the truth has roots deeper and darker than he ever feared.
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INTRUDERS
Michael Marshall
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2007
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Cover photographs © BBC Worldwide
Michael Marshall 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 nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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 here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008114954
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007325313
Version: 2014-10-27
How can we be sure we are not impostors?
Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
Contents
Thump, thump, thump. You could hear it halfway up the street. It was bizarre the neighbours didn’t complain. Or do so more often, and more stridently. Gina sure as hell would – especially if the music sucked this bad. She knew she ought to go upstairs as soon as she got indoors, yell at Josh to turn it down. She also knew he’d look at her in that way teenagers have, like they’re wondering who you are and what gives you the right to bother them and what the hell happened in your life to make you so boring and old. He was a good son at heart though, and so he’d roll his eyes and nudge the stereo down a notch, and then over the next half hour the volume would creep up until it was even louder than before.
Usually Bill was around to get into it with him – if he wasn’t hidden in his basement, tinkering – but tonight he was out with a couple of faculty colleagues. That was good, partly so he could get the bowling out of his system without involving Gina, who couldn’t stand the dumb sport, also because he went out very seldom. They usually managed to grab a meal somewhere once every couple weeks, just the two of them, but most evenings this year had seen him disappearing downstairs after dinner, wrench in hand and a pleasurably preoccupied look on his face. For a while he’d generated his own strange noises down there, low booming sounds you felt in the pit of your stomach, but thankfully that had stopped. It was healthy for a guy to get out the house now and then, hang with other guys – even if Pete Chen and Gerry Johnson were two of the geekiest dudes Gina had met in her entire life, and she found it impossible to imagine them cutting loose at bowling or drinking or indeed anything at all that didn’t involve UNIX and/or a soldering iron. It also gave Gina a little time to herself, which – no matter how much you love your husband – is a nice thing once in a while. Her plan was a couple hours in front of the tube with her choice of show – screw the documentary channels. In preparation she’d gone to the big deli on Broadway, picked up groceries for the week and a handful of deluxe nibbles for right now.
As she opened the door to the house and stepped into a zone of even higher volume, she wondered if Josh ever considered that his vanilla mom might have rocked out on her own account, back in the day. That before she’d fallen in love with a young physics lecturer called Bill Anderson and settled down to a life of happy domesticity, she’d done plenty time in the grungier venues of Seattle-Tacoma and its environs, had been no stranger to high volume, cheap beer and waking up with a head that felt like someone had set about it with hammers. That she’d bounced sweatily to Pearl Jam and Ideal Mausoleum and even Nirvana themselves, back when they were local unknowns and sharp and hungry instead of hollow-faced and dying, and most memorably on a summer night when she’d puked while crowd-surfing, been dropped on her head and still got lucky in the soaking and dope-reeking restrooms with some guy she’d never met before, and never saw again.
Probably not. She smiled to herself.
