Page 27 of Death Kiss

Tugging my balaclava down, I reposition my eyeholes. This one is fully black because I don’t need his cameras catching anything that gives him info on Kat and me. It itches like mad, and I’m desperate to tear it off. One hand rests lightly in my pocket, gloved fingers on my knife handle.

I haven’t come here to kill old Dick today, but if the opportunity hands itself to me, I’ll take it.

Moving bush to bush, I work my way closer to his sitting room window, careful to stay out of view. Yellow light spread over his neatly cut grass, drawing a perfect square of green. The rest of the garden stays out of sight. I trip over a mound of dirt and swallow a curse, glancing up to make sure I haven’t been spotted.

Richard is in an armchair, eating from a tray in his lap while looking perfectly harmless. Just like you’d expect a retired widower to be.

He’s not the only one who’s been investigating.

His wife tripped and fell down the stairs and died. Allegedly. The thought that perhaps she discovered her husband’s horrific desires—and was pushed—digs into my brain. Seeing as he favours male children, I was surprised to learn he had a wife at all. Poor woman. Assuming she was kept in the dark, that is.

Wiping his face with a napkin, he sets his tray aside and puts on his reading glasses, peering at a folder. To his left, I see a huge stack of folders. Police documents, if I had to guess.

Another man who appears utterly normal. In his quiet, rural home. With his old man cardigan and lap meal.

It’s all a fabrication. A careful disguise to hide what lies beneath.

You could end it now.

Feel the crunch of his cartilage and hear his death rattles. Feel the life draining from him with each spurt of jugular emission.

End him.

I look over my shoulder, half expecting to see Kat. The soft voice sounds so much like hers that it sends chills up my spine. Kat’s not here. I didn’t tell her I was coming.

Gripping my knife, I take a step forward. Only to see a car come into view. I duck back, watching until it pulls into the driveway. The guy who gets out is around my age, maybe a few years older. Pausing to grab a satchel from the passenger seat, he stops, fitting an official-looking badge into his pocket. A policeman? No, I don’t think so.

Curious, I edge through the bushes to get within earshot as the guy knocks on Richard’s front door.

Richard opens the door only a crack, chains visible crossing to the doorframe.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Sorry to bother you so late in the evening. I’m Freddie Baker, a journalist with—’ Freddie doesn’t get to finish his sentence; the door slams in his face.

Poor shit probably didn’t even want to come. Sent by some higher-up to bother Ashworth to get a lead on the story.

Richard clearly has little time for journalists behind his little news appearance.

‘Please, Mr Ashworth,’ Freddie laments, moving around to the window. ‘I was hoping I could verify some information potentially linkin⁠—’

The curtains are promptly closed.

Freddie’s shoulders drop as he looks to the inky sky. ‘Blew that, didn’t you?’

He mutters to himself all the way to the car, and I work to memorise his number plate, because what does Freddie think he knows?

Richard might not want to know, but I sure do.

Freddie doesn’t leave, sitting in the car and probably hoping that Richard might change his mind, or maybe hoping he can root through his bins or something.

Stepping carefully, I head back to my car, parked half a mile away, over two fields.

Each step fills me with a new level of ire. Rage and tension coil around me until my head aches. Great aching throbs have me wincing by the time I tumble into the front seat, and I have to breathe through the pain. It feels like my head’s going to explode with it all.

There aren’t supposed to be leaks, so what the hell did the journalist find?

By the time I get out of the shower, my head is pounding hard enough that I’m seeing stars.