Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)
Angela Marsons
Prologue
Amy Wilde’s eyes closed as the liquid gold entered her vein and travelled around her body. She could visualise the trail of white hot beauty hurtling towards her brain.
The effects were almost immediate. The pleasure suffused every inch of her being, almost painful in its intensity. The euphoria transported her to another planet, another world, somewhere undiscovered. Nothing in her life had ever felt so good. Elation pumped through her body. Wave after wave of ecstasy surged through her skin, muscles, tendons – right through to the centre of her bones. She tried to hang on to it as it weakened in strength.
Don’t go. I love you. I need you. Don’t go, her mind screamed, pleaded, begged, desperate to hang on to the sensation for as long as she could.
As the last tremors of happiness faded away she turned her head to her left to share that secret smile with Mark, her lover, her friend, her soulmate as she always did after a shared hit of heroin.
But Mark didn’t look okay, she realised, through the fatigue that was pulling her into the welcoming dark oblivion that always followed the hit.
She knew they were sitting on the floor in an unfamiliar room. She knew the radiator was warming her through the denim jacket. She knew there were handcuffs around her wrist but she didn’t care. Nothing mattered after a hit like that.
She tried to say Mark’s name but the word wouldn’t crawl out of her mouth.
Something was wrong with Mark.
His eyes were not closed, already succumbed to the warm drowsiness. They were wide: staring, unblinking, at a spot on the ceiling.
Amy wanted to reach across and touch him, shake him awake. She wanted to share that smile before she gave in to the dark.
But she couldn’t move a muscle.
This wasn’t normal. The usual heaviness that soaked into her bones made her feel lethargic and weighted down but she could always muster enough energy to turn and snuggle Mark.
The exhaustion was trying to take her, pulling at her eyelids, willing her to sleep, but she had to try and touch Mark.
Through the descending fog she tried with all her might to move a single finger, but there was no response. The message was not making it out of her brain.
She tried to fight the creeping drowsiness, but it was like a blanket being pulled up over her head.
She felt helpless, weak, unable to shoo away the blackness, but she knew that Mark needed her.
It was no use. She couldn’t outrun the shadows that chased her.
Her eyes began to droop as she heard the door to the flat slam shut.
One
Kim felt her jaws clench at the incessant tapping sound niggling her left ear.
A moth had entered her garage space through the open shutter that was capturing little breeze from the storm-heavy June air. The insect was launching itself repeatedly against the 60 watt bulb.
But that wasn’t the tapping that was annoying her.
‘If you’re bored, piss off,’ she said, as a few flecks of rust dislodged from the wheel spokes and landed on her jeans.
‘I’m not bored, I’m thinking,’ Gemma said, tipping her head and looking up at the moth, who was giving himself an aneurism.
‘Convince me,’ Kim said, drily.
‘I’m trying to decide whether to take the flowers with me or arrange them in a vase at home.’
‘Hmm…’ Kim offered, helpfully, as she continued to scrape.
She knew that Bryant and many other people questioned her relationship with the teenager who had been sent to kill her, manipulated and used by Kim’s nemesis, Doctor Alexandra Thorne.
Bryant’s view was that the girl should be locked up at Drake Hall prison, where her mother was currently residing and where the girl had come into contact with the sociopathic psychiatrist who had made it her life’s work to torment Kim at every opportunity since she had put an end to her sick experiments on her vulnerable patients.
As far as Bryant was concerned there were no circumstances under which you could befriend a person who had wanted you dead. It was simple. Except it wasn’t. Because Kim understood two things perfectly: how skilled Alexandra Thorne was in manipulating every weakness or vulnerability a person had – the ones they knew about and even the ones they didn’t. And that the girl had suffered a shit childhood through no fault of her own.
She wasn’t being facetious in not responding to the girl’s comment. It just wasn’t something she could see happening.
Gemma’s mother had been in and out of prison all the kid’s life, palming her child off onto any relative who’d have her, until no one would take the child. Gemma had resorted to selling her body in order to eat. Yet, for some reason, the kid had maintained regular contact with her mother and visited at every opportunity.
The woman was due for release the following week but somehow she always managed to get herself into some further trouble that extended her sentence.
Kim had offered Gemma a loose invitation that whenever she was in need of a meal to come round, instead of heading for the streets, and while she couldn’t offer a gourmet meal she could throw in some oven chips or a pizza.
And Gemma had taken her up on the offer, even after she’d secured a job a month ago working part-time at Dudley Library.
‘So, how’s work?’ Kim asked, avoiding the subject of her mother completely.