Dead Calm (A Dylan Scott Mystery) by Shirley Wells Read Free Book Online Page A

it. She’d put notices in shop windows and on lampposts—no reward—asking people to check their sheds and garages. Night and morning, and at hourly intervals in between, she’d called it and rattled a box of cat biscuits to entice the thing home.
He hadn’t told anyone apart from a couple of his mates, but he reckoned his sister had guessed. One day he’d been waiting for her to come out of the bathroom. She spent hours in there and he never knew what she was doing. When she’d finally come out, they’d squared up to each other. He was waiting for her to moan about his standing outside the room, “listening” she always reckoned. Then their neighbour’s voice had drifted through the open window.
“Smoky! Smoky, sweetheart, come to Mummy.”
His sister gave him a knowing smile. “I wonder what’s happened to the shit-machine.”
He’d smiled back and, for a moment, he’d felt close to her. It hadn’t lasted long.
It was years later before he’d killed again and he wasn’t even sure that counted because there’d been four of them, all new recruits to the army. Most of them had got along well, but one bloke, a fucking shirt-lifter they reckoned, had been different. He hadn’t mixed properly. He’d thought himself better than them. He came from a well-to-do family and was always getting fancy parcels in the mail.
One night, after a few hours on the town that had involved too many beers and a couple of hours with cheap prostitutes, they’d had a bit of fun with him. They’d only intended to kick him around. He could still remember the crunch as his boot connected with the faggot’s nose. Four of them had kicked him and four of them had assumed he’d stagger in for breakfast. He never did. He never moved again.
The other three had lost their bottle. For a while, he’d worried that they’d all confess like bloody schoolgirls. They hadn’t, but things hadn’t been the same again. They hardly spoke to each other after that.
He couldn’t see the problem. Okay, so they hadn’t meant to finish him off, but he was no great loss. What did the world want with a fucking pervert like him?
The next—he’d been leaving a bar in Amsterdam, drunk, but not so drunk he didn’t react fast when three blokes pulled a knife on him and asked him to hand over his cash. His own knife was between one of the thugs’ ribs before they could say “Have a nice evening.” The other two had scarpered, leaving their friend bleeding to death in the gutter.
Guns, knives, poisons, baseball bats, rope—the ways of killing someone were endless.
It was easy enough. At least, it came easy to him.
Hanna Larsen—she’d had it easy. He hadn’t blown her brains all over her pillow, sliced through an artery with a gleaming blade or smashed her skull to a pulp. All he’d done was put a pillow over her face. No one could argue with that.
He’d bet it was because she’d been so old that he’d been puking everywhere afterwards. He’d never liked old people. Not only did they look disgusting, very often they stank.
There’d been this old woman he’d been forced to visit as a kid. She was some relation of his grandmother’s but he couldn’t remember exactly what. She must have been a hundred and she always stank of piss. Her skin, deathly white and cold, had reminded him of a frozen chicken. Two budgies had flown around her sitting room, crapping everywhere and occasionally landing on her shoulder. Yellow and blue feathers littered every surface. Even now, feathers gave him the creeps.
“She’s had a stroke,” his mum would say when he complained about the saliva tracking its course down her chin.
He hadn’t killed her, but he wished he had. She’d probably wished it too.
He lay back on his bed and closed his eyes. He needed sleep, needed it badly.

Chapter Ten
     
A man had bored them at breakfast about the warming properties of the Gulf Stream but, this far north, Dylan had expected snow, ice and freezing temperatures.