The Shadows: A Novel by Alex North Read Free Book Online Page B

home life? Escape from Gritten altogether? I imagined the idea must appeal to him, and I didn’t like the way he was staring at Charlie as though he’d just been offered something magical.
    “They’re still just dreams, ” I said. “When you wake up, it’s not like it matters. It hasn’t changed anything.”
    Charlie looked at me. For a moment his expression seemed completely blank, but there was an undercurrent to it that set me on edge, as though I’d committed some kind of transgression by challenging him.
    “What do you mean?” he said.
    I shrugged. “Just that. They’re only dreams. They don’t make any difference.”
    Charlie smiled then, and for some reason it unnerved me more than the blankness had. It was the same smile he’d shown to Haguethat day, one that suggested he was way ahead of me, and that I’d said something simplistic and childish that he himself had gotten past a long time ago.
    They’re only dreams.
    A smile that said he knew a secret I didn’t.

SIX
NOW
    Amanda worked late that night.
    She drew the blinds in her office and turned off the light, so that the only illumination in the room came from the computer screen on her desk and an angled lamp beside it. The arrangement was probably not great for her eyesight, but she liked working this way when she could. It concentrated her attention and made the rest of the world go away. It allowed her to think.
    What she was thinking about right now was dream diaries.
    The concept seemed ridiculous to her. Everyday diaries were alien enough—if something happened that wasn’t important enough to remember in your actual head, what was the point in writing it down? The idea of going one step further and recording your dreams as well was so far off-planet she needed a telescope to see it. But that appeared to be what she was looking at now.
    While Robbie Foster was not cooperating, and Elliot Hick was borderline hysterical, the police had managed to establish a rough timeline of events, and Amanda now knew a little more about what had happened. Close to midday, Hick and Foster had gone to the quarry with a friend of theirs named Michael Price, and they had murdered him there. Afterward, they had taken sleeping pills. When they eventually woke up, they had wandered out across the waste ground, bloodstained and lost, at which point they had been spotted by a concerned member of the public. Each of the boys was carrying a knife and a book. Neither had denied the killing, and while the forensics would take time, Amanda had no doubt the two teenagers were guilty. She had the what and she had the who .
    What she didn’t understand yet was why .
    She’d had a meeting with her boss, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Lyons, an hour ago. Lyons was a notorious bastard, and she had known full well the calculations that had been going through his head at the time. There had been a murder on his patch, which looked bad, but the killers were already in custody and there appeared to be no risk to the wider community. The convictions were going to be iron clad, and the department would look good as a result. A boy was dead, basically, but things could have been worse.
    That was how Lyons’s mind worked—and while her father had certainly not been a bastard, Amanda imagined the two men would at least have understood each other. Why was not necessarily a question that mattered. Motivations, causes, reasons—they almost always turned out to be mundane and disappointing. What explanation could there possibly be for the horror she had seen in the quarry that afternoon that would make sense of it? Asking why was like diving into a black hole. The deeper you went, the less light you found.
    But she had been compelled to look.
    And she had found darkness that was difficult to understand. Foster and Hick had taken their dream diaries with them to the murder scene, and on the desk before her now were printed scans of the last few entries. She read what the boys had