Authors: Vicki Tyley
Tags: #Murder, #thin blood, #Mystery, #fatal liaison, #Australia, #sleight malice, #murder mystery, #Crime, #brittle shadows, #bestselling, #Suspense, #psychological suspense, #vicki tyley
Bitter Nothings (30 page)
His memory of the previous evening was patchy, to say the least. He had a vague recollection of arriving home stressed after a late-night meeting at the office and, bypassing the dried-out dinner Kirsty had kept warm for him, heading for the bottle of Chivas Regal. After that, it was anyone’s guess as to what had happened.
A series of short clips flashed through his mind. In one, he saw himself shouting at Kirsty, her throwing up her hands and yelling back. What had they been arguing about? In another, he was picking up his car keys, and…
Damn it! Why can’t I remember?
he thought, glancing towards the door leading into the garage. It was then he saw the set of four smudged, rust-brown streaks low on the doorframe. He closed his eyes, praying for the nightmare to end.
Except he had a feeling the nightmare was only beginning…
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SLEIGHT MALICE
SLEIGHT ~ use of dexterity or cunning, especially so as to deceive.
MALICE ~ the intention or desire to do evil; ill will.
One cold Melbourne winter’s night a suburban bungalow goes up in flames. Despite their best efforts, firefighters are unable to save the home. When a badly charred body is discovered in the remains, web designer Desley James is devastated. Her best friend, Laura Noble, had been the only one in the house that night – her partner, Ryan Moore, is away in Sydney on business. Then Desley learns the unidentified body is male. But it’s not Ryan. He and Laura have disappeared…
Not realising until it’s almost too late what some people will do to cover their tracks, Desley teams up with private investigator Fergus Coleman to search for the missing couple.
“In perfect Vicki Tyley fashion, ‘Sleight Malice’ entertains and stuns its readers.” – Lit Fest Magazine
CHAPTER 1
Rough hands grabbed her. Clamped across her waist, his powerful arm squeezed the breath from her lungs. He hauled her backwards, her thrashing arms and legs no more an inconvenience to him than if she had been a pinned fly.
She coughed, her eyes watering as the hot, acrid air seared the inside of her throat. With both hands, she tried in desperation to prize the immovable weight from her stomach. “Let me go! Get…”
Her chest convulsed against the heavy, grit-laden smoke. The man’s hold on her eased. She seized her chance and wrenched herself from his grip. She stumbled forward, shielding her face with her arms, but the fire’s intensity drove her back.
Back into the arms of the firefighter.
“What do you think you’re doing? You can’t go in there!” shouted the hulking black and yellow protective-clad figure. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
Desley James scarcely heard him over the din of the fire trucks, pumps and roar of the blaze. Her only concern was for Laura. Where was she? Had she been at home? Had she escaped the inferno? What about Ryan?
She opened her mouth to speak, inhaling a mouthful of burnt air instead. Spluttering, she bent her head forward and drew the thin cotton T-shirt she wore over her mouth and nose.
“Have you got everyone out?”
The firefighter leaned down, his ear almost touching her face. “Sorry, what was that?”
She repeated her question, watching his face as her words, muffled by the fine weave of her makeshift filter, sunk in. He averted his gaze, but not before she had her answer.
“Oh dear God, no. Please tell me it isn’t true. It’s not possible,” she added in a whisper only audible to herself.
This time when he lifted her off her feet she didn’t resist; all the fight had left her. A female police officer joined them, draping a blanket around Desley’s shoulders as the firefighter set her down beside the open back door of a police car.
She shivered, pulling the blanket in tighter as she sunk onto the backseat, the wool fibers bristly against her hot skin. The vehicle’s interior light cast a ghostly pall over the two faces staring down at her.
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BRITTLE SHADOWS
When soon-to-be-wed Tanya Clark is confronted with her fiancé’s naked corpse hanging from a wardrobe rail in the upmarket Melbourne apartment they share, her life is torn apart. Two months later, distraught and unable to cope, she drowns her sorrows in a lethal cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs.
On the other side of Australia, a grieving Jemma Dalton struggles to come to terms with the suicide of her only sibling. Despite there being no evidence to the contrary, Jemma refuses to accept Tanya had intended to kill herself. Not her sister. Then the coroner’s report reveals that at the time of her death she had been six weeks pregnant. The will, too, raises more questions than it answers. How did a young woman on a personal assistant’s wage amass shares worth in excess of $1,000,000?
In a desperate bid to uncover the truth, Jemma puts her own life at risk and starts to probe the shadows of her sister’s life. But shadows, like bones, grow brittle with age. The consequences can be deadly.
PROLOGUE
One foot inside the apartment, the smell hit her. Sour, like cat pee. Except they didn’t own a cat.
“Sean?” she called, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat. “Sean, honey, are you home?” Louder this time.
Not a sound. Only that putrid smell.
She dumped her heavy satchel on the floor, kicked the door closed, and surveyed the room.
The late afternoon sun streamed through the balcony-facing floor-to-ceiling windows. Long shadows from the life-sized, headless bronze nudes standing sentry sliced the living area. The Age newspaper lay open at the business section in the middle of the narrow glass-topped dining table, Sean’s mobile phone next to it. Apart from one of the eight chairs sitting askew from the table, she could have stepped into the pages of Home Beautiful.
She crossed the carpet toward the short hall that led to the bedrooms and stuck her head into the apartment’s galley-style kitchen. Tomatoes, red onions and a cling-wrapped tray of meat – the makings of what looked to be one of her fiancé’s specialties, Spanish steak – sat on the stainless steel drainer next to the sink. Further down the bench, she spotted a bottle of red wine together with two wine glasses, one of which was already poured. She sniffed the air and moved on.
Usually wide open, the door to the guest bedroom was half-closed. Hoping Sean hadn’t offered a bed to one of his boozy mates, she hesitated for a moment and then gave the door a sharp shove.
The door swung in, releasing a rush of sour air. Pinching her nostrils together, she leaned into the room, ready to beat a hasty retreat if anyone was in there. Her gaze went first to the queen-sized bed. Although the quilt looked rumpled, the bed itself didn’t appear to have been slept in.
Breathing out through her mouth, she glanced across the bedroom to where sunlight, filtered through the window’s upward angled Venetians, striped the ceiling.
She took another step into the room and turned around. The leather strap of her handbag slid from her shoulder. She didn’t try to stop it, couldn’t stop it. Unable to move, all she could do was gape at the open wardrobe, her eyes bulging almost as much as the vacant ones staring back at her.
A silent scream blocked her throat. She couldn’t breathe in; she couldn’t breathe out. Her lungs wanted to burst. The purple, bloated face of the naked man hanging from the wardrobe’s steel rail on a belt, his swollen tongue protruding from his mouth, was almost unrecognizable. Almost.
She stumbled backwards, snaring her handbag as she landed in a heap next to the bed. She scrambled in the bottom of her bag, her mobile phone eluding her like wet soap in the bathtub. When she did manage to get hold of it, she struggled to still her shaking hands. Her fingers felt fat and clumsy, the buttons on her phone tinier than she remembered.
“Emergency. What service do you require? Police, Fire, Ambulance?”
She opened her mouth to answer, but a magazine page stuck to her leg now had her attention instead. She peeled it off, dangling the magazine at arm’s length as if it were a dirty sock. She had never seen anything quite like it. Naked flesh. Entwined bodies. Explicit sex scenes.
If she had thought things couldn’t get any worse, she had thought wrong. She shook her head, unable to come to terms with what she was seeing. Her fiancé, her lover, her partner was dead; dead and surrounded with hard-core homosexual pornography.
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FATAL LIAISON
“It’s easy, enjoyable, captivating reading, and I am eagerly awaiting the release of her fifth...” -Book Boogie
“...easy, fluid readability factor. I didn’t want to put the book down, and it was immensely enjoyable.” -MotherLode blog
The lives of two strangers, Greg Jenkins and Megan Brighton, become inextricably entangled when they each sign up for a dinner dating agency. Greg’s reason for joining has nothing to do with looking for love. His recently divorced sister Sam has disappeared and Greg is convinced that Dinner for Twelve, or at least one of its clients, may be responsible. Neither is Megan looking for love. Although single, she only joined at her best friend Brenda De Luca’s insistence. When a client of the dating agency is murdered, suspicion falls on several of the members. Then Megan’s friend Brenda disappears without trace, and Megan and Greg join forces. Will they find Sam and Brenda, or are they about to step into the same inescapable snare?
CHAPTER 1
As he listened to the second phone call from his mother, Greg Jenkins noted the increased tremor in her voice.
“Samantha still hasn’t arrived. And she’s still not answering her phone. I’m so worried. Should I call the hospitals? What—”
“Whoa. Slow down, Mum. Don’t stress out. Remember what the doctor said. Don’t worry about Sam. We all know how bad she is with time. She’d be late for her own funeral.” Greg laughed, hoping to ease his mother’s tension.
“Yes, but—”
“Please, Mum, I’m sure you’re worrying unnecessarily. Sam has—”
“Gregory, dear, I wish you wouldn’t call her that. Sam’s a boy’s name.”
“Okay, Mum.” He started again, using the name Sam herself loathed. “Samantha’s a big girl now. I’m sure she’s all right, but just to put your mind at rest I’ll go and check on her. She’s probably so wrapped up in her new man she’s forgotten she was supposed to visit you this weekend.” He laughed again.
“What new man?” The pitch of her voice rose.
Greg could almost see her gripping the phone in both hands as she waited for her eldest child to answer. Silently berating himself for opening his big mouth, he wrestled with what he could say without digging himself into a bigger hole.
“Gregory?”
“Sorry, Mum, there’s someone at the door. I’ll have to go, but I promise I’ll get Sam… Samantha to phone you as soon as I can. Now don’t get all worked up. There’s nothing to worry about, you’ll see. Bye, Mum.”
He hung up, sucked in a deep breath and slowly released it. There was no one at the door but at short notice, it was the only thing he could think of to get out of what would’ve been the inevitable interrogation. His sister needed her butt kicked for letting down their mother like that. Sam, of all people, knew how over-protective their mother was, more so since Sam divorced her no-hoper of a husband and moved to Melbourne.
Greg picked up the phone again, and pressed the two buttons that would dial his sister’s home phone a suburb away. As he waited for the call to connect, he wandered through the house into the kitchen. The phone started ringing. Cradling it between his chin and shoulder, he filled the kettle. The phone rang out, which was good. It probably meant Sam was en route to their mother’s place. Maybe she’d been unlucky enough to end up with a flat tire or broken down. It was bound to be something as simple as that.
The kettle boiled as he tried Sam’s mobile number. It too went unanswered, but at least this time Greg was able to leave a message. He looked at his watch. He’d give her half an hour and if she hadn’t called him back by then, he would have to think of what else he could do to try to track her down. Younger sisters, who’d have them?
Twenty minutes later, he’d emptied the coffee pot and finished off the best part of a packet of shortbread biscuits without realizing it. His mother’s anxiety had started to rub off on him. He didn’t wait the half hour out. Instead, he reached for the phone and dialed Sam’s mobile first and then her home again, ending up with exactly the same results as before. No answer at either.
Had it been a Freudian slip when he’d inadvertently mentioned the new man in Sam’s life to his mother? Greg knew nothing about the guy except he was, in Sam’s words, “tall, dark, and drop-dead gorgeous.” He didn’t even know the guy’s name. What he did know was that Sam had met him through one of those agencies that specialized in dinner dating. Dinners for the desperate and dateless. He found the whole concept repugnant, but his sister had assured him that all was civilized and above board. He’d taken those assurances at face value, happy she was making an effort to get on with her life.
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