Michael Morley - Spider

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2008
1
Copyright Michael Morley, 2008 All rights reserved
Thats Amore . Written by Warren & Brooks
1953 Four Jays Music Publishing Co.
Peermusic (UK) Ltd. Used by permission.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishements, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

978-0-14-192075-7

To:
La gloriosa donna
della mia mente x

My thanks to all the people who got Spider into print:

Massimo Del Frate, one of Italys greatest and nicest drama producers, helped plant the seeds for this novel over lunch. He, his assistant Benedetta, and no doubt many unnamed others, were also kind enough to help me with the accuracy of the Italian police sections.

My wife and children gave up our precious times together to let me write, rewrite and rewrite again thank you for your love, patience and support.

Stephanie Jackson at Dorling Kindersley was generous enough to introduce me to all the right people Steph, thanks for going the extra mile when you didnt really need to.

Luigi Bonomi should wear a badge saying best agent in the world thanks for your inspiration, guidance and commercial skills no one does it better.

Richenda Todd helped enormously with the blunt, brutal and brilliant advice she gave me early on.

Beverley Cousins at Penguin blessed me with an abundance of painstaking care, eagle eyes, great imagination and wonderful humour Bev, its a true joy learning from you! Thanks also to Alex Clarke, Rob Williams, Liz Smith, Claire Phillips and the rest of the team at Penguin all your hard work and skills are hugely respected and appreciated.

Thanks also to Leonid Zagalsky in Moscow, for lending me his surname, advising me on the Russian sections and reminding me why you shouldnt play drinking games with Russians!

Nicki Kennedy and Sam Edenborough at ILA deserve special mention for all the international help theyve given me, as does Jack Barclay at Everett, Baldwin, Barclay.

Ive been inspired over the years by meetings with psychological profilers such as the FBIs Roy Hazelwood and Robert Ressler, and the UKs Paul Britton and Mike Berry. Similarly, I learned much from distinguished senior police officers in the UK such as Don Dovaston, who did much to pioneer profiling into serial child murders, and Dan Crompton, a police chief who dared to open his doors to the media when most other locked them shut.

Id also like to extend my gratitude to the late, great Home Office pathologist, Professor Stephen Jones, who taught me much about death and dignity.

My final thanks go to all those real-life heroes who hunt the real-life monsters thank God youre all there.

He who fights with monsters might take care,
lest he thereby become a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Georgetown, South Carolina

At the cool, dusky end of a sizzling day, barbecues spit flames while party laughter rolls along the banks of South Carolinas winding Black River.

Across town, in the sombre silence of Georgetown cemetery a solitary figure searches for the grave of someone once dear to him. Hes travelled for days to make this pilgrimage and is already physically and emotionally drained. In his arms he carries a bundle of flowers, her favourite Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies. The first time hed spoken to her, shed been in a local park surrounded by thousands of them, and the flower had taken on a special meaning for both of them.

The headstones of the crowded cemetery bear names almost as old as America itself. Locals have been burying people in these plots since the countrys first Spanish settlers grew old and died here, way back in the mid sixteenth century.

The grave hes looking for belongs to no one famous; theres no towering statue, no ornate family tomb to mark her place. Her anonymity disappeared only when her mutilated young body turned up bloated and decomposing in the Tupelo Swamp offshoot from the Black River, a stretch of ancient tumbling water that was once the conduit of commercial colonialism and the main waterway of South Carolinas plantations.

Finally, he sees her gravestone. Simple black marble, paid for by the community out of special grants for the poor. Engraved in gold lettering is her name: Sarah Elizabeth Kearney. But that wasnt what he called her. To him she was only ever Sugar and he knew that to her he was only ever Spider. Barely twenty-two years old, she was, like the Spider Lilies that had brought them together, just blossoming, just realizing her beauty and planting the seeds of her dreams.

Spider pulls out some weeds growing among the pebbles on her grave and lays down the big flowers. His mind slips back to their wonderful meeting twenty years ago this very day.

Sugar was so special.

She was his first.

The first he kidnapped.

The first he murdered.