Mark Pearson - Death Row

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781407060118

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Arrow 2010

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright Mark Pearson 2010

Mark Pearson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the authors imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

I Walk The Line Words and Music by John R. Cash 1956 (Renewed 1984) HOUSE OF CASH, INC. (BMI)/Administered by BUG MUSIC All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, 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

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Arrow Books Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

www.rbooks.co.uk

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099550877

The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at: www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

For Kim, Curt and Tami

In addition to his novel writing, for the last decade and a half Mark Pearson has been a full time and multi-award-nominated, television scriptwriter working on some of the countrys best-loved and most popular drama series.

Praise for Mark Pearson

A cracking debut, matching gore with suspense.
His TV scripting experience shows Bookseller

Jack Delaney is hard to forget Time Out

Pearson scores a hit first time out with Jack
Delaney, a hard-drinking maverick that fans of John
Rebus and Jack Regan will love Daily Record

This is a cracking debut novel, the pace never flags,
the dialogue is as sharp as a cut-throat razor
www.shotsmag.co.uk

Also available by Mark Pearson

Hard Evidence
Blood Work

The percentage of adults who experienced sexual abuse as children and have had long-term side effects is not known. However, in one British study, thirteen per cent of the sample of such adults reported that they had been permanently damaged.

Counselling Directory 2009

They all say its a physical thing. An urge. An uncontrollable desire that builds and swells, like an ocean at high tide, until action must be taken. A slow boiling of the blood. As uncontrollable and devastatingly powerful as a tsunami. But that isnt it: it was part of it but just that a part. Its a mental thing, he knew that as well as any. Thoughts scuttling and skittering in the brain like hundreds of small crabs in a tin bath, climbing the sides with scratching, feverish claws, falling back into the writhing, clicking mass. Memories crawling through his mind like shickle in a turning drum.

Billy Thompson. Just eight years old and his first trip to the seaside. His first trip anywhere more than five miles from where he was born and had lived his entire life. It was deep in the cold-hearted grip of a brutal winter and he was huddled against the passenger-seat window, shivering against the cold. It was a boxy, draughty, metallic rectangle-on-wheels of a car, with a hard bench seat and the wind whistling through gaps in the doors and window frames. It bounced and clattered on the uneven road, jolting him and sending needles of pain shooting though his thin, bony body. The wipers were scratching thick, flurrying snow from the windscreen and tears were pricking his eyes so that his vision of the changing landscape outside was softened, blurred. His life behind him fragmenting like the flakes of snow scattering into pin-points in the rear-view mirror.

Billys uncle was a crab-and-lobster fisherman living in a small village on the south-east coast between Southend-on-Sea and Herne Bay. This tripwas the first time Billy had ever been away from his family home and he would never be returning. His father had been sentenced to three years in prison for battering his wife once too often; his mother had been hospitalised for three weeks, during which time Billy was looked after by his next-door neighbour, Grace Williams, a woman in her late sixties with a houseful of cats and a forgetful nature. When Billys mother returned from hospital she decided she couldnt bear to look at her sons face any more she said he looked just like his father and arranged for him to live with his Uncle Walter, her elder brother, who was looking to take on someone he could train as an apprentice. Billy had never met Walter before, a tall lean man with a face like a rusty hatchet, battered by sea and sun and wind, carved lines of cruelty written into it like the scratchings of a blunt bradawl.

Billy was bundled without ceremony from the car, shivering with the cold, the tears near-freezing on his cheeks, into a house that was only marginally warmer. He was put to bed with barely a grunt of welcome and a cold glass of water and then shaken awake at four in the morning to help his uncle at work. Cold, wet and hungry, he huddled in the back of the small craft as it slapped and danced on the yawing waters. Waves splashed over the sides, chilling his wind-blasted and sore face. He had made the mistake of complaining once he didnt want this, he wanted to go home and his uncle had hit him. Not rebuked him or slapped him. But punched him. Hard, in the side of his face with a hand fashioned of sinew and muscle, knocking him to thefloor where he whimpered but didnt cry. He had long ago learned not to cry out. Then the boat was anchored. Inside as his uncle called it, a mile out to sea. He was huddled against crates filled with shickle, the remains of the crabs and the lobsters after they had been processed. Empty, broken shells, claws, legs, eyes. The smell filled his nostrils, and the sound as his uncle tipped the crates emptying the eviscerated carcasses back into the cold water was like the sound of an army of cockroaches skittering on a dance floor.

Like the thoughts dancing in his head now. Building like a symphony as the blood roared in his ears and he remembered how it all began. Back in that boat shed with the smell of the shickle still ripe in his throat and his uncle tall in the shadows as he pulled the door behind him closed and looked down on Billy, with the inhumanity of a feral thing, his eyes empty. Billy remembered the sharp cuts in his knees as he was forced to kneel, the slivers of lobster and crab shell cutting through the thin fabric of his jeans.