Read a preview extract from Hurt before it's published in November 2013 Danger Hides in Plain Sight ... Brian McGilloway's Little Girl Lost was a runaway bestseller, now DS Lucy Black returns in Hurt, a tense crime thriller about the abuse of power and how the young and vulnerable can fall prey to those they should be able to trust. A sixteen-year-old girl is found dead on a train line one freezing December night in Derry. Detective Sergent Lucy Black is called to identify the body of the murdered girl as Karen Hughes. As Lucy delves deeper in to the case, she discovers that Karen has been living in residential care the child of an alcoholic mother and a father behind bars. The only clue as to the girl's movements are her mobile phone and various social media sites - where her 'friends' are not all they seem ... Hurt is coming this Autumn. Also includes bonus DS Lucy Black short story - The Sacrifice.
Release date:
September 1, 2013
Publisher:
C & R Crime
Print pages:
41
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He’d just got a pint in when the aura started. A quick flickering of iridescence on the periphery of his vision that already made his stomach turn. He shut his eyes, in the hope that perhaps it was a trick of the light, over tiredness from the night before. The last thing Harry needed was another late evening, but then he’d promised the missus this for months. A bit of dinner, a few glasses of wine, then down to the pub after for an hour. The tentative re-beginnings of a relationship which had sprung leaks years earlier, but whose gaping holes only became apparent with the departure of their only son to University.
‘Empty nest syndrome,’ one of the drivers had told him that day as he’d mentioned during break that he had to go out. They’d all been out the night before on a work do; John-Joe Carlin’s leaving party. He’d been driving the Belfast-Derry train for thirty three years, through all kinds of shit. And now, this evening, he was bringing his last train home.
Harry glanced at his watch, could just make out the time beyond the growing intensity of the flickering, his whole field of vision now haloed with shifting ripples of light. John-Joe would be on the final stretch of his final drive, passing Bellarena.
He stumbled back to the table where his wife, Marie, sat, glancing around her, smiling mildly at the other drinkers.
‘I need to go home,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve another bloody migraine starting.’
Marie tried to hide her disappointment, a little.
‘Have you none of those tablets?’
Harry shook his head. ‘They’re in my work uniform. I left them in the station.’
She tutted, turning and picking up her coat, the fizzing soda water untouched on the table where Harry had set it fifteen minutes earlier. ‘Come on, then. I knew it was too good to be true.’
The shimmering had thickened now into a perfect circle of tightly packed strands of light that seemed to encircle his pupil. Harry felt his stomach lurch, swallowed hard to keep down his meal. It really would be a wasted night if he brought that back up.
His phone started vibrating a second before he heard the opening notes of The Gypsy Rover, his ringtone. He stared at the screen, trying to make out the caller ID.
‘John-Joe,’ he said, answering the phone. ‘You’re done early.’
‘Earlier than I’d planned. Something’s happened. The train’s just died.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Just past Gransha. Coming in on the final stretch.’
That was less than two kilometres from the station. The train would already have been slowing, rounding the curve at St Columb’s park, then the last few hundred metres in past the Peace Bridge.
‘What happened?’ Harry asked, shifting the phone to his other ear.
‘I don’t know. We just lost power. Everything. Can you check it out?’
Harry glanced up at where Marie stood, the keys in her hand, the hoop of the key ring hanging off her wedding finger.
‘I’ll be right down,’ he said.
As he moved onto the tracks, away from the brightness of the station, Harry was grateful for the silence after all he’d listened to in the car. The darkness actually helped ease his building headache a little. The aura had stopped as they’d pulled into the station, though that was perhaps because his attention was diverted into trying to placate Marie. After all, he was well enough, she suggested, to work, but not to take her out for the night. How could he explain that it was John-Joe’s final night? Tha. . .
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