Between the Lines

by S.J. Butler

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

The closer you are, the less you see . . .

When Kev's girlfriend is killed in a hit-and-run, he thinks he's suffered the worst.

Haunted by his past, Kev attempts to put his life back together, throwing himself into his new relationship with Stella and his job as a literary agent.

Then a book lands on his desk that changes everything. And he quickly realises his nightmare has only just begun.

Between the Lines is a darkly gripping psychological thriller, perfect for fans of Teresa Driscoll, K.L Slater and Shalini Bolland.

(P) 2022 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: August 6, 2020

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

‘It’s a point of no return,’ he said to himself.

Briefly closing his eyes, the man on the cliff shifted uneasily from toe to toe as if engaged in an awkward slow dance. His hands, thrust deep in the pockets of an ankle-length overcoat, fingered the cold assortment of stray coins, kneading them in his palms until warm, then letting them drop like winnings from a one-armed bandit. He stood restless, preoccupied and at the same time confused by what lay before him, as he struggled to link shapes, clouds, and terra firma. Slowly, he lifted his binoculars from his chest; rubbing the scar above his left eye he pulled the glasses close, wincing at the suddenness of hard metal on skin. Each time the wind blew in from the sea he could feel the salt setting on his pockmarked cheeks, puffed up like scarred boulders. Nervously checking his watch he returned to the tubular vision of his glasses, from left to right and back again, his shaking hands the only giveaway that they were being operated by someone not used to watching and waiting for something to happen.

Pushing his hair to one side he now surveyed further up the worn trail towards the headland which gave the appearance of a piece of embroidery, knitted together by the odd chalk vein or sodden patch of grass. Like an unwanted blemish on a newly washed white sheet, a man with a dog spilled into his line of vision, rambling down the path five metres from the edge, the dog zig-zagging around his master, frantically sniffing every cranny in its path. The owner, a stooped elderly man with a tartan cap, barked instructions to the spaniel, who continued to make imaginary triangles as he went – the words lost on the rising wind as if bellowed from the mouth of a silent movie star.

Tiring of the man and dog, he switched his attention to the ocean, expecting to see a ship or maybe a submarine, but saw only a vast restless greyness which threatened the white cliff face with slow rhythmic slaps, each clap reminding those safely above of the violence of the waves below. Hearing a far-off cry, he anxiously swung towards where two children, a boy and a girl, appeared to sprint towards the edge only to suddenly stop as if commanded to do so. To the right their mother sprung into view, running and waving her arms wildly; her red cheeks and cross expression a symptom of the anguish within as she grabbed both toddlers roughly by their mittened hands, marching them away and no doubt explaining the dangers of running towards the fall of a cliff.

He stayed with the woman for some time, admiring the light lines around her eyes. Her flushed beauty making him want to watch her more. Lowering his glasses, the mother and her children became mere dots on a rain-drenched landscape; lost in time; now further away in a distant parallel world they drifted slowly out of sight as they disappeared down the coastal path towards the car park.

Alone, the man on the cliff swayed like a meditating Buddha, caught at times on the wind which threatened more than it blew. Allowing his weight to be held, his billowing long coat a sprung sail, he felt as if he were floating on air as the gulls above showed him how it was done, gliding up and down on the currents of air, their cries ringing in his ears like the songs of sirens. Looking down at his six-foot-two block of a body, his gaze arrived at his scuffed, muddy, brown brogues and focused on the light scratches around the tips and the oil stain on the right toe he could never get out.

‘What you looking at?’ asked Steve from Accounts who’d shuffled over with two pints of lager, locked together like a rack of snooker balls.

‘Me shoes; look,’ motioned Kev, nodding downwards, ‘the burger dripped all over me new brogues.’

‘You’ll never get that out.’

‘What?’

They looked at each other for a moment, their words lost, muddled and competing with the booming disco coming from the front of the riverboat.

‘Me shoes,’ he managed again, staggering forward as a strong current of the Thames decided to ripple and lurch in another direction.

‘Hold on a minute.’ Steve expertly placed the pints down on a spare table. ‘Just a second,’ he said holding down the bile in the pit of his stomach as best he could. He didn’t make it though, puking up in the bin besides the gents as the rest of the partygoers from an assortment of companies cheered him loudly as they punched the air in between singing a chorus of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’.

Kevin Parker, reasonably competent literary agent, was out celebrating his colleague Rachel Winkler’s successful book launch: debut novelist Emma Brockenhurst had got a glowing mention on Richard and Judy’s Book of the Week slot with Spider in the Garden.

‘How’s your list going?’ Rachel had asked him earlier in the evening, when everything was relatively normal and each had had a complimentary white wine plonked into their hands as they stepped from the gang plank.

‘Fine,’ he’d answered unconvincingly. The list was a disaster: two plodding crime novels, a debut thriller and a book of jokes by a clapped-out old comedian who was making something of a comeback due to the resurgence in un-PC comedy. He always thought it strange how they’d both started out as literary agents around the same time: Rachel coming straight from university with a First in English, while he’d come the same route with a 2.1, before slogging it out in the lower echelons of publishing, working in circulation, eventually gaining a position at the venerated Hargreaves & Bennett Literary Agency.

Now, while his colleagues’ writers were winning awards, he was still struggling, picking up the pieces and playing catch-up. Sonia Allen’s The Wave of Time had been his best success so far, and sadly his only dinner party story. He desperately needed something fresh and intensely absorbing (his boss’s words, not his).

Fuck the YA route, thought Kev, as one of the company directors threw some glowing comment Rachel’s way. Anything but Young Adult Fiction; why, he didn’t know exactly, but he detested the genre, even if it did sell well as Rachel had demonstrated time and time again.

‘That’s better.’ It was Steve again. ‘Drink up,’ he said handing Kev a whiskey which he’d somehow acquired in between throwing up and returning from the gents.

There was something very normal and uncomplicated about Steve that Kev liked, or rather, that reminded him of his old comprehensive. Sadly, apart from his mum and dad, he only met confident, well-educated literary types nowadays, who were far detached from the world he used to know. He was also drawn to Steve’s hook nose, Buddy Holly glasses, and nasal whine which was used to good effect if he wanted to entertain or annoy those around him. Kev was sure the other agents thought it strange that he preferred to hang out after work with Steve from Accounts rather than Rachel or Josh from Notting Hill.

‘Oh, hi, Josh,’ sighed Kev. Annoyingly always on a high, Josh had just crept up behind Kev and flicked his ear.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘I’d know that limp flick anywhere,’ he managed, slurring the last part as he turned and flung his arm around Josh’s shoulder, dragging him in for a hug.

‘Anyone would think it was your party,’ remarked Josh smiling and showing a very white, straight set of teeth in a perfectly square chiselled jaw as he managed to slip Kev’s drunken grip.

‘Some might say he’s just a geezer who loves to party, hey, Kev?’ whined Steve pushing up his glasses which kept slipping over the bridge of his nose as his head bobbed to the music.

Barely acknowledging Steve, Josh continued. ‘Do you know who I met today?’

‘Go on,’ said Kev, knocking back another shot which had materialised in front of him.

‘Holly Watkins Lockhart,’ he announced proudly before clicking his fingers and making the shape of a gun as he shot off an imaginary round of bullets.

‘Wow, Holly,’ mimicked Kev winking at Steve. ‘Isn’t she . . .’ What had happened? Ah, there they are, he almost said, as the words began to form in the pint glass of his mind. ‘Isn’t she a commissioning editor at . . .’

‘Penguin,’ interrupted Josh, red-faced, the affirmation he’d wanted drastically sucked from his clutches by a few fading brain cells in Kev’s frontal lobe.

‘Look at me shoes,’ he began again his back fully arched as he struggled to touch his toes.

‘Burger juice,’ added Steve.

‘Yeah, bastard burger . . .’

‘Juice,’ helped out Josh smarmily before making a quick beeline for the company director who’d been gushing at Rachel.

‘Tosser!’ said Steve as Josh sidled off.

‘Ah, he’s alright, he’s just . . .’

‘A tosser.’

‘Yeah, a tosser.’

For a while that was all he could remember. Though he vaguely remembered spending some time in the gents, where he’d met Josh again who’d offered him a line of coke. Whether he’d taken it or not, he couldn’t think, but he was sure there was now a numb bitter taste at the back of his throat.

12.01 a.m. ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ by Sophie Ellis-Bextor. The jacket was off, neatly folded in a safe place, as was his waistcoat. Spinning, lost in the music, he tried to make sense of his surroundings. Steve, he’d last seen sitting with Cathy (also from Accounts) looking as if they were having a serious heart-to-heart. This, he was sure, had something to do with her running mascara. Things suddenly seemed slower than usual as he pumped out his arms and moved in time to the beat as best he could. It was as if he was everywhere, gliding like a bird over the dance floor. As Steve had remarked before, Kev could dance himself sober. It was something he’d done from a very young age.

Back when his mum and dad went dancing in Streatham they always took Kev and his sister Alice along. Though nothing like his sloppy repertoire of moves now, back then they’d copied as best they could the moves of The Temptations, The Drifters, and The Four Tops – dancing was a bit more stylish back then. Now, he threw himself around the floor until that time when what you felt, said and did and what you thought you may hear others say was of little consequence. The faces (mostly happy), bodies, muscles flexing, joints springing, sweat pumping, twisting, moving within the haze of drink. Slow it down and it’s really not much fun at all: ritualised, hardly spontaneous fun.

‘Dance, brother, dance!’ he shouted wondering where the words had sprung from as he smiled gormlessly at another face he didn’t know.

The pulsating beat was now pouring into his ears from the pounding speakers he’d got too close to, while the brightly coloured light provided an almost hypnotic, Morse-code flashing dance. Whose tongue is this in my head? he thought, landing in another place across the dance floor. Whose hips am I holding on to? he wondered as he became suddenly disentangled from the warm curve of a pencil skirt. The music was now a wall of noise booming in his ears, as another pair of arms sprung like roots around his neck; a new smell; a different perfume; her hair splayed, bouncing and hitting him in the face as they jumped and clutched and finally collapsed in each other’s arms as the song ended. Then another tongue in the back of his throat (or was it the same one?) along with the bitter taste and gurgling whiskey fumes.

Back in the dark spot, in the corner of the dance floor with his brown pin-striped jacket, a young woman sits on his lap as he cradles her bottom and someone flicks his ear. The yearning, the feeling that he’s between the sheets but he’s not, as his hands move up and down, rubbing, trying to colour in the curves and make sense of the warm body which feels as if it’s attached to him like a limpet on a rock. The sensation; the need; the frustration; the constant desire for; the desperation; the fumble for the unattainable. He’s there for some time, lost, hopelessly drunk, stranded as if a beached whale on a lonely shore, scarred, his lips lacerated by sticky red lipstick and a longing for home.

1.15: They’re all gone; lost in a bad dream; dispensed with; left spinning in a throbbing skull somewhere on the lonely river. Alone outside on the deck the distant thud of the speakers are just audible above the soft slurps of the Thames as the boat ducks under Waterloo Bridge for the tenth time. Pint of water in hand and trying to quell the taste of vomit in his throat, Kev pulled up the collar of his jacket and marvelled at the ink black river and sky which had merged into one, only separated by the embankment of lights and looming, lit buildings on either side appearing as if leaning in like lurking riverside branches and reeds. The blues and greys in between the architecture blurred by the fuzzy bulbs decorating the Queen Elizabeth Hall rising into the night sky as if mixed on a French Impressionist’s palette.

‘Penny?’ The word rang clear and would have leapt into the sky if it had been a starry night. Turning, Kev could just make out the silhouette of a woman, her hair tied into a high bun, smoking a cigarette. Whatever she was wearing it gave the impression of edgy elegance in a vintage 1950s style. Moving out of the shadow, the woman squinted before opening her eyes to reveal their wide, chocolate brown opulence. She was dark; petite; mysterious-looking with a Parisian aura about her.

‘For your thoughts,’ she said.

‘Ah, just sobering up,’ shrugged Kev, trying to appear casual while still admiring her.

‘Are you with the marketing company?’ she asked, moving closer and standing by his side as he leaned against a warm steel hatch which had some kind of boiler humming under it.

‘No, the Literary Agency; there’s only a few of us – celebrating a colleague’s success,’ he said glancing down at his shoes. ‘And you?’

‘The Design Company: Blue Larsson. We’re the ones where the women have pale faces and red lipstick and the men wear glasses with the top buttons of their check shirts done up tight,’ she said, consciously pushing her hip to one side and taking a deep drag on her cigarette.

‘Is that a pen in your hair?’ It had been bothering him ever since she’d moved into the light. If it was a pen, it was a look he liked: that arty student or silently moving effortlessly between tables, professional waitress look.

‘It’s a pencil,’ she laughed as the creases around her eyes danced and then disappeared as her muscles relaxed. ‘I like to draw.’

‘An artist?’ he said scratching his stubbly chin. ‘I mean – you draw.’

‘Yes, I draw,’ she giggled.

‘What do you draw?’ A game of verbal ping-pong seemed a good idea. In his experience a lot of good conversations started out this way.

‘Eyes.’

‘Eyes?’

‘Yes, I love eyes. I do large charcoal drawings. If I see a pair I like, I sketch them, then upsize them later.’

‘Big art?’

‘Yes, big art. And if I have my camera I just zoom in like this,’ she added, making a tube shape with her hand, putting it up to her eye and pushing her head closer to his as he laughed.

He thought about asking her if she wanted to draw his, but knew it would sound a bit predictable. Anyway, he was still doing his best James Dean: back to the wall and right foot up against it, coolly supporting him. He was quietly flirting without being too obvious.

‘So you’re an art school graduate?’ he said, aware that others were slowly making their way out onto the deck, their conversations lost on the night air.

‘Yeah, a bit of a giveaway isn’t it?’

‘Don’t they just spend their grant money and form indie bands?’ he said before realising how old-fashioned the comment sounded.

‘Kind of thing my dad would say.’

He liked her; knew instantly that she was different, had a uniqueness that couldn’t be bottled or imitated convincingly. Some people just had that beauty about them: that verve and mindset which made them pieces of self-contained, ever changing art.

Hoping she had an exotic or French-sounding name, he asked her.

‘Eve Blake,’ she answered, holding out her pale hand. He liked the name, it suited her. Great if her dad was a William like mine, he thought, as he felt the warmth of her touch and a tingling sensation in his stomach which he was sure wasn’t reflux.

‘And you?’ she asked.

‘Oh, Kevin Parker; Kev.’ He always introduced himself this way, as if his Christian name was somehow offensive.

‘Kev Parker: Literary Agent.’ She said it slowly and deliberately.

‘No, no one well-known,’ he quickly added anticipating her next question.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you thought I was going to ask you about your writers?’

‘Weren’t you?’ he said, feeling a bit foolish and less cool than before as his foot suddenly slipped down the wall and made him wobble on the spot.

‘No; though it was probably going to be my next one.’

‘Well, to answer your next question then: Sonia Allen.’

‘Oh, yeah, The Wave of Time,’ she replied excitedly.

‘You read it?’

‘No.’

They laughed.

‘Is that a scar above your eye?’ she asked suddenly as, as if on cue, another passing riverboat illuminated his face, honking its horn as it tore by.

Instantly conscious, lit for all to see, he put his hand up and stroked his chin.

‘I like it. Can I touch it?’ she asked, rolling up her fingers into a lens shape again.

‘Sure,’ he said.

As she ran her finger over the smooth laceration he felt a cold pleasant ache above his brow and behind his socket, like he’d just swallowed ice cream and got a brain-freeze. He didn’t for a minute think it strange that she would ask such a thing.

‘How’d you get it?’ She was inquisitive in a friendly, good cop kind of way – the type you’d readily spill your guts to.

‘Fight in school over a girl named Jane.’

‘Chivalrous.’

‘Stupid – scarred for life for a girl who cared for someone else.’

‘Unrequited love.’

‘Something like that.’ He smiled, noting something else crossing her brow as if her mind appeared to come to a decision about the next thing she was about to say. ‘You like to dance then?’ she said cautiously. ‘I saw you dancing. I watched you for some time,’ she blurted.

‘Right,’ he said simply, with the vague inclination that she probably saw more than he would have liked. After all he had been that dancing fool: the drunken two-step, fox-trot-dog.

‘The other women: they seemed to like you – a lot,’ she said with a mischievous smile, but the lowering of her eyelids as if in prayer on the final word seemed to reveal more.

He’d been trying to link it all together before she’d appeared on the deck. There had definitely been two women he’d snogged. Cringingly, he remembered snippets of dirty dancing and a slow dance which had perhaps a little too much bum-squeezing, and then the elusive, yet-to-be-comprehended fumble in the shadows which he couldn’t place.

‘Yeah, bit embarrassing, that part of the evening.’ He felt like saying sorry; was even guilty that she’d been a voyeur of his drunken escap. . .