SEVEN DEADLY THINGS (Henry & Sparrow Book 3) by A FOX (best value ebook reader TXT) 📗

name and also insisted that Tessa and Mickey were genuine Norfolk inbreds because he’d seen their webbed toes. Oh god… the frogs… the glued-up feet! Kate shivered as she made the connection.

She remembered she hadn’t enjoyed it then, watching Talia and Craig explode with laughter. She had tried to make them nicer — but they were pissed and silly and exhausted from having to be so upbeat and cheery with all the punters for a twelve-hour stretch. If she was honest, she had giggled a bit too, because Bill had natural comic timing and clever mimicry, and it was hard to resist. Of course, none of them had known the targets of their spiteful comedy were listening in.

Martin, tanked up on JD and Coke, had joined in the fun. The girl had fixated on him, like so many did as he strode around the pool in his lifeguard trunks and vest, tall, ripped and good-looking. He’d told them he had asked her to leave the water. Something had happened… what was it?

Oh fuck. The note on the sanitary towel. Now she remembered. ‘I had to get her out before she turned the water pink,’ Martin had spluttered into his glass. ‘She was getting her fuckin’ period and she hadn’t worn a tampon.’

His words sliced through Kate’s mind, still vivid seven years on, because she had felt caved in with pity for the poor girl, who hadn’t been more than fifteen at the time. Imagine being hauled out of a public pool and asked to leave because you were bleeding into it. The horror was palpable then and it still was now. Shit. She was starting to get it.

‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ she called up, while testing the blocked door again and reaching the sinking conclusion that she could not shift it on her own. ‘We were thoughtless little pricks, all of us. Is that why you made Martin write on the sanitary towel? Because of what happened in the pool? To get revenge for your sister?’

‘Oh — you picked that up, did you?’ he sneered. ‘With your special detective powers?’

‘People forget the stuff they do,’ she said. ‘Especially when they’re ashamed of it. They blot it out. We weren’t much older than your sister, were we? We were all hardly more than kids.’

‘Even after the pool,’ said Mike, ‘she kept trying. She so wanted to fit in, you see, because she thought you lot meant so much to me. She was wrong. SHE was the only one who mattered. But she kept trying. She said Julie talked to her. She went to one of Julie’s classes and Julie gave her advice. Julie said she could be quite pretty if she just lost a bit of weight.’ He spat out the last five words with a dark venom and Kate closed her eyes and shivered, picturing Julie with her throat and mouth choked with cold lard.

‘That’s when she stopped eating properly,’ Mike said. ‘That’s exactly the day she started to become anorexic.’

‘Oh god, Mike, I’m sorry,’ said Kate. She meant it, too.

‘Why should you be sorry? You didn’t tell her she was fat, did you? You didn’t take the piss out of her clothes, either. That was Talia. Talia saw her in the bar with me, wearing her favourite dress. The yellow one. Oh, she made a big fuss of it — nearly had us both fooled. And then you came in and she gave you a sneaky look, which she thought we didn’t notice — but we could see it in the mirror in the bar. She was just taking the piss, as usual. It broke Tessa’s confidence in two, that did. Do you remember that? Do you remember the dress? You might have seen it today. It looked better on Tessa, don’t you think? Tessa looked beautiful in it. Talia looked like a fucking whore.’

‘Oooh, shit,’ murmured Kate, hearing the fraying sanity in his voice and losing hope that she might reason with him and end his vendetta. She sank down in a drift of sand which was now covering the legs of Nikki and Craig, and started feverishly working away at the cuffs behind them. There was nothing else she could think of to do.

Craig was making distressed noises about Talia. ‘She’s alive,’ Kate said to them both, sensing a little give in the cuff attaching Nikki to the pipes. ‘We got there before he could finish her off. She’ll be OK.’ She just hoped neither of them would ask about Bill.

‘It could have been all right, you know,’ went on Mike. ‘Because she kept trying, my little sis. She didn’t give up, because she wanted to show me she could be part of the gang. She didn’t know that I was never in your gang — I just pretended I was.’

‘What happened to her?’ Kate asked, although she was beginning to guess.

‘You were meant to meet her,’ he said. ‘You said she could come along on one of your stupid little trips along the beach, checking out the bunkers. Do you remember, Kate?’

And now Kate did remember. It had been one of those throwaway things you say to someone who is on the periphery of a group, listening in, anxious to be included. Mike — or Mickey as they’d known him back then when he was just a Bluecoat, like the rest of them — had been there with Tessa, listening in to the chat but not really taking part. Kate had been in the cafe next to the amusement arcade, on a break with Talia and Craig, if she remembered rightly, and also Mickey and his sister. Craig had suggested a tour of the bunkers and the cliffs, with snacks and drinks, on their half day off. They’d set the time and the meeting and agreed on it and she, noticing the close attention Mickey and Tessa were paying to these plans, had said, ‘OK… let’s all meet on the beach at eleven, then.’ She had included