Cut to the Bone by Roz Watkins

Author:Roz Watkins [Watkins, Roz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

30

I dropped my death-by-cake and pressed the phone to my ear. Hannah looked at me wide-eyed.

‘They’ve … it’s horrible …’ Daniel’s voice was shaking. ‘They’ve put … stuff on my caravan. My friend’s called the police and they’re on the way, but I thought … after what they did to Gary …’

‘I’ll come to you. I’m in Gritton. Get yourself somewhere safe with other people.’

I phoned to check that uniforms were on their way, gulped down a glass of water, grabbed my stuff, and said a hurried goodbye to Hannah.

I pushed through the tea room door, and my phone rang again. Jai. I answered while running to my car.

‘I just finished talking to Violet’s friend, Izzy,’ Jai said. ‘Remember we both had a feeling she wasn’t telling us the whole story? Well, we were right. There was a secret relationship. Violet made Izzy promise on her mother’s life not to tell anyone, but eventually my charm was too much for her.’

‘All right, Jai,’ I gasped. ‘We all know about your charm. Who the hell was it?’

‘To be honest, I’m not sure if it was my charm or the fact she’s totally bloody terrified because he’s now dead with a pig’s head mask on him.’

‘Gary? But we think he’s Violet’s father! She was having an affair with him?’ I tried to imagine Violet’s feelings if she’d discovered that the man she’d been having a relationship with was not only her father but had raped her mother. And what about Gary? How must he have felt if he found out the girl he was sleeping with was his daughter?

‘Not sure you’d call it an affair,’ Jai said, ‘but she hooked up with him, according to Izzy.’

‘God.’

‘There’s more. Gary told Violet a secret. He made her swear never to tell anyone.’

I arrived at the car and clicked it unlocked. ‘A secret? Do we know any more than that?’

‘Violet told Izzy it was a secret about the Pale Child.’

I hopped into my car, opened all the windows and drove rather too fast up the main road through the village. A secret about the Pale Child. Everything kept coming back to the Pale Child. But it made no sense. Who was the girl in Hannah’s video? Wasn’t the Pale Child supposed to be a ghost?

I drove down a side road. A sign for a school hung from a red-brick building, and a couple of children stood on the grass outside. They were oddly still. I looked again. Not children. Bollards in the shape of children, positioned firmly in the uncanny valley. Like the sinkhole in the road into the village, they were presumably intended to slow drivers down and prevent accidents, but I nearly crashed into a railing, freaking out at how sinister they were.

I called Jai back, and talked over his attempt at a greeting. ‘What the hell is it with this village? All the railings and gates and ways to make you slow down. We’ve been sidetracked by the whole meat thing and the Animal Vigilantes.

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