LAST ONE ALIVE an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist (Detective Maddie Ives Book 7) by CHARLIE GALLAGHER

Author:CHARLIE GALLAGHER [GALLAGHER, CHARLIE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JOFFE BOOKS crime thrillers and mysteries
Published: 2022-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 49. Another Night

Wednesday, 9 November 2022

There is an ambulance that has arrived for next door, their truck pulled across the frontage of both our houses with lights left to pulse through the last of the darkness and straight into my living room. It is cold in here, cold and empty and not just because the sun is yet to rise on a new day. The radiator is long since switched off and this door wedged shut; another room stripped of all its life and warmth — radiator or not — another room I can’t bear to use. Even the carpet has a crunch to it under the sole of my shoe where dust has settled on dust.

All I can do is watch the flickering lights, an awkward sit on the arm of a sofa that used to take me laying down with my baby daughter sleeping peacefully on my chest, constant delight as she murmured and sighed. That is not a comfort I have ever found again. Certainly not as I sit here now with this ledger balanced on my thigh to note the latest activity involving next door.

Last night a car pulled up outside at dusk, two people with it, a man and a woman. Both coppers. They weren’t in uniform but they might as well have been. I’ve met a lot in my time, I’m not talking about Charles either; spend any time running a nightclub and you’ll get used to the way they pull up in their cars, the way they step out, their heads always up; surveying. Last night two coppers were surveying Betty Snow’s house and I still can’t think of a reason why.

It was enough to keep an old man awake wondering. I gave up on sleep in the end, chose a strong coffee and an early start in favour of getting more and more frustrated that sleep wouldn’t come. I thought I would be able to get on but instead I am stood in the shadows of a desolate living room, watching for an ambulance crew to reappear, totally unaware that they carry my fate just as much as that of Betty Snow.

The timing is not lost on me of course, it is the page before this one that contains Betty Snow’s promise scratched out in pencil, although it now feels like it wasn’t me that wrote it at all, or at least not willingly. It is almost like Betty Snow, as the apparition in a nightdress, wrote it for me, like maybe the ambulance is too late and an already dead Betty Snow and her unfinished business passed through the thin layers of brick and mortar to write out her promise again, to remind me of the contents of her last will and testament. Like I could ever forget.

Last night I waited for the police to leave while standing right here, the carer showed them out. Then I timed a walk to the bins when the police were gone but the

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