The Stepson: A psychological thriller with a twist you won't see coming by Jane Renshaw

Author:Jane Renshaw [Renshaw, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkubator Books
Published: 2021-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

She was standing again at the door. The white panelled kitchen door with no handle. She needed to get in there. She needed her family to open the door.

‘Mum! Dad! Dennis! John!’

She thumped on the door with the thing in her right hand.

Thump thump thump!

It was heavy and made of metal, the thing in her hand. It had a big, wicked-looking hook on one end.

It was a big crowbar.

The next day, very early in the morning, while Nick was closeted in the study making trades, Lulu set off on a walk in a soft drizzle, striding away from the house up the farm track. The fields here were so lush, such a contrast to the parched land at Braemar Station. The air smelt of damp earth and verdant undergrowth. To her left was grazing land, cattle turning lazily to watch her pass by and, beyond them, sheep and the stark hump of the bare hilltop. To the right was a sea of oats, green tinged with yellow ochre, the surface rippling in places as a little breeze got up.

It was hard to imagine that this rural idyll had ever been part of The Debatable Lands, which must have been like some sort of dystopian, sci-fi nightmare. But it had been real. And it had happened here. Nick’s ancestors, probably, had been caught up in it all.

She walked up the edge of the oats, up a slope to a little knoll covered in beech trees, and sat on the weathered, bone-grey smoothness of a fallen tree under a sheltering beech canopy, looking back down the fields to the trees that screened Sunnyside from view.

Oh God – was this the ‘top field’ Yvonne had spoken about?

She jumped to her feet and ran back down the edge of the field, the breath tearing in and out of her lungs. How could Yvonne think that Nick – Nick – might have murdered his own family? She was his aunt. Surely she should know him better than that?

But she didn’t, of course, because she’d never taken the trouble.

Oh, Nick! The only blood relative he had left didn’t just dislike him, she thought he was some kind of monster.

By the time she got back to Sunnyside, she was sobbing.

The study door came open and Nick was standing there, hair slightly rumpled, eyebrows raised in that gently enquiring way of his, ready to hear all about what was going on with her, ready to provide a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, an ally against the world who would always be in her corner.

He was so kind, so empathetic.

How could Yvonne not see that?

He strode across the hall and swept her into his arms. ‘What the hell’s happened?’

‘Nothing! Nothing.’

He held her away from him, tipping her chin with one finger and contemplating her gravely, just a hint of a tender smile lifting his lips. ‘Funny sort of nothing.’

‘Yvonne . . . Yvonne said something to me last night, and I can’t believe . . . I can’t believe your own aunt would think something so terrible.

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