BLOOD ROSES: How do you find a killer in a city of the dead? (The Warsaw Quartet Book 1) by Douglas Jackson

Author:Douglas Jackson [Jackson, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

Spring 1940

The Artist had cultivated her for three days, like a gardener coaxing a rose to bloom.

He had been right about the uniform. In one way or another it gave him power over them. This one had been easy because it held attraction for her, rather than fear. She had been brought up to respect what it stood for and the men who wore it. The symbolism it projected was like a magnetic pull. A combination of authority and the very essence of the man she had been taught to revere since kindergarten. She was only on the verge of puberty, but the way she stared at the silver trinkets that adorned it contained an eroticism, a love, verging on the sexual, for the uniform, and a curiosity about the man who wore it.

He hated her.

On the outside she was beautiful, with the silken waves of blonde hair, ripe peach complexion and glowing blue eyes he had first fallen in love with as a boy. But beneath the veneer she was the same as all the rest. It had taken him years to understand that.

It had begun in his third year at grammar school. He had admired Christa since the early years in primary. A precocious and lively girl, she lived a few doors away and it was natural that they should walk together to school. Natural, too, that he should carry her satchel; his mother had brought him up to be a gentleman. To the boy, her eyes shone like glistening sapphires and her pale skin glowed gold in the summer sunshine and when she smiled it made his stomach turn somersaults of pure joy. His mother had called him handsome, a perfect specimen of Aryan manhood, and he had believed her. One day, he would marry the girl of his dreams.

He had watched Christa change and grow. At first, it was a matter of poise and confidence, a certainty in her ability to control the boys in class by the force of her personality and some all but imperceptible transformation in the way she moved. Then came the physical: a gradual increase in the proportions of her lower half which began to draw the eyes of not just her classmates, but her teachers, too: the swelling in her blouse seemed to bud and become full grown over the length of a season. He was hypnotised by every millimetre of these changes and the very fact of them wrought a breathlessness and a reaction beyond his control every time they were in proximity. Even the scent of her seemed to reach out to him and draw him to her. Eventually, he realised he loved her.

He decided to tell her on her fifteenth birthday.

The Artist suppressed a groan of anguish at the memory. The boys in the class were a rough crowd and he had never made friends with them. When they wanted to go for long marches in the countryside all he wanted to do was study. When they wrestled with each other he stayed a step back, declining to become involved.

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