THE DYING DOLLS (Henry & Sparrow Book 1) by A D FOX

Author:A D FOX [FOX, A D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPARTILLUS
Published: 2021-01-13T22:00:00+00:00

20

‘Where were you between 4pm yesterday and 7am this morning?’

Lucas shivered uncontrollably. He was still in shock. It didn’t seem real. None of it seemed real. He kept thinking he could wind back time and reset everything; untangle all this mess and make it work properly; the way it should be. Nobody dead. Nobody missing. No dull staring eyes gazing lifelessly up at him through a broken tomb of stone.

He should never have agreed to help. He should never have led them to the body. What had he been thinking?

‘Lucas,’ said DCI Gary Phillips, sounding world weary. ‘It’s not a trick question. We need to tick your name off the list of suspects. If you can tell us where you were and what you were doing, that’s going to help us a lot.’

‘I was at home,’ he mumbled. ‘With Mum.’

‘And your mum can vouch for you, can she?’ asked the other one; the one called Sarah who smiled at him sympathetically.

Lucas closed his eyes. Could she? She probably would but the truth was she had been out for the count from mid-evening onwards. Mum did battle on the daily basis with the demons that whispered ‘Drink!’ in her head. She tended to lose the battle round about teatime. She was usually asleep on the sofa by 8pm. Occasionally she reached her bed before she lost consciousness but more often than not he would fetch her quilt and put it over the deeply drowsing form on the sofa, propping the cushions around her to keep her on her side so she wouldn’t choke if she was sick. Usually, sometime in the early hours, she would wake and stagger up to bed, taking the quilt with her, so that when the morning started it seemed like anyone else’s morning. She was a functioning alcoholic and often up at breakfast.

Anyone popping into the Henry household in the morning would see nothing much out of the ordinary. Joanna Henry would be getting ready for work and Lucas would be pouring cereal into a bowl and getting his school stuff together. If he looked quiet and withdrawn, well that wasn’t unusual for a 15-year-old. Of course, anyone with a good sense of smell might notice the sour scent of two bottles of Chablis still on his mother’s breath and maybe spot the shakes as she poured her first coffee of the day. But if anyone ever did, they didn’t let on.

So, no. Mum couldn’t vouch for him. And the truth was, he often did go out at night, meeting up with Zoe and Mabel or Eddie, sometimes Zac. In the summer they’d all hang out in the parks, misusing the little kids’ play area, or go off down the quarry, trying to slingshot the rats - which were as big as rabbits - or dare each other to climb its precarious cliffs. Sometimes he just hung out around his friends’ houses. He wished he’d done that last night. But Eddie and Zac had gone to the Odeon and he hadn’t joined them - he was broke - so there was no one to vouch for him but Mum.

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