For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

as possible so as to save him and his beloved town’s reputation. The car was scrapped without a trace, Noah was buried in secret under a blank stone – even the autopsy was carried out on the down-low. Grisly motherfucker wanted all the details.’ Quentin spoke with expertise. There was that lecturer again, except without the apologetic tone. He knew his class was captivated. ‘Most importantly, he got rid of you.’

Her eyes remained fixed on him, jaw limp.

‘Yeah, word spread of you and your brother requiring permanent care. “Always such a fragile girl.” In reality, he just wanted to put as many hundreds of miles between him and his beautiful son’s murderer as possible. Of course, you were still in your – come on, you know the words!’ He grinned at the silent Renata. ‘– vegetative state of unresponsive wakefulness, and so were none the wiser. They shipped you off to some nuthouse up north and forgot about you, kiddo. Put it all behind them.’ His lips quivered with excitement. ‘But I didn’t.’

He stood at the foot of her bed, fragmented sunbeams pointing over his shoulders like accusing fingers through the smoke. ‘I never forgot about you. It took some detective work; Daddy really covered his tracks, but I followed your progress.’ He stroked his chin. ‘Fifteen years in Manse Copse Psychiatric Institution in the north of Scotland: nine in a specialised unit set up just for you, six in the rehabilitation complex to gear you up for release. You were observed every step of the way, for their benefit more than yours. So they could…wait for it…study ya! You were an oddity, baby! A seventeen-year-old country bumpkin driven to random slaughter who sits drooling the same two words year after year? Horror Highway, Horror Highway, Horror Highway… Sure made tracking your progress easier. They kept calling my agent to find out why this nut was babbling the name of my book. Well, I was a good boy, Renata. I only observed from afar. Didn’t interfere in the little Wakefield girl’s recovery. After your first few years in the loony bin, your unresponsive state was replaced by an extreme dissociative psychogenic amnesia…translated: you forgot the whole fucking lot! Mind just blanked it all so you could get up and about again. Fascinated the doctors, from what I hear. Once up and about, you were an antisocial little freak, apparently; just sat scribbling in your room quite the thing, happy as Larry. They decided the only way for you to live a normal life was to feed the amnesia, let you believe some accident had put you in hospital. You ate that shit right up and carried on your scribbling. Then you popped off my radar. Was she dead? Was she back to normal? Was she out there caving in little boys’ skulls again? I eventually learnt they’d figured the only way to keep you believing this shit was to officially release you. After all, your body was fit as a fiddle. So they fling you onto an island in the middle of nowhere where nothing could trigger your memory or tip you off your tightrope of mental blockage – yeah, the rock was their idea, not yours. But how could they afford that? How could she afford that? I found my answer on the cover of a cheap paperback in an airport newsagent…’

‘Stop, please stop. I don’t understand, I don’t—’

‘THERE SHE IS,’ Quentin yelled. ‘THERE SHE IS, her name on the cover of a goddamn book, no less! Yeah, it looks like shit, but still, she’s writing?’ He slapped his cheeks in mock disbelief. ‘It takes a man to cry, Renata, and let me tell you I wept at that steaming bowl of irony served to me that day. What a wonderful world!’

His grin wavered. Suddenly he turned his back to her, slicking back his greying hair and straightening his tweed blazer. He cleared his throat and turned to face her again, expression composed. ‘All my life I’ve hunted the truth. Novel after novel I aimed for a note never before struck. My obsession cost me my marriage – basically, she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Truth this, truth that. Maybe you don’t either, maybe no one can but me. Regardless, I kept searching. I kept dangling that hook but all I could drag up was the same old rotten stories, same old recycled trash. And yet they all kept gobbling it up like the hungry fucks they are. I knew, though. I knew I was getting nowhere.’

He smiled down at her proudly, a scientist regarding his prize specimen. ‘I told you, Renata. I never forgot you. And one day it became clear, so clear. Matter can never be created nor destroyed, just recycled. Life, death, birth: it’s all just the same shit refashioned. How can you create truth out of nothing? I needed a vehicle for the fiction, just as the fiction was the vehicle of truth. It needed to be forged in reality, in true horror. It came so quick, so clear, as if gifted from above: you were the answer.’

‘Did you KILL HER?’ Renata yelled, jolting in the bed. ‘My mother, did you—’

Quentin’s fists thrust into the pillow on either side of her head as his face flew towards hers. ‘I burnt her, baby!’

She froze.

‘I burnt that bitch like a witch! Your little detective buddy’s been telling you porkies. There was no note left at the crime scene. I carved that Midnight, Midnight rhyme right into her wrinkly old flesh while she lay on that altar. Oh, I promise she was awake for it all. Had to carve it again after the fire, of course. Words were all charred and shit, really quite—’

Renata went for his throat. The drip yanked from her hand and left a trail of blood down the stiff bed covers. Far off in the distance she heard