Caught in the Web Emmy Ellis (best ereader for textbooks txt) 📖

There were many people leaving condolences, so word had got out that she was dead. That was a shame, but sometimes in order to be happy in life you had to upset someone else. It appeared that Gordon had upset hundreds of people in order to be infused with wellbeing, but again, that was a shame.

He thought of the spiders, the moths, Anita, the men—all of them had had their turn in the spotlight, which was more than he’d ever had. Unless he counted being under her or The Man’s spotlight when their hateful attention had been turned on him. But the recent people’s spotlight time… Was what he’d done a way to not only gain contentment, but also to show the world what had happened to him, how he’d been treated and forgotten, left to the mercy of a woman who hadn’t given a shit about him? Did he want someone to catch him so he could tell them everything? Get some sympathy? Find someone who cared?

I don’t know. Really, I don’t.

Anita’s timeline came back into focus. Bored with reading how wonderful Anita had been—and she had been, he just didn’t need to be told that several hundred times—he reverted to his favourite page, in need of some more memes.

When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right things a chance to catch you.

That one was unsettling. Gordon wasn’t sure why he didn’t like it, but he didn’t have time to work it out. A waitress was coming towards him with his plate of pie and chips in one hand and his tea on a tray in the other. He waited while she placed it all in front of him and walked off, then he got up to collect a knife and fork wrapped in a white paper napkin that was in a grey cutlery tub on a trolley beside the bar. He picked up a salt shaker and selected a sachet of tomato ketchup—a little ‘fuck you’ to her, who hadn’t liked him eating red sauce as a child—plus a sachet of vinegar, then returned to his seat.

He glanced out of the window. The police car was still there, as was William’s Ford, but no one stood on the pavement. His flat door was ajar, which bothered him somewhat as heating was expensive and all the cold would be creeping up the stairs by now.

Gordon tucked into his dinner, the pie reminiscent of the homemade ones Gran used to bake. Since she’d gone, he’d found it difficult to enjoy his food. Nothing ever came close to hers. He’d tried to replicate her meals from a notebook he’d found amongst her things after her death, recipes she’d filled out by hand in her getting-older-by-the-day scrawl. Maybe his oven, which was electric, didn’t cook things as well as her gas one had. Or maybe he just wasn’t a chef and never would be. But this pie—yes, it was fitting that it tasted like Gran’s. Fitting that she was here with him in some form, especially today.

Gran would have understood why more people had to die. She’d have known why he’d done it. And if Gran would have approved, Gordon had nothing to feel guilty about.

Gran was good. She was kind.

And she’d loved him.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Burgess widened his eyes at a row of school exercise books that stood side by side on the shelf of a somewhat outdated teak cabinet. The furniture was odd, out of place in this decade—even the last three decades—and he made a mental note to ask Mr Ustav if he’d furnished the place or whether Gordon had brought it all with him. The items fitted Mr Ustav’s age during the time these things would have been in fashion.

Now, though, they resembled something found in an older person’s home—someone who hadn’t moved with the times and had been unable to let their ancient possessions go. For a young man to own the beige velvet wingback chairs, the matching sofa, all with elaborate Edwardian-style wooden legs, was strange. Burgess had expected something modern—leather sofas, glass shelving, or white IKEA pieces—not this stroll back down memory lane.

His mother had owned similar furniture back in the day, but she’d kept up with the trends and updated her home to suit each new fad that had come along. Burgess recalled his nan having this type of stuff, too, from the two-tiered, oval teak coffee table to the revolting Chinese rug beneath it, the cream-coloured tassels of which were frayed, some missing. An old electrical fire complete with seriously fake coals moulded from a piece of plastic stood inside a wooden surround that tried to emulate a posh mantel but failed miserably. The tiles on it were mustard, and the electrical cord was black-and-white-striped material, not the usual white or black flex of today.

He’d walked into a time warp.

But the school books, they were what captivated him the most. Written on the slim rounded spines in tiny, childish handwriting were years, starting from around the time Burgess had first joined the force. Curiously, but further adding to the mounting evidence, there was a gap of sixteen years between two of the books, and he pulled out the most recent, dreading what he’d find inside.

She’s back. In my head. The bitch is back.

BITCH.

FUC  NG BI CH!

Fucking bitch, he presumed, although why it hadn’t been fully spelt out was a mystery. What had been written didn’t startle Burgess so much as the way the pen had been used. The words had been dug into the paper, sort of carved out, by either a heavy-handed person or someone with severe anger issues. Parts of the page were torn from the vigour with which the writer had wielded the pen.

A drawing beneath the words, of a woman who appeared to be snarling, had each line thickened by several passes with the