No Place Like Home Jane Renshaw (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📖

Owen inside. They had tied his wrists and ankles together behind his back.

She was pulling open the gate but she was too late, they were jumping into the cab and the van was moving off…

Her bike.

She’d left it propped against the wall of the house.

She jumped onto it and pedalled like mad up the street after the van’s tail lights. The van was swerving all over the road, and at one point did a three-sixty, wheels spinning as it turned in a tight circle, and she could hear them whooping, Dad and Fraser, in the cab, and oh Christ, Owen was in there, in the back of the van, being thrown about!

But at least all the swerving around meant she was able to keep up on her bike.

She was panting, though, by the time the van’s tail lights slowed, far in front of her, on the dead-end road through the woods that led to the Old Bridge of Spey. Why were they taking him here?

Her thighs ached, her leg muscles screaming at her to stop, but she pushed on, sobbing with the effort, forcing the wheels of her bike to keep turning, standing on the pedals and then sitting and then standing.

When she reached the bridge she could see them in the moonlight, Dad’s shaved head a pale disc, Owen’s naked body – Oh God, he was over the bridge! Dad was dangling him over the edge!

‘I shouted,’ Kirsty whispered. ‘I shouted his name. Owen’s name. Dad said I distracted him, that Owen suddenly wriggled when I shouted and Dad let go of his feet by accident. He said they were just putting the frighteners on him. He hadn’t meant to let him go. But I saw him, Bram. I saw him fling Owen away like he was something to be discarded, a piece of rubbish he was chucking in the river. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t.’

Bram couldn’t find words. He just reached over and grabbed Kirsty’s hand and the two of them sat there together, staring out of the windscreen at the cars and lorries whizzing past.

This was horrendous.

But somehow he wasn’t having a hard time believing it. It certainly explained the rage against David that had been simmering in Kirsty, just under the surface, ever since they’d moved up here and she’d been forced to spend day after day in her father’s company. And then when Max had arrived and been pulled into David’s orbit… No wonder she had been freaking out. No wonder she had been so dead set against David taking action against whoever was harassing them. No wonder she didn’t want Max and Phoebe to live with her parents.

‘Why on earth did you want to move back?’

She sighed. ‘For Mum’s sake, mainly. And this is my home, Bram, it’s always been my home – why should I be exiled from it because of what Dad did? And I thought… I thought I could get past it. Come to terms with it. Tell myself, as a parent, that he was only protecting his daughter from a sexual predator. I can see, now, how much of a shock it would have been for him to find out that this man, this twenty-three-year-old man, had seduced his fifteen-year-old daughter, or so he thought.’ She stared into Bram’s eyes. ‘But it wasn’t Owen. That’s the awful thing. It was me. I was the one who went after him. I was obsessed with him, I used to follow him about town–’

‘You were a child, and he was an adult. No matter how “obsessed” with him you were, he shouldn’t have had a relationship with you. A sexual relationship. Any sort of relationship.’

‘If I hadn’t pressured Owen to be my boyfriend, to have sex with me… I was a wild child back then, Bram. I first had sex when I was thirteen.’

‘With Scott?’

She shook her head. ‘Other boys. I went after Owen. If I hadn’t – if I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have died.’ She choked on a sob.

No wonder Kirsty had been so broken at uni. No wonder she hadn’t wanted another relationship. There was the trauma of what her own father and brother had done to Owen, but also her own feelings of guilt.

Bram took her in his arms. ‘You were only a child. None of it was your fault.’

‘I hated him so much,’ she wailed. ‘I hated Dad so much. The only thing that kept me going, after that night, through the years of school I had left, the years I had to stay here living in the same house as him, was the thought of escaping to university.’

‘Which was why you chose UCL. As far away from here as possible.’

She nodded.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said, holding her against him.

She hugged him back so tight it hurt. ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell anyone. Dad made me promise not to tell Mum, and I never have – it would destroy her if she knew. And… Oh, Bram, I was so ashamed! It was my fault Dad did it!’

‘No,’ he said fiercely.

‘It was too hard,’ she choked. ‘Living with it, with what we’d done but also the lie, having to make out I had no idea how Owen had died. It was too hard, pretending, with Mum – I couldn’t do it. When I went to uni in London it was the perfect excuse to spend the minimum time possible at home – it was so far away, I could reasonably limit my trips home to a few times a year, and I pretended I was caught up in this mad social whirl and was busy with studying so couldn’t stay long when I did go back… But it was awful, Bram! Mum was so hurt. She thought I had… had left them behind, had more interesting people to spend time with. Then when you and I got together, I used that as an excuse too… I’ll never forget what Mum said to me when she