Girl:Broken Read online

  Girl:Broken

  S. Williams

  Copyright © 2021 S. Williams

  * * *

  The right of S. Williams to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2021 by Bloodhound Books.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  * * *

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

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  Print ISBN 978-1-914614-37-8

  Contents

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  Also by S. Williams

  July

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part II

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part III

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  December

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

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  Also by S. Williams

  Only You

  For Josephine

  Forever

  People will never stop dying and being destroyed.

  — Proverbs 27:20

  International Children’s Bible (ICB)

  July

  Rain

  The rain is coming straight down like it’s from a tap. A million taps. There’s no wind to feel, no distraction to be had; just the steady downpour. Constant and unstoppable. As if someone’s punched a hole in the sky. I watch Daisy ahead of me. Sometimes I can see her, and sometimes not. The city is busy tonight, with people scraping across its dark surface. That’s why I can’t see her. Because of other people.

  Hiding her.

  Daisy’s got her head down. It’s her default position these days. Looking at her feet. Watching them as they move one in front of the other. Over and over, like she’s constantly falling, then constantly catching herself. Every few seconds she raises her gaze and does a quick scout of her surroundings then lowers it again.

  I match my pace to hers. Mirror it. Slide completely in sync with her. It’s the best way to get to know someone. To be them. Do exactly what they do. Get inside their head.

  That way you can know what they think. See what they see. This is how I know what’s going on. When to time my move.

  Daisy kind of stutters in her walking, and I do the same. We’re step-counting. It’s a way to not be complacent with your surroundings. Count to one hundred steps then change stride. Make a break. Stops things being constant. Stops you forgetting where you are. What the dangers are.

  It’s a good method.

  Keeps you safe and in the moment.

  Helps you stay in control.

  Except I’ve seen something she hasn’t.

  Poor Daisy. She’s been doing so well too. Since I started watching her. Following her. She’s hardly put a foot wrong.

  Different cities. Same dance.

  Walk.

  Look up.

  Look down.

  Walk.

  Repeat.

  This city centre.

  The rain. The neon lights with their siren call. The Big Issue seller. The mad Jesus man shouting his lunacy. The suits and the skirts and the gangs and the goons. Buses and cars sharking through the roads, their headlights parcelling up the gloom. The buskers and the beggars and the hawkers selling terrible jewellery. The dirt and the litter and the cracked paving.

  She sees everything, but only registers what she’s interacting with.

  What’s interacting with her.

  CBT. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. What a joke. Like sticking a plaster on an amputation.

  She sees everything but misses the only thing that matters. The thing that’s going to switch her.

  I don’t though.

  I’m in her footsteps, seeing what she sees.

  And what she doesn’t see.

  That’s why I’m here.

  I watch as she stops.

  Not step-counting.

  Not anything.

  There.

  Her lizard brain has sensed the danger. The primal part of her head that has kept the species safe since the beginning of time.

  She half turns, then starts to walk again, then stops. People bump into her, mutter under their breath, or look away like she’s a mistake they made.

  It’s amazing to watch. It’s like she’s out of signal. Like she’s a phone and someone’s switched off her data feed.

  But it’s the exact opposite.

  Daisy puts her hand over her wrist and shakes her head slightly.

  Then she falls to the ground. Just straight down to the wet concrete, like she’s taken an elevator.

  And screams.

  Bingo.

  Like the rain, the commuters are unstoppable. They stare but no one helps. No one wants to touch the mad girl. They go round her like she’s a rock that has just been dropped. Commuter memory that means don’t stop. Don’t make eye contact. Deny reality. Like madness is contagious.

  Which gives me time to move in.

  Control the situation.

  What a shame for Daisy.

  She’s been trying to live her life but it’s not working.

  Because, like I said, I know something she doesn’t.

  She’s got no chance. Never had.

  I reach her and pick her up. Quieten her. Hold her so she’s not a spectacle any more. Help her to pull herself back together.

  The crowd settles down.

  Moves on.

  Nothing to see here.

  Nothing to see at all.

  Part I

  Daisy

  1

  31st October

&nb
sp; Grize Cottage

  North Yorkshire Moors, Nr Lealholm

  * * *

  Joseph looked out of his window across the flat expanse of the Yorkshire Moor. It was late afternoon and the weather was closing in as the light fled away over the heather. The clouds, low and fast above the rough moorland, were taking no prisoners; their dark shadows racing over the grey-green of the thick scrub. There were no other dwellings nearby to break up the weather, or to spoil Joseph’s view of the brutal beauty of the bleak countryside. The daylight had dimmed so low he had switched on his reading lamp, causing a ghost-reflection of himself to stare hollow-eyed back from the window as he looked out. He placed his focus between his reflection and the moor, letting his mind drift, sifting through his thoughts.

  Behind him the phone trilled, pulling his thoughts back into the room. The noise it made was old-fashioned. It was a nineteen eighties corded device in cream-coloured plastic that sat incongruously on his wooden desk. The sound it produced was more a purr than a ring; discreet and muted. He picked up the bone-shaped receiver and leant against the desk.

  ‘Professor Skinner,’ Joseph said into the mouthpiece. His voice was courteous and professional; a neutral RP accent with a very soft northern flattening of the vowels; a voice that commanded attention from his students, but allowed warmth and empathy to bubble gently under its surface. It had taken him a lifetime to develop it.

  ‘Professor? It’s Thomas Hayes from admin at Leeds University.’ The low fidelity of the phone’s vintage earpiece made the caller’s voice sound cold and metallic.

  ‘Mr Hayes, hello! How are you?’

  ‘Fine, thanks. Sorry to call you so late in the afternoon but I wonder if you received my email regarding Doctor Rowe?’

  ‘Apologies, Thomas, my internet is down at the moment.’ Joseph paused for a beat, then smiled. ‘Actually, it’s down half the bloody time out here, to be honest. Was there something urgent I can help you with? To do with Cass Rowe, you said?’ Joseph turned and looked out over the moor. ‘Is she all right?’

  Doctor Rowe was an expert in theoretical psychology, and a colleague of Joseph’s, although he hadn’t seen her in many months.

  ‘Yes, she’s fine,’ said Thomas, reassuring. ‘Thing is, though, she is booked in to give an early morning lecture here on Friday, and has just got in touch to say she can’t make it…’

  Exactly what the Head of Admin thought of that seeped out in Thomas’ tones: irritation and slight annoyance.

  ‘…which frankly puts me in a bit of a bind. I had dropped you a line to see if you might be able to help?’

  ‘How so?’

  Joseph watched out of the window as a Merlin hawk swooped down onto the ground, then flew up again. It was too far away for him to see what it had caught; possibly an adder or a vole.

  ‘Well, when Doctor Rowe broke the news, she mentioned that you might be able to stand in? That there was some crossover on the syllabus and perhaps…?’

  The administrator left the sentence hanging, the hope and slight panic poorly hidden in his voice.

  Joseph reached across for his diary. He would normally just check his phone, but his partner had stolen it.

  ‘It’s a bit short notice, Thomas,’ he said, opening up the faux-leather book. He ran his hand through his hair, noticeably thinner as he neared his sixties. Not that he was counting. Often. Much.

  ‘You’re telling me! This has been in the schedule for months! You know how hard it is to timetable these things. And now that everything is monetised, there is a certain expectation. I know sometimes these things are unavoidable, but…’

  Judging by Thomas’ tone, Joseph had a fair idea about his thoughts on the unavoidability of the matter.

  ‘Quite. Friday, did you say? This Friday?’

  ‘I know, I know.’ The tone of the administrator’s voice reminded Joseph of sad food: resigned and bitter. Like motorway service station soup. ‘Too little notice? It really was a shot in the dar–’

  ‘As it happens, I am free that day.’ The only thing that was written in his diary was:

  Haircut: present from Mark. Noon.

  ‘Or at least I am until lunchtime. Did you say it was an early-morning lecture?’

  ‘Yes, pre-breakfast. You’re free?’ The relief in Thomas’ voice was almost physical. ‘That’s wonderful! Doctor Rowe said she caught your lecture in Nottingham, and that it would complement the cultural psychology option of the course. Can I ping across the details?’

  ‘No internet,’ reminded Joseph. ‘Ping it across, by all means – I’m sure it will be back up in a while – but just in case you had better give me all the details now. I’ll write them down as we speak. You are aware of my lecture fee?’ Joseph reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a pen.

  ‘Of course, I have it in front of me. It really is fantastic of you to step in like this. Let me give you the relevant information.’

  Joseph wrote down the time and place the administrator related to him, along with the access code and web address to upload his lecture and notes, which would allow the students to prepare.

  ‘Okay, Thomas. When I’m back online I’ll confirm by email and send in my invoice, so don’t worry, panic over, you can pen me in for 7.30am on the third.’

  The administrator’s voice almost crawled out of the phone.

  ‘That’s just completely saved my life, professor. Thank you.’

  ‘No problem. I’m sure Doctor Rowe would do the same for me. See you on Friday.’

  Mr Hayes thanked him once again, and then hung up. Joseph gently placed the handset back into the cradle and walked back to the window, gazing thoughtfully out. The hawk was nowhere to be seen, and the sky looked bruised and swollen; like it was swallowing the daylight but had nowhere to store it. Visibility was rapidly diminishing, as it did on the moors. Many times, when Joseph had first moved here, he had nearly been caught out by the swiftness of the night. With less light outside, his reflection in the windowpane was more pronounced, along with the vague outline of his desk and the sofa against the far wall. There was a quiet knock, and in the ghost-room-reflection, he saw the door next to the sofa open. He turned and smiled at his partner.

  ‘That was Leeds University. It looks like I’m going to be giving a lecture on Friday.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They tried to reach me electronically, but I explained about the connection out here.’

  ‘That it’s fucking rubbish?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Joseph. ‘So I’ll need to go into Whitby and dial on to the web. Do some research and pick up some information that’s being sent. File my lecture.’

  ‘And we can get some Woof?’

  Joseph smiled wider.

  ‘Woof?’

  ‘Woof,’ the partner confirmed. ‘So you can prove it exists.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  2

  August

  Inspector Slane watched the Leeds city centre feeds on her laptop, the screen split into individual camera shots.

  She’d culled them from all over. Outside the shopping arcade. Inside the train terminus. Up and down all the main streets and any of the small mewses and squares that have public CCTV. The bus station. The images varied in quality. Some were time-triggered, giving a strange, stuttered existence to the people being digitally captured. Some were smooth and almost 4K. Slane suspected they were the ones owned by private companies; corporations paid to monitor the city centres all over the north.

  Ever since the red flags went up she’d put Clearview into action; the controversial computer algorithm that analysed the thousands of faces in crowds to find the single one. Often used to spot terrorists or criminals, and increasingly used to spot drug dealers and those juveniles that made up the county lines.

  And used by Slane to find one young woman.

  First in Cardiff. Then in Leicester. And finally here, in Leeds.

  Daisy.

  Except Slane had got more than she’d bargained for.

 
; Once the flares went up – the red flags that told her someone was investigating something that really shouldn’t be known about – it became urgent for her to find the woman. To keep tabs on her. To keep her safe. The searches that had been done on the net had been from a Leeds internet hub, possibly a stealth data-café, and had set alarms going deep in the branch. Alarms so deep there were only a handful of officers who even knew they existed. Even understood what they signified.

  Slane watched Daisy, alive and well on a Leeds pavement two weeks earlier, screaming and kicking at ghosts like she was being dragged to hell.

  Slane blinked, then looked down at the girl’s file, and corrected herself.

  Like she was being dragged to hell again.