Scared to Live
by Stephen Booth
Summary
[T]wo grim murder scenes in England’s Peak District—one inexplicable…and the other unspeakable.
How do you investigate the murder of a woman without a life? That is the challenge facing [Detectives] Cooper and Fry when a reclusive agoraphobic is found shot to death in her home….
At virtually the same time, a raging house fire claims the life of a young mother and two of her children. But as the debris is cleared, troubling questions remain in the ashes….
What if the two investigations are somehow connected? A killer is stalking the Peak District…. And his next victims could very well be the only two cops who can stop him.
Excerpt
ONE
Sunday, 23 October
Even on the night she died, Rose Shepherd couldn’t sleep. By the early hours of the morning, her bed was like a battleground—hot, violent, chaotic. Beneath her, the sheet was twisted into painful knots, the pillow hard and unyielding. Lack of sleep made her head ache, and her body had grown stiff with discomfort.
But sleeplessness was familiar to Miss Shepherd. She’d started to think of it as an old friend, because it was always with her. She often spent the hours of darkness waiting for the first bird to sing, watching for the greyness of dawn, when she knew there’d be people moving about in the village. There might be the sound of a van in the street as someone headed off for an early shift at the quarry, or the rumble of a farmer’s tractor in the field behind the house. She didn’t feel so completely alone then, as she did in the night.
For Rose Shepherd, this was the world. A distant noise, a half-heard voice, a snatched moment of indirect contact. Her life had become so confined that she seemed to be living in a small, dark box. The tiniest crack of light was like a glimpse of God.
By two o’clock, Rose had been out of bed twice already, moving aimlessly around the room to reassure herself that she was still alive and capable of movement. The third time, she got up to fetch herself a glass of water. She stood in the middle of the bedroom while she drank it, allowing her toes to curl deep into the sheepskin rug, clutching at the comfort of its softness, an undemanding gentleness that almost made her weep.
As always, her mind had been running over the events of the day. There was no way she could stop it. It was as if she had a video player in her head, but it was stuck in a loop, showing the same scenes over and over again. If they weren’t from the day just past, then they were snapshots from previous days—some of them years before, in a different part of her life. The scenes played themselves out, and paused to allow her to fret whether she could have done things differently. Then they began over again, taunting her with the fact that past events were unalterable. What was done, was done.
It was one of the reasons she couldn’t sleep, of course. Her brain was too active, her memories too vivid. Nothing seemed to slow down the thoughts that stalked backwards and forwards in her consciousness, like feral animals roaming the edge of the forest, restless and apprehensive.
But Rose was glad that she’d been out the previous day. She’d been doubtful about it beforehand. No journey was without its risks, even if it was only three miles over the hill and down into the village of Matlock Bath.
Reviews
“[E]nergetic pace and memorable characters…few will be able to predict Booth’s twisted conclusion”—Publishers Weekly
Author's Biography
Stephen Booth is a two-time winner of the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Black Dog and Dancing with the Virgins. Other bestsellers in his Cooper and Fry series include Blood on the Tongue, One Last Breath, and Blind to the Bones, which earned him the prestigious Dagger in the Library Award. A former journalist, Stephen Booth lives in Nottinghamshire, England.