The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

throat closing, nothing to do with her bruising.

Why had he done this? A surge of anger settled around the weight in her chest. She rammed the key in the lock, raised a hand at DI Smith in his car and let herself in.

The mess everywhere surprised her all over again. She threw her keys into the glass bowl on top of the tiny hallway cupboard. The tinkle summoned Charles to the top of the stairs.

“Eva? What are you doing here?”

Up the stairs, each step seemed to grow higher as she climbed them.

“Where’s Lily?” he asked.

“Hugo’s.”

She searched his face, but Charles looked no different to how he had at CJ’s when they’d last been together. Had she been seeing only lies since he came back to her, was that why she hadn’t known?

“Who is she?” she blurted it out.

“Who?”

“The woman in the café, the black-haired lady you met.” She said them as though they were just words, but each one splintered something inside her. He looked shocked, at least, sideswiped.

“You followed me?”

“If it makes you feel better, I wish I hadn’t.”

There was something different about him, a nervous energy fizzing through his veins. She was used to him pacing while he thought his deepest thoughts, but this was different, more. He fidgeted with the banister.

“Are you having an affair?” The word hit her hard, said out loud, but she had to hold herself together.

“No, nothing like that. I knew Nancy a long—”

“I don’t need her name.”

He nodded once, message received and understood. “What do you want to know?”

Nothing, everything.

“How long have you been seeing her now?”

“I haven’t. It’s not what you think, Eva.”

“What is it then? I saw the way you looked at her.”

“I. . .I needed to. . .The Society’s after her, too. I had to warn her.”

“They were, they just killed her.”

The words punched him. She’d been too cruel, bursting out with it like that, wanting him to hurt like she was. But at the look on his face, she smothered her softening apologies.

“You love her.” Her stunned whisper gathered strength, her pain hitting out. “You’re in love with someone else.” The pressing double weight of grief and betrayal on her chest stopped her breathing enough. In her heart it crippled her, in her mind paralysed anything else.

He loved that woman.

“How?”

Eva gave him a wide berth on her way to their bedroom.

“How?” Almost animalistic, his howl of grief and pain crammed into that one short syllable.

“She was run over, then a man suffocated her.”

“You know this for certain?”

“I saw it happen, he tried to do the same to me.”

Charles whirled away from her and ran down the stairs. He didn’t care?

Eva closed her eyes as though that might shut it all out. She wanted to sleep more than ever, not for the rest she needed but for the oblivion it promised. But Lily would be getting up soon, time for her and Eva to leave. And figure out how to explain why her dad wasn’t coming too.

Eva stopped in her bedroom doorway. What? A brown holdall she didn’t recognise was on their bed, and on the floor beside it, one of their big suitcases zipped up. Charles was leaving? Not what she thought? He was leaving. It was everything she’d thought, dreaded.

Downstairs he was slamming doors, Eva got in the shower.

She leant her hands on the tiles, bent her head, let the water pummel away the man’s blood from her hair, from everywhere she hadn’t been able to wash at the police station. She watched it swirl away down the drain as though it might take her pain away with it. Her gaze traced the patterns in the woven bracelets on her wrist. What would you say now, Daddy? How would you make this all better?

Dressed in leggings and a fleece, Eva inspected her neck. DI Smith was right: as clear as if he’d painted it on, the imprint of the man’s fingers, all swabbed, photographed and measured at the police station, was bruising. She stuck a clean dressing over her stitches and went into their bedroom to pack.

“We have to go now.”

“I see you’re all ready to do that.” She gestured at the luggage.

“Eva, after Nancy we’re next.”

“Lily and I are leaving soon enough. You can leave, it’s clear that’s what you want to do.”

He grabbed her arm; she pulled it away. “Just go, Charles.”

“Listen to me, they’ve planted something on the gas inlet pipe outside, some kind of timer. It could go at any time, make it look like we died in a gas leak explosion. We have to get out. Now. Get Lily, next door is still too close.”

Eva hammered at Hugo’s door while Charles warned the neighbours on the other side.

“Get out, there’s a gas leak.” Eva screamed over Hugo telling her something about Lily and breakfast.

Lily appeared at the kitchen doorway, holding Cynthia. “Lily, out quick, run!”

She did.

“Out, go, go.” Eva pushed her from behind. Hugo, Charles and the other shocked neighbours following.

Halfway up the street, their charge petered to a halt. Was this far enough away? Should they tell more neighbours? Eva looked back. Their houses as solid and safe as always, brick exterior, curtains closed in the lounge bay window, the ones in their bedroom open. Built at the end of the Victorian era, these houses had survived the best efforts of the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Solid, invincible almost, they’d witnessed generations come and go, the rise of the cars that now clogged the roads, the climate emergency that made the residents appreciate the plane trees planted at the kerbside. Yet they weren’t safe from a fanatical group?

Charles had left their front door open, another departure from his methodical self.

“Have you called it in?” A neighbour asked.

Who to? Bomb squad, police, MI5?

“Do we just have to stand here?” Lily asked.

“You said no time to get anything.” Eva pointed at the unrecognised brown holdall in Charles’ hand.

“There isn’t.”

“What’s in there that’s so important?” It had to be more than clothes, the way