Читать онлайн «Little Black Lies»
Автор Шэрон Болтон
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Part One: Catrin
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
Part Two: Callum
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three: Rachel
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Also by Sharon Bolton
About the Author
Copyright
For Anne Marie, who was the first to tell me I could do it; and for Sarah, who makes me do it better
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
PART ONE
Catrin
DAY TWO
Tuesday, 1 November 1994
1
I believe just about anyone can kill in the right circumstances, given enough motivation. The question is, am I there yet? I think I must be. Because lately, it seems, I’ve been thinking of little else.
It is a minute after midnight. In two days’ time it will be the third of November. Two more days. Am I there yet?
Something is moving. Not the water surrounding me, that seems frozen in time, but the reflection of a bird. I don’t need to glance up to see that it’s a giant petrel.
Massive, prehistoric-looking beasts with their six-foot wing span and their huge curving beaks, they often follow the boat, especially when I’m out at night, keeping pace with me however far I go or how fast I drive.I’m not driving now. I’m sitting in the cockpit, staring at a photograph of my two sons. I must have been doing so for some time because my eyes are stinging. I squeeze them shut, then force myself to look away.
In the distance, the mountains are dark against a paler night sky and the water around me has the appearance and texture of an old glass mirror. Still, flawed in places, not quite translucent. It does this at times, this ocean, assumes a character so unlike itself as to take you momentarily unawares, make you forget that it’s one of the harshest, least forgiving seas in the world.
I’m anchored off the coast of the Falkland Islands, a tiny archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean, so distant from everywhere that matters, so unimportant on the world stage, that for centuries it escaped just about everybody’s attention. And then it became the discarded bone over which two ego-driven dogs of politics picked a fight. For a few brief weeks the whole world knew about us. That was over a decade ago and the world soon forgot.
