Read Online The Ties That Bind by Erin Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

strung with double rows of lightbulbs that looked like mother-of-pearl in the daylight but you could tell would shine like the real thing come dusk.
    Luke bought a takeaway coffee at a greasy spoon underneath a backpackers hostel between the Grand and the Metropole hotels. He drank it gazing at the old West Pier, the fire-ravaged nineteenth-century masterpiece. Even in ruin, it was still in period: it currently looked like a giant Victorian birdcage, a thousand times too large for the starlings that perched in their hundreds along its top. The masts of little sailboats clanked gently in the breeze. Up on the main drag, just behind him, some middle-aged people were doing yoga in a bandstand. The sun picked out a daytime moon, pastel in the sky. Leeds felt about that far away, and Jem and his threats like a bad dream.
    Sufficiently caffeinated, Luke called at the Jubilee Library and stuffed his bag with leaflets. He meant to keep an open mind, to search for a subject on its own merits rather than return to his default setting of crime, but his magpie eyes fell on a flyer for a guided tour of the old police cells and the same thing happened in the reference section where his fingers, trailing old spines, came to rest on a book about local murders. It fell open at a chapter called ‘Razors and Racecourses’, one that told of the gang-torn town that had inspired Brighton Rock , and he felt inspired to re-read the novel. Now that Luke felt under threat himself, he took a strange comfort in reading about past crimes, crook-on-crook murders, the kind of violence that was far removed by time and circumstance from his own experience. If it was fictional, so much the better.
    He couldn’t join the library without proof of address but he picked up a pocket-sized copy of Brighton Rock in a second-hand bookshop deep in the labyrinthine heart of the Lanes, the maze of old fishermen’s cottages that were now Italian restaurants, boutiques and jewellers.
    Opposite the bookshop was a pub, perfectly dark and Hogarthian. Luke found a table near the window and spread his things about him. Most of the leaflets he had bagged were irrelevant crap – he put to one side the wedding photographer and the pregnancy yoga class – but kept in a ‘serious’ pile some other stuff: Artists Open Houses, evening tours of the haunted city called Ghost Walk of the Lanes, listings for the Duke of York’s Picturehouse, the Hove Museum, the Brighton Museum and its History Centre, a card from someone called Sandy Quick, advertising his or her services as a private archivist and freelance local historian, whatever that meant.
    Tourists passed him by once, twice, three times, charmed expressions turning to bewilderment as they tried to navigate their way out of the Lanes. Luke already looked forward to the day when his fellow tourist’s sympathy would shrivel to a native’s contempt.
     
    It was midnight and he was on the phone to his service provider. Luke, like his friends, was against globalisation in principle but welcomed the help of the polite, capable young man in the Philippines call centre. The bad news was that apparently blocking someone’s number wasn’t just a case of pushing a few buttons. Serious threats or stalking had to be reported to the police before the company could take action. So far most of Jem’s threats had been implicit, but the man in the Philippines said that the frequency of contact alone might constitute harassment. Luke would have to take it up with the police the following day.
    He scrolled through Jem’s texts. He had never deleted any of them, and the history of their relationship was there, both sides of the conversation, from the charged intensity of the early days through to the recent barrage of begging and abuse.
    The phone was still hot from the long chat with the Philippines when it rang again, Viggo’s number and portrait on screen. It was half past one in the morning.
    ‘Jem’s outside,’ he said in a stage