Count to Ten Read online

  Count to Ten

  Mark Ayre

  My brother’s birthday is in five days (at the time of writing) and I’ve yet to buy him a present.

  Will he accept a book dedication, I wonder?

  Contents

  By Mark Ayre

  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

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  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

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Author’s note

  Get a free pre-release thriller

  Have you read?

  Hide and Seek

  The James Perry mysteries

  Standalone

  About the Author

  By Mark Ayre

  HIDE AND SEEK

  hide and seek

  count to ten

  JAMES PERRY MYSTERIES

  The black sheep’s shadow

  All your secrets

  STAND ALONE

  poor choices

  One

  Mercury put a knife through her lover’s heart. As the black curtain of unconsciousness rolled in, she watched him die.

  What might have been an instant or a century later, she awoke with a start.

  In total blackness, she sat. With a trembling hand, she touched her forehead. Hot and clammy. Her breath was a lithe, fit criminal, and she a portly cop. She couldn’t catch it.

  If not for the mattress, she might have believed her memories, not only the culmination of her confrontation with her boyfriend, were nightmares.

  If of an evening, over drinks, Mercury told a stranger of three hooded criminals who came to her village to perform an evil ritual. If she claimed they performed this ritual not once, but thrice; that with each, an otherworldly evil had possessed someone close to Mercury. If she insisted, to prevent untold destruction, Mercury had no choice but to murder first her mother, then her lover.

  If she told someone all this, they would have assumed she was writing a novel, or that she was mad.

  Or, that it was all a foul dream, or series of interconnected nightmares.

  Because Mercury remembered nothing after stabbing her boyfriend, she might have believed the same. Might she not have woken in her precious bungalow, next to the loving boyfriend who, in her sleep, she had so recently murdered?

  The mattress gave the game away.

  Mercury’s bungalow was her pride and joy. From the first time she’d driven past, she’d fallen in love. In record time she had completed the purchase. Once in, she couldn’t wait to start making it hers.

  This was no quick process and was still ongoing. Each item took hours of research and careful deliberation. Fixtures and furnishings were bought and returned or discarded if the reality didn’t match the promise made online. It had taken fourteen different bulbs before Mercury achieved the desired glow for her target ambience.

  She knew it was strange but didn’t care. Assembling the perfect living space was the ideal antidote to an unhappy childhood spent in an oppressive home, where nothing had been hers.

  After two days of shopping, she had found the perfect mattress.

  Not too hard, nor too soft. Not too springy, nor too moulded. From the night it arrived, she slept deeper, sounder, and longer than before.

  When she woke, it was not this mattress on which she found herself.

  Chances were, then, she was not in her bedroom.

  Unless someone had crept in late at night, bringing a new mattress. Unless they had lined up this newer, lesser mattress against hers, and rolled her from one to the other. Unless they had placed the new crappy mattress, atop which she now lay, onto her frame (one day to choose) and taken hers away.

  All of which seemed unlikely. However hard Mercury tried, she could not imagine for what nefarious purpose someone might steal her mattress but leave her unmolested.

  Despite its many outstanding qualities, which should be coveted far and wide by criminals who sought, by way of a better day’s sleep, to be more productive during their nights of wrongdoing, Mercury could not believe she had been robbed.

  Aside from lying in the wrong bed, in the wrong room; no one lay beside her.

  No Dom.

  Across her mind skittered the memory of his demise. The knife plunged into his heart, the darkness leaving those cruel, possessed eyes.

  Though she was afraid of what she might see, Mercury reached instinctively to her right, where the bedside table in her room held a lamp.

  In this other place, the setup was the same, but the lamp was different. In the dark, half asleep, it took what felt like several painful minutes to find the switch which allowed light to cascade beneath the lampshade, rendering visible most of the room.

  Harsh as the light was, not soft like her lamp, Mercury recoiled as it flashed into life, blinking away pain. Spots danced across her eyelids.

  After acclimatising, she saw the bedside table was clear but for the lamp, and a book.

  None of room, mattress or lamp belonged to Mercury. Neither did she recognise them. They were alien objects.

  The book was hers.

  A slim, leather volume, she recognised it immediately. An early edition secured at a price she had never revealed. Not even to her best friend, Amira. She couldn’t be bothered to deal with peoples’ incredulity.

  It was a gothic classic. One of Mercury’s favourites.

  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  Had been one of her favourites. Now the device of a sick joke, made by a cruel comedian, used to torment Mercury rather than generate genuine laughter.

  Dom was dead. Her mother was dead.

  None of it had been a dream.

  Two

  During Will’s wedding vows, he proclaimed his marriage to the beautiful Gina would be like that of his parents’: perfect.

  Afterwards, amid millions of professional photographs, each pairing William or Gina or both with a different set of people, his mother had taken his elbow and dragged him to one side.

  “William.”

  “Yes, mum?”

  “I need to correct a misconception on your part. Before it’s too late.”

  A fan of drama, his mother had cleared her throat before proceeding. Her eyes had flicked to Gina.

  If she told him a dark secret about his new wife—Gina was a murderer or d
rug dealer or a cat rather than a dog person—he would chastise his mother. Her revelation was several months and thousands of pounds too late. Because he loved his wife, he would disregard almost anything. Even, painful though it would be, the cat bombshell.

  Instead, she said, “there are two types of newlyweds. Those who will last as long as your father and me, and those who believe in the perfect marriage.”

  He was unable to conceal his smile.

  “You may well give me that look, but I’m warning you, the pursuit of perfection is the surest route to ruination.”

  With a condescending smile and a tone that made it clear he believed Gina, and he would have the perfect marriage, whatever his mum might warn, Will said, “Yes, mother.”

  He patted her arm and returned to allow the photographer to snap him alongside his new wife, his best man, and her chief bridesmaid.

  Fifteen years later, he suspected Gina might be engaged in an affair.

  Not quite fifteen years. They were two months shy of their crystal anniversary. Will had big plans involving an extravagant meal at her favourite restaurant.

  Gina loved swans. For her gift, Will had commissioned a beautiful crystal swan, engraved with their names, and the date of their wedding. The happiest day of his life. It edged out the birth of his daughter by virtue of involving less blood and screaming, though the fight between his uncle and Gina’s father had nearly offered both.

  None of this did he have added to the crystal. Only their names, and the date.

  There were other gifts. Will loved his wife. Once he started shopping, he found it difficult to stop. If they were lucky, slimy, suited men would not spoil the evening by arriving at their table to serve them a bankruptcy notice.

  Returning home to find the bailiffs repossessing their TV, fridge and cat would also put a dampener on proceedings.

  Neither would be so bad as receiving confirmation his wife was having an affair.

  In their double bed, he lay alone. If you discounted the past couple of weeks, he could not remember the last time they had spent a night apart.

  Not two years ago, the mere suggestion Will might have to spend a night away for work had brought Gina to tears. She claimed she could not sleep without his arms around her. Nor single-handedly face the struggle of getting their daughter up and ready for school in the morning.

  He had not gone.

  You would have to go back thirteen years to find the last night they had slept apart. To soon after their only daughter was born. For a time, Edie had shared the bed with her mother while Will had taken the sofa downstairs. It was the only way the baby would sleep.

  Across the hall, Edie slept in her bed now. Where once they had fought to make her sleep, these days they battled to wake her. She could hold the duvet so tight over her head it was a miracle she didn’t pass out from oxygen deprivation.

  A month ago, Gina had purchased Will’s anniversary present. They shared a bank account. When he asked about the expense, she had flushed.

  So recently, the words ‘marital bliss’ had very much applied.

  And now …

  Unable to sleep, Will abandoned bed, snuck past his daughter’s room, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, he turned on the under-cabinet lights and filled the kettle.

  More nights than not the last two weeks, worry had prevented Will sleeping. Exhausted and depressed, he was desperate to talk with someone about his troubles.

  Unfortunately, Will’s closest confidant and companion was his source of worry and woe. With his daughter, he was also close.

  This was one issue with which he could not burden her.

  Though it was nearly midnight, Will made coffee, brought it to the kitchen table, and sat drinking in the semi-dark.

  His wife was working on-site until the early hours of the morning.

  Or so she claimed.

  Trust was important. Without it, there could be no relationship. If she knew he doubted her, she would be hurt. Devastated if he surrendered to his compulsion to check her claims, and she found out.

  So far as he knew, the sites never opened later than eight pm. That might have changed. As an employee of the company in question, Gina was more likely to know than was Will.

  It would be easy to check, practically.

  What it would mean for their relationship prevented action.

  When Gina had called to tell him of her absence, Will had been cooking dinner. In a monotone, she had delivered the bad news. She had sounded unconcerned with missing another family meal and night with her husband and the telly.

  Though Will’s phone had lit with his wife’s name; though he had recognised his wife’s voice, it might have been a stranger on the line. Both tone and intent were wrong. Where was the Gina who had cried at the thought of his spending one night away?

  As Will finished his coffee, the clock struck midnight. Today became yesterday and tomorrow became today. Often, Gina had said, the sites remained open all night.

  A couple of months into dating, they had laid bare their dating history. Will’s was unspectacular. Gina had spent several months with a liar and cheat. Upon confrontation, he had proven himself also to be physically abusive. While holding a bag of peas to a black eye, Gina had packed her bags and fled.

  Lying in his arms, Gina had snuggled close and made Will promise he would never lie.

  “I promise.”

  In retrospect, he should have asked the same of her. He had only himself to blame.

  If she was lying.

  Which she wasn’t.

  She never would lie.

  Once the coffee was gone, he rinsed his mug and dropped it in the dishwasher’s rack. On his way upstairs he clenched his fists tight and told himself not to worry

  Promise you’ll never lie to me.

  He never had.

  And she would never lie to him.

  Standing over the bed they shared, Will stared at the space his wife should have occupied.

  Without knowing where Gina was, or what she was doing, he would never be able to sleep. Because few of his hobbies were available at night—the bowling alley, for example, was closed—he was forced to lie in the dark, waiting for her return.

  Maybe he would confront her.

  He doubted it.

  To put his mistrust in the open would be to open a wound in their relationship.

  It would also be to admit his mother had been right. Something he couldn’t countenance.

  Climbing into bed, trying to decide if he could focus on a book, his phone rang. Expecting it to be his wife, perhaps in tears, possibly with a confession and apology, he grabbed the handset and answered.

  “Hi, Will. Sorry to bother you. I know it’s late.”

  Instead of his wife, it was an acquaintance.

  “Kayla, what’s up?”

  Although she had phoned him, and, given it was midnight, presumably with a purpose in mind, this question seemed to provide Kayla some trouble.

  For some time, silence was her answer.

  When she spoke, it was with a mumble, a stutter.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have called.”

  Will didn’t speak. Though he wouldn’t have admitted it, he feared her motivation. It might be for the best if she hung up.

  No news was good news.

  After a spell where neither spoke, Kayla forced herself on.

  “I have a young daughter,” she said, apropos of nothing. “Xyla. She’s six months old. Sometimes she sleeps three hours in a row. Usually less.”

  Will had worked with Kayla before she had a child. If Xyla had been a factor at the time, and Kayla had revealed her sleeping woes, Will would have sympathised. Though many years had passed, the scars of those sleepless newborn nights remained.

  Though he and Gina had never fully solved the problem, he would have tried, as best he could, to offer advice. At the least, comfort.

  Coming at midnight, when one might reasonably assume he would be asleep, Will struggled to summon the same
sympathy, or enter into the conversational spirit.

  “That’s rough,” was all he could say. Polite as he was, he found it challenging to ask Kayla what was her point; though it was the obvious question.

  Perhaps sensing it in the ensuing silence, Kayla said, “I was up, rocking her, soothing her. Trying to get her to sleep.”

  Will opened his mouth to ask if it was conversation, distraction, she sought. As a notion, this seemed ridiculous. Before it began, Will killed the sentence.

  Kayla said, “Do you still drive a Blue BMW Mini? Number plate ending LHX.”

  As this might have seemed another random tangent, Will could have fallen into frustration. Afraid he might know what connected these points, he felt only fear.

  “Yes.” His mouth was dry. One or two words were all he could manage. It was his wife’s car. “Why?”

  Will heard the soft cries of a baby. Nothing like the screaming it could manage. Early signs of dissatisfaction.

  “My daughter,” Kayla said.

  “I guessed. Takes me back. If you need to go. To settle her…”

  More than anything, he wanted her to hang up. He didn’t like to think about why.