Kill Who You Want

Epilogue

Still a few more little twists to come... After this section please keep scrolling for tasters of my other three Wattpad novels, The Scent of Death, The Third Shadow and The Painted Altar

Lavinia Cheswick had been born in the mid-seventies to noble but impoverished blood. Just as her father would struggle vainly to continue the family's antiques business, so too her mother would struggle equally as vainly to control an ever darkening clinical depression. So consumed were both parents by their own differing problems that they seemed barely to notice Lavinia's spiralling snarl of rebellion - an embittered revolt which would reach its nadir at sixteen years old with the news of her pregnancy. Though the father was uncertain, and despite her parents' urgings to the contrary, the girl was resolved not to terminate. That bringing the baby to the light of the world was nothing more than a childish and ill-considered act of spite she would realise within forty-eight hours of the birth. For everyone's sake, most especially Lavinia's own, the decision was made to give the child away for adoption.

Despite her mother's eventual suicide, Lavinia's life would become a little more bearable as she reached her late-twenties; indeed, would reach something of a high point during her engagement to the charming and upwardly mobile Victor Hancock. The subsequent marriage would prove rather less scintilling however, Victor's time stolen by work commitments, his affections by his curvaceous personal assistant. Following the birth of their son Giles, Lavinia found herself slipping into the same blinding fog of depression which had accounted for her mother. In a perverse kind of filial homage, she would choose exactly the same method and same location by which to end it all...

Her first son was by this time a teenager. The couple who'd adopted him, the Butterfields of the nearby village of Croxley, had christened him Adam.

*

It was the morning following Giles Hancock's arrest that Wye took a drive out to Croxley. Butterfield had lost so much weight, his skin become so pale, that had she passed him on the street she may not have recognised him. It was almost as if his grief were some hideous terminal disease ravaging away at him from the inside.

A series of stuttering half sentences would emerge through the chemical fug, the slow steady squirm of tears. A year or perhaps eighteen months earlier, the boy had presented himself on the doorstep in Churchill Avenue. A midweek evening, Catherine had been out with her colleague Madeleine Cosgrove. The boy had just stood there lanky and awkward, all dressed in black. He said they were half brothers. Said it like it was some kind of accusation.

It had been too much. That moment. Way, way too intense. Adam had just told him to go away, closed the door in his face. Half a minute later - regretful, the emotional bomb blast partially absorbed - he'd opened it up again. It was too late though. The boy was already off halfway up the street. Scurrying, out of earshot. He would never try to make contact again.

Family, reflected Wye sadly as she'd stooped herself back behind the wheel of the Renault.

We were all just looking for family. All looking for tribe.

*

The small shattered vial which had been found on Shreeves' desk, it was quickly established, contained traces of a chemical compound consistent with cyanide. Along with the the rifle which had killed Sophie Markham, the means of procurement of the poison would remain a mystery. Secrets, it seemed highly probable, which had vanished with the extracted and subsequently hammer-beaten hard drive from his laptop computer.

As a local journalist, Shreeves had been a man of many contacts but, it would soon emerge, few real friends. Those handful of closer acquaintances would talk of a happy and optimistic teenager whose life would reach a dizzying zenith in his early-twenties during an eighteen-month relationship with the beautiful and clearly success-bound Josie Carmichael. It was around the same time as her earth-shattering abandonment of him and subsequent quick-fire marriage to fellow lawyer John Markham that Shreeves' widowed mother was first diagnosed with a particularly serious and debilitating form of arthritis. Shortly afterwards, the owners of the Ravensby Evening Echo decided to overlook him for the vacant editor's role and appoint Heather Gilchrist instead. A demanding and praise-shy boss with only a fraction of his journalistic talent, Shreeves' sense of professional unfulfillment and geographical entrapment only deepened further. Though thirty years his junior, in Giles Hancock he was to find a kindred spirit. A companion in the shadows.