Purgatory Is a Place Too Read online

  Purgatory is a Place Too

  by

  Dominique Kyle

  Not Quite Eden series – book 5

  Purgatory is a Place Too © 2016 Dominique Kyle

  Cover Design © 2016 Dominique Kyle

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction and although some real places, events, and organisations are mentioned within the plot, the main events and characters in this story are completely made up and are not based upon, nor intended to represent any real events or personalities. However, the events referred to that took place in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford all actually happened, and the criminal investigations and court cases are ongoing…

  All I needed was a pint of milk. I stopped off at a corner shop on the way home, and as I paid the Asian guy behind the counter I got a strange feeling that I knew him, but I couldn’t place why. I’d never been in here before. I turned sharply and walked rapidly out of the shop and crashed slap into Hussein who was coming in the other way. My heart slammed suddenly against my ribcage. Hussein Malik! For a second we stared at each other and then I saw the recognition leap into his eyes and he grabbed at my arm. I wrenched away and walked fast across the pavement to my motorbike, jammed on my helmet and drove speedily away. In my mirror I could see him leaning against the doorway watching me disappear up the street. Dammit! He’d know my number plate now. My heart was still beating too fast. I wished there was someone I could tell, but there was no-one who’d understand except Quinn, and I’d seen nothing of him for a year. I didn’t even know where he was living now, except that he was shacked up somewhere in a bedsit with Daisy.

  I glanced at my watch. Only fifteen minutes until we were due to meet a potential client in a town centre pub. Jo would be going ballistic waiting for me. I jogged up the flight of steps to our flat above the Spice of India restaurant which was issuing enticing smells out of the kitchen fans at the back, and burst through the door.

  Jo had already had a shower and changed into some clean clothes. As I predicted she was in a towering bad mood.

  “For God’s sake, Eve!”

  “I know! I know! I’m sorry! That Vauxhall Corsa was a complete bitch and the woman is picking it up at eight thirty on the dot tomorrow so I couldn’t leave it…”

  “Well you’ll have to come as you are,” she told me crossly, “but it doesn’t look professional!”

  I glanced down at my grimy hands and oily jeans and pulled a face. “But at least it looks authentic!” I teased.

  She wasn’t for smiling though.

  Zanna came out of their shared room and glanced disapprovingly at me. She put her luridly tattooed arms around Jo and gave her a pointed kiss on the lips goodbye. “Good luck!”

  That pissed me off. I didn’t much believe in luck. Either the client would want to go with us because we put forward a good case, or they wouldn’t because ultimately we had turned out not to be good fit for what they wanted. We didn’t need luck.

  I threw my helmet down on the settee, from where Zanna promptly picked it up and placed it on the low table by the door, giving me a dirty look as she did so, and then I turned and headed down the stairs again to where Jo’s car was parked, closely followed by Jo.

  Our client was standing in the entrance of the pub looking awkward in smart jeans and a check shirt. He was a stocky middle-aged man with sandy hair.

  “Apologies for the dirt,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’ve come straight from work.”

  He visibly relaxed.

  Jo shook his hand unsmilingly and asked if he wanted a drink.

  Finally, once we were settled with two pints (them) and a Jack Daniels (myself) around a table made from a huge wooden barrel, he started to explain why he had approached us.

  “It’s my daughter Cody,” he plunged in. “She watched that Thrills and Spills documentary when she was about thirteen and now she’s just dead set on the F2 Stocks.” He spread his big hands. “And thing is, the rest of us are into Bangers, and she’s stuck between two brothers who both want to carry on with the Bangers, and I can’t manage to sort her out with an F2 as well as keep up with the boys’ schedule, so I figured that if you’d take her on for a year, and if she did ok for herself and was still wanting to carry on, then maybe I could re-think my priorities.”

  “So is she already driving in the Junior Bangers?” Jo established.

  He nodded.

  “God, I hope she’s not that pink one with all the fairy lights who spends most of the races on the infield!” I remarked with a laugh. “That’s a girl who’s only doing it to please her Dad if I ever saw one. Someone needs to get that girl ballet lessons!”

  Jo shot me a fierce look. “Sorry Mr. Frost, I’m afraid Eve’s not renowned for her tact…”

  He laughed and glanced at me. “No but she is renowned for her driving – that’s why Cody’s so moonstruck! First female F2 just about everything isn’t she? Silver roof, that’s a serious achievement…”

  Jo nodded slightly. “Yes, she can certainly drive…”

  He looked straight at me. “I’ve not mentioned this to Cody. I didn’t want to get her hopes up. But I thought if you were willing to take her on then maybe I could bring her up to meet you all on her sixteenth birthday..?”

  “Which is when..?” Jo asked with a frown.

  “Twenty-third of December,” he explained. “It’s always so hard to find her a present so close to Christmas, so this would just make her year, it really would!”

  I left Jo to negotiate the business side. Paid vague attention to the discussion of how many races she’d want a month, what the aims would be, how we’d get her and the cars we’d be loaning her to the stadiums. All the money talk.

  Finally he glanced at me. “Adam Quinn couldn’t be there could he, on her birthday I mean?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Why?”

  He blushed on his daughter’s behalf. “She was kind of nuts about him. Big crush. Poster of him on her wall and such like.”

  My jaw dropped. “Poster? Where the hell did she get a poster of him from?”

  He shrugged. “Some website.”

  I bit my lip. Shit, that was hilarious. Quinn the pin-up! “I hope he had some clothes on!” I said ironically, “and didn’t do some sly naked photo-shoot for a gay magazine without telling me?”

  He looked at me under his sandy lashes and suppressed a smile. “Some sort of weird cross-dressing rock outfit as far as I remember…”

  “Phew,” I said with exaggerated relief. I sat back in my seat with folded arms. “I dunno. I lost contact with him when he gave up the driving for his music. But I guess I could track him down easily enough. But excuse me if I discourage him from turning up in thigh boots and a thong!”

  He grinned at me.

  I put my glass down on the table. “Are we done?” I said abruptly, looking at my watch. “I need to get some welding finished tonight.”

  Jo gave me another repressive look and apologised again for my behaviour to Cody’s dad.

  He shook his head. “No worries, she’s a busy woman…”

  “I’ll email you with a proposal and an outline contract,” Jo finished off with him. “And if you’ve thought of any more questions, or need anything ironed out, you can do that by email.”

  On the way back to the flat she gave me a right royal ticking off which I just ignored. I ran up the stairs, grabbed up my lid from the table by the door and jogged back down again. As I got on my bike she was shouting at me, “And for God’s sake make sure you eat something!”

  I drove off and headed up to her parents’ place on the moors where we kept all the cars and had our workshop in an old converted barn. I meant to go up to the house and ask Jo’s mothe
r Sue, if I could make myself a sandwich, but when I walked into the barn and saw all my welding equipment, I just got on with it without remembering. It was the closed season for the F2 Stocks, so neither Paul, Jo’s father, nor Pete, her brother, had any urgent work to do on either of Pete’s cars, so I saw no-one else between my arrival and my leaving again at eleven pm, by which time I found I was too stiff and cold to carry on. I crept back into the flat where all was quiet and fell into bed to try to snatch enough sleep to get me through another long day.

  Twenty-third of December and Jo and I had arranged to take the day off work. Entwistle the boss of the garage where we both worked had done pretty well out of our involvement in the F2s and the year-long documentary an ITV company had made about them, so he seemed resigned to the fact that whenever something F2 related came up he lost two of his workers at the same time. Quarter to eleven and we were all gathering in the barn alongside the cars to await the arrival of the birthday girl.

  A shadow passed across the open door and I turned to see Quinn wandering in. Our eyes met.

  “Hi there Ginty,” he said casually. “How are you?”

  “Ok, I s’pose,” I said cautiously. “And you?”

  “Ok, I s’pose,” he echoed. His green eyes didn’t glint any humour across to me, so I figured he wasn’t taking the piss.

  I’d thought we’d just automatically take up where we’d left off, but it felt really awkward. We stood a safe distance apart.

  Paul came forward and held out a hand. “Good to see you again.”

  Quinn smiled slightly and shook his hand.

  Pete gave him a cool nod. Quinn almost ignored him, but not quite. He couldn’t completely blank the guy who was going out with his sister without being off the scale churlish. His only genuine smile of the day so far, was directed at Jo.

  “And I’m here because..?” He queried with raised eyebrows, his gaze returning to me.

  “We’ve got a girl called Cody who turns sixteen today who wants to start out in the F2 Stocks and we needed you as an extra driver in the mini race we’re going to set up for her on the practice track today to test her out,” I explained.

  “Ok,” he responded, without appearing to question why we’d gone to so much trouble to track specifically himself down. “I hope I can remember what to do…” He glanced around the barn. “You seem to have a minor industry going on here these days!” He began to wander round the seven cars. He ran his hand over the one with the silver roof and the two gold stripes. “This looks like the one Tyler used to drive,” he commented, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

  Paul answered for me. “Yes we bought it for Eve after he died.”

  Quinn nodded and said nothing. He ignored the car with the gold roof and stopped in front of a smart lime green and royal blue liveried one. There was no number as yet on the rakishly angled aerofoil. He walked slowly round it, then crouched down and eyed it up from a different perspective. He frowned. “I don’t recognise this design.”

  “That’s the one Eve’s designed and built herself,” Pete curtly informed him.

  Quinn’s eyebrows raised again, and he straightened up.

  “Jo’s going take up her number again and test drive it for me in a few races this year,” I said.

  Quinn glanced at Jo, then looked back at me. “You’ve cut your hair,” he observed suddenly, apropos nothing.

  I waited. He didn’t offer an opinion either way.

  “I notice you’ve still got my bike,” he added.

  “Yes.” There was a short silence. “How about you take it out for a spin?” I suggested. “And come back here for a quarter past? When you come in though, don’t forget to say ‘Happy Birthday Cody’ and give her a polite kiss on the cheek…” I tossed him the keys to the bike.

  Jo glanced swiftly at me and suppressed a smile.

  “And don’t forget you’re no longer on the insurance!” I called after him.

  After the sound of the roaring engine died away into the distance Jo remarked. “Well that seemed a remarkably tense encounter. What’s wrong with the lot of you? Have you really not seen him even once during this last year Eve?”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “Don’t even know where he’s been living. Rang his Dad and asked for his latest phone number and texted him. Do you think he’s taller? He can’t possibly be taller can he?” I looked to Paul for an answer.

  Paul smiled. “Boys carry on growing till they’re twenty one, girls stop at eighteen,” he informed me. “So quite likely he is.”

  “He’ll find that bike a bit cramped now I guess then,” I said pulling a face.

  Pete was leaning with folded arms on the gold roof of his car. “So why’s he really here?” He asked cynically. “With Cody’s Dad here, we don’t need any more drivers…”

  Jo’s lips parted and I shot her a glance. “We agreed we wouldn’t say!” I reminded her.

  Pete and Paul’s expressions took on identical thumb screw ambitions so I figured it was best to crumble quickly. I got the giggles. “Cody’s Dad asked if we could invite him. Apparently she used to watch Thrills and Spills and has a terrible crush on him!”

  Paul suppressed a smile. Pete rolled his eyes.

  “You’ve set him up something rotten,” Jo chided me. “I hope she doesn’t scream or faint or something dumb like that…”

  I heard the sound of a car engine coming up the track. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” I said cheerfully.

  Cody turned out to be a right little tom-boy, with a mane of shoulder length curly carrot coloured hair, lots of freckles and a snub nose. Her eyes were bright blue and sparkled mischievously. At the moment her mouth was formed into a big ‘O’ as her darting gaze took in the faces in front of her and the sea of aerofoils. “Oh my God, Oh my God,” she kept repeating. She looked back at her beaming Dad. “Am I dreaming?”

  Jo was walking her round the cars as Quinn moseyed innocently in. “Where’s the birthday girl?” He asked good naturedly. Cody froze as Quinn looked towards her. “I guess that’s you right?” He smiled. “Happy Birthday Cody,” he greeted her and bent to kiss her on the cheek.

  She went very pale, stared fixedly at him and then a tide of red rushed up her face, right to the roots of her hair. Quinn smiled at her. She went a shade more beetroot.

  “Quinn’s come to drive one of the cars for us,” I intervened briskly. “Quinn, you can have my shale car. Jo, you’re in Pete’s shale car. Cody, you’re in the shale car that you’ll be driving all year and your Dad can have the tarmac one, and Paul – you can take the new one. But listen up everyone,” I warned severely, “I don’t want to see a scratch on that new one when we get off the track, or you’ll be answering to me for it, get that?”

  I got Jo to sit Cody in the car and give her the introductory talk, while Paul and I discussed tactics for the practice session.

  “Right, helmets and harnesses on everybody,” I instructed. “No exceptions.” The Frosts had been told to bring their gear with them. I tossed Quinn some kit. “Now listen up, Cody,” I frowned at her. “You’re not in the Bangers now. You’re going to have to learn some discipline and control. And if you want to get anywhere in this game you’re going to have to sacrifice a lot of other things and work very hard at it. So it’s over to you now as to whether you’ve got what it takes or not, because we can give you some pointers and look after the car for you, but once you’re behind the wheel of that car you’re on your own and it’s all down to you.”

  Her robin’s egg blue eyes were fixed with painfully intensity on my face and she nodded seriously. I repressed a smile as I turned away and slid into my car. She was gazing at me like I was a Goddess and the fount of all knowledge. I guess thirteen is an impressionable age. I must have seemed like a film star to her.

  After an hour on the track and the presentation of the birthday cake in the shape of an F2 car in the purple and orange livery colours we kept for the hire cars, and with the number that her Dad ha
d already applied for on her behalf, 114, revealed on the aerofoil, Cody and her Dad departed, Cody’s cup seemingly overflowing as she breathily thanked us over and over again and blushed whenever Quinn smiled at her.

  “Well!” Jo said as their car door slammed. “You were a right martinet with her Eve! You never smiled once…”

  “Just laying down boundaries, Jo,” I said firmly. “She’d going to be a right handful, I can tell. And I need her to respect me if we’re going to keep her in line.”

  Pete grinned teasingly at me. “Takes one to know one, I guess!”

  I showed him a deliberate middle finger and he laughed.

  Jo glanced at her watch. “I’m starving! Mum said to come in at one.” She looked across at Quinn. “You’re invited too.”

  Round the large stripped pine table in the old farmhouse kitchen eating soup and bread and cheese, Quinn seemed more relaxed.

  “So how are you really?” He asked me in a low voice while Jo was addressing Pete sharply in some sibling altercation.

  “Oh God, Quinn, I don’t know,” I said despairingly. “Every day I wake up and find I’m still alive and I wonder how I’m going to get through another day. Unfortunately my body seems determined to hang on in there…”

  Quinn glanced under his brows at me. “Yeah, me too.” He sighed. “But I feel like I owe it to Mum to drag myself through another day.”

  I pushed my hair back from my face. “I figure that my Mum only had another thirteen years to go at our age, and Tyler sixteen, so I feel I’d better get on and achieve something just in case.”

  Quinn groaned and put his head down in his hands. “I just wish I was that motivated. I don’t even know what I want to achieve!”

  I glanced up to see Sue staring worriedly at us. I figured she’d heard the exchange and my heart sank. I’d been doing a good job of keeping up a front where the Satterthwaites were concerned. Now she’d be on my back about this.