STRATEGY
Strategy launch date is 10 August 2017
How much can one family take?
Jenny Carbrook murdered three people to make it look as though there was a serial killer at work in Lincoln, when the only person she wanted to kill was Ray Carbrook, her father-in-law, who had raped her the week before her marriage to Mark, Ray’s son.
Jenny wrote letters detailing her crimes in order to protect everyone she loved, but was forced to go into hiding before retrieving the evidence against her. Not only did she leave the letters behind but also her young daughter, Grace.
Now Jenny has a plan, a strategy, to get the letters back. But it’s not only the letters that Jenny has in her sights…
Prologue
The image in the mirror was so different to the face she remembered as being her own. This reflection looked haunted, troubled, and deeply sorrowful. The grey eyes, which had once sparkled with happiness, now resembled nimbus clouds, always verging on rainfall. Her long, blonde hair was gone, replaced by an untidy, short bob, dark brown and impossibly messy.
She stared into the mirror, wondering if anyone from her old life would recognise her now. She had dropped two dress sizes, appearing diminutive. Her choice in clothing had changed; she felt she lived in poorly cut, cheap jeans. Her shirts were so inexpensive, it was laughable, a travesty to fashion; a stark contrast to her wardrobe at Lindum Lodge, an overflow of designer labels and shoes for which most women would kill.
Would Mark have thrown everything out? she pondered. She guessed the answer would be yes. Once he had read the letters, her marriage was out of the window. Probably along with her precious clothes. And the one person to blame for all her worries and problems was Ray Carbrook. If he hadn’t been such a bastard, a rapist, wife-beater, there wouldn’t have been any need for the actions she had taken. When he had irrevocably ruined her that Friday afternoon, he had set things in motion for which he never accepted responsibility; it took eleven years to repay him, but she had done it. She regretted nothing about the death of Ray Carbrook, and if it hadn’t been necessary to kill him, she wouldn’t have had to kill the other two; he had a lot to answer for, her late father-in-law.
The letters hovered in her thoughts. She felt the shiver run through her body. Those bloody letters, a sort of Plan B, had been written to protect her and Anna’s family after the three murders of the previous year. She had carefully written them, detailing everything she had done to prevent accusations of complicity from anyone else in her family, from any accusations of murder on their part, if anything had gone wrong with her plans. Her big mistake had been in asking Anna to take care of them, because when she had asked Anna for them back, her mother-in-law had refused. If only Anna had handed them over, none of this would have happened.
She wouldn’t be staring at herself in a cracked mirror that came with the tiny flat she rented above a shop in Newark, and Anna wouldn’t be dead.
Anna, her mother-in-law, her friend, her alibi, dead because she had driven into a truck after driving away from Lindum Lodge, crushing her body in the wreckage; a whole life pouring away with the blood gushing out from a head wound accidentally inflicted by her.
She missed Anna, she missed Mark, she missed Adam and Grace, the two children who were her reason for living, but she didn’t miss Anna’s new husband, Mr. Bloody Perfect, Michael Groves. It angered her to remember the police had gone to him first with news of Anna’s death. It was that son of a bitch who had brought the letters to Mark, ruining every well-laid plan.
One day, she would face him, and she would hurt him; kill him, just like he had killed her life. He destroyed her family ties, separated her from her children. What did she have to lose, now? If the letters ever reached DI Gainsborough, it was game over anyway.
She had to have a strategy. There was only one way to have peace of mind, and that was to get the letters back in her keeping, and destroy them.
This would take some working out, and she would need money. Substantial money. But, it would happen, and she could get on with the rest of her life, and wait for her children to come back to her, because, really, that was what it was all about. She missed them; she ached for them. She needed them.
She continued to stare into the mirror, the crack that went from the top right to the bottom left bisecting her face across her nose. She wondered if she would ever smile again, if her eyes would ever shine again, without the addition of tears to help them do so.