Running in Circles: An international mystery with a heart-stopping twist (Lucy Lewis Thriller Book 1) Read online

  RUNNING IN CIRCLES

  Lucy Lewis Thrillers

  Book One

  Claire Gray

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Chapter One

  Steve texts and asks if I want to meet him somewhere for a drink. He says the air-conditioning has broken in the office again. It’s late afternoon, still hot. We go to a place halfway up a hill, with thick green leaves fringing the view and insects nearly drowning out the music playing behind the bar, where a couple of young Thai men are laughing together. Steve and I take a circular table by a window, each of us with a plastic cup of white wine; sweet and sickly against our lips.

  ‘They botched it, I think,’ Steve says. He won’t let me look at his teeth, which have been drilled into by a dentist on the other side of the island. ‘I wanted white fillings. But they gave me gold. And the pain relief made me laugh but didn’t stop the pain.’

  I’ve been working all afternoon; a pair of Bollywood stars got married to each other on the beach. Steve would have enjoyed himself there, but I felt uncomfortable and hung back from the crowds, near to where a pile of dead crabs had been scraped out of the way, stray dogs creeping in to snatch them. I made some notes which I’ll turn into an article tomorrow morning.

  ‘I’m sure you’re fine,’ I say, trying to see past Steve’s hand, his strategically placed drink and his big, grey moustache.

  ‘I should have gone to the mainland for it, but, you know,’ he says.

  I nod, although I don’t know, really. Steve Boyd, my editor, is American but hasn’t left this tiny island off the coast of Thailand for years. He’s from a town in the centre of the USA, just a single row of houses really, where he says the fields are like oceans. His passport lies in the back of a safe in our office; water damaged and curled at the edges. I flicked through it once and saw visas for Asian countries, long since expired. I’ve been working as his junior reporter for about a year, ever since I somehow impressed him during a long-distance job interview over Skype. I arrived here thinking that he must have made some kind of mistake, and I still can’t believe my luck when I wake up and come to work each morning.

  We haven’t spoken much about the lives we led before meeting each other here, but sometimes we go out for dinner and Steve drinks too much wine, opens his mouth to speak and then shakes his head, smiles and pours another glass. I think his life, like mine, is better now that he’s on the island. Although my career was just starting to take off at a local newspaper back in England, other things were happening to me which I was desperate to escape from. I try not think of them now.

  We run a newspaper called the Koh Star, just the two of us; releasing it every Saturday, just a few pages printed with cheap ink. We write for the Western tourists who come here to play golf and go to full moon parties, and sometimes they read it but mostly the paper just sits about the island in hopeful little piles. We make just enough money to get by, filling the pages with adverts for scuba schools and bars, although sometimes Steve has to put his own money into paying the rent on our little office.

  To distract him from his teeth, I talk about the Bollywood wedding for a while, trying my best to describe the clothes, even sketching the bride’s dress and shoes on the back of a beer mat. I try to hum the tune that was playing as the bride first appeared, but even with Steve tapping a beat on the table I can’t manage it.

  ‘I wish I could have been there. I was sitting with my mouth open for hours. There was a lump in the chair just here.’ He pats at the small of his back. ‘And the dentist had a family of bald guinea pigs under her desk.’

  ‘Really? I’ve read about those somewhere. They’re called skinny pigs.’

  ‘Yeah. And they cost about ten times as much as regular guinea pigs which, now that I think about it, you could just buy and shave. She made me pet them. It was like touching a load of old ladies’ hands in a box. But tell me more about the wedding. What was he wearing?’

  So, I tell him, acting reluctant although I’m not really; I like seeing how interested he is and making him smile.

  ‘We’ll put your Bollywood story on Saturday’s front page,’ he says, pouring more wine from the jug left on our table. ‘Maybe we’ll even feature a couple of your sketches. That shoe. Look at that shoe!’

  ‘It didn’t really look like that. I can’t draw.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Are you drunk already?’ I say, smiling.

  ‘No, it’s the laughing gas.’

  The wine grows warm in our hands and the sun begins to set, turning the sea red for just a moment. And then night is here and it’s time to go home.

  I make myself something to eat in my hostel’s kitchen, pumping boiling water into a mug and watching as dry noodles came to life, and specs of unknown vegetables and chemicals rise to the surface. Stirring with a plastic fork, I say hello to some backpackers who are drinking beer beside the row of refrigerators.

  ‘Will you come for a drink tonight, Lucy?’ asks Ben; Irish, blonde and perhaps five years younger than me.

  I take a sip from my cracked mug. The noodles are still crunchy. I shake my head and smile at the floor. ‘I can’t. I have work in the morning.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘I always have work.’ I shrug and put the mug up to my face again, burning my lips. Conversations like this make my face prickle.

  Ben passes a flyer to me, the kind I often see as I walk to the office early in the morning, crumpled in the gutter at the end of a party. ‘There’s a bonfire on the beach tomorrow. We’ll go to that.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I nod.

  ‘You sure you won’t come out for one now?’ he asks. ‘The night’s not old yet.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

  Chapter Two

  I’m walking towards my bed when there is a roar so enormous that at first I think an aeroplane must have fallen from the sky. I drop to a crouch on the tiles, hands raised above my h
ead. Looking up, through my shaking fingers, I see that the ceiling is still there, but the light has gone out. The fan has stopped; its chord rocking wildly. And then I realise all of the glass in my window has shattered and been blown across the floor. Outside of the window, smoke moves, darker than the night sky. My throat has tightened and I can feel my lungs hanging like dead sacks. A bomb. It must have been a bomb.

  I stand, dropping the toothbrush I’ve just finished using. As I shuffle towards the window, my feet moving between needles of glass, I’m aware that I ought to go downstairs, where other people are probably gathering. But still I keep moving in the wrong direction, reaching out as if someone might take my hands and help me.

  The usual view from my bedroom is one of stray dogs lying in the shade, backpackers drinking at plastic tables, and a row of bars and brittle trees. I peer through the ragged hole that used to be a window. There’s a smoking crater across the street, surrounded by debris. The buildings opposite mine are broken and burning. Fragments move in the air; sparks and torn pieces of material. People stream out of the bars, moving like fish in a current, opening their mouths to scream. The stray dogs are gone. I scream too, just once, and then press my knuckles into my mouth.

  Blood everywhere. It’s black in the darkness; even the fires don’t properly illuminate it. Black blood on faces. On knees. A man in a football shirt lies face down on the pavement. I hear screams, the crackling of flames, and something that sounds like rain. Dogs bark. Alarms are going off. Crying and wailing like I have never heard before. I put my hands over my ears and keep them there.

  My toenails are freshly painted, my hair still wet from the shower, and I’m wearing pyjamas that my sister gave me before I moved here; shorts and a vest with pigs on them. I don’t think to get dressed or put on my shoes before I turn and run.

  It’s the way I run in nightmares; too slow, the ground feeling all wrong against my feet. The room looks almost normal as I pass through it. There’s my book left open on the bed, my hairbrush on the chair, but I can feel hot air against my back and I kick a piece of glass. I nearly scream again but hold it in, biting down on my lips.

  Stumbling out to the narrow corridor, I hear the building creak around me. It is too dark to see the posters on the walls, or to know if Billie the hostel dog and her puppies are in their normal place at the end of the landing. I call her name anyway, in a scratchy voice. But there’s nothing, no familiar shapes in the shadows, and no animal or human noises. I reach the stairs, my body shaking so badly that it’s a struggle to take the steps and grip the banister.

  I run through the reception area, which has become slippery with a thick layer of dust. This room is usually bright with potted plants and a cage of parrots but it is now dominated by a mound of rubble which I have to climb to get out. It shifts beneath me, and I slice my hand on a broken piece of glass, feeling heat around the place where thick wires have been severed.

  I’m shivering as I step onto the street, despite the fire that’s climbing over the bar and the ice cream parlour opposite, eating up their awnings, turning plastic furniture into something terrible. A man is slumped out here on the ground, covered in the same dust as the tiles inside and with rubble in his lap, one of his shoes missing, his eyes half closed.

  ‘You’ve got to move,’ I say, looking at the mess of bricks and plaster which could slide down and consume him at any second. I try to clear the debris from his legs, skinning my knuckles, and then I struggle to pull him to his feet. He’s heavy like metal, like someone more than half dead. In the end, all I can do is slide him across the pavement a little, where he moans and turns onto his side. Another man comes over, with blood on his hands.

  ‘Jim?’ he says, bending down and pawing at the stricken man’s shoulder. ‘Jim, can you get up?’

  Looking around, I hope to recognise someone’s face. Dozens of people are wandering each way along the road. Others are burnt and torn, laying where the blast threw them or where they’ve fallen after trying to escape. Some people, I think, are dead. People are shouting, searching for their friends. Men and women sob. Screams come irregularly. Each one makes me flinch.

  A girl stands alone in the middle of the street, circling slowly and tottering on her bare feet. There is blood in her hair, and dirty looking wounds all around her eyes. I recognise her from the hostel; didn’t we play poker together just a few nights earlier? I keep my eyes on her and move across the road which is strewn with bricks, clothing, drops of blood.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I say as I reach her side. She’s not okay, clearly, but I don’t know what else to ask. She stares right through me, opening and closing her mouth. I look around for help but everyone else is doing the same. And then, with a bang loud enough to make all of us scream and cling on to each other, a wave of bricks crack and tumble from the front of my damaged hostel.

  ‘We need to move, we need to move!’ someone shouts. ‘The building’s coming down!’

  People are being ushered into the Grand Hotel, at the far end of the street. I drag the injured girl there with me. Her hand is small and hot in mine; I feel her pulse against my palm. We go into the hotel lobby, which seems too still, too clean, to be part of our world. I don’t feel safe in here; I think another bomb might go off. Who did that? Whose bomb was it? Was it even a bomb? I look around for any sort of answer, but all I see are frightened people huddled on plush furniture, lying on the black carpet, drinking bottles of water from behind the bar.

  ‘Are there medics? Is an ambulance coming?’ I ask a member of staff, but he just shrugs his shoulders, blood across his uniform.

  I leave the girl with him because he has a pile of first aid kits and looks vaguely official. Stumbling back outside, the heat slaps me all over again; the burning of the fires mixed with the usual sticky, night-time temperature.

  And then I see Lena, my German friend who works on reception at the hostel. She is holding a bunched-up rag against her forehead, but when she sees me she runs, arms flailing; a wound clear beneath her hairline. We grab each other. I close my eyes and feel her blood trickle onto my cheek.

  Chapter Three

  The Green Turtle Hostel, my home of six months, is smashed and dark. When the police arrived and saw people trying to climb in over the rubble, they told us we better find somewhere else to stay. They wouldn’t even let me inside for my things. I haven’t spoken with anyone I know except for Lena, who has gone to stay with her boyfriend. I half recognised some of the faces on the street last night, lit by fires and blue lights. Perhaps some of the people crying amongst the rubble were my friends. I’ll look for them all, but first I need to find Steve.

  I know he was planning on staying home all evening, to watch Cary Grant movies and eat a fruit pie his sister had posted to him, and I know his home is nowhere near Main Street, but I’ve been to the office every hour, all night long, and he’s not been there. I haven’t seen him amongst the shifting crowds either. It’s just turned 7 am. He’d be in the office by now, on a day like today.

  A maid at the Grand Hotel gave me a spare uniform to wear because when I wandered back there in the early hours I was still in my pig pyjamas and splattered with Lena’s blood. The maid offered me a basket of fruit too, but I didn’t accept it because my stomach was churning. I went up to a room for a while and the bed was comfy but I didn’t sleep. It’s hard to sleep when the hotel you’re staying in has streaks of blood in its lobby.

  Steve and I rent space above an internet café, not far from Main Street, where my hostel is. I keep my eyes to the ground as I walk past groups of backpackers, injured and lost, and weave between mounds of bricks and exhausted emergency workers in soiled clothing. The sun is fully up and things seem even worse than they did in the darkness. Some of the fires are still smouldering. There’s a smell of chemicals in the air. My legs are numb; I misjudge kerbs and potholes. I have to grab hold of a dustbin when I trip and nearly fall.

  As I pass through the town I write its obituary in my head. I thi
nk of the little green parrot who greeted me the very first time I walked into the hostel. He bowed from atop a broken House of the Dead arcade game and said hello in a Thai accent. I mourn my little square room, with its tiled floor, juddering ceiling fan and someone else’s dreamcatcher hanging over the window. After I started working at the newspaper and was earning some money, I could have rented one of those cabins by the beach, but I liked the hostel. I liked the building itself; dim stairways, colourful corridors, and noisy birds both wild and caged. I also liked the people; the backpackers and the elderly owners who always looked angry but then offered sour sweets to me whenever I walked by.

  Where are they now?

  I climb the fire escape at the back of the building to reach our office, stepping around plants that Steve has put out here and forgotten to water; we never use the front door because it sticks, and spiders nest over it.

  The door’s ajar this time. I clatter into our small, grubby newsroom and he’s here. Alive and intact. The first thing I notice is how sweaty his bald head looks as he speaks on the phone. He flaps a hand at me and smiles wildly. I smile back, but my mouth bends into something else. He’s telling someone not to worry. He has a daughter, perhaps he’s talking to her. Sitting down, I catch sight of my dusty reflection in the computer screen. Blonde hair hanging lank around a pinched, white face. Is it strange that I haven’t cried yet?

  ‘Lucy!’ Steve throws down the phone, gets up, and sends his chair spinning across the office. He comes at me with his arms outstretched. Oh, okay, we’re going to hug. I don’t like people touching me anymore, but I don’t want to upset him. I’ve seen him cry on more than one occasion, most recently at the hatching of a duck, so I know tears come easily for him. Standing up, I let him envelop me in his meaty arms, my face pressed against the floral pattern on his chest. Actually, this is the safest I’ve felt in hours. I love you, Steve, I want to say.

  ‘I was starting to think maybe you were dead,’ he says into my hair.