Free Pawn by Greg Curtis Page A

probably the only child you’ll ever hear of who ran away from home, to go to school. I got myself scholarships and went into boarding school at the age of twelve, and barely ever went home after that.” He would never have gone back at all if he could have avoided it. But a twelve year old child, no matter how capable, couldn’t stay away forever. Still it was funny how easily the words came out of his mouth, almost as though it wasn’t him that had suffered all those beatings, that had spent so many weeks and months in the hospitals. Time as they said, healed all wounds. Maybe even his.
     
    “I didn’t miss them, they certainly didn’t miss me.”
     
    “The last time I saw them, I was nineteen, a student in London, and I hadn’t seen them in years. But Daryl came out of nowhere and tried to kill me. My sister had apparently told him that I stole some money or something. She was lying of course, I hadn’t even been near their place in years. I don’t actually know how they found me.” Though he could guess. His mother was always one to spy on people. She kept tabs on everyone she could, mostly so she could blackmail them later. That was her calling, her passion. Blackmail, extortion, and sometimes just for the hell of it, a little manipulation and domestic theatre as she called it.
     
    She loved to destroy people. She loved to watch their lives fall apart, and it didn’t take much. A few lurid photos, even if she had to edit them, the odd call in the middle of the night, some incriminating documents. With just those things she could destroy marriages, end careers, shatter dreams and sometimes, engineer a suicide. And that was her recreation. When there was the chance to get a little money out of it, she was a hundred times worse.
     
    His sister might have been the one to make the accusation, but he was sure it was his mother that had found him that day and stage-managed the entire event. Her evil it had always seemed to him, was far more cunning than the brute violence of his father and brother. Far more dangerous.
     
    “I spent months in the hospital after the attack, suffered loads more reconstructive surgery after that, and then still more months of plastic surgery to hide the surgical scars. It wasn’t the first time they’d beaten me half to death. It wasn’t even the first time they’d put me in hospital, or even on life support.” And though he didn’t say it, it wasn’t the first time he’d been in the emergency room with doctors panicking all around him. But they were always good, and they had saved his life. Of course the doctors could only repair the physical scars, and he knew that the psychological ones would never heal. He knew that, and though he knew he was odd and would never really fit in anywhere in life, he didn’t care that much any more. It was enough that he was safe. In the end that was the only thing that mattered.
     
    “If my family are involved in this mess somehow, the one thing I can promise you inspector is that I have nothing to do with it.” Except that of course he did. If they were involved, then he was apparently high on their hit list. The only question was why? He hadn’t seen them in a decade. He hadn’t heard from them. He hadn’t even heard of them which was unusual. It seemed that Daryl had gotten smarter. Smart enough to stay off the police radar. Before then he had been in the court sections of the papers, on a monthly basis, always for burglary and violence. Only the family barristers had stopped him being sent down for life, several times.
     
    And his father, he was a capable enough robber, and cleverer than Daryl by a good half. But even if the police never seemed to have enough evidence to touch him, they had spent years simply following him around while the reporters seemed to have a never ending source of crimes to write about. Until they met with unfortunate accidents one by one. That seemed to stop them writing, at least about his family.