Free The Calling by Alison Bruce

are on speaking terms with. Any ideas?’
    Walsh focused somewhere beyond the closed curtains, and a ghost of sadness passed across his face. ‘I’m twenty-eight this year, and single, and I’ve had a few girlfriends. An average number, I guess. And some can’t deal with rejection,’ he replied, sounding subdued.
    ‘Can you suggest a name, please, Mr Walsh?’
    ‘Just one?’ Walsh gave a thin smile. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
    ‘This is serious, Mr Walsh. Like I said, wasting police time constitutes an offence, and that goes for you, too. If you know anyone remotely capable of making a malicious call regarding you, you need to tell me.’
    ‘Sorry, I realize it’s serious. I suppose if I look back I could say hell hath no fury, and all that,’ Walsh tapped his temple a couple of times, ‘but that would be going too far. All women can be a bit mad, but I don’t know one that would go this far. Can’t we just leave it?’
    Goodhew ignored the question. ‘And what if the caller was male?’
    ‘Then I can’t think of anyone.’ Walsh’s good humour returned. ‘I’m not even playing around with someone else’s girlfriend at the moment.’
    He gave an impish grin, and Goodhew relented. ‘I think that will be fine for now. Ring me if you think of anything else.’
    ‘No problem. And don’t leave the country?’
    Gary grinned. ‘Just let us know about it first.’

CHAPTER 12
TUESDAY, 29 MARCH 2011
    The rain sprayed across the lake in gusts of icy splinters. Kaye’s skin smarted as dribbles of water slid inside her clothes.
    She turned her face into the downpour, hoping the rain would fill her mouth and wash away the blood that had dried into her gag. But the water seemed to fall everywhere except on her swollen tongue.
    She tried to open her mouth wider, but her jaw throbbed as the skin stretched and tore further around her split lips.
    A small puddle expanded on the dimpled ground inches in front of her. She waited until it filled up to almost an inch, then wormed forward until her ear sank in the softened earth. She pressed her cheek against the mud, trying to coax a trickle of water into her mouth from the growing puddle.
    She couldn’t push her face into the water to suck it in, so she waited until it soaked into the gag and, drip by drip, ran down along the back of her lacerated throat. She tried to imagine sweet tea and the delicate china of her mother’s Eternal Beau cups, as she swallowed these muddy dregs.
    Suddenly something caught against the back of her tongue, small and hard and uncomfortable. She coughed but it only slipped further back in her mouth. Her arms strained against the rope, shearing another fine layer of skin from her wrists. Her tongue then convulsed and she sucked in a wheezing breath, before spluttering the beetle back into the mud.
    It righted itself and scuttled off under her shoulder. Thankfully, insects were scarce in winter. The flies in summer would have madeher ill by crawling all over her face to feast on her blood, and over her soiled clothes.
    Stop thinking about them, she told herself, and tried to remember what she would do on an average Monday. Is it Monday now, or Tuesday? She tried to work it out, distracting herself enough until she drifted into a fleeting interlude of half-sleep.
    People always came to save her, when she dreamt. Even in the little dreams that flashed by as she only dozed. The gnawing questions of why she’d been left here and who was behind it vanished. She lay totally exposed, but in her sleep she believed it would all be OK.
    It will be OK, she repeated to herself as she came round again. She then asked herself, over and over, what she’d done to make anyone hate her so much.
    The light had faded into deep dusk and this was the hardest part of the day, when huge silhouettes crept out from her surroundings and night stretched before her.
    Today she had realized that her abductor wouldn’t be returning. And she could be dead