Read Already Dead for Free Online

monster for the first time, or hear the deranged killer approaching. In the car headlights, he’d seen the pale oval of her face, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. Terror and dread. The frozen rabbit expression.
    And for the first time, he’d believed that she might be sensitive about people. Because he’d felt it himself a few moments later, a sensation like a dark shadow falling across him, even though it was night-time. A chill that struck to his heart and made the tiny hairs stand up on the back of his neck. My God, he couldn’t get away fast enough.
    Charlie noticed Barbara standing in the lounge watching him through the window. She’d be wondering what he was up to, as usual. She was on the phone, of course, chatting to one of her friends, and no doubt complaining about him. But rather than concentrating on the conversation, she’d moved to a position where her eyes were fixed on his movements, staring with hawk-like intensity. She was gossiping about him and spying on him at the same time. And probably making an obscene gesture towards him with her other hand. He supposed she would call that multitasking.
    He gave her a thin smile and rotated his finger in a ‘hurry up’ sign. But she stared straight through him and carried on talking. Charlie sighed. He and Barbara had been married for ten years and he’d been experiencing the seven-year itch for nine of them.
    Last night in the pub, he’d taken a long gulp of Scotch and tried to think seriously about his relationship with Sheena. They’d met on a driving course at a hotel in Chesterfield. That was ironic. It was like a reversal of speed dating. They’d both moved a bit too fast once, driven over some artificial speed limit by a few miles an hour on an empty road, and got caught by one of those damn cameras. They’d had to sit in a classroom for four hours and be lectured about what naughty children they were. He liked to refer to it enigmatically as an SAS course. Let people interpret it in any way they wanted. He knew that SAS stood for Speed Awareness Scheme.
    But four hours. And no driving involved.
    ‘What?’ he asked a mate who’d done the course before. ‘So that’s four hours doing … what? Sitting in a classroom being lectured?’
    ‘You get to watch a video.’
    ‘Oh, great.’
    Four hours. It was enough to make you want to jump in your car and put your foot flat down on the pedal, just to prove that the rest of the world didn’t move so slowly. Four hours. It felt more like a year off his life. He hadn’t been kept in detention since his last year at school, and that wasn’t for four sodding hours. He could have reported the school for breaching his human rights, if they’d tried it. But because his car registration number appeared on that camera, he was stuck in a room all afternoon to avoid getting three penalty points on his licence. It would have been terminally boring without Sheena to look at. Their speed had led to their meeting, but their first encounter had been slow .
    Charlie made a deliberate pantomime of checking the refuse containers after yesterday’s collection. They had no wheelie bins this far up The Dale, but there was a green kerbside food caddy, a blue box for glass and cans, and a blue bag for paper and cardboard. He checked that Barbara had removed the kitchen caddy and taken it back indoors, then locked the handle back down again. The smell of rotting food was unpleasant. He ought to clean that out one day.
    He picked up a bit of rubbish from the drive, a scrap of paper dropped by a passing youth or a careless binman. Let Barbara find some reason to complain about that.
    Yes, that driving course in Chesterfield had changed Charlie’s life. At first, it had reminded him of the management seminars he’d been obliged to attend when he was a middle manager at the finance company, before he left to get a job selling property at Williamson Hart. You had to look interested at those things, and you were