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The Intruders
Michael Marshall
Now a major BBC TV show starring John Simm. Taut, menacing, sinister, gripping, intelligent, action-packed – everything you could want from a thriller.When ex-LAPD patrol cop Jack Whalen’s wife goes missing on a routine business trip to Seattle, his world is shaken.Meanwhile, a ten-year-old girl vanishes from a beach in Oregon after an encounter with a sinister stranger – but it gradually becomes clear that she’s very far from defenceless.Searching for answers in the shadowy secrets of a past that still haunts him, Jack discovers that the truth has roots deeper and darker than he ever feared.
INTRUDERS
Michael Marshall
Copyright (#ulink_040a4ce5-e4e5-5730-b68f-4c80f34e8580)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2007
Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2007
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015 Cover photographs © BBC Worldwide
Michael Marshall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008114954
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007325313
Version: 2014-10-27
Dedication (#ulink_c7ac8629-675e-5f71-9a84-f41ff913a40f)
For Nathaniel
– I did it
How can we be sure we are not impostors?
Jacques Lacan
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
Contents
Cover (#u45b414dd-2553-5d07-84b8-4c66222a9a66)
Title Page (#u98f8f575-153b-5939-9969-136c73c03df7)
Copyright (#ulink_a25daa7e-0795-59e2-8d4c-51134271dc75)
Dedication (#ulink_0641c178-1d17-509e-b790-7a81a3b81e50)
Epigraph (#uc25e9048-1092-58e0-acc7-f5c48d5e4070)
Prologue (#ulink_271cd40a-4c6e-5dad-860b-25f0a3b83aa3)
Part 1 (#ulink_75040023-adb8-5299-bfab-eb76292b5e9e)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_0776d3f0-8498-54b9-bc3a-40c23dc9b199)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_70b7902e-17c7-5acd-a394-765417012a09)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_4ab61ccc-64d3-538e-9c5e-fc0da438c736)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_f6d15754-7748-5a53-b6c6-b9ebb482a38c)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_3ed5e4a8-aa33-5995-aed5-d232793ff119)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_094490f5-bc52-570b-8795-90c9c171f51e)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_34574c9e-4b71-5f72-a8db-2af6eb8ff1c3)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_e7391ca9-bdd6-56c9-be7d-a0b9e6b4fd50)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_b7286a96-14b6-5cc2-a6b4-05bc9d008494)
Chapter 10 (#ulink_02a6d6b0-d23f-58f3-a7b9-27d394181055)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Bad Things Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Michael Marshall (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_231c8e82-323b-57f0-a90a-928c5f8d146a)
Thump, thump, thump. You could hear it halfway up the street. It was bizarre the neighbours didn’t complain. Or do so more often, and more stridently. Gina sure as hell would – especially if the music sucked this bad. She knew she ought to go upstairs as soon as she got indoors, yell at Josh to turn it down. She also knew he’d look at her in that way teenagers have, like they’re wondering who you are and what gives you the right to bother them and what the hell happened in your life to make you so boring and old. He was a good son at heart though, and so he’d roll his eyes and nudge the stereo down a notch, and then over the next half hour the volume would creep up until it was even louder than before.
Usually Bill was around to get into it with him – if he wasn’t hidden in his basement, tinkering – but tonight he was out with a couple of faculty colleagues. That was good, partly so he could get the bowling out of his system without involving Gina, who couldn’t stand the dumb sport, also because he went out very seldom. They usually managed to grab a meal somewhere once every couple weeks, just the two of them, but most evenings this year had seen him disappearing downstairs after dinner, wrench in hand and a pleasurably preoccupied look on his face. For a while he’d generated his own strange noises down there, low booming sounds you felt in the pit of your stomach, but thankfully that had stopped. It was healthy for a guy to get out the house now and then, hang with other guys – even if Pete Chen and Gerry Johnson were two of the geekiest dudes Gina had met in her entire life, and she found it impossible to imagine them cutting loose at bowling or drinking or indeed anything at all that didn’t involve UNIX and/or a soldering iron. It also gave Gina a little time to herself, which – no matter how much you love your husband – is a nice thing once in a while. Her plan was a couple hours in front of the tube with her choice of show – screw the documentary channels. In preparation she’d gone to the big deli on Broadway, picked up groceries for the week and a handful of deluxe nibbles for right now.
As she opened the door to the house and stepped into a zone of even higher volume, she wondered if Josh ever considered that his vanilla mom might have rocked out on her own account, back in the day. That before she’d fallen in love with a young physics lecturer called Bill Anderson and settled down to a life of happy domesticity, she’d done plenty time in the grungier venues of Seattle-Tacoma and its environs, had been no stranger to high volume, cheap beer and waking up with a head that felt like someone had set about it with hammers. That she’d bounced sweatily to Pearl Jam and Ideal Mausoleum and even Nirvana themselves, back when they were local unknowns and sharp and hungry instead of hollow-faced and dying, and most memorably on a summer night when she’d puked while crowd-surfing, been dropped on her head and still got lucky in the soaking and dope-reeking restrooms with some guy she’d never met before, and never saw again.
Probably not. She smiled to herself.
Just went to show kids didn’t know everything, huh.
An hour later, she’d had enough. The thumping was okay while she was just watching with half an eye – and the volume had actually dropped for a while, which maybe suggested he was doing some homework, which was a relief – but it had started ratcheting up again and in ten minutes there was a re-run of a West Wing episode she’d never seen before. You needed a clear head and peace and quiet to follow what the hell was going on with those guys, they talked so fast. Plus, Jesus, it was half past nine and getting beyond a joke.
She tried hollering up at the ceiling (Josh’s bedroom was directly overhead) but received no indication she’d been heard. So she sighed, put her depleted plate of goodies on the coffee table, and hoisted herself off the couch. Tramped upstairs, feeling as if she was pushing against a wall of noise, and banged on his door.
After a fairly short time it was opened by some skinny guy with extraordinary hair. For a split second Gina didn’t even recognize him. She wasn’t looking at a boy any more, nothing like, and Gina realized suddenly that she and Bill were sharing their house with a young man.
‘Honey,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to cramp your style, but do you have anything that’s more like actual music, if you’re going to play it that loud?’
‘Huh?’
‘Turn it down.’
He grinned lopsidedly, and went back into the room to jack the volume down. He actually cut it in half, which emboldened Gina to take a step into his room. It struck her it had been a while since she’d been there when he was also present. In years past she and Bill had spent hours sitting on the floor here together, watching their tot careering around on wobbly legs and bringing them random objects with a triumphant ‘Gah!’, thinking how magical it all was; and later tucking him in and reading a story, or two, or three; then perched on the bed in the early years of homework and puzzling out sums.
At some point in the last year the rules had changed. It was a solo mission now when she came in to fix the bed or sweep up piles of t-shirts. She was in and out quickly, too, remembering her own youth well enough to respect her child’s space.
She saw that, amongst the chaos of clothing and CD cases and pieces of at least one dismembered computer, there was evidence of homework being tackled.
‘How’s it going?’
