Blood Work

it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Arrow Books

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

www.rbooks.co.uk

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781409035787

Version 1.0

For Mum and Dad

The woman's muscles spasmed and as she floated towards consciousness she heard a man's voice, and what she heard made her want to scream and kick and thrash her arms. But she couldn't move. She had been drugged, she knew that. And the drugs held her paralysed. She could barely open her eyes a millimetre but it was enough to see what the man held in his hand and if she had been able to scream she would have ripped her lungs apart doing so.

The blade in the man's hands dipped and she could feel the flesh and muscles of her stomach parting. No pain. But she could feel it. She could see his head bending lower, his other hand reaching forth, reaching into her. Violating her. Then he stood back, holding a mass of tissue in his hand, blood dripping from it as if he was squeezing what he held. And she closed her eyes, willing it to stop. Suddenly she could feel the cool air, feel it lift the heat from her skin. As she sank deeper inside herself, she could picture that heat like a fine cloud of particles swirling up into the black inkiness of the night sky, separating, dissolving and lost to the universe.

And then she didn't feel anything at all.

PROLOGUE

A group of noisy, enthusiastic young men gathered around one corner of the bar of the Unicorn, a mock- Tudor pub. A large-screen TV was commanding their attention. England was playing South Africa in a friendly and the atmosphere in the pub was rowdy, but not aggressive.

Detective Inspector Jack Delaney stood at the other end of the bar and waited patiently for the young man, with short cropped hair and arms like strings of rope and the word 'WRATH' tattooed in big, black letters along the length of one forearm, to get around to serving him. Any other day he would have been simmering with barely contained fury as the barman flirted with a couple of South African girls with hair as yellow as corn and strong, bright teeth. But Jack Delaney had other things to occupy his mind that night.

All things coalesce somewhere. All things come together in a pattern. He couldn't see it yet, but he knew it was there. Finding patterns was his job, after all, seeking what linked seemingly disassociated events. What Delaney did know just then, as he waited at the bar, with dark images flashing through his memory, was that he had a focus again. Something to help concentrate all the hurt and pain and anger he had lived with for four years into a single point of energy and use that to move forward out of the wreckage of his past, annihilating anything that got in his way. Jack Delaney didn't do standing still very well.

The barman's casual smile died as he approached Delaney.

'Help you?'

'Pint of Guinness and a pint of lager.'