Scared to Live. Stephen Booth

      STEPHEN BOOTH

      Scared to Live

       Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      Harper

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

      Copyright © Stephen Booth 2006

      Stephen Booth 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

      Set in Meridien by Palimpsest Book Production Limited Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007172078

      Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007279692

      Version: 2016-10-27

      This book is dedicated to my parents, James and Edna Booth

      Contents

       Title Page Copyright Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty–One Chapter Twenty–Two Chapter Twenty–Three Chapter Twenty–Four Chapter Twenty–Five Chapter Twenty–Six Chapter Twenty–Seven Chapter Twenty–Eight Chapter Twenty–Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty–One Chapter Thirty–Two Chapter Thirty–Three Chapter Thirty–Four Chapter Thirty–Five Chapter Thirty–Six Chapter Thirty–Seven Chapter Thirty–Eight Chapter Thirty–Nine Chapter Forty Keep Reading About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

       1

       Sunday, 23 October

      Even on the night she died, Rose Shepherd couldn’t sleep. By the early hours of the morning, her bed was like a battleground – hot, violent, chaotic. Beneath her, the sheet was twisted into painful knots, the pillow hard and unyielding. Lack of sleep made her head ache, and her body had grown stiff with discomfort.

      But sleeplessness was familiar to Miss Shepherd. She’d started to think of it as an old friend, because it was always with her. She often spent the hours of darkness waiting for the first bird to sing, watching for the greyness of dawn, when she knew there’d be people moving about in the village. There might be the sound of a van in the street as someone headed off for an early shift at the quarry, or the rumble of a farmer’s tractor in the field behind the house. She didn’t feel so completely alone then, as she did in the night.

      For Rose Shepherd, this was the world. A distant noise, a half-heard voice, a snatched moment of indirect contact. Her life had become so confined that she seemed to be living in a small, dark box. The tiniest crack of light was like a glimpse of God.

      By two o’clock, Rose had been out of bed twice already, moving aimlessly around the room to reassure herself that she was still alive and capable of movement. The third time, she got up to fetch herself a glass of water. She stood in the middle of the bedroom while she drank it, allowing her toes to curl deep into the sheepskin rug, clutching at the comfort of its softness, an undemanding gentleness that almost made her weep.

      As always, her mind had been running over the events of the day. There was no way she could stop it. It was as if she had a video player in her head, but it was stuck in a loop, showing the same scenes over and over again. If they weren’t from the day just past, then they were snapshots from previous days – some of them years before, in a different part of her life. The scenes played themselves out, and