THE DOMINO BOYS (a psychological thriller) Read Online Free

there wasn’t that strong pull of nostalgia for the town of his birth. He’d spent years trying to escape it, for one thing, and his long career in the police force had ensured he got what he wished for, ever since he was a kid. To leave Overthorpe and never look back.
    Except he did come back. Seven years ago. Things didn’t work out for him in the Met and he ended up returning to South Yorkshire. Bought a house on the outskirts of Overthorpe, where all the best housing stock in the town was. As far away from the street where he’d been born as possible; Victoria Street, a long, seemingly unending row of back-to-back terraced houses in time-grimed red brick. The street had always been rough, had its fair share of problems, but it had gone downhill of late.
    Back when he was a kid of about seven or eight the street didn’t have cars parked all the way up it, because nobody could afford cars in those days, and work was a short walk to the colliery for the majority of men who lived there. But the 1980s had slit the town’s throat, slowly bled it to death, and people nowadays had to commute to wherever they could find work, and there wasn’t a lot of that around. The road was crammed with souped-up Subaru Imprezas, lowered Renaults and Fords, the occasional battered Mercedes, and a host of rust-buckets that he just knew were dodgy. What with all the cheap white double glazing, the litter collected in the gutters and dog mess on the pavements it had been ruined, he thought.
    Duncan Winslade chided himself for getting unduly sentimental as he stood in the narrow street, gazing up to the bedroom window of the house where he’d first come screaming into the world. It wasn’t like him. He’d always been a bluff, unemotional kind of guy. When the teachers caned him at school – a regular occurrence through junior and then secondary school – he never even winced, much to the amazement and admiration of his fellow pupils, and the teachers would lay into him all the harder to provoke a reaction. But he never gave them the satisfaction. ‘You’ll end up going bad, Winslade!’ one of them snarled into the ear he’d got a sharp hold on. ‘I’ve seen boys like you. The prisons are full of them.’
    He had the last laugh, because he defied everyone’s expectations and went into the police force. Turned out there were only two choices for young lads leaving school anyway, the mines or the police, and by the time he was sixteen he’d had enough of Overthorpe and wanted to leave it, not get buried under it. Turned out he was brighter than he thought, and the detached demeanour everyone used to get so worked up about was a distinct advantage in his chosen career.
    As a copper on the beat he’d been called out to Victoria Street many times in the early days. It wasn’t exactly a den of thieves, but it was pretty close at times. All it takes are a few problem families and a place can go downhill fast, he thought. He still knew where they used to live, could point out the houses if he had to, tell you what colour door they had, how many kids, married or divorced, unemployed or employed, thick or sharp. The Baxters, the Coghills, the Websters, the Craddicks.
    Worst of all were the Craddicks.
    The father – Donald Craddick – had been in and out of prison for one thing or another all his life, carving out a career path of his own from petty theft to GBH through to manslaughter. Surprisingly, his wife seemed a decent sort, relatively attractive, but he’d seen many such women drawn to thugs like Donald Craddick. In a small backwater like Overthorpe, characters like Craddick offered a twisted sort of glamour for the young and impressionable. Even if she realised her mistake there was no escaping it once Donald Craddick had his hooks into her. She eventually had three kids, grew fat, ever more timid, drank herself into oblivion, and pretty soon the attractive young woman he married was swamped forever under a mire of daily