Kill For Love Read Online Free Page A

shaking.
The running order never changed. First came the hut, a concrete prefabricated
building at the edge of the forest by the shore; then the single electric bulb
with its squadron of fat, slowly circling moths; and finally the boy guards in
their voodoo masks, wigs and tattered dresses, torn from the women they'd raped
and murdered, worn now as trophies.
    Jumpy on ecstasy and crack, they were unpredictable
in their emotions, one moment asking politely, "Do you know the Queen of
England. She is everybody’s boss, yes?", the next polishing their stolen
bayonets on the trembling skin of their captives, then giggling hideously as an
old Abba record played incongruously in one of the other huts. "You are the dancing queen, young and
sweet, only seventeen.” All through the night the music never stopped, old
songs, which she knew, and newer ones, most of which she didn't, someone's
compilation from better times.
    From outside the hut came the tumbling roar of
the ocean as the tide receded, leaving the open beach firm and clean and ready;
then the sound of feet padding past in the darkness as the local people were
assembled to witness and be complicit in the guilt of the occasion.
    Inside the hut the stillness was broken only by
the terrified, quiet sobbing of a young girl, a wife though hardly a woman. She
was wearing a Cartier Tank watch and a brand new pair of expensive trainers
with special blue trim. Beside her lay her husband, until a few hours earlier a
handsome man in his late thirties prime, his face now broken by boots and rifle
butts, his white shirt ripped by machetes. Soon they would take him and
castrate him. He knew that. Everyone did. And that would be just the beginning.
    And Kate, now in her bed in London, bathed in
sweat, wondered, as she never ceased to wonder, if there was anything she could
have done that would have stopped it; if it had happened because of her:
because she and a television camera had been there.
                                                                              
    It was nearly ten when she got up, disturbed by a
call from the travel desk at WSN-TV reminding her that she hadn't put in any
expenses for three months, and that this was the last day to claim. Promising
to do something about it, she hung up and switched over to voicemail. Then,
showering, she pulled on a track suit, checked her email in her study, and,
finding nothing of interest, went downstairs.
    The morning newspapers lay with the post on the
mat of the Fulham cottage in which she lived, and she leafed through the
foreign news pages as she drank her coffee at her large kitchen table. In the
background the television, tuned to WSN, provided a murmur of rolling incident.
    She'd lived alone all her adult life and had been
in this house for three years. With a large living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen,
study and a white walled patio, it was functional and convenient. There had been
men along the way, some of whom had wanted to move in with her or have her move
in with them, but sharing a life was not how she saw herself. Love, cosiness
and responsibility to another would have imposed limits. She was a foreign
correspondent, frequently a war correspondent. It was a transient kind of life:
sometimes dangerous. But it was the career she wanted, even if the price she
had to pay brought the occasional ache of loneliness.
    After the late night at the Jesse Gadden concert she
wasn't due at the studio until the afternoon, so she took her time over
breakfast, before making a token attempt at tidying her kitchen. Personally clean
to the point of obsession, the result, she was sure, of never being certain that
there would be a plug or even water to put in the wash basin whenever she got
off a plane, at home she was untidy. And, quickly losing interest in her housework,
she stepped out on to her patio to take a look at her potted plants. The WSN
weather girl