The Domino Killer Read Online Free

away. First to university, then to a series of flats around the city, rented from landlords who crammed people into every tiny space they could create, until he bought his own place. Anywhere but home.
    He knocked on the front door, and watched as his mother’s shadow grew larger behind the frosted glass panel. She opened the door warily, the chain still on.
    ‘Joe?’ she said, surprised. ‘Is everything okay?’ And she unlocked the chain to let him walk in.
    ‘Morning. I was passing and I fancied a cuppa,’ he said, trying to sound casual. It was if he was thinking through fog, only able to see a short distance ahead.
    His mother smiled. ‘I’ll make you one,’ she said, and shuffled back along the hallway to the kitchen at the rear of the house.
    Joe knew that she had a hard day ahead. She’d finally listened to his concerns that she was drinking too much, that Ruby, the baby of the family, needed looking after. Ruby was fifteen, at that age when being allowed to make her own decisions invariably led to bad ones. His mother had sunk into a routine of drinking that started earlier and earlier each day, and one day, when Joe had caught her reaching for a glass before Ruby had left for school, he’d told her that enough was enough.
    So for his mother, each day was about not being left with nothing to do, the silence too easily filled by the sound of vodka pouring into a glass.
    When Joe followed her inside, he felt the stifling heat of her radiators, the heating turned on even though it was early summer. The cheeriness of breakfast TV drifted from the living room and, when he looked in, his sister Ruby was sitting with her legs over the chair arm and a bowl of cornflakes in her hand.
    On another day, he might have suggested that she used the table. Ruby had always been allowed to do what she wanted, treated like a precious doll. On this day, it didn’t seem important. After what the family had been through, eating breakfast sprawled in an armchair didn’t seem like much of a big deal.
    ‘Hi, sis,’ he said.
    ‘Joe, what are you doing here?’ she said, her mouth full.
    Concern flashed across her face, perhaps expecting a long lecture. Their father had died when Ruby was young, so Joe and Sam had tried to step into the breech whenever his mother couldn’t cope. Which was often.
    ‘I just wanted to say hi,’ he said, and went into the room.
    ‘So you’re not here to have a go at me?’
    ‘No, I’m not,’ he said, and sat on the sofa. It sagged under his weight, and he wanted to sink into it. He closed his eyes for a moment, but the lack of sleep made his head dip and his legs twitch.
    Ruby giggled. ‘You look like you’ve been out all night.’
    Joe paused as his mother brought him a tea. He raised his cup. ‘That’s how it is sometimes.’
    Ruby shrugged and finished her cereal, putting her bowl on the floor. ‘So what do you really want?’
    Joe thought about that. The truth was that there wasn’t an answer.
    ‘Let me walk you to school,’ he said.
    Ruby rolled her eyes dramatically and swung her legs over the chair arm. ‘This
is
a lecture. What have I done now?’
    ‘I just want to spend some time with my baby sister,’ he said. ‘There’s not enough of that.’
    Ruby frowned. ‘Okay, if you must,’ she said, and stood up. She went upstairs to finish getting ready, leaving the bowl for someone else to clear away.
    Joe looked around the room. It had hardly changed since he’d left home years earlier. A gas fire with fake coals sat beneath a wooden fireplace with glued-on mouldings. The wallpaper was thick and with two designs, a flowered border separating the two. He’d tried to persuade his mother to change the look, to go for something more modern, but she said she didn’t want the fuss. Joe knew the real reason, though: she didn’t want to move on.
    The real reason for his visit was the large picture above the fireplace. His little sister, Ellie. Like Ruby, she’d been a tangle