Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller) Read Online Free PDF

considering,
was this relevant?
There appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary about the room, a space which told of a female inhabitant, a young girl. Different, though, from Martin’s own room as a teenager, which had been more an obstacle course around huge stacks of books than a pretty-in-pink sanctuary.
    Against the left-hand wall of the room was a single bed. A heart-shaped cushion and blue teddy bear sat on the pillow, a patchwork quilt pulled up over it and the duvet. The bedside table held a small lamp and a book,
I’m
OK
, You’re
OK
.
Martin looked up at the walls over the bed: posters of people Martin couldnot have named and an old movie poster of
The Philadelphia Story
. She walked over to the wardrobe and looked inside. Jeans were hanging folded alongside some black cocktail dresses; a hockey kit bag sat on the floor in front of it.
    Martin stood in the middle of the room and breathed, her eyes closed.
Who are you, Emily?
She could smell – what was it – Estée Lauder Beautiful? An old choice for a young girl. She half-opened one eye and was proved right as she spied a bottle of it on the dressing table next to the sink.
What else?
A feeling permeated the room, cloyed as it was with over-heating and hormones,
what was it?
    She opened her eyes wide and strode to the cupboard. It was large, and as she opened the door she could step inside, where shelves lined the walls. In there were about thirty pairs of shoes thrown carelessly in a pile at the bottom; on the shelves were heaps of crumpled T-shirts advertising some college fundraiser; suitcases and tens of handbags. That wasn’t what interested Martin, though. Feeling the sting of tension in the back of her neck, she whirled round, and there, on the back of the door, was a mass of photos – tacked on the wood in a jumble, stacked on top of each other, hundreds of them. They were of parties and balls, cricket matches, picnics, a theatre trip it looked like. And all of the photographs featured one particular boy. Sometimes with Emily andsometimes not. A hundred or so photos of this boy, smiling, laughing, his arm draped over Emily’s shoulders. His face looming out from the back of the door. Over and over again.



5
     
    ‘I’ll call you later,’ Emily breathed down the phone to me. She was whispering, hurried. I rolled over and glanced at the blinking red light of the digital clock on my bedside table. 3.18 a.m.
    ‘Really?’ I said, almost crossly. Not too askance though. I was never irritable with Emily.
    ‘I’ve got to go, he’s coming.’ She spurted the words, frothing with excitement. ‘I’ll call you back. You won’t believe the night I’ve had!’
    I lay flat on my back again.
    ‘I’m sure,’ I said, irrelevantly it turned out, as the phone was put down on me. I sighed and switched on the bedroom light. There was no hope of going back to sleep now, so I wearily picked up
My Ántonia
and opened it where I had turned down a corner of a page about a third of the way through. The Americans weren’t doing it for me. Hawthorne, perhaps. But James? And as for Cather. Well really, all her descriptions of making hand-crafted Christmas presents just weren’t cutting the mustard. Nevertheless, I picked it up at Mr Shimerda’s funeral but found I couldn’t concentrate.
    I knew Emily was at Nick’s house. They’d all have gone there in a crowd after leaving Sixes. I hadn’t been there. The idea of pushing into the barn-like room at the top of two flights of concrete steps, almost vertical in incline, ordering a concoction of tropical fruits and booze by which to get smashed, dancing to jungle beats accompanied by waving hands and screeching voices, well, let’s just say I would rather have stuck with Jim Burden and Antonia. And that’s saying something.
    That night, I’d watched her in the Joyce College bar with the others, before they tumbled out to go to Sixes. I had taken to wandering up there on occasion and would sit, nursing a