Stark Contrasts (An Adam Stark novel Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

been lacking many things but ambition and decency were not among them. His parents were two such people. His mum was a school dinner lady and his dad a factory worker. They never fulfilled their own potential academically, but that only seemed to drive them even harder to want more for their kids.  
    Alloa was not a place he deliberately ran from but neither was it a place he pined for. Sure, he harboured fond memories of school, and some of the people, but the town itself, not so much. In his formative years, he became embroiled in several incidents involving gangs. He never actually joined one himself, but they could still prove hard to avoid. Indeed, one of his front teeth was transformed from enamel to denture thanks to a particularly nasty beating he received around the time of his fifteenth birthday. Still, giving almost as good as he got during that incident, led to the boys involved turning their spotlight on easier targets afterwards.
    Thanks to his parents prompting and support, he did well at school without being one of the top four or five students in his year. But, the inescapable pull of the police force reduced academia's importance. If his hankering to follow in Quincy's footsteps had been stronger, things would've been different. Part of his fascination with becoming a policeman (or a fuckin polis as his Dad's next door neighbour liked to call them) sprang from a desire to help people like his Mum and Dad, or his younger self. To try to make life more bearable for the good folks in bad places and do something about the bad folks making good places bad.
    Stark attended Tulliallan police college for his basic training. It sat on the outskirts of the small, provincial town of Clackmannan, which was fiscally and geographically convenient as he could live with his folks and not have to lash out a fortune on rent.  
    It was apparent right away that he possessed a natural talent for police work. He worked hard, solved plenty of crimes, and did all the right courses. Before he knew it, he was thirty-one and being offered a job in London with the Murder Investigation Team or MIT as it was known. He enjoyed the work but he wasn't so keen on London.
    London was big - huge in fact - and several times bigger than Scotland's biggest city of Glasgow, where Stark first made his name. The fume-filled, grubby streets and the oppressive, incessant noise were hard to cope with. Worse still, its size ensured respite from these irritants could only be achieved after enduring a journey of several hours.
    Like so many Scots, he disliked how impersonal and unfriendly it could be. He was used to saying hello to strangers for no other reason than they were within earshot. Similarly, his sense of humour regularly misfired and left English colleagues baffled or even affronted on occasion. The Scottish wont for relentless piss-taking of oneself and ones friends was not always taken in the spirit intended.
    Without consciously being aware of it happening, he began modulating his accent in order to be understood, which made him the butt of many a joke back home. Some of his pals even took to calling him Sheena: in honour of the singer Sheena Easton, famously bottled off stage in Glasgow after addressing the audience with a transatlantic twang rather than her native Bellshill brogue. He'd actually have preferred a bottling to having one of his pals shout 'Get us a drink Sheena!' while he waited to be served in a Glasgow bar. No matter how many times they said it, his friends never seemed to find it anything less than hysterical.
    Discussions about football, humour, school days and music could be difficult to sustain since these areas of culture and identity were so different in Southern England than they were in Scotland. When you're trying to make friends with new folks, it's the things you have in common that help you forge a bond. So often, there was too little to work with.
    After five years, the novelty had definitely worn off. Apart