What Came Before He Shot Her Read Online Free PDF Page A

but Joel waved him off. He wanted to see who the boys were because he wanted to know in advance what this place promised him. At the top, however, when he looked down the path in the direction that the voices had taken, all he could see was shapes, silhouetted where the towpath curved. There were four, all identically dressed: baggy jeans, sweatshirts with the hoods drawn up, anoraks over them. They shuffled along, impeded by the low crotches of their jeans. As such, they looked anything but threatening. But their conversation had indicated otherwise.
    To Joel’s right a shout went up, and he saw in the distance someone standing on a bridge that arched over the canal. To his left the boys turned to hear who’d called them. A Rasta by the look of him, Joel saw.
    He was dangling a sandwich bag in the air.
    Joel had learned enough. He ducked and slid down the bank to Toby. He said, “Le’s go, mon,” and pulled Toby to his feet.
    Toby said, “We c’n have the fort—”
    “Not now,” Joel told him. He led him in the direction they’d come from until they were back in the relative safety of their aunt’s front porch.

Chapter 2
    Kendra Osborne returned to the Edenham Estate just after seven o’clock that evening, rattling around the corner from Elkstone Road in an old Fiat Punto made recognisable, to those who knew her, by its passenger door on which someone had spray-painted
    “Take it in the mouth,” a dripping, red imperative that Kendra had left, not because she couldn’t afford to have the door repainted but because she couldn’t find the time to do so. At this point in her life, she was working at one job and trying to develop a career in another. The first was behind the till in an AIDS charity shop in the Harrow Road. The second was massage. This latter field of employment was in its infancy in Kendra’s life: She’d completed eighteen months of course work at Kensington and Chelsea College, and in the last six weeks she’d been trying to establish herself as a masseuse.
    She had a two-fold plan in mind as far as the massage business went.
    She would use the small spare room in her house for clients who wished to come to her; she would travel by car with her table and her essential oils stowed in the back for clients who wished her to go to them. She would, naturally, charge extra for this. In time, she’d save enough money to open a small massage salon of her own.
    Massage and tanning—booths and beds—were what she actually intended, and in that she revealed a fairly good understanding of her white-skinned countrymen. Living in a climate where the weather often precludes the possibility of anyone’s having the healthy glow of naturally bronzed skin, at least three generations of white people in England have fried themselves into first- and sometimes second-degree sunburns on a regular basis on those rare days when the sun puts in an appearance. Kendra’s plan was to tap into those people’s desire to expose themselves to ultraviolet carcinogens. She would lure them in with the idea of the tan they were seeking and then introduce them to therapeutic massage somewhere along the way. For those regular customers whose bodies she would have already been massaging at her own home or theirs, she would offer the dubious benefits of tanning. It seemed a plan destined for sure success.
    Kendra knew all this would take enormous time and effort, but she had always been a woman unafraid of hard work. In this, she was nothing like her mother. But that was not the only way in which Kendra Osborne and Glory Campbell differed from each other.
    Men comprised the other way. Glory was frightened and incomplete without one, no matter what he was like or how he treated her, which is why she was at that very moment sitting at an airport boarding gate, waiting to jet off to a broken-down alcoholic Jamaican with a disreputable past and absolutely no future. Kendra, on the other hand, stood on her own. She’d been