Chapter One – The Creatives and the Corpse

One

She loved every pebble of the place, it was peaceful and safe, a nice contrast to the violence and mayhem that constantly whirled in her mind.

A scattering of stoic locals remained in the village all year round, mostly older people abandoned by their dead partners and grown children. A benign Cornish sea-side community bypassed by life. Even though many of them had read her books they had zero interest in her, the outsider. She was thankful for that; the option of winter solitude had been her main goal when she’d bought the place to write in, and it was working out just fine.

The whitewashed cottages had been built as small but solid homes for long-passed fishermen and their families, and with their thick walls and open fires they’d easily weathered the worst of what the world had been throwing at them for more than a hundred years. These days the humble buildings did little more than play host to a succession of giddy holidaymakers, but the rooms made more money in a summer month than any of their previous owners had seen in a good year.

Her own small piece of Cornish history, at the end of its uneven row of eight had been owned by a friend who’d only used it for a total of two weeks in five years and never taken advantage of its summer letting potential. Money had never been a problem for him until suddenly it was and he’d needed to sell quickly. It was the perfect match; her work was taking off and for the first time in her life she had access to funds. She’d been looking for a place she could disappear to and this was it.

Two

Falling through a glistening spray of swirling crystal he was brutally aware of what was coming next. He tucked his head and shrugged his shoulder to absorb the impact. The ground arrived with its jarring finality, a shocking, undisputable leveller as he crunched into the broken glass. Rock bottom, he thought, nowhere left to go now. A boot shuddered into his gut and then the stamping began. Someone was trying to stamp the life out of his skull through his ears. He knew he only had seconds before even his thick cranium would crack open like a jelly-filled Easter egg.

Moving much faster than the assailant could ever have expected, Donovan grabbed the ankle twisted it against the resistance and rolled his weight into the shin. The guy had no choice, gravity and the physics of leverage were against him and toppled backwards. Donovan moved with deadly snakelike speed to strike hard at the throat of the surprised attacker leaving him choking and nullified as a threat.

Donovan frisked him quickly. ‘Your mistake was thinking I’d be out of it once I came through the window. Big news, shithead, it’s not the first window I’ve been through and it won’t be the last.’ He bent and put his face close to the still gasping man. ‘More bad news,’ he whispered menacingly, ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t your only mistake today.’

Three

Her days in the physical world were disciplined because routine and publishing deadlines forced her imagination to open its glittering doors to another universe on order. She made the fire at the same time every morning then fed it every hour with gnarly logs, as much for the dancing flames as the heat.

At a desk carefully placed in the very centre of the room she worked solidly at her laptop. She broke off at exactly the same time for food but for the rest of the daytime hours she disappeared completely into writing the book that had already earned her an impressive advance. Unbelievably, money had already been paid for words that were still only vague swirling thoughts. A spendable value had been placed on nothing more than her daydreams. It was the amazing financial knock-on effect of her lucky break. In her first year after university, on a boring holiday in an Anglicised Spanish resort with a boring boyfriend she’d wished she’d never resorted to, she’d written a crime novel to see if she could and somehow invented a detective she’d called Donovan.

It was quite a while before that particular accident of invention paid off, but it eventually changed her life. She’d kept the first draft of the book in a box under her bed, knowing that there was a lot it was missing but was unsure exactly what those things were. She left the book alone, not touching it for years, other than to move it from one home to the next as she carried on with her life.

But Donovan never left her, his character nagged at her and the book would fall into her mind as an unsettling project that she had to finish. Eventually she’d started to write again, pushing and pulling at the book until she’d been introduced to the vital ingredients it had lacked, anger and violence.

Now, ten books into her ‘Donovan’ series the tough and dependable hero had become as real to his legions of fans around the world as any member of their own family. Like a train with faulty brakes straight from one of her own plot-lines, her ride was getting faster. Now there was even excited talk of the first book becoming a film or perhaps a TV series, and because she was hot, her agent was eagerly awaiting the latest instalment so she could leverage, negotiate and squeeze money from anyone who had some.

Writing books wasn’t a great way to make money these days, not with the competition of the internet and everything. You had to sell a hell of a lot of books to make any money at it, and in the early years Lisa had lost money and then barely covered her costs. But the Donovan cult had grown and now she was selling a lot of books, or he was, so now, finally, the publishers were happy. The free advertising of a TV series or film would make everyone with percentages of her pie ecstatic.

But the writing still had to be done and it had to be done by her and she knew that the trick was to not let the weight of success, cash and expectation drag down and warp her half-formed thoughts. She had other vague worries too, but they could halt her in her tracks so she stayed clear of ever thinking of them.

Sometimes, when the story was stalling she allowed herself a break from the computer to walk by the sea, but her mind continued writing.  She’d found that anything she wrote when she was tired had to be rewritten the next day, so instead of wasted effort her evenings from 8pm onwards were kept for drinking wine and talking to friends on the phone. She firmly rebuffed all pleas to visit her, it was not a holiday. Slowly as the wine worked her mind quietened enough for sleep. She was turning in on herself, becoming more isolated, living in her work to the detriment of her relationships, but it didn’t worry her because she knew all that would end when the book did.

The artist had a studio near the seafront and the writer had first seen her walking on the beach. They’d exchanged a few words and a smile, but both were lost in their own creative worlds.

She saw her again a few days later at the sea wall where she was perched, furiously sketching. Strands of her blonde hair were being blown unnoticed across her face. The writer said hello but the painter seemed unaware of her presence. Recognising the state of artistic distraction and knowing the precious fragility of it she backed away. As she turned she heard,

‘You’re the writer?’ She turned back smiling expectantly but saw only her concentration as she frowned at the page in front of her.

‘And you’re the artist,’ she said and left her to it.

The weather began to change, colder, windier, darker but equally as beautiful and she found herself looking forward to the darker nights when there would be no nagging guilt at not venturing out. That distant echo of her mother’s voice chiding her for not coming out of her bedroom to play with the other kids would fade.

The book was going well. Avenues had opened, characters had arrived and the pull was getting stronger all the time.