Southampton
Seventeen hours later
Naomi loved thrillers. The bloodthirstier the better. For the cruise on the luxury liner she’d hauled a whole wagonload on board the Sultan of the Seas (she hadn’t been able to get used to this newfangled e-reader), and on a good day she could get through almost an entire book, depending on how thick it was.
Or how bloody.
Sometimes she wasn’t sure who was nuttier: the author who thought up all this sick nonsense, or she who actually paid money to get cosy around the pool with axe murderers and psychopaths, within range of the sexy waiters who, between chapters, would supply her with coffee, soft drinks or cocktails, depending on the time of day.
In the seven years of her marriage, before God decided that an urn on the mantelpiece suited her better than a ring on her finger, her husband had once said he wondered why there were age limits for films and computer games, but not for books.
How right he’d been.
There were scenes she’d read years ago that she was still unable to get out of her head, no matter how hard she tried. For example that one from The Cleaner, where Joe’s looking forward to a wild sex adventure with his conquest in the park, but instead the crazed bitch rips off one of his balls with a pair of pliers.
She shuddered.
After a description like that you have to think the author’s a pervert, yet the book was a huge success, and its writer, Paul Cleave, who she saw at a crime festival reading was charming, good-looking and amusing. Funny, like large sections of the book itself.
Very different from Hannibal by Thomas Harris. It made her sick when Dr Lecter ate the brain of his adversary from the man’s open skull while he was still alive. The book got almost seven hundred five-star ratings!
Sick.
Almost as sick as the story of the thirty-seven-year-old woman who is kept in a well by her abductor until one day a pail is lowered down with a bowl of rice in it. On the bowl are two words, which the woman, a PhD in biology, can barely make out in the darkness: Spirometra mansoni.
The Latin name of a parasite which exists predominantly in south-east Asia, as wide as a shoelace and up to thirty centimetres long, and which grows into a semi-transparent, ribbed tapeworm. This migrates beneath the human skin to the brain. Or behind the eye, as with the woman in the book, whose hunger is so unbearable that in the end she is forced to eat the contaminated rice to avoid dying a miserable death.
For Christ’s sake, what’s that book called again?
She thought of her shelves in the conservatory back home, of the authors sorted alphabetically, but she couldn’t remember it.
Hold on, is that a possibility? It’s not so long ago that… oh, yes, now I remember!
At the moment when the pain wrenched her back to reality from her momentary doze, Naomi remembered.
It wasn’t a book.
It was her life.
Somewhere on the Sultan of the Seas.
And much to her displeasure it was long from over.