Bad company, p.1
Bad Company, page 1
BAD COMPANY
JOCELYN DEXTER
Copyright © 2023 Jocelyn Dexter
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The right of Jocelyn Dexter to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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First published in 2023 by Bloodhound Books.
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Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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www.bloodhoundbooks.com
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Print ISBN: 978-1-5040-8519-9
Contents
Love best-selling fiction?
Also by Jocelyn Dexter
1. Penny
2. Penny
3. Penny
4. Penny
5. Penny
6. Butty
7. Butty
8. Butty
9. Butty
10. Butty
11. Penny
12. Butty
13. Butty
14. Butty
15. Butty
16. Penny
17. Penny
18. Penny
19. Butty
20. Butty
21. Penny
22. Butty
23. Butty
24. Penny
25. Penny
26. Penny
27. Penny
28. Butty
29. Butty
30. Penny
31. Butty
32. Penny
33. Penny
34. Butty
35. Penny
36. Butty
37. Butty
38. Penny
39. Penny
40. Butty
41. Penny
42. Penny
43. Butty
44. Penny
45. The Whisperer
46. Penny
47. Penny
48. Penny
49. Butty
Acknowledgements
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A note from the publisher
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Also by Jocelyn Dexter
Shh
Uninvited
ONE
Penny
NOW
Penny Crisp closed her eyes and stood still in the garden. Remembered way back to when she was fourteen and her father had said, ‘It’s called “hoarfrost”.’ She recalled smirking and had settled her weight on one hip, crossed her arms and made an exaggerated visual scan of the trees, the grass, the shrubs and the bushes. ‘Whore frost? Really? Seriously? Where are they then? The prostitutes?’
In her mind she’d pictured sparkling, frozen women dangling from branches, swinging by their leg garters and suspender belts: stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and red-slashed lip-sticked mouths. She’d laughed.
Her father hadn’t tried to hide his smile. He was good like that.
Two years ago, she’d lost that sense of humour, lost that joyous sense of the ridiculous that she’d had as a young girl and adult. As she now crouched to touch the needle-like ice crystals on the ground with her mittened hands, instead of envisaging glistening ladies of the night, glittering with alluring promises of the flesh, she could now only enjoy a disturbed and relatively new fantasy as she rocked on the hoarfrost, back and forth on her wellington booted heels, thinking dark, black thoughts. Listened as the frost creaked under her feet and hands.
She heard only the sound of death.
The icy shards clinging to every blade of grass crackled and yielded to her bodyweight. In her mind, a corpse made that same sound as it rotted – the bones decomposing as she shattered them.
So, she hoped, a skeleton would give up that strange little snapping noise in a last attempt to be noticed and heard.
That’s what she hoped the brittle, dried bones of the man she’d killed would sound like.
And those of all the bastards she would kill in the future.
But this early morning cold was a transient thing and already the winter sunshine was destroying the haunting sound of the newly dead.
Breathing in the cold, huffing out her warm breath in a shivering puff, she trudged back towards the house. Cold and flushed with the icy temperature, both external and internal. Trudged back towards her house and her parents.
Her mother who knew absolutely nothing about her.
Her father who knew absolutely nothing about her.
Not anymore.
Not since then.
TWO
Penny
2 YEARS AGO
Penny, although twenty-eight years old, still slept like a baby. She’d wake in the morning, in precisely the same position as she’d gone to sleep; her fists semi-curled in relaxation on either side of her head, her arms bent at the elbow. In sleep, not one muscle twitched. Impervious to the sounds of the night, she might as well have been dead.
However, as she was jolted awake from a deep sleep, she knew she was very much alive. Right at this moment, possibly too alive. Something had awoken her. Someone had awoken her. There’d been a sound – wrong and out of place.
Her parents were in bed, and once there, it was rare that either of them ventured out of their room until the morning. Her father’s declining health meant he spent most of his time propped up in bed, as if in-waiting for death, whilst her mother quietly and sadly struggled to cope.
So it definitely wasn’t either of them moving around.
Penny’s eyes bulged into the black, grey light. Blinking wildly.
There it was again. A noise. A noise that didn’t belong.
Lying still, lying very still, she realised that she’d stopped breathing. Her ears strained, attuned to anything audible that shouldn’t be. There it was again. Damn it. At first, she failed to identify it, but then she placed it. A muffled footstep. And then the very distinct and instantly recognisable sound of her bedroom door being opened.
Shit.
Her eyes felt like they were bleeding as she stretched her lids as far apart as was possible, trying to penetrate the darkness and recognise the figure who’d stepped into her room and stood stationary at the door. The male figure who’d stepped into her room: she knew that much from the form of his outline. He turned slightly but quickly to close the door behind him.
Sudden light split the blackness, blinding her. Automatically, she closed her eyes. And then the white bright torch beam was gone, leaving a smudge of orange burnt onto her retinas.
Having apparently got his bearings, the man walked softly, softly towards her: his steps barely making any sound at all. But she could smell him. Aniseed. He smelt of aniseed.
And she continued to lie there. Involuntarily, her arms moved swiftly but silently into a defensive but useless gesture. There she remained, paralysed; her hands tucked under her chin, bunching the duvet tight up to her neck. The terror inside her, sounded like the deafening clash of cymbals – so loud that surely he would hear it and she waited for his anger at the clamour that shrieked from her.
She knew with certainty that her pupils would be huge black circles, diminishing the colour of her eyes, as they desperately tried to see. The man stopped. ‘Are you awake?’ his voice whispered out.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t know what the best answer was.
Oddly, flat on her back, eyes wide open but blind to anything more than the shadowed silhouette of the man next to her bed, she felt him smile. It was if the air had shifted, and she imagined the corners of his mouth tilting up. She smelt a stronger smell of aniseed as he opened his mouth again and whispered. ‘I know you’re awake.’
Unable to speak, she listened to him smiling loudly. Her heart beat so strongly that it matched the pulsing throb in her temple. Penny waited.
He waited with her.
Then he stopped waiting and grabbed her by the throat.
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t fight. Couldn’t do anything. Knowing what was coming, she gritted her teeth together and vainly and pathetically attempted to keep the duvet to her. Of course, she couldn’t compete with his strength. He ripped it off her and she felt ludicrously naked, although dressed in a pair of cotton pyjamas.
Instead of raping her straight away, thrusting himself on to her and into her, he slipped into bed beside her. Turned her gently but firmly on to her side and tucked himself tightly up against her spine, bottom and legs, keeping her physically restrained, forcing her into a position where they were cupped together like two spoons in a drawer. Snuggled up behind her, as if they were lovers. He stroked her hair. Her shiny black beautiful hair.
She couldn’t tell if he were young or old, only that he was around about the same height as she. Because, horribly, their bodies fit. Obscenely, they fit. A physical match.
Wanting to wail, to scream and shout and swear, she remained utterly quiet. Acquiescent. Accepting of her fate before
He had no knife, he had no gun, he didn’t threaten physical violence. It was merely his presence that terrified her so. Kept her obedient and obliging.
And she just carried on, silently letting him frighten her.
Why am I letting him do this to me? I’m giving my permission. By doing nothing, I’m saying, you may go ahead.
Because I am frozen.
The man ran his fingers through her hair, flattening it to her scalp, with long sweeps of his hand against her head. Her marvellous, thick hair. It fell naturally like the crest of a wave, dark and sleek on the pillow. Stunning. Magnificent. Hers.
He carried on flattening and smoothing it with his hand. Dampening it with the sweat from the flesh of his hand.
The more he stroked her hair, the less magnificent it felt. Now it was more like a burden, weighing Penny down, making her head feel heavy and useless. How could something so beautiful be made suddenly so repulsively ugly.
‘Lovely hair,’ he whispered.
When it inevitably came, the actual rape, the very physical penetration of her, the visceral violation of her body, she felt detached from it. Remote. He grabbed her hair tightly, holding on to it as he did whatever he pleased to her. She didn’t want to engage with it, or him, and so she did nothing. His thrusting barely registered on her body, so far away had her mind taken her. It was happening to someone else. Some other poor bitch.
At last, with an agonising but muted wail of release from him, he patted her on the head as if she’d been a very good girl. Tousled her hair, as if she were a child. He handed her something in the dark. Automatically, her fingers traced its outline, felt the stick and the round hard circle shape at the top. She heard the crinkle of cellophane. Instinctively, she knew what it was.
Emotionally freezing, but not actually physically cold, she continued to lie there in her bed. Not shaking, nor trembling. But deep-down bone cold. Dead. She might as well have been sculpted in ice.
‘Bye-bye. And don’t tell, will you? I know you won’t.’ He still whispered and he stroked her hair one final time. ‘See you later. And thanks.’ She felt his smile again in his words. Smelt his smell again. Died just a little bit more. Again.
It took a while, still curled foetus style, stiff and immobile, before she could move. Turning on her lamp, she winced at the sudden glare of artificial light. Looked down and examined what she was holding.
Realised that he had given her a lollipop.
Alone. Dry-eyed. Fists clenched.
Holding a fucking lollipop.
THREE
Penny
1 YEAR AGO
Penny no longer slept like a baby. Instead, she rarely slept at all; more the dozing of a person mimicking slumber. She was too full of rage. Constant rage.
And hatred.
That’s who I am now. Angry and hateful.
She’d also never told anyone. Not a soul. Certainly not the police. She didn’t like authority, especially the police.
As a teenager, walking home from school, she’d been cautioned by an over-zealous policeman for smoking a spliff, and consequently been expelled from school because of his unnecessary intervention. The powers that be had been over the top then. She assumed they’d be equally useless this time. The justice system was too often underwhelming in rape cases. Everyone knew that.
She was better using her own authority.
That night, after the Aniseed Man had left, she’d felt as if he’d cored and peeled her – leaving her stripped: emotionally naked. That first year, it had been like walking on thin ice. One misstep and she’d have sunk: never to re-surface again. She’d have drowned, without bothering to come up for air – too destroyed to even kick for the surface.
So, she focused. Better, she thought, to march on. Alone and silent, keeping her secret to herself as if its release would further wound. Would further damage. She told herself she was better on her own and in charge of herself. Reliant on no one. No one at all.
All that remained inside her was rage. A rage with no outlet. Penny hated everyone, except her parents, whom she loved. But she hadn’t told them and so they didn’t know. They had no idea. It would have been beyond their comprehension, but as angry as she was, Penny had no desire to stain them with her own filth. She protected them. From herself and her hatred of the world.
Instead, she moved out. Couldn’t bear being in her old room: the rape room – now impossible to think of it as her bedroom. It had become simply a dwelling. Bricks and mortar filled with filth.
She lived in a small bungalow in town and busied herself despising everyone. She fumed and ranted at the universe, despising all the stupid fools that surrounded her; wanting to destroy everyone’s pedestrian lives, their petty existences. Men, women, children – anyone who breathed, she loathed. She could almost taste her anger.
She particularly hated men.
She specifically hated the Aniseed Man.
But most of all, she hated herself.
Her beautiful, glorious hair had been cut. She’d had it cut like a man’s soon after the rape: a brutal short back and sides. Gender-anonymous. Her clothes were now always black and most importantly, they were baggy, floating, formless, making it impossible for people behind her to identify her as female. Even from the front, her sex was questionable. Others would have to really look to make sure that she was indeed a woman. Make-up was a thing of the past.
Hiding in her bungalow, surrounded by a clan of geriatrics who’d gathered in these houses that differed only by their front gardens, furious with anyone and everyone, she thought of revenge. It obsessed her, filling her mind with violent thoughts.
Revenge against the Aniseed Man.
Against all the aniseed men out there.
She was going to get as many of the bastards as she could.
Let the vendetta begin.
FOUR
Penny
10 MONTHS AGO
Vengeance was a cosy bedfellow for rage. The two emotions had become best friends within her mind, and Penny nurtured both as if they were her babies. One drove the other.
Initially, she’d experimented with a hammer on a watermelon. It was a frustratingly difficult tool to wield with the correct amount of heft. Too small a tap and all it produced was crescent-shaped cuts in the flesh. Too big and powerful the hit, using a full arcing backswing, simply obliterated the fruit. The impact and carnage of a hammer had completely thrown her. She hadn’t expected such utter devastation: she’d been covered in red flesh and black pips and pink juice. Splattered from head to foot.
It wasn’t a difficult decision for Penny to make: no hammer. It was far too messy and more to the point, it was too sudden and final. And far too unpredictable. She had no control with it.
