Chapter Twenty Nine

As Jake pulled into the parking bay of one of the places he’d never quite got round to calling home, with Sorcha sound asleep in the passenger seat, Duncan was having the crap beaten out of him.

Having been thrown out of a small, terraced house a few miles from the centre of Manchester, he had been subjected to a vicious, if not very effective, attack by a very tall woman wearing unnecessarily high heels. Despite the fact that she was thumping, kicking and scratching quite hard, in between the bits when she tried to pull out his hair in handfuls, she was managing to hurl constant insults and chat at him as she did so. Even as he struggled to keep his face out of it, knowing that looking as if you’d been beaten up was usually more of a problem than the beating itself, Duncan found himself admiring how fit she was - but it meant that she just didn’t let up, either. After punching him in the guts, which had him gasping for breath, and announcing that she was going to make sure that he couldn’t father any more fucking bastards, he decided that enough was enough.

It didn’t help that the next door neighbour had appeared with a video camera, and was yelling at her to move the action to a more convenient part of the street. Picking a moment when she was tottering on her heels, Duncan shoved her so that she stumbled backwards into a flower bed full of pansies and made a dash for his car. He just managed to jump in and lock the door shut behind him before she picked herself up and flung herself after him. Trying to force her way through the locked car door, she looked weird and wild; like a very pissed off zombie but without the zonked-out eyes. He waved at her, as he started up the engine and went to drive away. He could see her shriek at him, even if he couldn’t hear her, and laughed.

The next thing he saw, as the car was just starting to roll, was a body with its tits out flying through the air and hitting the bonnet. He swore and slammed on the brakes, wishing that he didn’t have to, and the body picked itself up, pulled its top up, and started yelling at him again. But it was only when he saw what Nicola had done that he finally lost his cool. She hadn’t just hurled herself at the car; she had hurled herself at the car with one of her monster stilettos in her hand, and had left a large silvery gouge down one side of the bonnet of one hundred and eight thousand pounds worth of brand new, limited edition, black Audi.

He leapt back out of the car, determined to make her pay, only for the right side of his face to be met by a swinging left hook. He staggered back against the car door, just as a police community liaison patrol drove round the corner. As he saw Nicola crumple theatrically to the pavement, as if she had just been knocked senseless by the invisible man, he wished that he’d been fighting a bloke. Then he would have been knocked out cold, and wouldn’t have to deal with the heap of shit that was about to land on his head.