Perfect Day is the first book in the Perfect Worlds series of full-length crime-mystery-suspense novels. Future novels may not always feature the same characters or situations, but they will be defined by a consistent darkness of tone, and a commitment to depth of character as well as richness of plot. Perfect Day is the story of how the worst year of one woman's life turns into a nightmare.
There was a time when Joan Crosby seemed to have it all: her own small but thriving interior design business, an attractive and successful solicitor for a husband, and a large, comfortable home in one of London’s wealthier suburbs. But that time has gone, and Joan has just suffered through the worst year of her entire life.
First her best friend mysteriously vanished from the face of the earth, then her marriage began to disintegrate from the inside out, and finally a hit-and-run incident on a busy London road shattered her mental health and almost took her life. Now Joan believes that the worst is over. But she’s wrong... it’s only just beginning.
Hate. Greed. Lust. Betrayal. Revenge. Madness. Murder. Does this sound like your perfect day?
PERFECT DAY is a slow-burning, full-length crime novel that builds through layers of mystery and suspense to a thrilling, unforgettable climax.
Approx’ 102,000 words.
Excerpt
1
‘I’m thinking about it a lot just lately, and I don’t know why. It isn’t as if I dream about it anymore, and I don’t get those flashbacks when I’m walking down the street, either. No sweating, or heavy breathing. No serious panic-attacks, they’re pretty much gone. But still…something keeps taking my mind back there, and the memory has never been as clear as it is now. I don’t know, maybe I’m just embellishing it myself, with my imagination. The details seem richer than they were. Sharper. And the textures are real. They have depth, if you know what I mean?’
A small grunt of encouragement from the man at the other side of the room, a minute nod of the head, and she goes on.
‘Okay, so this is early January - just five days into the New Year - and I’m on the pedestrian crossing. It’s cold enough for me to see my breath in front of my face, but I’m really warm because I’m wearing Olivia’s thick wool coat, the brown one, the one with the hat. No, actually it’s my coat, Olivia only borrowed it. I’d just been to get it back... I think. That’s one of the things that still won’t come clear. I know it’s just a small, insignificant detail, but it’s just so damn stubborn... Anyway, I’m crossing the road quickly, almost jogging, and for some reason I’m crying really badly ― that’s something else I don’t understand yet ― and then I hear it, the engine, racing like mad. I stop moving, and I turn, and I see it. There it is…’
After a long pause, another prompting grunt.
‘Yeah, so… I see it. A big black 4x4 jeepy thing, huge wheels, black tinted windscreen, the whole middle-class school-run tank-job, and it’s coming straight at me. I know immediately that it’s going to hit me, and I mean immediately. I just know it. It isn’t going to stop at the crossing, and it won’t do me any good to run because the jeep’s going too fast. The damn thing wants to kill me, that’s the thing. It wants to, and it’s just using the fact that I’m crossing the road as an excuse. This is what I feel at the time, you understand, what I think I know. It’s actually accelerating as it comes toward me, and it’s getting bigger and bigger, like something out of a stupid cartoon…’
Another long pause, another grunt.
‘Then I realise there’s someone else on the crossing, too, following me. This really beautiful black woman I’m noticing for the first time, very heavily pregnant, and she’s looking down at her coat stretched over her lovely full belly, or down at the road, or maybe at the way the toes of her shoes flick out from underneath the curve of her stomach as she walks. All I really know is that she doesn’t seem to see or hear the jeep at all, and I can’t warn her. I try to, but I just can’t. My throat’s closed up so tight and I can hardly breathe, let alone…
‘When I look back at the jeep again, it’s almost on top of me, and it’s enormous, it’s gigantic. We’re looking at each other, the car and me, like it’s alive, and we both know that I’m going to die. But then something amazing happens. It seems to change its mind. Suddenly it doesn’t want to kill me anymore, and it tries to stop. The tyres screech, there’s smoke coming off them, like they’re on fire almost. The whole front of the jeep goes down all the way to the road-surface and there are sparks flying from somewhere. But it’s too late now for the brakes to stop it. It’s still going to hit me, and when it does…
‘All of this is like slow motion now, like a film. At this stage I can almost hear the jeep thinking, and it’s thinking that it’s got a choice to make here; it can just come on and kill me, or it can try to turn away. To its right there’s a lamppost, a parked car, things like that. To its left is a pregnant woman. That’s its choice. Me, the other woman, or the things that don’t matter, the things that won’t die if it hits them. Then I think I can hear its thoughts again, and I know that it’s going to turn away from the people and toward the lamppost and the parked car. Of course it is. That’s what I would do. That’s what anyone would do, isn’t it? But the jeep isn’t human, you see, and it doesn’t think the same as us...
‘At the last moment, at absolutely the very last moment, it swerves to my left and I start to scream at it to stop. It pays no attention, just plows on through, accelerating again. If nobody else had been on the crossing it would have missed me by four or five feet at least, and I wouldn’t have been hurt at all. But someone was there, of course. And she was so pregnant. She was so hugely, obviously pregnant...
‘I saw it hit her. I saw her... just before she hit me…’
2
As she sat in the familiar worn leather armchair, Joan Crosby was quite aware that her lips were flapping with the even regularity of a metronome, and equally aware that apparently coherent phrases were passing through them on a zephyr of minty breath, partially deodorising her part of the consulting room. But Joan wasn’t paying too much attention to herself this afternoon, and didn’t really hear the specifics of her own monologue. She was quite sure, though, that it wasn’t anything she hadn’t said before.
Blah blah this, blah blah that.
In fact, it was far more likely that she’d told the same story a dozen times over and her doctor was as bored as Joan was herself, now that she had become desensitised to the genuine horror of her recent history. Those polite and vaguely encouraging grunts of his were probably discreet snores. Oddly enough, she found that this potentially unsettling idea made her feel a little like chuckling.
Joan was pleasantly adrift from herself. For the first time in what seemed a very long while, there were other things to consider besides the terrible events that had landed her here. Other things she found more interesting than her own over-familiar problems.
For instance… she had suddenly decided that the décor of the consulting room, which she had visited once every week for the last four months, was truly gruesome. It was as though she were seeing it for the first time - or for the first time with clear eyes, at any rate. The walls had been painted a uniform pale green, an Art Deco shade called Eau De Nil, which she recognised from her former life as an interior designer. It was a calm colour, a restful colour it was presumably hoped would suggest peace and tranquillity to the mentally vulnerable. But today the colour’s psychologically well-intentioned effect, if any, was indeed nil, and instead Joan speculated that this was what it must be like to be imprisoned within a vast block of mouldering cheese.
A deep, long-dormant, long-denied part of her longed to repaint the walls in a more empathetic shade, to restore the ceiling mouldings to their original elegance, to breathe warmth into the room and help bring it back to life.
For instance… the tropical fish in the aquarium that had appeared after her second or third visit here seemed to have undergone a quite dramatic reduction in their numbers. This may or may not have had something to do with the brooding presence of a squat black fish with long fleshy whiskers she could see lurking ominously at the bottom of the tank. This microcosmic predator now seemed a little too large for its environment, and she thought that the remaining fish - guppies and yellow- and black-striped angelfish, mostly - looked as though they were living on their nerves.
Running vertically down the centre of the aquarium’s front-plate was a long hairline crack for which Joan was responsible. It had been casually repaired with a strip of all-weather greenhouse tape.
For instance… she had finally noticed, quite obviously some months after it had begun, that her doctor, the great and good Robert Stratton, Dr Bob, appeared to be in the midst of a fairly obvious mid-life crisis. He sat opposite but not facing her in a matching armchair, his chin almost on his chest. The first three fingertips of his left hand were lightly pressed to his broad forehead, and his eyes were closed. It was the same carefully considered listening pose he had adopted on her very first appointment, and maintained thereafter, but almost everything else about him had changed.
At some point over the months, his mop of salt and pepper hair had been mown down and gelled to something approaching trendy neatness, most likely at the same time the unkempt matching beard had been made to disappear. Mild, gentle brown eyes, previously corralled by severe horn-rims, had been liberated by either contact lenses or laser surgery. The musty tweed suits that had been far too old for him had been replaced by designer label casuals which, like his hairstyle, Joan considered to be just a little too young for him. Most tellingly, one of the fingers pressed to his forehead had once sported a slim gold wedding band and now did not. Even the tan line around the finger was no longer visible.
When exactly had all this happened? Where had Joan been while it happened?
But with hindsight, these questions were easy enough to answer. She’d been lost, swallowed up by the Dragon - by Life itself - and so far she had spent a whole year trying to crawl back out of its gullet.
And she was getting there, she really believed she was; for just as she was beginning to notice the world around her once more, Joan was also beginning to remember aspects of the past that were not just memories of terror and revulsion, pain and guilt. From somewhere deep within herself she was rediscovering memories of what life had been for her before the Dragon had taken her - and if those memories were true memories, then her life had been, in part, wonderfully, uneventfully normal. Average, boring, in the best possible way.
She sometimes saw these random moments as fiery bright still images, static but full of light and life, and they came at her out of the blue, often at times when she least expected them. But whenever they came, however they came, they warmed her whole being, body and soul.
Here are some of them:
She is sitting cross-legged on the floorboards in a stripped, unoccupied house that is like a three-dimensional canvas, a blank canvas, just waiting for her to begin work; the floor around her is covered by the colour swatches and fabric patterns she has sourced for her unknown, invisible clients, and her face is radiant with gleeful, concentrated delight. It is the joy of beginning.
She is out shopping with her friends, having a frivolous, girly afternoon in town; they are trying on clothes that they are never going to buy, shoes they can’t even walk in, make-up they wouldn’t be seen dead in, and laughing at things men would never understand if they lived to be a million years old.
She is getting ready to go out somewhere, to dinner in a favourite restaurant, perhaps, and is wrapped in a towel sitting at her dressing table applying her make-up; her husband stands behind her gazing into the mirror, supposedly tying his tie, but in reality he is just watching her, admiring her, and has been unable to resist laying a warm, possessive hand on her heated, naked shoulder.
She is standing at the kitchen sink, washing the Waterford crystal glasses she doesn’t trust to the dishwasher. She is forking canned tuna fish onto a saucer for a stray cat. She is lying on a foreign beach, half-asleep, having sun-cream stroked over her back by her husband’s large hands while the sun dries out the soles of her feet. She is watching a young mother hoist a crying toddler back to his feet after a fall, and wishing that the arms about to enfold the child, the voice about to sooth his tears, could have been hers.
Moments, that was all, nothing special. Just brief moments.
But now they had begun to feel like things that might actually have happened to her, and not just images culled from a movie of her former life, with an actress playing Joan’s part, and playing it badly. Dr Stratton had told her that these pictures would soon begin to move, to shimmer into a facsimile of life, and then grow into self-contained scenes, which would then splice together to become a complete film. He had assured her that she, and not some look-alike actress, would be the star of this movie.
It was quite impossible for her to doubt Dr Bob. Joan knew this for a fact - she had tried.
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Following this brutal double homicide, Johnston, RI D
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