The Billows

Julia Whittaker stands on the brink of a precipice. Once, she remembers, she was a student at King's College in London. She had her own apartment in Bloomsbury. She spent her evenings with her friends, drinking and dancing in city bars. She was nineteen, set free, enjoying life.



Then something terrible happened. The world slammed in her face.



When she recovered, she found herself in the company of John Lankin, a man more than twice her age. He claims to be her father, but he doesn't share her name or her lineage. His face and body, kept hidden in a hooded coat, are ravaged by years of brutal conflict. He's a crippled demon, a volatile madman, dragging her relentlessly through the squalor of the English countryside. His motives sinister, his purposes unknown, his past shadowy and violent.



All Julia has left of herself are the fashionable clothes she wears, the silver ring on her finger, and a handful of memories.



She is lost in the wilderness, in empty lanes and fields, in dark woods and huddled villages, and there is no chance of rescue.



THE BILLOWS is a standalone thriller novel by the author of "Constant" and "Hiding Place."



EXCERPT:



It was as if she summoned him.

A shadow appeared at the door. There was the rap of a walking stick on the bodywork. She started visibly as if struck unexpectedly from behind.

‘It's open,' Mack drawled. ‘You might as well come in.'

The door swung back. Lankin was there, just as she'd thought, bringing with him a chill that sucked all the warmth out of the coach.

Beyond him, the camp was desolate under a blowing afternoon sky, squally with rain.

Boo began to cry. Molly picked him up and carried him outside, pushing past Lankin without a word. She preferred the deserted camp to Lankin's presence, and made no attempt to hide her disgust of him.

Mack sat in the driver's seat tinkering with the radio and hardly bothered to glance up at the intrusion.

Julia, sitting cross-legged on sofa, looked at the thin man in the doorway. She was still shivering despite the times she'd told herself to be strong and hard against him.

He'd pulled back the hood revealing his straggling hair and the permanent gray stubble that roughened his face. She could see that the scar on his temple stretched across the back of his head where there was no hair, revealing a plate of gray bone—it could only be bone—in the rags of white scar tissue.

Once his features might have been handsome, she thought. Once he might have been rich and distinguished, or talented like Grint. But the rigors of life on the road had banished all trace of beauty from him.

She felt the bile of revulsion in her mouth and didn't look at him for more than a few moments.

He had to stoop to enter the coach. Once inside, he paused at the edge of the sofa, leaning heavily on his stick. He was close enough to reach out his arm and touch her.

‘These are better clothes,' he said. ‘What did you do with the old ones?'

‘I threw them in the ditch,' she said coldly. ‘Why do you care?'

‘I have a right to ask,' he said.

‘If you were my father you'd have a right to ask. But I don't think you're my father.'

‘Who do you think I am, then?'

She glared up at him.

‘You're nothing to do with me. The moment I get the chance, I'll—'

‘Run away? And maybe this time I won't catch you.'

‘You admit you abducted me, then?'

Lankin stared fiercely at her. ‘If I was worried about you, I'd put you in with Pog. I wouldn't let you have the run of this place—and believe me, it's a palace in comparison.'

Anger was her only recourse, the only thing that stopped her crying again.

‘You'd give me—your own daughter—to Pog to be raped?' she cried.

‘Why not?' Lankin shot back. ‘It wouldn't be the first time.'