Past Twilight: When true evil crosses your path duck. (Hannah Tree: Detective Book 2)
PRAISE FOR D M MACDONALD
“Once again Macdonald has written an outstanding novel based on interesting characters. Hannah is truly growing as a person but still dealing with the ghosts of her past.
I loved the first book in this series, Long Shadows. Sometimes the second book is not as good as the first, but not in this case. Past Twilight is just as good, if not better than the first book. Knowing the characters and relationships just adds another layer to an already fabulous series. I highly recommend reading this series, and am waiting anxiously to begin the third book in the series
Laura Hartman
Reviewer.”
PAST TWILIGHT
WHEN DOES JUSTICE BECOME REVENGE?
D M MACDONALD
Copyright © 2022 by D M Macdonald
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. The characters and incidents are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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https://www.dmmacdonaldauthor.com
CONTENTS
Untitled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Also by D M Macdonald
UNTITLED
“Once again Macdonald has written an outstanding novel based on interesting characters. Hannah is truly growing as a person but still dealing with the ghosts of her past.
I loved the first book in this series, Long Shadows. Sometimes the second book is not as good as the first, but not in this case. Past Twilight is just as good, if not better than the first book. Knowing the characters and relationships just adds another layer to an already fabulous series. I highly recommend reading this series, and am waiting anxiously to begin the third book in the series
Laura Hartman
Reviewer.”
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I need someone to mind my newish 3 bedroom house and 2 siamese cats. The house has a double garage, a small garden and all mod cons. I will be away for 1 month.
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1
1
You'd like to think that people would recognise a psychopath when they saw one. You know the slavering, violent lunatic who slaughters innocent people for fun. The sadistic torturer. The mass killer stalking strangers. The ruthless business executive who heartlessly robs vast numbers of hapless investors.
Well, some of them might be like that, but while most people who do these things are psychopaths, most psychopaths don't. That's not to say that they don't leave a trail of destruction behind them. They do, but mostly they don't try to take your life. They don't need to. They just destroy your soul.
I don't know many people who've met a true psychopath. Or know they have. Most of them manage to cover it up really well. Until you stand face to face with them and you're in their way. Then it's time to bail out fast. If you've got any sense, that is. And I've never been known for that.
In my life, I only ever knew one and until recently I had only seen him once since I was ten. I didn't even know he was one until I was twenty-seven. All I knew was that he was bad and that I would spend as much of my life as it took to bring him down.
But right now he just lurked in the background of my life, there but not there. A life I was getting back, bit by tortuous bit. Two steps forward, one back.
Right now I was the nemesis of some straying husband. I didn't really care where the poor sods took their jollies but their significant others were paying to keep my fledgling detective business afloat. That was far easier than my other job of soothing the flayed emotions of the temperamental cast of the best drag show in town.
`Step, pause, step, kick, turn. Together! Jesus. I've never seen so many fucking prima donnas in my life. You're supposed to be a fucking chorus line, so now, all together...'
Gary, our dance master's voice finally penetrated my reverie as he tore new ones in the lads as they rehearsed the new show for Starr's Follies. The one we had to have ready for Gloria when she arrived back from her sexual reassignment surgery in two weeks. I felt quite proud. It was my more spectacular exploits as a detective that ginned up enough profits for her to afford the extortionate fees that paid for her surgeon's new house in Sorrento. Italy, not Victoria. Not every show in town had a paedophile ring-busting assistant stage manager and the publicity, which she pushed hard, was awesome.
Gloria was a towering figure, literally at six-foot-five, and, at her best, a kind and thoughtful boss. But since the surgery, she hadn't been at her best. Far from it. She was cranky, short-tempered, and all up a proper pain in the arse. Which, come to think of it, was probably the cause of her sour humour.
From her hospital bed, she'd tried to dictate every last detail in the new show. She listened to no one, not even placid old Charlie with his fringe of wispy grey-blond hair and crinkly, no colour eyes, my immediate boss and our stage manager. Nothing we could conceive of was good enough. We patted her hand, told her to get well soon, and ignored her. We put it all down to pain and hormone therapy, sent chocolates, and hoped it would be good enough in the end to pass her very critical eye.
And she did have a very keen eye for the theatrical, honed over her years in court as a Queens Council. Or so she said. I guess there’s theatrical element in the court system. The judges who peered at me with the intention of making me cringe in fear and shame, and the social workers who nodded sadly were surely acting. They never showed any concern anywhere else. The police threatening hellfire and damnation and giving me a clip on the head to go on with were serious, though. They all failed to make me contrite for one second. Mainly because I never did anything to anyone that wasn't thoroughly deserved. Even if it was illegal.
What they did do was instil in me a bottomless need to see justice done, no matter what. In spite of them.
`Back, step, turn, kick—What the fuck are you doing, Marky? This is a chorus number, not a showcase for your megalomania. Get back in the fucking line. Christ. Break, everyone, back in ten. Marky, my office, now.'
I grinned at Charlie. Gary's `office' was a corner of the storeroom behind two stage flats held in place with sandbags. It had a tiny trestle table with his co
mputer, and a whiteboard on a stand. But with this little bit of technology he created magic. It wasn't just my shenanigans that brought the paying audience. Gary's superb dance numbers had the punters drooling in the aisles, begging for more.
After a whole lot more yelling from Gary and sulks from the lads, I knew I'd be spending the rest of the day soothing frayed egos and injured sensibilities. As assistant stage manager, part of my job was being den mother to the cast of Starr's Follies.
It used to be Charlie's job, but when I took the job as ASM, he quickly passed the baton to me.
`You understand their...er...problems better than me,' he said. `After all, you're a woman.'
I have no idea how being female means you can better put up with petty jealousies, insecurities, and the overall neuroses of a bunch of young gay men than men can. Weren't all the most famous psyches men? Not that they'd done too well. My own experience with the bastards had made that absolutely clear.
It didn't mean I was any better. Mostly I just murmured, `There, there,' and `How awful,' a few times, and they thought I'd healed their souls. Until the next time. A few of the more discerning realised I'd done nothing, but they weren't the ones who whined, so I didn't care.
That was my normal way of dealing with the world. Me first and hang everyone else. Or it used to be. Until Gloria. But I was fighting back. Without her around, I was able to keep everyone at a distance. It was my way of staying safe. Betrayal was a huge black shadow in my life, and setting myself up to care about anyone or anything was just saying come and get me.
This included my sort of boyfriend, Nick. A massive chemical reaction had forced me to succumb to my raging libido, but it didn't have to set me up to drop my guard.
Right now I was relatively comfortable. I didn't need to run any risks whatsoever. Gloria wasn't peering over my shoulder into my mind, and Nick didn't get the chance.
I was unsuccessfully suppressing the hormones that always surged at the thought of him when Charlie's hand on my arm made me jump a foot off the floor. A rise in chatter signalled that the boys were straggling back to the rehearsal area. I was still edgy after the consequences of my detective successes, almost all of which had put me in hospital. The clients might have come out all right, but I never did. So far I'd been arrested, stabbed, and kidnapped twice. All in the pursuit of justice. My only human trait, some claimed. Including my currently estranged assistants.
I admit I wasn't easy to get along with over the past couple of months, but when my trusted right-hand assistant dobbed me in over Nick to my left-hand assistant, it was too much. I let my guard down with those two, and the next thing I knew, they too betrayed me.
My romantic liaison with its chemical reaction subverted my libido and left me struggling to deal with being vulnerable, so it was intolerable that I caught my trusted crew snickering and smirking behind my back. I might have been more savage than I should have been, but stuff it, I had to cover my back.
The outcome was I had no more driving lessons because Nola, my driver, got the huff and quit. Damian, a chorus boy in the show as well, refused to speak to me, which challenged my authority at work. Both desertions made life far more difficult for me than it did for them, but I never back down. Ever.
Nola was at the core of my detecting business. The one Gloria had insisted I follow. I never meant to be a detective and I was still not a legal one. With a police record, I wasn't allowed to be. Nola wasn't legal either. A long sentence for manslaughter made sure of that. But without her, I was sidelined.
My only current client wanted me to find out if her old man had his leg over his secretary and I needed a car to track down their trysting places. Because I was twenty hours short of applying for a driver’s license, I needed a driver. Without Nola, I either had to resort to my old ways of driving without a license or apologise to her for cursing her out. Since I met Nola in jail, it wasn't the swearing that offended her, that's for sure. She said something about appreciating her when she stalked out, but I'd been too angry to care at the time.
Looking back, my rage was a bit over the top, but I was struggling with the whole idea of a boyfriend anyway, and having anyone know about the affair really got to me. Even Gloria, who was the only person I'd come even close to trusting since I was a child, didn't know about Nick. I wasn't going to tell her either since he was her son, from when she was a man. They hadn't seen each other or spoken since she came out as transgender seven years before.
What pushed my rage over the top was that I'd just heard that one of the men in my last case, who'd been caught in the act of brutalising a young man, had evaded the law. I was disgusted but not really surprised. Privilege and power mean you never have to say you're sorry, as they say.
I'd been hanging back on chasing down the worst of them. The one who had not faced the law for one minute. Who'd clearly been tipped off or secreted away before it hit the fan. He was my father. Richard Trevelyan QC.
As a leading barrister with very powerful friends, he’d know where all kinds of bodies were buried. That was almost certainly why he'd managed to disappear from the scene just as his mates were being rounded up by the police for making child pornography movies in the basement of their club. The one with a little side arrangement of sadism and torture upstairs.
Now one of these scum had been able to slip away from prosecution by using his connections and I had little faith that others wouldn't do the same. My first thought when I found out was that it was past time for me to mount a campaign to pursue my father until I nailed him for the vicious criminal he was. Until then, no little girl was safe. Paedophiles never stop. They just slither underground until next time.
And I needed Nola to help me.
So once again, as so often in my life, I faced totally conflicting desires at the same time. In the past it had often paralysed me until I was forced to choose. But usually I chose the wrong thing and got myself into a world of misery as a result. The one time it worked out was with Gloria, but that was more her than me.
This time it wasn't a truly sanity shredding issue. If I needed to make a bit of extra money with clients or to have any chance of tracking down my father, I'd have to eat crow.
Grovelling was made easier because I really liked Nola and knew she understood me better than almost everyone I'd ever met. We were both outcasts, and while our paths had been different, we knew each other's worlds. It made life so much easier. Even though she’d nearly been killed because of me, I knew she didn’t blame me for that. It was just part of the world we both understood. I reckoned she'd sulk for a while and I'd have to be nice, but we'd both know we were playing the same game. Saving face.
2
With Damian it wouldn't be that easy. I worked with him. I wasn't his boss in my legit job as ASM, just in my non legit job as a detective. In helping me out in that, he too had nearly been killed, but he was far more vulnerable than Nola was, so me savaging him about something so mundane as a sexual encounter hurt him a lot.
He didn't, couldn't, know that for me anything associated with sex was difficult. Since I was around twelve, boys and men had hit on me. They seemed to believe they had some sort of right to do that. And I still didn’t know why. At five-feet-nine I’m taller than a lot of them and shaped more like a boy than some of them too. I’m a ranger, too, with reddish-blond curly hair and freckles. With my dreadlocks gone the rest of my looks are nothing special either. I never encourage them, ever, but I’ve been fending the sods off all my life.
In fact, it was the revenge I took on three bastards who gang raped me in year ten that put me in Juvenile detention for nearly two years. They were the victims, they said. How does that work? The fact now was that with Nick the sex was mixed up with other stuff. I felt I was somehow risking something more and that made it impossibly hard.
But to have the theatre operating smoothly, I had to try to get him onside again. With Gloria away and rehearsals in full swing, Charlie couldn't afford to have a feud between his ASM and a
cast member. The tensions were already poised to erupt at any time as it was.
I jumped when Charlie leaned towards me and pointed at a figure standing near the edge of the roller doors.
`Find out...'
There was a bloodcurdling scream and a crash. The lads scattered as someone lay stretched out on the floor. It was Marky. He was back on his feet in an instant and looking for trouble.
`You did that deliberately,' he screamed and lunged at one of the other boys. Mayhem erupted.
Charlie turned and shouted, `Get that bloke out. I'll sort this out.' He headed like a warrior into battle into the mass of swirling, shouting boys.
I walked calmly over to the interloper. He was a tall, thin man with a slicked back ponytail and mean eyes whom I felt I'd seen before. That worried me. Over the last few months, I'd had rather too many encounters with malignant people I didn't really see too closely. I hoped this wasn't one of them. The man held his ground as I approached. I stopped in front of him.
`Sorry,' I said, `I'm afraid you'll have to leave. This is a restricted area.'
`I'm just looking,' he said. `I'm with one of the cast. He invited me to watch the rehearsal.'