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  ‘She’s predictable,’ Whitt surmised.

  ‘She’s safe,’ I said. ‘Why do you think Tox Barnes likes her so much? The guy’s a boat without a sail crashing around in the waves. She’s a secure harbour.’

  ‘You can’t tell me how I feel about you, Harry,’ Whitt pushed his drink away. ‘I care about you. I don’t want to go skiing every winter.’

  ‘You don’t want to wake up to the sound of a bump in the night and wonder if it’s the bikies coming for me,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to answer the door of our house and find some serial killer standing there. This is my life, Whitt. This has always been my life. I’m chaos. I’m misery. I’m a storm that crashes and rages and never blows itself out. If I don’t go looking for trouble, it’s because trouble has already found me. That is not the life for you. You’re not that kind of guy.’

  ‘I don’t care how chaotic you are, Harry,’ Whitt said. He took my hand. ‘I want to be with you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to be with you,’ I said.

  I slid my hand out from under his and walked out of the bar. Tox and Chloe didn’t even glance up. He was whispering in her ear, and she was smiling.

  Chapter 118

  I WALKED DOWN Victoria Street towards the harbour. A wind was picking up, shifting the fig trees above me, carrying voices from busy Darlinghurst Road. I put my hands in my pockets, trying to shake off the feel of Whitt’s fingers on mine, trying not to retrace my words.

  I don’t like lying, and it had all been lies. Of course I wanted to be with Whitt. From the beginning, the thought had risen now and then like a siren. Whitt was my safe harbour. But I knew, just as plainly as I knew it about Tox and Chloe – that there would be trouble on the horizon. The pain and darkness in my past never stayed away for long, and Whitt didn’t deserve to get swept up in the kind of life I lived. I was destined for badness. Sometimes it came from inside me. Sometimes it was drawn towards me. Tox was the same. And I had known many others over the years like me, too. In the foster system. In group homes. In the prison where I’d spent the last four months. Even on the police force, carrying badges and guns. Some people are just walking disasters waiting to happen.

  It didn’t matter what I wanted. What mattered was protecting the people I loved from the curse that I was.

  Chapter 119

  SYDNEY DOGS AND Cats Home was on a quiet suburban street lined with pretty little houses with neat yards. I followed Pops and his trio of small, fluffy dogs up the stairs and into the foyer, which was crowded with people. Three families were standing in the little space between the high counter and the wall covered in posters and photographs, huddled together, faces lit with anticipation as my friend and his brood of hounds arrived. I stood in the corner and watched as an Asian family with two excited little boys, a young couple, and an older couple with their adult daughter took their dog from Pops, signed their paperwork, and carried their hairy bundle off, cooing and laughing with joy.

  When it was all done Pops went to the counter and a group of three women stood chatting with him as he signed the paperwork reporting on the foster experience with the dogs he’d just seen adopted.

  ‘Is this your daughter?’ one of the ladies asked, spying me standing by with my hands in my pockets. Pops didn’t lift his eyes from the paper.

  ‘She’s not far off,’ he said.

  ‘Can we tempt you into becoming one of our kitten foster mums?’ one of them asked me. She took a small black kitten from the floor beneath the counter. ‘We’re overrun at the moment.’

  ‘I would,’ I said. ‘But I’m technically homeless.’

  The women didn’t know whether to laugh at that or not. Pops finished up his forms and spread his big, hard hands on the counter.

  ‘Alright, ladies,’ he said with a resigned sigh. ‘What have you got for me this time? Let me guess. A toy poodle in a little pink tutu.’

  ‘Actually, we’ve got something a little different for you today,’ one of them said. They were trying to keep straight faces, but I spied the lady at the back cracking a big grin as she walked off towards an office at the rear of the room. Someone handed Pops a key. ‘She’s in row three, enclosure twenty-one.’

  There was furious barking as we entered the yard. Dogs of all shapes and colours and sizes were housed in separate enclosures, watching us as we entered, pawing at the gates and turning excited laps. Volunteers were hosing out empty enclosures and filling buckets with dog food. On every cage a laminated card gave the dog’s name and a little slogan about their temperament. Boston – I’m a rambunctious boy! Miffy – I’m a little nervous but full of love! Damon – I like naps on the couch! Pops directed me to the third aisle and I followed, watching the dogs as I went.

  ‘They think they’re funny, those girls,’ Pops said as we turned down the aisle. ‘You watch. It’ll be a pack of Chihuahua puppies wearing onesies.’

  Pops looked into enclosure twenty-one before I did. He stiffened, and smacked a hand against his heart.

  I looked in and saw a glossy Doberman staring at us, sitting at attention with her paws perfectly aligned on the damp concrete and her eyes big and attentive. The dog examined us with an almost human air of dignity, like a princess looking over the crowd huddled in the rain outside her palace, aloof yet curious. The laminated card zip-tied to her cage said Antoinette – I’m pretty and I know it!

  ‘Oh,’ Pops said, his hand still on his chest. He looked over Antoinette the way some men look at sports cars. ‘Oh wow. Wow. Wow. She’s so … She’s so …’

  ‘Beautiful?’ I chipped in.

  ‘Glamorous!’ he corrected.

  Pops led Antoinette from her cage with a proud, straight-backed gait. I followed behind. The dog was playing it cool up front.

  But in the back, her little stumpy tail was wagging.

  Are you a fan of the Harriet Blue series?

  If so, you’ll love…

  THE INN

  Bill Robinson is starting over. The former Boston detective has moved to a secluded coastal town where he runs the local inn. Yet all too soon he discovers that his past won’t let him go, and that leaving the city is no escape from dangers he left behind.

  A new crew of criminals move into the small town, bringing drugs and violence to the front door of the inn. Robinson feels the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Can he save himself, and his residents, before time runs out?

  Read on for an extract of this gripping new thriller

  Available in hardback from August 2019

  CHAPTER ONE

  SOMETHING VERY BAD was about to go down.

  There are things you know as a cop in Boston. You know how the city feels, because its streets are your veins and the voices of its people come through your lips when you talk. You know the smell of the salt in the harbor like the scent of the back of your wife’s neck, and it’s just as precious, reassuring. The hammering of footsteps out of Back Bay Station for the morning rat race wakes you up, and the wail of sirens in the old Combat Zone at night puts you to sleep. Every Christmas, you gather up some young wide-eyed uniforms to take poor kids from East Boston and Hyde Park into the toy stores, try to show the new cops and the kids that they can get along. You know that in a few years, some of those cops and some of those kids will end up killing each other. But that’s how the city works. It’s like a living thing. It sheds, and it hurts, and it bleeds.

  I could feel what was about to happen in the air. It was an unexpected and dizzying heat, surreal against the snow on the ground outside the car.

  When my partner Malone and I got a call to go to the commissioner’s office downtown, I knew we were in for it. A Boston cop knows that being called to the commissioner’s office is a bad, bad thing.

  Malone always made fun of me for thinking I had Boston’s pulse, a sense about approaching trouble in the city. On the morning of the marathon bombing, we’d been a mile up Boylston Street doing crowd control and I told Malone I felt hot and weird, like I had a fever.
We felt the thump of the first blast under our feet a second or two later.

  We were in the back of the cruiser, Malone looking out the window, joggling his knee and picking his teeth.

  “Wait. I know what this is,” he said suddenly. “This is about that baby. We’re getting a medal for the baby last week.”

  The week before, Malone and I had been walking out at the end of a shift when a woman outside a café two doors from the station started screaming like she was on fire. She was standing in the street pointing at a balcony five floors above, where a toddler was sitting on the concrete ledge, having the time of his life. A crowd gathered, and it was quickly established that the mother was inside but wasn’t answering the door or her phone. While some guys went in to try to break down her apartment door, Malone and I watched, pulling out our own hair, while the toddler crawled along the ledge and then, wobbling, stood up.

  There was no time to decide who would catch the kid. Malone and I both went in and snared him in a tangle of arms about two feet off the ground while the people around us hollered and screamed. Turned out the mother had been so damned tired from working two jobs that she fell asleep with the baby on the couch, the balcony doors open and a pot of peas cooking dry on the stove.

  It was a good get, the kind of thing that wins you cheers when you walk into the station the next day. Ribbing about how tubby you look in the YouTube footage. Calls from the Globe. A medal, maybe. The toddler catch had gotten my wife, Siobhan, on the phone for a week, bragging to all her friends, telling them to watch the news, patting my head and saying she was proud of me like I was some kind of heroic dog.

  But today wasn’t about the kid. I could feel it in my bones.

  “This is bad,” I told Malone. “They only send a car for you when they know you’ll be too fucked up to drive home afterward. We’re in big trouble here. You better start thinking what we’ve done to piss off the top brass.”

  Malone, still twitching and joggling his knee, settled back and watched our driver. I gripped the seat belt and let Boston roll by, trying to guess what they were about to tell us.

  The car dropped us at the building on Tremont Street. We went in, and as the elevator doors closed on us, I noticed that all Malone’s twitching had suddenly stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were fixed on the floor. “I’m real sorry for this, Bill.”

  “You’re sorry for what?”

  He didn’t answer. I had to hear it from the commissioner.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BOSTON PD LEGEND says that the visitor’s chair in the commissioner’s office is an old electric chair. I’d heard whispers around the department that some sadistic jerk occupying the top job had acquired the chair from a prison auction in Ohio and simply cut the straps and headgear off to make it acceptable for the office. Malone and I entered and took two identical chairs, either of which might indeed have been an Old Sparky sourced from the depths of the Midwest. The wood was eerily warm, and there were gouges in the arms that perfectly fit my fingernails.

  I wouldn’t have liked to be sitting in front of Commissioner Rachel McGinniskin even if the news were congratulatory. The red-haired, narrow-faced woman was a descendant of Barney McGinniskin, the first Irishman ever handed a police baton in Boston. From the moment Barney pulled on his blue coat, his appointment spurred hysterical newspaper reports, violent riots, and Irish bashings nationwide. The anti-immigration, anti-Catholic parties dumped him out of his job after only three years, and years later, Rachel McGinniskin had fought her way up the ladder in the force out of pure spite.

  The commissioner opened a laptop and swiveled it on the desk so that the screen was facing us. She pushed a button and a black-and-white video began to play.

  Only minutes into the video, I could feel sweat sliding down my ribs beneath my shirt. I looked at Malone, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  McGinniskin pointed to a guy in the video. “Detective Jeremiah Malone,” she said. “Is that you there on the screen?”

  Her tone was strangely heavy, like she was the one getting the bad news. Malone didn’t say anything. Just nodded, defeated. She let the video play a while longer.

  “Detective William Robinson.” She pointed at the screen again and looked at me, her eyes blazing. “Is that you?”

  “It is,” I said. Malone still wouldn’t meet my gaze. Look at me, you prick, I thought. But the bastard put his face in his hands. McGinniskin turned the laptop back around and slammed it shut.

  “You’re both out,” she said. The muscles in her jaw and temples were so tight, they bulged from beneath the skin. “And I’ve got to admit, gentlemen, after seeing that tape, it gives me great pleasure to say it. There’s no place in my police force for people like you. Your discharge will take effect immediately. If I hear that either of you have inquired about pensions, I’ll make sure you can’t get a job in this city as a fucking mall cop.” McGinniskin swept her hair back from her temples, chasing composure. “Give me your badges and your weapons,” she said.

  It was hard for me to get out of the chair. Gravity seemed to have tripled. I took my gun off, walked what seemed like a hundred miles to her desk, and put my weapon down at the same time Malone did. He finally looked at me as we took our badges off. Then we left. Neither of us spoke until we were outside her office.

  “Bill,” Malone said. “Buddy, listen. I—”

  “I can’t believe you did this.” I was shaking all over. “I can’t believe you did this to us. We’re out. That’s it. It’s over. You lying, backstabbing piece of shit.”

  My job. My city. The walls of the old stone building were pulsing around me, closing in. Malone had killed us. We were being expelled from the living thing. Shed like dead skin, like waste. I couldn’t breathe.

  “I’m so sorry, Bill.” Malone sounded panicky. “I was trying to—”

  I grabbed my partner by the shirt and slammed him into the wall beside McGinniskin’s door. It was all I could do not to knock his teeth out right there. I put a finger in his face and eased the words out from between my locked jaw.

  “You and me?” I said. “We’re done.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Two Years and Five Months Later

  THE DEATH TOLL was eight, according to Cline’s count.

  He knew it was narcissistic, but every day he sat under the big bay windows on the second floor of his house where he could see the ocean beyond the cypress trees and checked the papers for signs of his work. Some days he told himself he was being too proud, and other days he knew it was just good business. Since he had moved to the tiny seaside town of Gloucester, there had been eight overdose deaths. Two a month. The papers were blaring out words that excited him. Epidemic. Crisis. Downfall. Whenever things started to slide, Cline felt happy. Being a criminal meant his concept of the world was upside down. Reversed. A downward slide for others meant an upward rise for him.

  That didn’t mean it was time to take it easy on anyone. As he sat reading the paper spread flat on the table before him, the way he used to in the can so that he could keep an eye on the movement of other prisoners, his lieutenants started assembling before him. Cline had made sure from the outset that his standards were known and respected. Tailored shirts. Cuff links. Ties for meetings. No speed-stripe buzz cuts, no neck tattoos, none of this gold-chain, bling-bling shit. They were a business, not a gang. The men who entered the room looked like a bunch of lawyers attending a daily meeting, but they came in punching each other and giggling and talking trash, and he silenced them with a glance. They were street thugs and prison bitches and violence-intervention-program dropouts he had recruited from rock bottom, but he’d make them true soldiers before long.

  “Where’s Newgate?” Cline asked when everyone was settled. “You fuckers know to be on time.” There were uncomfortable looks around the crew, and then Newgate appeared with a baby in his arms. No, not a baby, a little girl, though she seemed like a baby in this setting, surrounded by hard men who mad
e their living dealing in death. Cline stood and watched as big, muscle-bound, scar-faced Newgate put the barefoot child on the floor.

  “I’m real sorry, boss.” Newgate gave a dramatic sigh. “I had a fight with my girl and she dropped the baby on me this morning and ran off. I didn’t know what to do.”

  Cline watched the girl toddling around the room, pulling books off his shelves, slapping her greasy palms on the huge bay windows. He felt a muscle twitching in his neck as he went to the desk and got his gun.

  “No problem, Newby. These things happen,” Cline said. “I’m sure she won’t cause us any trouble. Let’s give her something to play with while we talk. Come here, little princess. Come on.”

  The lieutenants watched in horror as Cline loaded a full clip into his pistol and flicked the safety off. Newgate’s daughter gave a coo of intrigue, tottered over to Cline, and took the gun. Squid, perched on the edge of the couch, didn’t dare retreat but he hid beneath his gangly arms like they could protect from the child’s aim. The little girl swung the heavy gun around wildly, then lifted the barrel to her eye and looked down into the blackness. Cline’s eyes seared into Newgate’s, daring him to protest. The little girl walked up to her father and pointed the gun at him.

  “Bang-bang!” The girl laughed. Newgate reached for the weapon as his daughter fumbled with the trigger, unable to get her pudgy finger around the steel. Before Newgate could take the gun, Cline reached forward and grabbed it. He pointed it at Newgate, whose face contorted as he realized what was happening.