The One That Got Away

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY DI HEATHER FILSON BOOK 1 JD KIRK For my wife, Fiona, who I proposed to in my very first book (She said yes, thankfully.) CONTENTS Prologue 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 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Afterword JOIN THE JD KIRK VIP CLUB Also by JD Kirk THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY ISBN: 978-1-912767-73-1 Published worldwide by Zertex Media Ltd. This edition published in 2023. 1 Copyright © 2023 by JD Kirk The right of JD Kirk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher. www.jdkirk.com www.zertexmedia.com PROLOGUE DECEMBER 18TH, 1989 The pungent odour scorches her airways. Sizzles and pops in her nostrils. Burns all the way to the back of her throat. Harsh. Chemical. Toxic. She gags, not on the stench, but on the filthy rag wrapped around her head, pulled tight across the corners of her mouth so it carves painful red welts into her cheeks. Her lungs cramp. Her stomach tightens, bringing up a hot wave of acid that she has no choice but to choke back down. Pain sears itself across her wrists. Her arms are behind her, but she knows she’s torn the skin of her hands in her struggles to get free. She can still feel the blood oozing along her fingers. There is blood above her eye socket, too, drying into her hair and what’s left of her eyebrow. There was a blindfold, but she managed to shake that off, running her forehead back and forth across the rough ground until she worked the tightly tied material free. The skin is torn and ravaged there, from where she rubbed, and rubbed, and rubbed against the stone floor. And why? To what end? Wherever she is, it’s dark. Impossibly dark. As dark as it was beneath the blindfold. Perhaps, she thinks, even darker still. It’s cold, too. Bitingly so. She can’t see them, but she can imagine the shaky clouds of her breath as they come rasping in and out of her raw, damaged airways. She screamed at first. Of course she did. She screamed when she roused from a sleeping nightmare into this waking one. The gag muffled the sound, ONE THIRTY-FOUR YEARS LATER Between the pain needling through her skull and the erection jabbing into her back, Heather Filson could tell that mistakes had been made. It was now just a question of magnitude. She could hear him snoring away behind her, whoever he was. Snoring was good. Snoring meant she could get out of there without any awkward small talk, or suggestions of one more quickie for the road. First, though, she’d need to find her clothes. That would involve opening her eyes, but she wasn’t quite ready for that yet. Opening her eyes meant facing the reality of where she was, what she’d done, and—more importantly—who she’d done it with. Even with her eyes closed, though, the signs weren’t encouraging. The mattress beneath her felt lumpy and old, the sheet thin and bobbled against her bare skin. The room smelled stale, like an old pair of wet running shoes. Notes of cheap beer and discarded fag ends were woven through it, along with the cloying sweetness of cannabis. The cheap resin variety, she thought. Not even the good stuff. There was light coming from somewhere, tinting the darkness behind her eyelids. Daylight, she thought. That was bad. It was early March in Scotland, so for the sun to be up it had to be at least eight o’clock. But the last few days had been overcast, threatening some late-season snow, which meant it was probably much later than even that. Great. She was supposed to be at the station in Glasgow by half eight. That would teach her to go out on a school night. Neither