K J Skoyles
Kathryn grew up in King’s Lynn and now lives in Norwich. In between, she has wandered between London, the Middle East and Australia. She has been at various times an academic, a bookseller and an RAF intelligence officer as well as a commercial lawyer.
Kathryn won an international writing competition in 1995 and an Escalator Award in 2007. Her short story, A Friend in Need, was published in 2002 in Crime in the City, an anthology produced by the UK Crime Writers Association. She completed her first novel, The Judgment of History, in 2005 and is currently working on her second, a historical crime novel provisionally entitled A Death of Little Consequence.
Extract from A Death of Little Consequence
“For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Chapter 1
London
Saturday, June 10, 1922
The man they called An Cara - the Friend - leaned over the grime-encrusted basin and peered into the mirror that hung, slightly askew, on the dingy bathroom wall. His bleary eyes stared back at him for a moment, full of accusation. Is this what he had come to?
He blinked as the overhead bulb flickered, crackled and died. The only sound was his breathing, hard and fast in the darkness. The bathroom, tucked away under the stairs, was no bigger than a broom cupboard. There was no window to the outside, no source of natural light. He felt the familiar trembling, grimaced at the sourness in his gut. He clenched his fist so tightly that his fingernails gouged the palm of his hand.
Turning towards the door, he scrabbled for the switch. At the sound of footsteps trudging down the hall he froze, his arm still outstretched.