This is my first blog tour
and it’s incredible to have been paired with Stevie Turner, author of A House Without
Windows. Although I now live in New Zealand, my father is from East Anglia in the
UK which is where Stevie lives and I spent the first few years of my life
living behind the Norwich City Football ground. It just goes to show what a small
world it really is!
Stevie Turner is a medical secretary by day, typing clinic
letters dictated by doctors. At all other times when she is not typing women's
fiction she will be wandering along the country footpaths of her village in
picturesque East Anglia, UK. Stevie is married with two children and three
grandchildren.
Synopsis of A House Without Windows
'A House Without Windows' is from the suspense/romance genre.
Newly pregnant Dr Beth Nichols is stalked by crazed ex-patient
Edwin Evans and held captive in his basement for 10 years. Escaping with her daughter
Amy, Beth finds a whole new world outside captivity and when the Press get hold
of the story, Beth and Amy find their photographs splashed across the world
news. Beth's ex-fiancée, Dr Liam Darrah, believed that Beth had been murdered years
before. He is forced to make the difficult choice between staying in Canada with
his new partner Patty and their son Toby, or seeking out his first love, Beth in
the UK.
This novel careful crafts multiple perspectives together, offering the reader a
panoramic view of the ripples which spread out from one man’s crime, to create
innocent victims of others.
One of those victims is Joss, Beth’s son. Feeling unloved
and lost, he reaches out to his natural father in the secure mental hospital,
finding a man who is still obsessed with Beth. Disappointed and confused, Joss
inadvertently gives away the location of the little family, unleashing fresh
horrors on a group of people, who had worked hard to rebuild their lives.
Joss begins to understand what fatherhood really is and that
love is more than genetics, as danger
once again stalks his family.
Sample
of A House Without Windows
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks again to Libbie Grant for
the cover, and my gratitude goes to Enid Blyton for writing the Island of Adventure and starting me out
on my love of reading all those years ago.
Dedicated to all those
rescued from captivity.
All names and characters
are fictitious. Any similarity to persons living or deceased is purely
coincidental.
PROLOGUE
The unprepossessing exterior of the suburban
1930’s end-of-terrace house was giving nothing away. Inspector John Hatton pushed past the usual
group of ghouls and rubberneckers, dipped his slightly overweight body under
the cordon, and opened the gate leading to the tidy pocket-handkerchief front
garden.
“Morning Ford.”
“Morning Sir.”
“You get all the best jobs don’t you? Anyone in or
out?”
“Not as far as I know, Sir.”
“Have you had a word with the neighbours?”
“The ones I’ve spoken to say he was always a bit
of a loner; kept himself to himself.
They don’t really know much about him.”
Stamping his feet as he sheltered from the January
chill in the half–enclosed front porch, Ford looked to Hatton as though he was
freezing his arse off. Hatton let a
faint smile play around his lips as he realised that yes, this morning there was
actually somebody worse off than him.
He curbed the impulse to wipe his feet on the
welcome mat just inside the front door.
Grimacing at the irony, he put on plastic overshoes and gloves and
continued down the hallway into the kitchen.
Everything was still in its place, modern and
clean. The door to the dishwasher was
open as though it had been in the process of being emptied; there were still
clean plates, bowls, and pots and pans stacked neatly. Knives, forks and spoons filled the cutlery
compartment, all with their handles facing the same way. Hatton noticed the five large plastic
containers still standing side by side above the dishwasher on the worktop,
each full to the brim with a different breakfast cereal.
He could imagine guests (if there had ever been
any) popping into the kitchen for a drink of water and wondering why somebody
living on his own would have wanted to buy so many containers of cereal, and
why they would have required such a huge American walk-in fridge. He opened the fridge door that stood next to
the dishwasher; there were seven pints of full-fat milk in the storage space in
the door, three large portions of raw fillet steak on the bottom shelf, and
numerous types of vegetables, salad stuff and fruits filling the middle two. Various yoghurts sat on the top shelf in
regimented lines, segregated into flavours, with the ones nearest their sell-by
date at the front. Twelve raw eggs sat in holders slightly too small for them
in the door above the milk.
Hatton took one last glance at the food that would
soon begin to spoil; he could have just eaten that fillet steak with some
chips, mushrooms and peas.
Walking around the central table he noticed the
dishcloth folded neatly on the draining board, not just thrown down as he would
have done. He opened the cupboards
underneath the sink; bleach, Dettol, and washing-up liquid stood one behind the
other on the left side, next to two large packets of sanitary towels on the
right.
The guests would have really begun to wonder at
the sight of those…..
He sighed and closed the cupboard and looked
around some more. Adjacent to the sink
stood a washing machine still full of damp women’s clothing, and on the far
wall was a long clean-looking worktop with cupboards underneath containing sweets
and crisps, and what looked like a pantry just outside the kitchen door. Hatton checked inside and found shelves
overflowing with rice, spaghetti, pasta, potatoes, more tinned food, and the
door to what resembled yet another American type of walk-in-fridge, silver in
colour, but built into a recess with a bolt on the outside. The bolt was pulled back into the open
position, and the door was slightly ajar.
He walked towards it, opened the door fully, and trod carefully down the
narrow flight of steps.
He had to see it just once more, before the
house was bulldozed and razed to the ground.
CHAPTER 1
Mummy wonders if it will be Christmas soon, but I
don’t know what she means. She says that
when she was a little girl she would get lots of presents on Christmas Day, and
there would be a big tree in her house with lots of twinkling fairy lights on
the branches and shiny baubles that she could see her reflection in. I’ve never seen a tree, so Mummy drew one for
me in my colouring book and showed me. I
don’t understand why there was a tree in her house.
My name is Amy, and Mummy thinks I could be seven,
eight or nine years old because my big front teeth are growing in. I have long blonde hair like Mummy that I can
sit on. Mummy puts it in a plait and she
showed me how to plait hers, and she taught me how to read. She says I can read and write really well,
and I like writing stories. I write
everything down in a secret diary and keep it under the mattress. Mummy writes
things down too. The Man brings us paper, pencils, exercise books, and
colouring books for me, but he doesn’t speak much. Mummy tells me to keep out of his way, so I
run to the toilet when he comes.
Sometimes he finds me and smiles, and says that I’m getting a big girl. I don’t like him. He’s nearly as tall as the ceiling and he has
hair all over his face. Mummy told me
his name is Edwin, but I don’t like him so I call him The Man.
Our house is small and dark. There’s a light bulb hanging from the ceiling
that stays on all the time, even when we go to sleep. It’s too dark without the light on, and I get
frightened. I get in bed with Mummy
because there’s nowhere else to sleep.
When I lay in bed I can see all the rest of the house except the toilet
and sink, which is around a little corner and out of the way. All the walls are greenish-grey, and Mummy
says they’re made out of concrete. When
I touch them they’re cold.
Mummy sticks my pictures on the walls with
something called Blu-tack, and she says they brighten things up a bit. My best picture is the one of Prince, a
ginger cat that sometimes follows behind The Man when he brings our food. I’m allowed to stroke Prince until he goes back
out, but then Mummy says I have to wash my hands before I eat anything.
Last week The Man brought me a reading book. I’d
never had a reading book before. He said
I had to look after it because he’d kept it safe for years since he was a
little boy. It’s got thick pages, large
letters, and a sort of yellowy cardboard cover. I’ve started to read it. A lady called Enid Blyton wrote it, and it’s
called The Island of Adventure. It begins where a boy called Philip who loves
animals is at some sort of summer school and is bored as he sits under a tree
doing something called algebra (I asked Mummy what algebra is, and she said
it’s a different kind of maths). He
hears a strange voice telling him to blow his nose and wipe his feet. It turns out the voice comes from a parrot
sitting in a tree nearby, and he follows it as it flies off down the hillside
back towards his school. That’s the only bit I’ve read so far.
I asked Mummy what a parrot is, and why I can’t
sit under a tree. She told me a parrot
is a colourful bird that flies around in hot countries, but that some people in
this country keep them in cages as pets.
I think that’s cruel. If I had a
parrot I’d let it fly about.
I had to ask her again why I can’t sit under a
tree. Mummy sighed and told me that
trees grew outside, and we weren’t allowed to go outside. When I asked her why, she said that The Man
doesn’t want us to.
It’s boring in our house. I do maths with Mummy like Philip had to do
at school. I know how to add up lots of
numbers in my head and come up with the right answer, and Mummy says not many
eight year olds can do that. She always
asks me to spell words and read even longer words. She helps me with the ones I can’t do,
because she’s a doctor and she’s cleverer than me. When my felt tips run out I have to wait for
The Man to bring more. There’s no parrots flying around to look at, and I want
to sit under a tree. One day I will get
outside, but I’m not sure yet how I’ll go about doing it.
OTHER BOOKS BY STEVIE TURNER:
THE PORN DETECTIVE
THE PILATES CLASS
LILY: A SHORT STORY
