KAREN’S KILLER BOOK BENCH: Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, where readers can discover talented new authors and take a peek inside their wonderful books. This is not an age-filtered site, so all book peeks are PG-13 or better. Come back and visit often. Happy reading!
~~~
WHEN WE WERE EVIL
Are you ready to confess your sins?
BY S.B. CAVES
BLURB
They locked her up. Now, they want to hear her story.
At fifteen, Ruby Wilcox was involved in the Vincent Street Incident – one of the most horrific murders in British history. Despite protesting her innocence and claiming that someone else was responsible, she was convicted. Two decades after being released, Ruby has done everything she can to move on and create a new life. But that all threatens to crumble once she learns that a streaming service is creating a series about the murders, and her alleged role in them.
When Ruby is given the opportunity to share her version of events, she knows that it’s now or never. The only question is, has the world made up its mind about her, or will people believe her story? The consequences of speaking out might cost her more than she thinks, because Ruby wasn’t the only person on Vincent Street that night…
~~~
WHEN WE WERE EVIL
Are you ready to confess your sins?
BY S.B. CAVES
Excerpt
My appearance now is completely different to my Year 10 school photo and my infamous mugshot, taken just over a year apart. Those are the two images most people connect with the name Ruby Wilcox. If you lived in the UK at the time when the story broke, you couldn’t get away from them; the photos were blown up on the front pages of every newspaper and used as stills on the TV. Both photos show a scrawny, unremarkable-looking girl with bright red hair, thin lips, and a pointy nose. Today, my hair is bottle blond and cropped short, which gives me a more pixyish look that would probably be cute if not for the lines carving across my forehead and scraping from the corners of my eyes. I’m about fifteen years too old for the style I’m trying to pull off, but my ever-changing looks have never been about vanity. I have two piercings in my left eyebrow, a small hoop in my nostril, and a ring in the centre of my bottom lip, as well as a stud in my tongue. A smudged-looking tattoo of a butterfly occupies one side of my neck that, from a distance, resembles the faded bruising of a throttling.
Unless you were actively searching for me, you wouldn’t recognise that haunted teenager in the weathered husk of my forty-year-old body. The High Court rejected my appeal for anonymity under the Mary Bell Order, so hair dye and an alias are the only things protecting my identity. To track me down, all you’d have to do is know your way around the restaurants and pubs in London that pay cash-in-hand, ask a few questions, drop a general description. The butterfly tattoo that I got shortly after my release seemed like such a necessity at the time (I was still only twenty-six), but like most things in my life, it’s something I sorely regret. I wanted a visual metaphor to remind me that I was a new person, but all I did was brand myself with a homing beacon to help any True Crime fanatic or media bloodhound spot me. Usually after a few months at a new place, the paranoia will creep up on me and I’ll start to wear high-collared shirts, or even go so far as to smear my neck with foundation.
Age and gravity have had their way with me, and I am considerably heavier now, which all keep the masquerade moving. But sometimes, through no fault of my own, the mask slips.
The moment I saw the man approaching the bar, I knew he knew. I had spotted him about ten minutes before, lingering by the fruit machines, checking his phone as though awaiting some urgently important message. It was a Thursday morning, and the Ship and Bottle was empty except for the red-faced regulars dotted around the tables at the back, stretching out their pints with calculated sips.
With his flannel shirt and tight jeans, the man was about as out of place in this pub as I would have been on a catwalk. When he had summoned enough courage to cross the empty dancefloor, my stomach rolled over. With each step he took, I could see sparks of nervous excitement dancing in his eyes through his horn-rimmed glasses. He reminded me of a wary gazelle nearing a watering hole. With his slight, almost childish build, and his smooth unblemished face, he could almost pass for a student, but I guessed he was probably closer to thirty.
“Hello,” he said, fidgeting a fiver out of his wallet. “Could I have a glass of Coke please?”
I didn’t move. I waited for him to make eye contact again before saying, “Is that all you want?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed sharply in his slender throat. “Well, perhaps a moment of your time.” A smile twitched on his lips. The butterfly felt like sunburn on my neck.
“A moment of my time?” I sprayed Coke into a pint glass and plonked a slice of lemon into it but held the drink hostage. “What do you want my time for?”
An airy laugh slipped from his mouth. His fingers wriggled back into his wallet, feeling for a business card. “My name is Peter Fidditch,” he began, relieved to have made his introduction. He cleared his throat and said, “I work for um…well, it’s my company actually, Z- uh, Zelda Lane, um…”
My mouth was full of cotton balls. I took a large gulp of his Coke.
His eyes flicked to my name badge. Luanne. “I’m not here to cause trouble.”
“Then listen to me,” I leaned on the bar, my forearms soaking in a puddle of Fosters I’d spilt earlier and neglected to sop up. “I don’t know what Zelda Lane is. I don’t care to know either. Whatever you’re here for, I’m not interested. Do we understand each other?”
He nodded thoughtfully, fanning his business card against the palm of his other hand. The aura of nervousness began to recede, and I could see his body language changing; he pinned back his shoulders, stood taller. Perhaps he realised that the demon he had been psyching himself up for was nothing more than a cranky, middle-aged woman; a thing to be pitied.
“They’re making a film about Vincent Street. A dramatization, I mean. I don’t suppose you knew that. Or maybe you did?”
I took another gulp of his Coke. There had been rumours of films and a TV series about Vincent Street since the trial, but to date, the only thing to come close was a BBC documentary that was so factually inaccurate, it received almost six-hundred complaints from the public.
I always knew they would find a way to glamourise Vincent Street and had carried that particular dread like a tumour growing in my stomach, but always hoped that the subject matter was too grisly to redeem for the screen. A naïve part of me believed that nobody would go near the case for fear of public outcry, condemning anyone that tried to profit from our crime.
“Netflix are going to announce on Monday. They’re still in pre-production, haven’t mentioned any cast members or anything yet, but it’s slated for next summer. There’s an embargo on that information, but I’m in the business. I’m a documentary maker.”
I concentrated on my breathing, watching the bubbles fizz and pop in the pint glass. Moisture beading my forehead, tendrils of hair sticking to my face. An image flittered through the confetti of my memory; Mia sitting on the stairs, her face painted red with blood. I felt a weight lodge in the centre of my chest and tried to swallow it down.
“I’m not here to interfere with your work,” Fidditch told me. “My being here is completely confidential.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” my voice cracked. “Please, look, I’m sorry I was rude to you. I don’t…” the grovelling was making me breathless. I wiped my clammy palms on my thighs and shuffled off down the bar. There were empty glasses streaked with suds sitting on a tray. I picked it up, the glasses clinking together, and began toward the dishwasher. Fidditch watched me pass, saying something about him not judging me, about me finally having my say. A glass rattled off the tray and smashed on the floor to a scattered, sarcastic applause from the regulars.
“Look what you made me do,” I hissed at him, bending to pluck the shards from the sticky floor.
His shadow loomed over me as he leaned across the bar. “I’d love to just sit and have a ten-minute chat with you. And I promise, if you don’t like what I have to say then I’ll just leave you alone. You won’t hear another thing from me or anyone at Zelda Lane again.”
“I have nothing to say,” I almost shrieked, my hands curled into claws.
“Alright then, that’s fine,” he soothed like a dad trying to calm a screaming new-born. “But let me just say this–”
About Author S.B. Caves…
Born and raised in North London, SB Caves is the internationally bestselling author of Honeycomb, A Killer Came Knocking and I Know Where She Is , which The Sun described as ‘sinister, unsettling and gripping’.
~~~
Links to S.B.’s websites, blogs, books, #ad, etc.:
Amazon Kindle: https://amzn.to/49eTTBU
Amazon Paperback: https://amzn.to/456YcN5
Amazon UK:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-We-Were-Evil-Confess/dp/1917415168
Waterstones UK:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/when-we-were-evil/s-b-caves//9781917415163
Publisher website:
https://daturabooks.com/product/when-we-were-evil/
Author instagram: https://www.instagram.com/s.b_caves/
~~~
Looks like good thriller
How intriguing. Thanks for sharing.
Welcome to Karen’s Killer Book Bench, S.B. I love the premise of your story. The excerpt was intriguing. It sounds like my kind of thriller. I cannot wait to read this book. Thanks for sharing it with us today!
Oh geeze…not suitable reading while eating Cheerios and strawberries!
Nice to meet you, S. B.
Hello and welcome! Your book sounds and looks very intriguing!! Thank you so much for sharing the excerpt, I will be adding your book to my TBR for sure!! Have a great rest of the week.