Page 16 of Hidden Daughters (Detective Lottie Parker #15)

He was two years older than his girlfriend and he’d wanted to do the right thing.

To marry her. He loved her and he was sure she loved him back.

Okay, it was wrong that they had had sex before marriage, but they were committed to each other.

Young love, his mother had scoffed. Love won’t put a crust on the table. And then his mother went and died.

He realised that she had been the one keeping the farm ticking over, because as soon as she was no longer around, his father had the freedom to drink in earnest. And the farm suffered.

The family suffered. He was the eldest, and with few skills other than shearing sheep and digging the fields, he was left with no money, no income.

And a burning hunger. Robbing a loaf of bread and a packet of Mikado biscuits, which had fallen out from under his jumper as he ran from the shop, had been his biggest mistake.

He didn’t count getting his girlfriend pregnant a mistake; that was love.

This was stupidity. And it wasn’t the first time he’d stolen.

The guards had plenty of evidence of all that.

The punishment for his many misdemeanours saw him being sent up to Knockraw, a school for wayward boys. An industrial school, it was called.

That was when his real nightmare began.

He knew he should never have been sent to Knockraw.

Now that he was trapped, he had to make plans to survive.

The second he entered through the imposing tall door, he realised he was too soft, too young, too naive to outlive his sentence.

Stealing to keep his hunger at bay had landed him here, but before long he would know a hunger like no other. A hunger to escape the horror.

The other boys were stronger and meaner.

He didn’t like them. But he didn’t fear them either.

Not like he feared those in charge. One was a chaplain, but he’d heard he wasn’t really a priest yet, just studying to be one, and this was like work experience.

That made him laugh. As if any experience in Knockraw could compare to the real world.

Though he supposed if you could survive Knockraw, you could survive anything, anywhere.

As the days bled into months, he noticed a strange bond developing between the chaplain and one of the boys. That was when he came to know the meaning of true evil. And when those two got together, they were the devil incarnate.

Life became so bad that he almost forgot about his girl and their unborn child. Almost. Not quite. But by then it was too late.