Deadly Obsession by Nigel May

showed a younger Riley alongside his mother, a woman who had died of cancer when Riley was in his teens and never had the chance to see what an upstanding man he had become. His mother, named Bianca, was a woman with kind features and a softness to her face. Amy and Riley had talked about Bianca a lot and Riley had shared his memories of what she was like. She was all about family, caring for her son and husband. The protective arm placed across Riley’s teenage shoulders in the photo showed a woman who would do anything to guard her offspring. Amy could feel another onslaught of tears pricking at her eyes as she looked at the photo, wondering if Bianca would have been able to save Riley had she managed to survive the cancer. Would his late father, Cazwell, have been able to save his son either, had he not died? Amy also couldn’t help but wonder if there had been more that she herself could have done to protect her husband. She knew the answer was no but still couldn’t stop her imagination from racing into overdrive and mulling over what ifs.
    The tears flowed. Amy watched as one of them tumbled from the end of her nose and fell onto the order of service she was holding in her hands. It landed on the poem that Amy had chosen to include. Death Is Nothing At All by Henry Scott Holland. The words said everything to Amy and served a dual sentimentality as she knew that Riley had insisted that they used it for Bianca’s funeral. It was a poem that she had read many times to a young Riley, during her illness, explaining how death was not to be treated as something so sad, it was merely somebody we loved ‘slipping away into the next room’. Amy hadn’t heard of it before Riley telling her but she found it beautiful and completely befitting now that he himself had slipped away. It was a shining star of beauty in a blackened sky of woe. But as Amy was taxied away from the funeral, her tears still dampening her face, she knew that death wasn’t ‘nothing at all’. Death was seeing her husband’s body on a mortuary slab with his beautiful features blown off beyond recognition. It was an image that would always haunt her.
    Night after night following the funeral Amy hardly slept, images of the carnage at the club suffocating her mind. The Kitty Kat that she knew she would have to reopen and soon if she were to try and keep it at the top of its game. But would people go there now, a place where so much badness had happened? It was supposed to be a place of excitement and happiness, one of carefree elation where all worries could be forgotten to the hardcore beat of a clubland tune, not a place where people would whisper ‘that’s the corner where so and so had their face blown off’ or ‘that’s where the owner’s best friend bled to death’. It would be a destination for the macabre and Amy couldn’t bear that. Did anyone ever visit Hollywood’s The Viper Room and not still think ‘this is where River Phoenix breathed his last’, even decades after his untimely death?
    Amy had been business-minded enough to keep everybody on the payroll at the Club for the moment. Lily had been brilliant at cancelling all upcoming bookings and DJ residences and generally dealing with everything that needed to be done. There would be a reopening, of that Amy was sure, but that would be a long time into the future. For now, everything was too raw. Amy was too weak. She felt as if she was in the middle of a breakdown, not capable of dealing with the things that life was throwing at her. She’d not even been able to attend Laura’s funeral or indeed that of Winston Curtis. She sent flowers but standing at the graveside of her best friend and staring at her beautiful face on an order of service was not something she could face. Not yet … It would tip her over the edge. Laura had been so important to her yet a piece of her own heart still wasn’t able to