Needing by Sarah Masters Page A

Jesus, why hadn’t he fucking said so from the start?
    “Because I forgot.”
    “You weren’t meant to hear that, Mark. I’m sorry.”
    “Right. You want to know where he lives, who he is?”
    “We do.” Oliver held his breath.
    “He lives in the basement of this old house. You know the one I mean?”
    “No. Tell me.”
    “It’s in Saltwater Street. That old thing on the corner. The one with the dirty windows with filthy net curtains. Grandmother lives there.”
    “Your grandmother?”
    “Yes. She’s still there. Old as the hills but there just the same.”
    “And his name?”
    Mark sighed. “ Damn easy to answer that one. He’s my brother. Alex Reynolds.”

Chapter Six
    Oliver staggered against the banister as Mark disappeared. The void his spirit left behind took a few moments to fill with questions, ones he knew Langham would also ask or ponder on out loud once he’d told him what Mark had said. Quickly, to save the detective battering him with queries, Oliver related the latest information.
    “So,” Oliver said when he’d finished, “do we have the same situation with Alex as we have with PrivoLabs? Only a dead man’s word on Alex’s guilt so we can’t barge in and arrest him?”
    “Something like that, but we can go and ask him if he knows where his brother is. Make it look like we’re after Mark not Alex. The freaky-eyed fuck might slip up.”
    Oliver shivered. “Yeah, or he might well turn into that freaky-eyed fuck and do to us what he did to Louise and Mark. This guy sounds like he’s been programmed to prevent people finding anything out about what Privo are up to. Except we’ve got a good idea—and really, we ought to think about telling Shields about this shit, just in case something happens to us and the information we have dies with us.”
    Langham stood and began his descent of the stairs. “Yeah, but if we tell him… You know what he’s like. He’ll poke his damn nose in, break the case and take all the credit.”
    “Rather that than us being dead, man,” Oliver muttered, following him downstairs. Outside on the path, he asked, “You calling this in?”
    Langham nosed about the garden, looking for God knew what. “Yep, so I guess Shields will hear about it anyway.”
    “Exactly. So call it in directly to him, save you repeating yourself, ‘cause you know he’ll want the ins and outs of the cat’s arsehole if he hears the news from someone other than you. He can deal with this place while we head over to Alex’s—and you are going to tell Shields where we’re going, aren’t you?”
    “Yeah, yeah, quit your fucking nagging.”
    “Fuck you.”
    Oliver turned away with a smile, leaving Langham to call Shields. As the detective rattled off what they’d been up to and what they’d discovered, Oliver faced the cottage and closed his eyes. Maybe, if he concentrated, Mark would come back, or Louise. They’d given him excellent information, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t going to be a cut and dried case. Okay, Louise had given Mark the notes, and Mark had investigated, finding out a whole lot of info he hadn’t expected. Louise had been killed over what she knew, Mark for the same reason, but how the hell did someone kill their own brother like that? Had Alex been changed so much by the experiments that he had lost the knowledge that Mark was his brother? Was he programmed to kill anyone who got in PrivoLabs’ way? Oliver thought so, but he also knew Alex must have been one fucked-up motherfucker before Privo had got hold of him. If the tale about the grandmother and those sugar strands were true, that man had serious issues he needed to deal with. They were spilling over into his kills, which meant the experiments hadn’t succeeded in taking away every part of him, the basic essence of who he’d been before.
    So, what was the point in PrivoLabs’ experiment? To allow people to seem relatively normal until someone needed killing? To have