Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith

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      Only Forward

      Michael Marshall Smith

       Copyright

      HarperVoyager

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain as a Paperback Original by

      HarperCollinsPublishers 1994

      Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1994

      Excerpt from ‘Silent all these years’ written by Tori Amos, copyright © Sword and Stone Music 1991.Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Michael Marshall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008117443

      Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007325368

      Version: 2019-02-27

       Dedication

      For my family: David, Margaret and Tracey, and in memory of Mr Cat.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction by Neil Gaiman

PART ONE: The Paper Over the Cracks

The beginning

One

Two

Three

Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       PART TWO: Some Lies

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       PART THREE: Requiem

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-one

       Twenty-two

       The End

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Other Books By

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      There is an audacity we possess when we are young, a cockiness and a knowledge that stems from, I suspect, two very different things: firstly, we don’t care what the rules are (we don’t even know what the rules are that we are breaking, as we break them. We want it all). Secondly, we may not have much time, we don’t know: if we are going to scrawl our names on the walls of the world we must do it in letters of fire a thousand feet high, and we must do it now.

      So