Read an extract from The Interpreter – the jaw-dropping new thriller by Brooke Robinson
More about the book!

Penguin Random House has shared an excerpt from Brooke Robinson’s taut psychological drama The Interpreter!

About the book

Innocent or guilty. It’s all a matter of interpretation …

The most dangerous person in the courtroom isn’t the killer …

Single mother Revelle Lee is an interpreter who spends her days translating for victims, witnesses and the accused across London. Only she knows what they’re saying. Only she knows the truth.

When she believes a grave injustice is about to happen, and a guilty man is going to be labelled innocent, she has the power to twist an alibi to get the verdict she wants. She’s willing to risk it all to do what’s right.

But when someone discovers she lied, Revelle finds the cost might be too high … and she could lose everything, including her son.

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Read the excerpt:

Prologue

One good push releases the handle, and the brass tongue withdraws into the lock.

‘I’m sorry, we’re actually closed.’ A young woman is fussing behind the counter.

Entering, I peruse the shelves closest to the door.

‘Victorian fittings – it never locks properly unless I use the key. Sorry.’ Her words travel towards me; I swat them away.

There’s a blackboard sign by my feet, the shop’s opening hours announced in pink and emerald chalk. Upcoming events are listed, author talks and playgroup sessions. Stickers in the shape of lions and elephants dot the clean, white walls.

‘We open at nine. If you’d like to come back tomorrow?’ She’s speaking loudly now, all wide-mouth and heavy vowels in case I don’t understand English. My fingers dance across the merchandise as my heels strike the hardwood floor.

The lights at the shop’s entrance have been switched off, only after another step forward is my face fully lit. I take my time, move past the fabric books for babies, and linger over a puzzle display. The girl has emerged from behind the counter and fiddles with a string of coloured flags which droop from the ceiling.

‘I only get paid till six and I’ve already closed down the system,’ she says. ‘So I can’t sell you anything.’

I cannot come into a children’s bookshop during business hours, not when there would be parents and children inside. A few weeks ago I ordered a gardening book online. When the delivery came I prised it open on my doorstep and saw a rectangle peeking out from behind the front cover. It was a promotional bookmark: Give your child the gift of reading this Christmas. Underneath the text, images of the top five selling children’s titles this year printed in a single column. It felt like the rubber band I wore on my wrist as a girl, the au pair would snap it when she caught me biting my nails. Snap. Standing outside my front door, the bookmark dropped from my fingers, into a puddle of last night’s rain. My hands let go of everything – the book, the box, bubble wrap, my receipt. The whole package tumbled down the front steps until it reached the dirt. I went inside. It’s still there, three weeks later. I have to step over it to leave the house each morning.

Give your child the gift of reading this Christmas. I only took one look at it but that was enough to lock it away. All day today I’ve been thinking about the time I read to him from James and the Giant Peach, a favourite from my own childhood. It was summer so we lounged in the garden, a stone plate of sliced white peaches sat between us. Has anyone read to him since me? That’s what I keep wondering. I think I know the answer, but the question keeps on tunnelling. Christmas is coming. How am I supposed to survive until the new year?

‘I only get paid till six?’ the girl says again.

It is twenty minutes past six. I extract a single note from my handbag, the new £50 with Alan Turing, and hold it out until she comes.

‘Is this …’ she says, taking it.

‘Overtime,’ I say. ‘Wow. I guess I could turn the computer back on.’ She looks lovingly into Turing’s flat, red eyes.

‘He died of cyanide poisoning,’ I tell her, scanning the books filed under the letter D. ‘It’s a profoundly slow and painful death. Your whole body convulses. Then there’s a flood of blood, vomit, bile – until eventually, you run out of oxygen. But only after you beg for it to end.’

She steps backwards and almost crashes into a giant Where’s Wally? cut-out. I tilt my head to examine the picture books, one about a wombat, another with an alligator on the cover. My thumb presses their flimsy spines, so easily snapped.

‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’ she asks, voice cracking on the final syllables.

There’s a famous comic where the villain is trying to build an acoustic weapon. ‘The Calculus Affair,’ I say. ‘It’s a Tintin book.’

‘Let me see if we have it.’ The girl scoots behind the counter. ‘I know we have Tintin in Tibet and one of the hardback collections.’

Sound is a wave which can move through air, liquids, solid human bodies, building up pressure. It’s been calculated that 240 decibels is required to make a human head explode. If I had one wish, this is how I would like to kill you.

‘No, sorry,’ she says, disappointed, wondering, no doubt, if this means she’ll have to return the money. ‘I can order it in for you. Can you wait a week?’

The wish would grant me an evil scientist with crazed hair who would be glad to do it. One word is all it would take. Special headphones over your ears pumping at a 240 decibel volume, not music but speech; one word, repeated over and over until you died. Just one word.

‘That won’t do,’ I say, turning for the exit. ‘I’ll find it somewhere else.’ When I reach the door: ‘Keep the money.’

One wrong word in the right place can be enough to kill.

But you already know that, don’t you?

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