BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1) by JANE ADAMS (best book reader .txt) 📗

“It’s my house,” he said defensively. “My mother left it to me, nothing owing. Nothing. Anyway, there’s no one lived next door, they moved out, told the landlord his drains must be blocked. And the old woman on the other side, she’s deaf as a post, so she never complains.”

He slipped the grub-like mouse pups back to their now frantic mother, leaving Rozlyn, her eyes watering, to wonder what being deaf had to do with a sense of smell. She had asked once what Mouse did with his charges when there were simply too many to fit in the cages. “Oh,” he had told Rozlyn happily. “I take them to the waste ground and I let them go.”

“You were going to tell me about Charlie,” she said.

“Oh. Oh yes.”

Mouse sighed, his now empty hands dropped to his sides and he stood quite still, looking lost and dejected as though now he had Rozlyn here he’d quite forgotten what to tell her. Their walk back to his house had been filled with Mouse jumping at every shadow and whittering about the big man following them, though Rozlyn had seen no sign. He had refused to talk about Charlie ’til they were ‘safe’, but now that they were, presumably, safe, he seemed at a loss.

“Charlie,” Rozlyn prompted him. “Charlie Higgins is dead, Mouse. Can you tell me anything about why that might be?” She paused, waiting. “Or am I wasting my time?”

The sharpness in Rozlyn’s voice seemed to jerk Mouse out of his reverie. ”Oh no, Inspector Priest, I wouldn’t dream of wasting your time.” He seemed to gather his thoughts, then glanced around again as he had done on the street as though afraid that someone might be listening. Then he moved closer to Rozlyn, his voice dropping to a confidential whisper. Rozlyn almost choked at the stench which seemed to emanate from the man like a dense cotton wool textured cloud, wrapping about her nose and mouth and amplified by the room full of rodents with whom he shared his pungency.

“They’ve got no bladders, you know,” he whispered and it took Rozlyn a moment to realise that he was talking about his mice and not Charlie. “So they’re . . . doing their little business all the time. People don’t understand that it’s not their fault, they pick them up and the poor little things dribble all over and they don’t seem to understand it’s not their fault.”

Rozlyn closed her eyes and sighed in exasperation. “Well don’t you learn something new every day.” she said. “Now what about Charlie. What did you want to tell me about Charlie?”

That seemed to agitate Mouse even more. He stepped away from Rozlyn and thrust his grubby hands deep into the pockets of his greasy trousers. “He knew what you thought about him,” Mouse Man said. “Charlie knew you didn’t think he was capable of nothing but he respected you, Inspector Priest, he really did. He reckoned you been good to him over the years, slipping him a fiver here and there, even when he didn’t have much to tell you. That counted for a man like Charlie. But he reckoned he got something really big to tell you this time, that he’d got an in.” He paused. Halted his pacing and swivelled round to face Rozlyn.

“An in?” Rozlyn prompted him.

“An in,” Mouse confirmed looking suddenly triumphant. “On a job. He was going to be a mole, he said and give you the deal. The whole deal, right up to the when.”

“He told you this?”

“Oh yes, he told me. He was proud of it. This was something he could give that would be worth more than the odd fiver. Charlie reckoned he’d get rich out of it.”

Instead of which he’d got himself murdered. Rozlyn frowned wondering what the hell Charlie might have been up to. Charlie hadn’t had two brain cells to rub together and had had the subtlety of the average concrete block. The idea of him infiltrating anything but the nearest whisky bottle was one that Rozlyn found absolutely absurd. Absurd and pathetically sad.

But it explained, perhaps, why he’d wound up dead.

“What was going on, Mouse Man? Charlie tell you that?”

Mouse shook his head. “Something big, he said and something about stuff that was very old and very rare.”

“Antiques?” Rozlyn asked. “Some kind of antiques?”

Mouse shrugged. “Old antiques, Charlie said, like they have in the museums. Something really, really old.”

Antiquities, Rozlyn thought. The dig? Did this have something to do with the dig? She remembered what the constable had told her that the archaeologists didn’t expect to find anything valuable in the graves.

Had someone thought different and been wrong? Or had there been something there valuable enough to get Charlie Higgins killed?

CHAPTER 4

YEAR OF GRACE 878

Theading was about two miles ride from the manor by the ford, along a narrow track that led first through woodland and then onto a ridge of land forming the backbone of gentle hills.

This too was his land. On this eastern side of the manor there were fifteen hides between Boden’s wood and the river Pearce which marked the boundary of Abbey lands. Theading was his, as was the tun of Bearwell and the homesteads that lay between.

“Your first task,” he said to Hugh “will be a survey of the land and the appointment of tythingmen.”

“For that I’ll have need of local knowledge. I hope there are men you can trust in this vill of yours.”

“As do I . . . it’s likely the abbey has already done the work for you if the abbot is intent on claiming the land for himself. I’ll not believe that any of his kind would miss the chance to take a tything.” He said sourly. “No doubt Abbot Kendryk will be most upset to find us come just as the harvest is brought home.”

“And no doubt