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

agreed. “I do and, Cate, if she stumbled back here tomorrow or in a year from now and asked me to take her in, I would and I’d face down any man or woman that even suggested I should be shamed to do it.”

“She won’t come back,” Cate said softly.

“Can you be so sure? That . . . man . . . she left me for, you think he’ll give her the life she hopes for?” He shook his head. “No, Cate, I’d see him dead and pay what blood price his kin thought him worth, but I’d have her back.”

Cate didn’t reply, she pretended to busy herself with some invisible tangle in her thread and Edmund chose not to press the point further. Instead, he turned and went back inside.

“She won’t be coming back,” Cate whispered. She bowed her head and the tears fell onto her hands as she wound the remaining twine back onto the spindle. Cate had heard her leave that night and had almost called out to her, begged her not to go. But she’d resisted the temptation to keep her sister there on her own account. She’d seen how happy Allis had been those past months, falling in love with Owain, stealing time with him, fearful of being caught but utterly unable to desist. Cate envied her that passion, that intensity of love that made her risk everything, be willing to leave all she knew behind — including Cate herself — and there was a small part of the younger sister that found that hard to forgive. Cate longed for such devotion.

But in the end, it had all been lost. Cate knew that as surely as she knew, watching the red and gold of the evening sky, that tomorrow would be a bright, fine day. She knew because she had seen another figure leave that night and, much later on, return. She’d seen him throw something the thickness of a man’s arm into the deepest part of the pond and then fall to his knees, weeping, soundless sobs that wracked his body. And Cate had known then that Allis had lost her dream.

Allis was gone. Dead and gone and Cate, even knowing who had been responsible, could tell no-one what she had seen.

CHAPTER 6

PRESENT DAY

Although Rozlyn had known Charlie Higgins for almost seven years, she had never been to his tiny flat on the sixth floor of Haywood House, one of the few remaining tower blocks in that part of town.

Haywood wasn’t bad, as such things went, Rozlyn mused. Sure, there was graffiti in the stairwell and the lift smelt of piss and drunks, but usually it worked, which was a definite plus in a twelve-storey building. The tower had been taken over by a private housing association the previous year and they’d put security locks on the main doors and provided a man and dog to do evening patrols. They’d also formed a tenants’ association in an attempt to deal with the problems of rowdy teens with nowhere to go and had provided play facilities for their younger siblings. Rozlyn had attended one of their earlier meetings, directed to do so by DCI Brook, who informed her that this month’s buzz was the importance of community policing. To Rozlyn’s reply that community policing was the domain of uniform, she was further informed that the directive from on high was to improve community relations between the police and the ethnic minorities and as one of the few representatives of such they had handy, she’d better get herself down there and show just how inclusive modern policing could be. Rozlyn gathered from this that ‘inclusive’ was another of the latest buzzwords that Brook had finally decided he ought to use.

She went to the meeting.

Charlie Higgins had been there with a handful of other tenants, mainly pensioners, Rozlyn noted. They sat around, staring uncomfortably at the representative from the housing association as she tried hard to find out what it was that they wanted for their community and, more importantly, what was actually possible given a distinct lack of budget.

At the time, Rozlyn had put the presence of Charlie Higgins down to his wanting to impress his pet police officer, but, looking round the flat, Rozlyn began to think there might have been far more to it than that. That Charlie Higgins might genuinely have cared what happened to the place in which he lived.

There were three flats per landing, and two landings per floor, branching off from the staircase. The landings, being communal, depended for their upkeep on the willingness of tenants. Charlie’s landing was spotless. There were even plastic tubs of flowers placed outside the doors, a rarity in Haywood House, where anything not nailed down was likely to be nicked or tossed over the balcony, despite the improved security. The entrance door to Charlie’s flat was painted in a vivid red and the brass letterbox gleamed as though recently polished. The door was open, left ajar by the search team already inside. Rozlyn could hear them chatting and was glad to recognise the voice of DC Jenny Harper. If there was anything to find in Charlie’s flat, Jenny would make certain it surfaced; she had a bloodhound instinct for the relevant. Rozlyn pushed the door open and went inside.

There were three in the search team. SOCO had already done their thing and here and there doorframes and shelves were mired with fine, silver grey powder but, Rozlyn noted, there were remarkably few prints in Charlie’s apartment and, apart from that which the fingerprint officer had left, remarkably little dust. Charlie’s place was beyond clean; well past being tidy. Despite the careful ravages of the search crew, Charlie’s flat was immaculately organised and precisely ordered.

Rozlyn stood on the threshold to the living room and stared about. The walls were magnolia and there was no carpet. The parts that showed revealed the vinyl tiling that