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

“I really don’t know.” Mouse Man. Mouse would miss him. Rozlyn too, in an odd sort of way. Like she’d said, Charlie had been part of the scenery. Now there’d be a piece missing. A small piece, granted. So small as to be almost unnoticed — until it wasn’t there.

“Sad, that,” Jenny commented. “Living fifty-odd years and no one to care when you’re gone. Not much of a footprint to leave behind.”

“Footprint?”

“Oh,” she grinned. “I had this boyfriend once, into all this eco stuff. He had this poster, said something like ‘leave only footprints and take only photographs.’ We had this big argument over how much damage you could do if you left too many footprints. Silly really, but I got this idea afterwards, that some people leave the buggers all over the place. Others, there’s not even a single one.”

Rozlyn nodded. It was a sad thought. She allowed herself a brief moment of self-pity as she wondered who’d be there to miss her should she depart this life as unexpectedly as Charlie Higgins had. Apart from her grandfather, a man now so sick that he could not even recall Rozlyn’s existence, never mind notice her absence, there was no one really. Mouse would notice, she thought, and her colleagues, but would she really leave much more of a footprint than Charlie Higgins?

“What have you got?” Rozlyn asked, concentrating on the matter in hand and telling herself firmly not to be so maudlin.

“Bills, in date order. Look, he’s written down the date he paid them. Telephone, utilities . . .” She paused and looked around. “Funny . . .”

“What?”

“There are phone bills, but no phone.”

“For a landline? I only ever knew him to use a mobile. Before that, he’d call me from pay phones.” Rozlyn took the bills and examined them. The latest was for two months previously. “No,” she said. “Look, they’re not for this address. They’re for a flat on . . . well must be on the third floor, I guess, number 303. What’s all that about, then?”

Jenny shrugged. “Want me to go down and knock on the door?”

“Later. Finish up here, see if we have any other anomalies, then I’ll tag along.” She looked at the bills more closely. They seemed to be for some kind of low-user tariff and, in all, recorded maybe a dozen calls per quarter, most of which were to Charlie’s mobile phone. Scanning them, Rozlyn could see only two other numbers recorded.

She handed them back to Jenny and returned to her own search. “Personal documents,” she said. “Birth certificate, medical card. I don’t think I even know where mine is. Marriage certificate! Charlie was married?”

“So there might be next of kin after all. That looks like an address book.” Jenny fished in the bottom of her own drawer and withdrew a black bound book. “Yep, telephone numbers, mostly, but it’s a start. Hang on, there’s another one here. You think he ran out of space?”

Rozlyn frowned suddenly recalling something she should have noted at the crime scene. “He had his wallet on him,” she mused. “The body had been dumped and the wallet chucked away a few feet from the body. They’d left his wristwatch — not that it was worth anything — but no mobile and no address book . . . no keys either. Jenny, was there anything to suggest you weren’t the first to get in here?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, but we’d a man on the door from an hour after the body was found, I believe. Of course, they might have come here straight after they killed him but if they searched this place they must have been super careful. Like you say, his wallet was found same time as the body, but there was no address book in the inventory, I’m sure of that. Did he always have it on him? What about these?”

Rozlyn frowned, trying to remember. Charlie was meticulous about his phone numbers, both those in his phone and those in his little black books. Rozlyn would never have noticed him changing them had Charlie not pointed it out. It was a regular habit to update his book every six months or so, copying his numbers with care into an identical new book, leaving out anything not current. He hated anything to be out of date.

Rozlyn picked up the collection of books and skimmed through until she had the most recent. She knew it had to be this one because her own new mobile number was listed with her old one crossed out. Three or four such amendments would have been enough for Charlie to have abandoned this little book and start another. Charlie hated disorder and crossings out were disorder in Charlie’s mind. Rozlyn found she had absorbed all of this without being aware of it. Evidently, more of Charlie Higgins’ ramblings had permeated her brain than she had initially thought.

“Someone knew he’d have recorded their number?” Jenny guessed. “Didn’t like the idea of it getting into the wrong hands?”

Rozlyn nodded. “This book must have been replaced recently,” she explained, showing her the change in telephone number. “I bought my new phone three months ago.”

“So, if whoever killed Charlie took the book and the mobile, they’d probably assume they’d covered their tracks. Probably wouldn’t have bothered coming here. Or maybe the body was found before they were ready?”

“Maybe, though the timing was so precise . . . they had a window of maybe half an hour to dump Charlie’s body while everyone on site was eating breakfast. They must have known what went on at the dig site well enough to realise that. Given that, they must have been aware that the diggers would have reported it quickly and they made no attempt to hide Charlie’s identity.”

“The dig site’s pretty remote,” Jenny observed. “You think it must have been someone local? For them to know how the place