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

of bleach emanating from the sink and the white plastic of the kettle was spotless. She filled it from a polished tap and followed the old lady’s instructions for the teapot and cups.

“How did you get to know Charlie?” She asked as they waited for the kettle to boil.

“It was after I had my bag stolen. He saw it in the papers. He brought me money and I let him into my hall. He was a gentleman, was Charlie Higgins. Never presumed.”

“Not like me?” Rozlyn couldn’t resist.

The old lady didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, she regarded Rozlyn thoughtfully. The pale eyes still watered when she talked of Charlie but she seemed more composed. “I’m sure your manners are well enough for a policewoman,” she said. “A policewoman is used to dealing with people who have none, I suppose.”

Rozlyn made the tea and carried the pot over to the table. The tea bags were some economy supermarket brand, she noted. She wondered if they were Mrs Chinowski’s choice or if they’d been selected by a thrifty home help.

“Did Charlie ever talk about himself?”

“He talked. We talked about people who had died and gone. About the old days.”

“The old days?” Charlie was only fifty-odd, Rozlyn thought. Mrs Chinowski was in her mid-eighties.

“When we were both young,” she said as though that were obvious.

“What about when you were young?”

“Oh, leaving my home, coming over here. Knowing that the family I left behind might not live to see the end of the war.” She shook her head. “It was a dreadful time.”

“Forgive me, Mrs Chinowski, but Charlie wasn’t old enough to remember that.”

She hissed again and reached for the teapot. “That didn’t mean he couldn’t listen,” she told Rozlyn acerbically. “Charlie knew how to listen.”

Did he listen standing in the hall, Rozlyn wondered. But she said nothing, still not certain what to make of this old lady. Instead, she drank her supermarket tea, hating the sweetened taste of it — the old lady had added sugar without asking — and listened as Mrs Chinowski spoke about her childhood in Poland. The family had crossed the sea to England in 1940, when she was just a tiny child. Even so, she could remember her first night on UK soil, sleeping on the floor of a hostel with her brother and sister, and how glad they’d been of the shelter because, despite the bombings, they really believed that they were safe at last. Rozlyn listened as she told how her parents had died and how she’d married and eventually come to live here when the flats were new. She elaborated on how things had changed. She spoke as though recounting a story so often relived she did not even have to think of the words anymore. A story that could only be partly hers; more likely one handed down to her by older siblings because she had been too young to remember much about their journey. A story so threadbare with use that the emotion had long been wrung from the fabric of it because there were only so many times your heart could cry. But when Mrs Chinowski told Rozlyn about Charlie and the small kindnesses of this man she hardly knew, she wept again and, when Rozlyn finally left her, having eventually wrested from her the names of her cleaning lady and a Mr Bishopson — who, it seemed was another beneficiary of Charlie’s kindness — Rozlyn felt exhausted, worn out by Mrs Chinowski’s life.

It was six fifteen and her route home took her past the Queen’s. She stopped off for a drink, but Big Frank Parker had not yet arrived. Tearing a page from her notebook, Rozlyn wrote a message for him, thinking how to phrase it while she drank her beer, trying Speckled Hen purely because she’d seen Frank Parker drinking it.

The note she finally left with the barman was cryptic, but she figured Big Frank would get the gist. She left the name of Thomas Thompson and the addresses of the two houses Mouse Man had shown her that day. One was definitely on Big Frank’s patch and the other only a street or so beyond his domain. Beneath that, she drew a large question mark.

The bar man, recalling Rozlyn from her previous visit, looked over at what she’d written. “You want to leave a number with that?” he asked.

Rozlyn shook her head. “He’ll know how to get in touch if he needs me,” she said, and the bar man nodded. Big Frank was not known to be big on phone calls. If he wanted someone, he sent someone else to fetch them.

“He’ll definitely be in later?”

The barman nodded again and slid the note behind one of the optics. “He likes to watch the Antiques Roadshow first, then have a spot of supper before he comes over here.”

“The Antiques Roadshow?” Rozlyn laughed. It didn’t quite fit with her take on Big Frank Parker. Rozlyn’s grandfather had liked to watch that, seeing it when he had stayed in England with his granddaughter. Later, Rozlyn recorded episodes for him and sent them over to the States. Later still, her granddad had rung to say he could get it on BBC America or some such. He’d been bugged about that. Rozlyn doubted he watched it now. He watched nothing, just stared into the middle distance at some world no one else could see and sometimes, just sometimes, he would smile as though glimpsing the face of an old friend through that mist of ruined memory.

Rozlyn, deciding that Speckled Hen was the dry white of beers, finished her drink and took herself off home.

* * *

THEADING, YEAR OF GRACE 878

All night Cate had sat with their neighbour, Aedra. Her son and daughter-in-law had been nursing her for weeks and were worn out with the grief of it. Alwyn was