No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

He had worried that a bad person could steal her, so one day he had snatched the goose up in his arms and run. He’d told Ma and Pap that he’d found her thrown out with someone’s rubbish, and made a nice safe home for her in their narrow back garden. But the next day, an elderly Ugandan lady, introduced by Ma as Mrs Nabirye, came to have coffee at their house, and Ma told him, ‘This is the lady who owns the goose.’

Ma had, of course, known all along where he’d got the goose. Bram had broken down in tears and confessed that he’d taken her because he’d been so worried about her being stolen. Mrs Nabirye had explained that her late husband had made her, and her name was Henrietta. She said her husband would have been delighted to know that a young boy so loved Henrietta that he went to such lengths to protect her. She’d insisted that Bram keep her.

But Bram couldn’t look Henrietta in the eye for a long time after that, he was so ashamed of what he’d done, thinking of poor Mrs Nabirye and her dead husband. Now, every time he looked at Henrietta, he remembered the lesson of empathy that Ma and Mrs Nabirye had taught him. He hadn’t so much as stolen a grape from a supermarket since.

Mrs Nabirye had had a Ugandan proverb painted on a piece of driftwood in her conservatory: A child does not grow up only in a single home. He always smiled when he thought of that. He’d been so lucky, growing up in that wonderful little community in Primrose Hill where his parents still lived in their narrow little mews house which, they always said, reminded them of Amsterdam. Islington, too, had been a close-knit, almost village-like community. He really missed the support network they’d had there. He’d hoped to find another such ‘village’ here for Max and Phoebe, but that dream was fading fast.

Still, maybe this housewarming party would turn things around.

He took a moment to scan the house. He’d hidden some of the cameras under the eaves, quite successfully – he couldn’t even see them himself, and he knew where they were. There was another under the gutter on the shed, one in a corner of the verandah, and another fixed to a tree covering the other gable. If anyone approached the house now, they’d be caught on camera.

He gave Henrietta’s beak a pat and hefted the pails.

The party would kick off at five o’clock, so that people with kids could leave reasonably early, but Bram had all the catering side of things ready by four. Linda had been ‘cooking for Scotland’, as she put it, because it was problematic for Bram to prepare food with the limited water availability. The fridge was full of a range of vegetarian and meat-eater salads and quiches and tarts and sausage rolls, and David’s supply of raw meat for the McKechnie Special barbecue. He’d set up the barbecue equipment this morning on the terrace.

Bram, against his expectations, found that he was actually looking forward to this shindig, and the kids were hyper, dashing about the house shouting at each other. Kirsty was stringing bunting around the walls of the Walton Room.

He headed up to the bedroom to change.

After he’d sponged himself with water from a bucket, he sat in his robe in the sun streaming through the big window and opened his laptop. Unbeknownst to Kirsty, he’d been googling Owen’s murder. The articles he’d found so far had all been very repetitive – they must all have used the same source, or copied from each other. He did another search on ‘Owen Napier Grantown-on-Spey’ but instead of ‘murder’ he added the words ‘body’ and ‘river’. This threw up some fresh results, and Bram copied and pasted the texts into the document he’d already created for all the material, which he was yet to read through properly. He’d go through it all when he had a bit of time to himself.

The first of the articles that his new search had thrown up reported that the body found by a fisherman in the River Spey on Thursday had been identified as that of missing local man Owen Napier, age twenty-three, a pharmacy assistant. It seemed he’d been reported missing by his employer on 21 August, and the body had been found on 18 September. Most of this Bram already knew.

Another article described the finding of ‘a man’s body’ by a fisherman near Cragganmore on the River Spey, caught in submerged branches. No mention, at this early stage, of a name. Another, much later article, published during the police investigation, added the information that Owen’s ankles and wrists had been bound and added, needlessly, that the police were treating the death as ‘suspicious’.

Sitting there in the hot sun, Bram shivered.

Bound hand and foot and thrown in the river to drown. Owen would have had no chance. The River Spey was the fastest flowing river in Scotland. Its catchment area was huge, and mountainous, so if there was a lot of rain it was guaranteed that the Spey would spate. They’d walked some of the Speyside Way, Bram and Kirsty and the kids, on one occasion after heavy rain, and it had been scary enough just standing on the path looking at that water, churning past in its headlong rush to the sea. Kirsty had soon turned away, suggesting an alternative path away from the river.

If whoever had tied Owen up and thrown him in that river was now after Bram –

But Scott and Kirsty and David and everyone else were no doubt right, and there was no connection at all between Owen’s murder and what had been happening here at Woodside. Bram had no logical reason to think otherwise.

11

‘Let’s get this party started,’ said David, heading past Bram to the kitchen, six-pack of lager dangling from one hand. ‘No more bits of offal left lying around we could