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

play with her friends when they were all just little kids. Standing on the end of her mother’s bed, they let themselves fall straight back, no hands, nothing to break their fall but the spring of the mattress and a puffy green quilt.

It was harder than it sounded, trusting yourself and the softness of the bed just to fall back straight and flat and not panic and bend in the middle before you hit bottom. If you managed to do it right, then you fell flat out like Charlie Higgins. On your back with your toes turned up and your limp arms straight out to either side.

His eyes were open and his mouth just slightly gaping. He looked shocked, Rozlyn thought. Death had taken Charlie Higgins by surprise.

“A single stab wound,” the young woman in the white coverall told her. “We’ve not turned him yet, but we don’t think there’s more.”

Rozlyn nodded. Charlie was dressed as he always was, in a cheap pinstriped suit and a white poly-cotton shirt. The cuffs were worn. Charlie’s cuffs were always worn. The front of the shirt was drenched with blood.

Rozlyn bent closer, leaning down into the trench, examining the sides and what section of the base was visible around the body. The surrounding area was clean of blood.

“There are blood spots there and there.” The SOCO pointed to where two of her colleagues cast about the open ground, carefully pegging any trace.

“So killed, then brought here?”

“That’s what it looks like so far.”

“But the body wasn’t wrapped in anything. Just left here.”

“Just as you see it. It was dry too and there was heavy dew this morning according to the diggers. Most likely scenario is someone came in here while they were all at breakfast, dumped him in the grave and then left.”

Rozlyn raised an eyebrow.

“Cool customer,” Brook said, from close beside her ear. “OK, let’s take a look at the back of him, now Detective Inspector Priest has given him his last rites.”

Rozlyn stepped back, watching as two of the SOCO eased the body over onto his side. The ground beneath was damp, bearing out the heavy dew fall. Blood had drizzled down the sides of Charlie Higgins’ chest, seeping through the jacket, but there were no further wounds visible on the dead man’s back.

“OK. He’s all yours,” Brook told the SOCO. “Your snitches often end up dead, don’t they?” he commented, turning to Rozlyn. “There was that one a few months back, decided to top herself from what I remember.”

Rozlyn ignored him. Jennis Morgan had been an addict. Heroin. A user since the age of seventeen, she’d died not of an overdose, as Brook well knew, but because some bastard had cut her drug of choice with rat poison.

“But why would anyone want to kill the likes of Charlie Higgins? He was such a harmless little man.”

Brook shrugged. “Being harmless doesn’t keep you out of harm’s way, does it?”

“No,” she agreed reluctantly. “I suppose not.” She stared down at the body, trying to make some sense of it being here.

Charlie was a listener; he had ears that twitched like radar for a niblet of juicy gossip and a memory like an elephant’s when it came to trivia. If there had been exams in useless facts, Charlie would have had a PhD. He’d been feeding Rozlyn dribs and drabs of information since just after she joined the force and Rozlyn kept him on more from habit than for the world-shattering importance of anything Charlie had revealed. Habit, and the memory of how once or twice Charlie had, in all innocence, provided the missing piece that linked two facts together. She could think of nothing Charlie could have done or known that would have made him worth killing and certainly not worth the effort of his body being shifted way out here. Charlie was the sort of man for whom a casual death in a back alley had been a possibility for years, but this was of a different order. It made no sense, Rozlyn thought as she watched them bag the body and lay it on a folding gurney ready to be wheeled away. She watched too in growing irritation as a mortuary ambulance drove into the site from a gate she could just see in the far corner of the field.

She scowled at Brook, who grinned back at her. “You made me come all the way through that field full of bloody cows when there was a way in from the road?”

“Just thought you might enjoy the country air,” Brook said.

CHAPTER 2

From the writings of Abbot Kendryk of Storton Abbey:

Treven was a man who knew how to touch the earth and read what was written there. He knew how strong could be the memory of the land. He felt it often and knew in his heart that whatever new gods might be brought into a place, the blood and fear and love poured out for centuries into the blessed earth was still held captive, ready to feed the harvest, to nurture hope or to nourish much darker urges. And so it was that he recognised a certain wrongness in that place. A memory, a hunger buried deep and never assuaged. Evil that waited for the man without pure purpose to fall down into its grasp.

* * *

THEADINGFORD. YEAR OF GRACE 878

At the foot of a low, tree-crowned hill, where the road was crossed by a shepherd’s trail, there stood two indicators that people still lived here.

Treven was hard pressed to say which disturbed him more.

The first was a wheel-headed cross. Carved of ash, the roots of the tree from which it had been created still reached into the earth. A thing at once natural and made, Treven thought, as though the man that had formed it wished somehow to bridge that gap between the