Текст книги "A Blessing From The Obeah Man"
Автор книги: Celina Grace
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 5 страниц)
Freedom Fighter
It was going to be a momentous day but of course, he didn’t know that when he woke up. Peter Drewett wasn’t normally aware of much before his first cup of tea in the morning, and so his peace remained unbroken until the middle of breakfast. He was reaching for his second piece of toast when it happened. His fingers closed upon the rigid crust and as he lifted it to his plate, he looked at his wife and thought I have absolutely nothing left to say to you.
That was it, that was all. He made no sound but his eyelids fluttered in shock and the toast dropped onto his plate, unheeded. Peter stared at his wife’s face, the same face he’d seen every morning for the past twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years! It was a lifetime. And now he had nothing left to say to her – nothing at all.
He reached for his cup of tea, noting with interest and a small amount of panic that his fingers were shaking. His wife, of course, noticed nothing. Mary Drewett was a fat, fair creature, buttoned tightly into the grey woollen cardigan that she habitually wore to breakfast. In the submerged strata of her face could be seen traces of the pert, pretty girl she’d once been. Peter stared at her. It could have been a stranger sitting across from him, despite the familiarity of that awful cardigan. He brought the china mug to his lips and gulped helplessly at the lukewarm liquid within. He felt lost, as if his chair was drifting gently on the current of an unseen ocean, floating him away from his old, tired, unwanted life. He was sure the walls of the kitchen shimmered for a second. The floor tilted beneath the soles of his slippers and he closed his eyes, suddenly dizzy.
Upstairs, under the hot gush of the shower, things were no better. He felt panicky, nibbled by anxiety; as if he’d missed a vital life-preserving appointment. I’m forty-eight, he thought incredulously. Half my life is gone. He stepped out of the shower and waded through the gauzy white sheets of steam that hung in the air. He wiped the mirror over the sink with a trembling hand. Forty-eight. And somehow, his forty-eight wasn’t the forty-eight of those creatures glimpsed in glossy magazines, or the figures who cavorted in the tiny glass compound of the television. His was a much older type of forty-eight. He was almost an old man.
He dressed himself in a daze, clinging to the old routine of his working day. He buttoned his white, short sleeved shirt and pulled on his grey, polyester-wool-mix suit, dull as pewter except for the oily shine of the elbows and knees. Peter thought of the train journey ahead of him, and the office routine ahead of that. He sold advertising space for a glossy car magazine. How many hours, how many years of his life had been spent in that little, grey box of a cubicle, headset clamped to his ears, listening to the oleaginous tone of his voice as he tried to persuade yet another reluctant customer of the need to buy a three centimetre, bordered box in the last five pages of the magazine? He’d never really thought about it before but he suddenly realised he was the one of the oldest people in the office. No, he was the oldest. He had gradually become surrounded by children; children who thought they were adults, strident, spike-haired children in any number of ridiculous clothes. Did they laugh at him behind his back? He reddened with shame as he straightened his tie and smoothed the sparse strands of his remaining hair back behind his ears. He’d always worn a tie to work – Mary bought them for him for his birthday and sometimes for Christmas. Every year he unwrapped another slither of coloured nylon to noose about his neck.
He kissed Mary as he always did before he left the house. She, as always, gave no sign that the brief press of his mouth upon her cheek gave her any pleasure. As he shut the front door behind him, Peter tried to remember when they last made love. It was early July now so… he found himself shrinking from the fact that it could have been last year. Perhaps on his birthday? He plodded towards the train station, briefcase dragging at his hand. He looked at it resentfully. Why did he carry this to work and back every day? It wasn’t as if he was a top business executive, his briefcase stuffed with important papers, vibrating with the urgent trill of his mobile phone. This case contained nothing more earth shattering than yesterday’s copy of the Daily Mail, an empty Kit Kat wrapper and some hieroglyphic squiggles on a torn piece of yellow paper. Peter frowned. Suddenly, the briefcase seemed indicative of his whole wasted, failed life. He felt a sudden, breathless surge of anger – fury, not at broken dreams but at having no dreams left at all.
There was only one thing to be done and as he was now crossing the footbridge over the river, he did it. The case flew in a widening arc, wheeling above the water like a square black bird, before splashing into the river in a cacophony of droplets. Peter laughed and the two people who’d been walking ahead of him looked back briefly. They saw nothing but a nondescript middle-aged man clinging to the railings of the bridge and turned back, uninterested.
Peter remained at the railings, clutching them in both hands. He was aghast – he’d just thrown his briefcase in the river! – and yet exhilarated at the same time. “Begone dull care,” he said to himself, giggling quietly and wondering whether it was part of a quotation and if so, from what. Slowly, he let go of the railings. The concentric circles that marked the spot where his luckless briefcase had landed gradually smoothed out into flat, reflective river water.
Peter began walking again. He let his footsteps continue in the direction of the railway station, past the newsagent’s shop on the corner. As he passed the entrance, he caught a glimpse of ‘his’ car magazine on the racks inside by the open door and his stomach contracted. He wasn’t going to work today. He wasn’t going back to work again, ever. All of a sudden, an enormous exhilarating energy possessed him. He felt his spine straighten, his weary, dragging posture spring into something energetic and upright. He climbed the steps to the railway platform but didn’t turn right onto Platform Two, as he had done every weekday for the past fifteen years. Instead, he let his new, vibrant feet cross the bridge and take him to Platform One, the one for London. A train was just drawing up as he reached the platform and he joined the mass of people that were sucked into the carriage doorways as if by an unseen force.
He’d never been on this train before and was astonished at how busy it was. There were no seats available, of course not, but in Peter’s new mood, that was no hardship. He leant against the wall of one compartment and felt the warmth of the young girl beside him with a kind of sensuous happiness. He could see out of the window from his cramped vantage point and it was a pleasure to watch the sunshine on the fields, winking from the windscreens of passing cars, blotted out here and there by thick white clouds. The train rattled and swayed beneath Peter and he closed his eyes in wonder. I’m going to London, he thought. I’ve run away from home, from Mary, from work. I’ve got a day off from the world. A day? Why not longer? He felt giddy with the possibilities unfolding before him.
He knew the capital as well as most people who live in the suburbs do: Oxford Street for clothes shopping in the January sales, one or two of the West End theatres for a musical show at Christmas, Trafalgar Square, Waterloo station and Big Ben. The intricacies of the smaller streets were unknown to Peter; the buildings, pathways, nooks and crannies of this ancient city were as mysterious to him as the treasures drowned in Atlantis. He was dimly aware of that fact and thought he might start his adventure by walking. Just to walk, by himself, looking and listening…and thinking, remembering… he savoured the thought.
A baby was crying, somewhere further down the carriage. Poor little mite, Peter thought sentimentally. He remembered the three miscarriages, the one fragile foetus that had clung to Mary for nearly four months before being swept away, helpless, in a red torrent. Again, he saw Mary’s face as she sat in bed at the hospital, pinched with pain, her mouth drawn tight. He thought perhaps that was when whatever feeling they’d shared between them had started to wither away; she was silent for so long, when she did eventually begin to speak to him again, he’d lost the art of conversation. He’d forgotten how to communicate, his real, true words reduced to meaningless platitudes. Sometimes he’d felt himself choke on the welter of clichés that clogged his mouth. He’d mentioned adoption to her, just once, and received a look of such naked, blazing pain that he shrivelled at the memory of it, even now. I want my own, she’d said. Not somebody else’s discards. The honesty, the cruelty of it had taken his breath away.
A shift in the acoustics of the train signalled their approach to Kings Cross. Peter felt the people about him begin to shuffle restlessly, and drew his arms in towards his body as the doors opened and people began to flood out onto the platform. He let himself be pulled out in the swirl of humanity and found himself in the midst of a vast and exhilarating hubbub. He let his feet take him to the gates. He had a moment of panic when he realised he hadn’t bought a ticket but for some reason the automatic gates had been left open. People streamed though and Peter went with them.
He found himself on an escalator, heading down towards the underground trains that thrummed through the ground beneath his feet. He turned onto the nearest platform, heedless of the crowds of people waiting for the next train. Peter could just make out the map on the tunnel wall though the shoulders, heads and backs of the people ranged along the edge of the platform. This was the Piccadilly line, he saw. The name had made him laugh as a child because it sounded so like piccalilli. This was fine – he’d take the southbound train to the West End and then he would… would… would start to be free. He looked at his watch – ten minutes to nine. Just think, he would have been at the office by now. Stuck in the awful little box, talking to people he didn’t like and never wanted to see again. Instead he was here in London. Again, Peter felt a surge of exhilaration and clenched his hands in a moment of joy and panic.
There was a low rumble, a metallic mutter and clatter as the train drew into the platform. People began to struggle towards the doors. Peter edged himself into the carriage and moved between the seats. Despite the heat and the crush, he found he was smiling. It’s not too late, he thought. It’s not too late at all. I can change; my life can change. He clenched his hand around the cool metal of the bar above his head. The rattle of the train was like the beat of a drum inside his head. The adverts before his eyes blurred into coloured squares, like the rippling flags of a crusading army; the rocking of the train was swinging him into his new life, one step, another step, on the jaunty, long awaited march to freedom.
Five seats away, the young man from Yorkshire put his hands to the straps of his rucksack, bringing its laden weight more tightly against his body. He moved his thumb against the button of the detonator, closed his eyes for the last time and began, softly, to pray.
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The first Kate Redman novel Hushabye (A Kate Redman Mystery) is available from Amazon Kindle.
A missing baby. A murdered girl. A case where everyone has something to hide...
On the first day of her new job in the West Country, Detective Sergeant Kate Redman finds herself investigating the kidnapping of Charlie Fullman, the newborn son of a wealthy entrepreneur and his trophy wife. It seems a straightforward case... but as Kate and her fellow officer Mark Olbeck delve deeper, they uncover murky secrets and multiple motives for the crime.
Kate finds the case bringing up painful memories of her own past secrets. As she confronts the truth about herself, her increasing emotional instability threatens both her hard-won career success and the possibility that they will ever find Charlie Fullman alive...
Read the first two chapters of Hushabye (A Kate Redman Mystery) below...
HUSHABYE
(A KATE REDMAN MYSTERY)
CELINA GRACE
© Celina Grace 2013
Prologue
Casey Fullman opened her eyes and knew something was wrong.
It was too bright. She was used to waking to grey dimness, the before-sunrise hours of a winter morning. Dita would stand by the bed with Charlie in one arm, a warmed bottle in the other. Casey would struggle up to a sitting position, trying to avoid the jab of pain from her healing Caesarean scar, and take the baby and the bottle.
You’re mad to get up so early when you don’t have to, her mother had told her, more than once. It’s not like you’re breastfeeding. Let Dita do it. But Casey, smiling and shrugging, would never give up those first waking moments. She enjoyed the delicious warmth of the baby snuggled against her body, his dark eyes fixed upon hers as he sucked furiously at the bottle.
She didn’t envy Dita, though, stumbling back to bed through the early morning dark to her bedroom next to the nursery. Casey would have gotten up herself to take Charlie from his cot when he cried for his food, but Nick needed his sleep, and it seemed to work out better all round for Dita, so close to the cot anyway, to bring him and the bottle into the bedroom instead. That’s what I pay her for, Nick had said, when she’d suggested getting up herself.
But this morning there was no Dita, sleepy-eyed in rumpled pyjamas, standing by the bed. There was no Charlie. Casey sat up sharply, wincing as her stomach muscles pulled at the scar. She looked over at Nick, fast asleep next to her. Sleeping like a baby. But where was her baby, her Charlie?
She got up and padded across the soft, expensive, sound-muffling carpet, not bothering with her dressing gown, too anxious now to delay. It was almost full daylight; she could see clearly. The bedroom door was shut, and she opened it to a silent corridor outside.
The door to Dita’s room was standing open, but the door to Charlie’s nursery was closed. Casey looked in Dita’s room. Her nanny’s bed was empty, the room in its usual mess, clothes and toys all over the floor. She must have gone into Charlie’s room. They must both be in there. Why hadn’t Dita brought him through? He must be ill, thought Casey, and fear broke over her like a wave. Her palm slipped on the door handle to the nursery.
She pushed the door. It stuck, halfway open. Casey shoved harder and it moved, opening wide enough for her to see an out-flung arm on the carpet, a hand half-curled. Her throat closed up. Frantically, she pushed at the door, and it opened far enough to enable her to squeeze inside.
It was Dita she saw first, spread-eagled on the floor, face upwards. For a split second, Casey thought, crazily, that it was a model of her nanny, a waxwork, something that someone had left in the room for a joke. Dita’s face was pale as colourless candle wax, but that wasn’t the worst thing. There was something wrong with the structure of her face, her forehead dented, her nose pushed to one side. Her thick blonde hair was fanned out around her head like the stringy petals of a giant flower.
Casey felt her heartbeat falter as she looked down at the body. She was dimly aware that her lungs felt as if they’d seized up, frozen solid. She mouthed like a fish, gasping for air, but it wasn’t until she moved her gaze from Dita to look at Charlie’s cot that she began to scream.
Chapter One
Kate Redman stood in the tiny hallway of her flat and regarded herself in the full-length mirror that hung beside the front door. She never left the flat without giving herself a quick once-over—not for reasons of vanity, but to check that all was in place.She smoothed down her hair and tugged at her jacket, pulling the shoulders more firmly into shape. Her bag stood by the front door mat. She picked it up and checked her purse and mobile and warrant card were all there, zipped away in the inner pocket.
She was early, but then she was always early. Time for a quick coffee before the doorbell was expected to ring? She walked into the small, neat kitchen, her hand hovering over the kettle. She decided against it. She felt jittery enough already. Calm down, Kate.
It was awful being the new girl; it was like being back at school again. Although now at least, she was well-dressed, with clean hair and clean shoes. It was fairly unlikely that any of her new co-workers would tell her that she smelt and had nits.
Kate shook herself mentally. She was talking to herself again, the usual internal monologue, always a sign of stress. It’s just a new job. You can do it. They picked you, remember?
She checked her watch. He was late, although not by much. The traffic at this time of day was always awful. She walked from the kitchen to the lounge – living room, Kate, living room – a matter of ten steps. She closed her bedroom door, and then opened it again to let the air flow in. She walked back to the hallway just as the doorbell finally rang. She took a deep breath and fixed her smile in place before she opened it.
“DS Redman?” asked the man on the doorstep. “I’m DS Olbeck. Otherwise known as Mark. Bloody awful parking around here. Sorry I’m late.”
Kate noted a few things immediately: the fact that he’d said ‘bloody,’ whereas every other copper she’d ever known would have said ‘fucking’; his slightly too long dark hair; that he had a nice, crinkle-eyed smile. She felt a bit better.
“No drama,” she said breezily. “I’m ready. Call me Kate.”
When they got to the car, she hesitated slightly for a moment, unsure of whether she should clear the passenger seat of all the assorted crap that was piled upon it or whether she should leave it to Mark. He muttered an apology and threw everything into the back.
“I’m actually quite neat,” he said, swinging the door open for her, “but it doesn’t seem to extend to the car, if you see what I mean.”
Kate smiled politely. As he swung the car out into the road, she fixed her mind on the job ahead of them.
“Can you tell me–” she began, just as he began to ask her a question.
“You’re from–”
“Oh, sorry–”
“I was going to say, you’re up from Bournemouth, aren’t you?” Olbeck asked.
“That’s right. I grew up there.”
“I thought that’s where people went to retire.”
Kate grinned. “Pretty much. There’s wasn’t a lot of, shall we say, life when I was growing up.” She paused. “Still, we had the beach. Where are you from?”
“London,” said DS Olbeck, briefly. There was a pause while he waited to join the dual carriageway. “Nowhere glamorous. Just the outskirts, really. Ruislip, Middlesex. How are you finding the move to the West Country?”
“Fine so far.”
“Have you got family around here?
Kate was growing impatient with the small talk. “No, no one around here,” she said. “Can I ask you about the case?”
“Of course.”
“I know it’s a murder and kidnap case–”
“Yes. The child – baby – belongs to the Fullmans. Nick Fullman is a very wealthy entrepreneur, made most of his cash in property development. He got married about a year ago – to one of those sort of famous people.”
“How do you mean?” Kate asked.
“Oh you know, the sort of Z-list celebrity that keeps showing up in Heat magazine. Her name’s Casey Bright. Well, Casey Fullman now. Appeared in Okay when they got married, showing you round their lovely home, you know the sort of thing.”
Kate smiled. “I get the picture.”
She wouldn’t have pegged DS Olbeck for a gossip mag reader, but then people often weren’t what they seemed.
“And the murder?”
“The nanny, Dita Olgweisch. Looks incidental to the kidnapping at this point, but you never know. What is known is that the baby is missing and as it – he’s – only three months old, you can imagine the kind of thing we’re dealing with here.”
“Yes.” Kate was silent for a moment. A three-month-old baby…memories threatened to surface and she pushed them away. “So on the face of it, we’re looking at the baby was snatched, the nanny interrupted whoever it was, and she was killed?”
“Like you say, on the surface, that seems to be what’s happened. We’ll know more soon. We’ll be there in,” he glanced at the sat nav on the windscreen, “fifteen minutes or so.”
They were off the motorway now and into the countryside. Looking out of the window, Kate noted the ploughed fields, shorn of the autumn stubble, the skeletal shapes of the trees. It was a grey January day, the sky like a flat blanket the colour of nothing. The worst time of year, she thought, everything dead, shut down for the winter, months until spring.
The car slowed, turned into a driveway, and continued through formidable iron gates which were opened for them by a uniformed officer. After they drove through, Kate looked back to see the gates swung shut behind them. She noted the high wooden fence that ran alongside the road, the CCTV camera on the gatepost. The driveway wound though dripping trees and opened out into a courtyard at the front of the house.
“Looks like security is a priority,” she said to her companion as he pulled the car up by the front door.
He raised his eyebrows. “Clearly not enough of a priority.”
“Well, we’ll see,” said Kate.
They both got out of the car. There was another uniformed officer by the front door, a pale redhead whose nose had reddened in the raw air. He was stamping his feet and swinging his arms but stopped abruptly when Kate and Olbeck reached him.
“DCI Anderton here yet?” said Olbeck.
“Yes sir. He’s inside, in the kitchen. Just go straight through the hallway.”
They stepped inside. The hallway was cavernous, tiled in chilly white stone, scuffed and marked now with the imprint of shoes and boots. Kate looked around. A staircase split in two and flowed around the upper reaches of the hallway to the first floor of the house. There was an enormous light shade suspended from the ceiling, a tangled mass of glass tubing and metal filaments. It had probably cost more than her flat, but she thought it hideous all the same. The house was warm, too warm; the underfloor heating was obviously at full blast, but there was an atmosphere of frigidity nonetheless. Perhaps it was the glossy white floor, the high ceilings, the general air of too much space. A Philip Starke chair stood against the wall, looking as though it had been carved out of ice.
“Mark? That you? Through here.”
They followed the shout through into the kitchen, big on an industrial scale. It opened out into a glass-walled conservatory, which overlooked a terrace leading down to a clipped and manicured lawn. Detective Chief Inspector Anderton stood by a cluster of leather sofas where a woman was sitting, crouching forward, her long blonde hair dipping towards the floor. Kate looked around her surreptitiously. The place stank of money, new money: wealth just about dripped from the ceilings. It must be a kidnapping. Now, Kate, she chided herself. No jumping to conclusions.
She had only met the Chief Inspector once before, at her interview. He was a grey man: steel grey hair, dark grey eyes, grey suit. Easy to dismiss, at first.
“Ah, DS Redman,” he said as they both approached. “Welcome. Hoping to catch up with you later in my office, but we’ll have to see how things go. You can see how things are here.”
He gave her a firm handshake, holding her gaze for a moment. She was surprised at the sudden tug of her lower belly, a pulse that vanished almost as soon as she’d registered it. A little shaken, it took her a moment to collect herself. The other two officers had begun talking to the blonde woman on the sofa. Kate joined them.
Casey Fullman was a tiny woman, very childlike in spite of the bleached hair, the breast implants and the false nails. Kate noted the delicate bones of her wrist and ankles. Casey had bunchy cheeks, smooth and round like the curve of a peach, a tip-tilted nose and large blue eyes. These last were bloodshot, tears glistening along the edge of her reddened eyelids.
“I don’t know,” she was saying as Kate joined them. Her voice was high, and she spoke with a gasp that could have been tears but might be habitual. “I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything and when I woke up, Dita,” she drew in her breath, “Dita wasn’t there. She would normally be there with a bottle and Ch– and Ch–”
She broke down entirely, dropping her head down to her bare knees. There was a moment of silence while Kate watched the ends of Casey’s long hair touch the floor.
Anderton began to utter some soothing words. Kate looked around, her eye attracted by a movement outside on the terrace. A man was walking up and down, talking into a mobile phone, his free hand gesticulating wildly. As Kate watched, he flipped the phone closed and turned towards the house. He was young, good-looking and, somewhat incongruously given the early hour, dressed in a suit.
“Sorry about that, I had to take it,” said Nick Fullman as he entered the room. Kate mentally raised her eyebrows, wondering at a man who prioritised a phone call, presumably a business matter, over comforting his wife after their baby son had been kidnapped. Not necessarily a kidnapping, Kate, stop jumping to conclusions. She thought she saw an answering disapproval in Olbeck’s face.
Anderton introduced his colleagues. Nick Fullman shook hands with them both, rather to Kate’s surprise, and then finally sat down next to his sobbing wife.
“Come on, Case,” he said, pulling her up and encircling her with one arm. “Try and keep it together. The police are here to help.”
Casey put shaking fingers up to her mouth. She appeared to be trying to control her tears, taking in deep, shuddering breaths.
“Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea?” said Olbeck. He caught Kate’s eye, and she immediately looked away. Don’t you bloody dare ask me to make it. He looked around rather helplessly. “Is there anyone who could , er–”
“I’ll make it.”
They all looked around at the sound of the words. A woman had come into the kitchen. Or had she? Kate wondered whether she’d been there all along, unnoticed. There was something unmemorable about her, which was odd because she too was dressed in full business attire, her face heavily made-up, her hair straightened and twisted and pinned in an elaborate style on the top of her head.
“This is my PA, Gemma Phillips,” said Fullman. There was just a shade of relief in his voice. “Gemma, thanks for coming so quickly.”
“It’s fine,” she said with a brilliant smile, a smile that faded a little as she surveyed Casey, huddled and gasping. “It’s terrible. I came as quickly as I could. I can’t believe it.”
“If you could make tea for us all, that would be wonderful, Miss Phillips,” said Anderton.
“It’s Ms Phillips, if you don’t mind,” she said, rather quickly. “Or you can call me Gemma. I don’t mind.”
Anderton inclined his head.
“Of course. We’d like to talk to you as well, once we’ve been able to sit with Mr and Mrs Fullman for a while.”
He turned back to the Fullmans. Gemma shrugged and began to make tea, moving quickly about the room. Kate watched her. Clearly Gemma knew her way around the kitchen very well. What, exactly, was her relationship with her employers like? Had she worked for them long? Presumably she didn’t live on the premises. Kate made mental notes to use in her interview with the girl later.
The tea was made and presented to them all. Casey took one sip of hers and choked.
“Oh, sorry,” said Gemma. “I always forget you don’t take sugar.”
There was something in her voice that made Kate’s internal sensor light up. Not mockery, not exactly. There was something though. Kate scribbled more mental notes.
Nick Fullman had been given coffee, rather than tea, in an elegant white china cup. He’d swallowed it in three gulps. Kate noted the dark shadows under his eyes and the faint jittery shudder of his fingers. A caffeine addict? An insomniac? Or something else?
“I heard nothing,” he was saying in response to Anderton’s question. “I was sleeping. I sleep pretty heavily, and the first I knew about anything was Casey screaming down the hallway. I ran down and saw, well, saw Dita on the floor. “
“Do you have any theories as to who might have taken your son?”
Casey let out a small moan. Nick pulled her closer to him.
“None whatsoever. I can’t believe anyone–” His voice faltered for a second. “I can’t believe anyone would do such a thing.”
“No one has made any threats against you or your family recently?”
“Of course not.”
“Who has access to the house? Do you keep any staff?”
Fullman frowned. “What do you mean by access?”
“Well, keys specifically. But also anyone who is permitted to enter the house, particularly on a regular basis.”
“I’ll have to think.” Fullman was silent for a moment. He looked at his personal assistant. “Gemma, you couldn’t be a star and make another coffee, could you?”
“Of course.” Gemma almost jumped from her chair to fulfil his request.
Fullman turned back to the police officers.
“Casey and I have keys, of course. Gemma has a set to the house, although not to the outbuildings, I don’t think.”
“That’s right,” called Gemma from the kitchen. “Just the house.”
