Killing a Stranger

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Jane A. Adams from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Epilogue

  Recent Titles by Jane A. Adams from Severn House

  The Naomi Blake Mysteries

  KILLING A STRANGER

  LEGACY OF LIES

  BLOOD TIES

  NIGHT VISION

  SECRETS

  GREGORY’S GAME

  PAYING THE FERRYMAN

  The Rina Martin Mysteries

  A REASON TO KILL

  FRAGILE LIVES

  THE POWER OF ONE

  RESOLUTIONS

  THE DEAD OF WINTER

  CAUSE OF DEATH

  KILLING A STRANGER

  Jane A. Adams

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in 2006 in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2006 by Jane A. Adams.

  The right of Jane A. Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Adams, Jane, 1950–

  Killing a stranger. – (A Naomi Blake mystery)

  1. Ex-police officers – Fiction

  2. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9’14 [F]

  ISBN-13: 978-0-72786-357-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-681-6 (ePUB)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Many thanks to Catherine and Rob Davies

  (www.echurch-uk.org) for their information

  and support. Bless you both.

  Prologue

  Friday. December 6th

  He was covered in blood, his hands, his face, the open jacket and white T-shirt beneath.

  ‘Mum!’

  He staggered in through the open door and fell in a heap on the hall floor.

  ‘Mum, he’s dead. I killed him.’

  Clara couldn’t absorb the words; they were too alien, too meaningless. ‘You’re hurt,’ she said. ‘Oh, Rob, Oh God, what have you done?’

  She knelt beside him, pulling him into her arms, her hands moving over his body as she sought the wound that was producing so much blood.

  ‘It isn’t me,’ he whispered. ‘Mum, I killed him. He’s lying there, dead, and I did it.’ He turned to look at her, his face grey with shock, eyes stricken, filled with such horror that Clara could hardly bear to look into them.

  ‘Rob? Rob, darling, what are you talking about? You’re hurt, Rob, let me help you.’

  Even as she spoke the words, Clara was aware of how inadequate they sounded. She still couldn’t comprehend what was happening, but her brain was telling her that this was bigger, more terrible than anything she had ever imagined could happen to her son, and her stomach tightened, gut writhing in fear.

  Somehow, she helped him to his feet and they staggered together into the kitchen. Clara pulled a chair out from the table and sat him down. Again, she moved her hands across his body, searching for the wound. Rob being hurt, even badly hurt, was easier to think about than that other thing. That thing he kept telling her.

  ‘Mum …’ More of a wail now, despairing, horrified. ‘I’m scared, Mum.’ A child’s cry, a child waking from a nightmare and finding that it hadn’t gone away.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she told him. ‘It’s all right, whatever it is, we can work it out.’

  What should she do? She pulled him close to her and stroked his hair. Her hands came away red and sticky and she couldn’t hold back the little whimper of horror.

  He jerked his head back and looked up at her. She could see the hurt in his eyes, that little cry of disgust and horror, he interpreted as disgust with him. Horror at what he had done.

  ‘Rob, no, no, it will be all right.’ She reached for him again, thinking, once more how inadequate the words were in the face of such anguish, such pain. But words were all she had and she knew that something had to be done. ‘Rob, we’ve got to …’

  Got to what? Making tea, finding biscuits, the usual recourse in times of upset didn’t quite cut it this time. Stiff drink? She had some whisky in the cupboard, stored, ready for Christmas. Should she get it?

  ‘You’ve got to phone the police,’ Rob whispered. ‘Mum, I killed a man.’

  Gently, almost as though he were now that adult, he pushed her away from him and pointed towards the hall. ‘Phone them, Mum, please. I can’t. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Rob?’ Clara could feel the tears pricking her eyes, then, next moment, trickling uncontrolled down her cheeks. She brushed them aside, then nodded mutely and backed away from him through the kitchen door and out into the hall.

  She wasn’t sure how she kept her hand steady enough to dial or her voice even enough to reply to the operator. ‘Police,’ she asked. Police and ambulance, still clinging to the faint hope that it was Rob’s blood.

  ‘He says he’s killed someone,’ she whispered. ‘He says … and oh, God, there’s so much blood.’

  She caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. Tears still flooded her eyes and poured
down her cheeks, tears running rivulets through smears of red. She dropped the phone, raised her hands again to brush the tears away, to wipe the stains from her face, but the blood was on her hands and she only spread it further, smeared it across her cheeks and temples. Her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Rob!’

  The operators voice, dim, but insistent sounded from the phone but Clara didn’t hear. She swung from the mirror as she heard the back door slam. Running through to the kitchen, she was in time to see him stumbling through the garden gate.

  ‘Rob!’

  But he was gone. She stood at the gate peering through the gloom, listening to the sound of his footsteps as he ran away from her and knew she’d never catch him now.

  The police found her crouching by the garden gate, shaking and weeping and calling her son’s name, her face and hands still smeared with blood.

  One

  Saturday

  ‘I saw the police car and the ambulance and they took Rob’s mum away and then I left. I didn’t know what to do.’

  Becky’s face crumpled with distress. Charlie was scuffing his feet against the mud and gravel of the towpath, his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his back half turned to them. Patrick recognised the body language of extreme discomfort and knew he’d get no help from that direction.

  He managed to ask, ‘You said you went back this morning?’

  Becky, who had already reprised her story several times, nodded emphatically. ‘I knocked at the door and then went round the back. The gate was open; Clara never leaves the gate open. I went and looked through the window and, like I told you, there was this policeman in the kitchen and this guy in a white overall, like you see them on the telly.’

  Patrick nodded. ‘SOCO,’ he said. ‘Scenes of Crime Officer.’

  ‘I know who it was. I watch CSI, don’t I?’

  Charlie laughed. ‘They don’t wear white overalls on CSI, they go around in their posh clothes contaminating the crime scene. Isn’t that right, Patrick?’

  Charlie was hiding behind the incidental again, just like he had all morning. Patrick just nodded. ‘Where the hell did Rob get to?’ he fumed. ‘I mean …’

  Becky hunched her shoulders deeper into her coat and shivered. ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘They didn’t take Rob away, just Clara.’

  She got up, angry with herself. ‘I should have asked them, should have gone up and told them I was looking for my boyfriend and that they were taking his mam away. I should have gone up to Clara and talked to her.’ She bit her lip hard enough to blanch it where her teeth pressed down. Patrick could see the tears about to start again.

  ‘Mum and … Him …’ Him Patrick knew, was her step-father.

  ‘Mum and Him, they said I should keep out of it and if the police came round I was to say nothing. Just to tell them Rob was at the party and then he left and I don’t know where he went.’

  Charlie’s laugh was harsher this time. ‘Well, you don’t bloody know, do you? I mean, none of us bloody do.’

  Patrick sighed and got up from his cold seat on the iron bench. He slid an arm round Becky’s shoulder. They’d been good friends now for almost a year and he felt that a brotherly arm was ok. She seemed to think so too because she laid her head against his shoulder and swore softly at the unfathomable pain of it all.

  Patrick towered over her now, while only six months or so ago he had been eye level. He was still skinny as a lath though, attempting to disguise the fact with baggy shirts and skater jeans and, lately, a long leather coat that had been an early Christmas present from his mother and step-father in America.

  Patrick liked his step-father and his stepbrothers. It would never have occurred to him to think of Ray as Him. He spoke to his mother once a week and the new husband and surrogate brothers always joined the conversation on the speakerphone they had set up in the living room of the large bungalow they owned a few hundred yards from the beach.

  It was a striking contrast to the tiny little house – two up, two down, kitchen and bathroom tagged on the back – which he shared with his dad. His dad, Harry, had been a bit put out with the gift of the coat, but, as Patrick said to him, ‘Mum and Ray can only buy me things. I’m not there, am I?’ He thought his dad had understood. The coat was too cool to send back anyway.

  ‘Will the police still be there?’ Charlie asked.

  Patrick glanced at Charlie and shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You must have some idea. I mean …’

  Patrick knew what he meant. His friend, Naomi was an ex-policewoman and her boyfriend was a Detective Inspector. ‘It would depend what went on,’ he said. ‘If they’ve got SOCO in …’

  If SOCO were there, then something bad had happened. Something that needed a fingerprint officer, forensics, samples taken … samples of what?

  ‘Not good, then,’ Charlie was just confirming what they had all been thinking. ‘Fuck, Rob, what the hell have you done?’

  ‘Rob wouldn’t do nothing,’ Becky defended. She pulled away from Patrick and flopped back down on the bench, head bent, shoulders shaking.

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ Charlie threw his hands in the air and turned his back once again. Patrick could see him clenching and unclenching his jaw. You couldn’t cry when you were male and just turned eighteen, but Patrick could see it was costing him to keep up that pretence. Charlie and Rob had been friends for years, for long before Patrick had come on the scene; Charlie was thinking the worst.

  Patrick glanced along the towpath. Rain clouds gathered down by the marina, behind the burnt out factory building scheduled for demolition, cranes already in place. Patrick had been trapped in that building the day it caught fire. Hard to believe it was more than two years before. It had taken them a long time, he thought, to figure they should pull the rest down.

  The day was bleak and grey and moisture chilled the air even before the threatened rain began. His feet were frozen in his boots and his hands, never good with the cold, were numb at the fingertips and turning blue.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, gesturing to the other two and striding off towards the steps that led back on to the road.

  ‘Come on where?’

  ‘Naomi. We’re going to see Naomi. She might be able to find something out. Ask Alec.’

  ‘You think she can?’ Becky’s voice was thick with tears.

  Patrick shrugged. He didn’t know. If she could, she probably would, but he’d been round Naomi and Alec for long enough to be familiar with the idea of operational integrity; they might well not be able to tell him anything that wasn’t already in the public domain. ‘Don’t know,’ he admitted, ‘but you got any better ideas? It’s too cold to hang about here anyway. It’s either that or back to Rob’s place.’

  He halted, waiting for a decision. Rob’s house was in the other direction.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘if Clara wasn’t there an hour ago and the police were …’ It was unlikely she’d be back there now.

  ‘Ok, Naomi’s it is then.’ Decision made, Patrick walked fast, the others scurrying to catch him and then keeping pace with the same sense of urgency. He could hear Becky sobbing still, trying not to, but the odd sniff and gulp giving her away. He reached out a hand and took hers, conscious of how warm her hand was in his cold one. She squeezed his fingers gratefully and then let go. Patrick angrily pushed the thought away that, in any case, Rob wasn’t good enough for her.

  Where the hell was Rob? And wherever he was, was he all right?

  Naomi opened the door and stood aside. ‘How many of you are there?’ she asked. ‘Oh, and Patrick, your dad phoned, thought you might turn up here. He said to tell you he’ll be home about two.’

  ‘OK, thanks,’ Patrick mumbled. ‘There’s me and Charlie, you’ve met Charlie?’

  ‘Um, yes. Hi Charlie.’

  ‘And this is Becky.’

  ‘Hi, Becky, come along in. You want some coffee?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Patrick said.

  Naom
i heard him go past her and slide the heavy coat from his shoulders before dropping on to the blue sofa beneath the window; his favourite spot in her flat. The others moved more uncertainly, hovering a bit before Naomi told them to make themselves at home. ‘You take sugar?’

  ‘Um, one please,’ the girl called Becky told her.

  She’s been crying, Naomi thought. Either that, or she had the mother of all colds. ‘Should I come and help you …?’ Becky offered.

  Naomi smiled in her direction. She was used to people being disconcerted by her blindness and assuming she might not be able to manage on her own and she had long ago given up taking offence. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘But thanks anyway. Say hi to Napoleon.’ She added. ‘Don’t let Patrick get all the fuss.’

  Becky laughed uncertainly but Naomi heard her go over to where Patrick was sitting and the steady thump thump of the dog’s heavy tail against the wooden floor as he realized he was about to get twice the attention.

  What was going on, Naomi wondered as she went through to her little kitchen and started to make the coffee. It was always a pleasure to have Patrick visit and he was a frequent occupant of the blue sofa, but, she sensed, this was different. She could tell, without needing to see their faces, that this trio felt the weight of the world on their shoulders.

  The story had taken a while to tell, Naomi coaxing it out of them at first, then, as they became more confident of her willingness to listen without judgement, they talked over one another in their hurry to get the story out and Naomi had to slow them down, go back over some details to make sure she had it right.

  ‘So,’ she said slowly. ‘Charlie’s eighteenth birthday party and everything seems fine, except Rob had something on his mind for days that he wouldn’t talk about.’

  ‘Weeks, more like,’ Charlie interrupted.

  Naomi held up a hand to pause before he went off on that tangent again. ‘OK, we’ll get back to that. Let’s get the time-line sorted first. You all agree it was just after ten when Rob left the party?’

  She felt the pause as they all looked at one another.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlie said. ‘It was only just after ten. My dad and my uncle decided it was time for speeches.’ Naomi could hear the embarrassment in his voice as he remembered. ‘They were pissed.’