Secrets Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles by Jane A. Adams from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Epilogue

  Footnote

  Recent Titles by Jane A. Adams from Severn House

  The Naomi Blake Mysteries

  MOURNING THE LITTLE DEAD

  TOUCHING THE DARK

  HEATWAVE

  KILLING A STRANGER

  LEGACY OF LIES

  SECRETS

  The Rina Martin Mysteries

  A REASON TO KILL

  FRAGILE LIVES

  THE POWER OF ONE

  RESOLUTIONS

  THE DEAD OF WINTER

  CAUSE OF DEATH

  SECRETS

  A Naomi Blake Novel

  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 Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 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.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Adams, Jane, 1960-

  Secrets. – (A Naomi Blake mystery ; 8)

  1. Blake, Naomi (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Ex-police officers–Fiction. 3. Blind women–Fiction.

  4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8290-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-439-3 (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.

  PROLOGUE

  September 23rd

  ‘There’s a man with a gun standing in my garden. I want something done about it.’

  A beat of shocked silence met this pronouncement and Molly sighed in exasperation. ‘Did you hear me? I said there’s a man in my garden—’

  ‘Yes, madam, I did hear. Can you give me your address, please and we’ll get someone right there.’

  ‘Beldon Avenue, number twelve. Not that it is an avenue, you understand, it’s a cul-de-sac. I’m right at the end. The big house with the high hedges, right at the end. And my name is Mrs Chambers.’

  Molly could hear the sound of a keyboard rattling and a woman’s voice checking details.

  ‘Madam, are you sure he has a gun?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ Molly exploded. ‘Young woman I have lived long enough and seen enough to know a gun when one is waved in my direction.’

  This was a slight exaggeration. So far the young man in the garden had simply stood uncertainly, with the weapon slightly raised. Molly cursed the dusk and her own failing sight; had either been clearer she could have issued a more exact description.

  ‘At you? He’s pointing the gun at you?’ That last seemed to have got the call handler’s attention, Molly noted with a degree of satisfaction. Sometimes one just had to overstate the case. It was the only way to get attention in these desperately hyperbolic times.

  ‘Madam, do you believe yourself to be in immediate danger?’

  ‘Young woman, I consider that to be a very stupid question. In my experience, and contrary to what so many idiots tend to believe, guns do not equal security.’

  ‘Please madam, if you could just—’

  Molly sighed. ‘My dear young lady, I’ve already made certain I’m not in his sight line. I’m upstairs in the front, that is the master bedroom. I have a clear view of him, but he not of me.’

  ‘And are the doors and windows locked? Madam, there are officers on their way as we speak. They are just minutes away.’

  ‘My dear,’ Molly said with heavy irony. ‘Unless one lives in some kind of bunker, then the act of closing windows or locking doors will do little to stop a bullet.’

  During the conversation she had moved back from the window and no longer had the young man in her view. She returned, now, swearing softly to herself in Swahili, a language she had always considered very suited to such a purpose.

  ‘Madam? Mrs Chambers? Are you all right?’

  ‘He’s gone,’ Molly said sharply. ‘He must have gone round to the back of the house while I was talking to you.’

  ‘Officers will be with you very shortly,’ the call handler said, though Molly could hear the tension in her voice. That and a little bit of doubt.

  She thinks I’m off my rocker, Molly thought. She thinks I imagined the whole thing.

  Had she locked her back door?

  True, as she had told the young woman, if someone with a gun wanted to shoot off the lock, then there was little she could do to stop them, but if she’d been so forgetful as to leave the door undone and thereby made it easy for him, well then she really would feel foolish.

  ‘I can hear the sirens,’ she said.

  ‘Good, that’s good, Mrs Chambers. Just hang in there for a couple of minutes more. Officers will be with you in no time at all.’

  She could hear something else, Molly thought as she turned from the window to face the bedroom door. The sirens were louder now, blanketing that smaller but unmistakable sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  Molly straightened, squared her shoulders and lowered the phone. Dimly, she could hear the young woman on the end of the line calling her name.

  Slowly, the bedroom door opened and Molly gazed upon the apparition that stood there. For a moment she was more puzzled than afraid, her senses tel
ling her something impossible was happening.

  ‘Oh,’ Molly said. ‘It’s you.’

  Sirens so close now as the cars sped into the cul-de-sac. The sound of the young woman calling out her name. Then everything overwhelmed by the blast of the gunshot as the noise echoed and resounded through the house.

  ONE

  Molly Chambers sat on one side of the kitchen table and regarded her honorary nephew with some small disdain.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone fussing over me and I certainly don’t need your advice, Alec.’

  ‘I’m not offering advice. I just came to make sure you were OK. That’s all.’

  ‘Because your mother was making a fuss.’

  ‘Because, odd as it may sound, we actually care about you, Molly. Mum just thought you might want to go and stay for a few days.’

  Molly harrumphed, but she seemed to accept that with reasonable grace. ‘I understand you’ve resigned from your job,’ she said. ‘What do you plan to do now?’

  Alec managed to hide the smile. Molly did so disapprove of people not doing. ‘I’ve resigned, yes. I’ve not decided what is next.’

  ‘You’ll need to earn a living.’

  ‘I’ve money in the bank. I’ve got time to make some decisions. First thing is to get the house sold. We don’t feel we can live there any longer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because finding a dead body in your kitchen sort of ruins the atmosphere,’ Alec told her.

  ‘I had a man shoot himself on my landing,’ Molly pointed out. ‘Brains all over my stair carpet. You don’t find me running away. This is my home and I’m not letting an incident like that drive me out of it. Neither should you.’

  ‘It’s not a competition, Aunt Molly. It isn’t a case of who’s had the worst case of violent death happen in their living room. It’s a matter of, well it’s a matter of it being time to move on.’

  ‘Have you tried to get bloodstains out of an oak floor? I got some specialist in, someone the crime scene person recommended. Even they couldn’t get all the bloodstains out.’

  Alec said nothing. He saw her purse her lips and twitch her shoulders, squaring them ready for battle again. Molly had lived an eventful life, he knew. A girl in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and then the wife of a diplomat who seemed to specialize in setting up shop in whatever happened to be the fashionable theatre of war for that year, Molly had led a nomadic and edgy existence. This house was the first really settled spot. Now death had come calling even here.

  ‘Show me,’ he said. ‘I might be able to suggest something.’

  Molly shrugged. ‘Oh, I’ve got a man coming to fit a new stair carpet,’ she said. ‘I’ve said he can do the landing and the spare bedroom while he’s about it. And I’ve scrubbed the walls. I’ll get the decorators in. I’d do it myself, but I think I’m getting a bit too old to be climbing ladders.

  Alec could feel a hint behind the words, but Molly was far too direct to merely hint.

  ‘Of course, you could always come and do it for me now you’re not at work.’

  ‘I could,’ Alec agreed. ‘If you want a bad job doing and gloss from here to Christmas. You’d be better asking Naomi. She may not be able to see the wall but she’d make a far better job of putting paint on it.’

  Molly harrumphed again. Alec knew she was never quite sure how to deal with what she saw as his wife’s disability. Molly would say things like ‘I think she copes wonderfully’ and ‘She’s quite remarkable, considering’ but she found it very hard to comprehend just how independent Naomi really was. She also found it distasteful for Alec to make what she saw as a joke about another’s misfortune.

  He had expected a rejoinder, but for the moment, it seemed, she would let it pass. Molly led the way up the stairs and Alec followed.

  ‘I’ve had to get rid of the carpet on the top flight,’ she told him, pointing at the bare treads and the naked boards on the landing. ‘I borrowed one of those retractable knives from Mr Johnson, next door, and cut the carpet away. I didn’t make the best job, though. Carpet fibres are tougher than you might think.’

  Alec nodded, looking at the rather uneven edge that Molly’s efforts had left. ‘I think I can at least manage to tidy that up,’ he offered. ‘Do you still have the knife?’

  Molly snorted. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I took it straight back once I’d finished with it. But he’s a decent sort, Mr Johnson. He’ll probably lend it to you if you ask.’ She sighed, then, ‘Just look at the state of these floorboards.’

  Alec looked. Old boards, wide and long as reflected the age of the house. Someone had taken a sander to sections of them in an effort to remove the stains that had been absorbed into the grain of the wood. Frankly, Alec thought, it would have been better with a good scrub and a pot of wood stain. ‘I think covering them over is your only option,’ he agreed. ‘It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it? Who sanded them? Surely not the person the CSI suggested?’

  ‘Oh, that was me,’ Molly admitted. ‘I borrowed a little sander thing from Mr Johnson. He had a bigger one, but didn’t think I’d be able to handle it. Of course, being a gentleman, he offered to come in and give it a go himself, but I wasn’t having any of that. I’ve always shifted for myself and I’m not going to start accepting charity now.’

  Alec was amused. ‘Unless it’s from me and it’s painting your walls?’

  ‘Oh,’ Molly waved a dismissive hand. ‘That’s different. You’re practically family and anyway, Mr Johnson goes to work all week, I’m not going to interrupt his weekends.’

  Alec let that pass. His gaze travelled from floor to walls – she’d had a good go at those too, scrubbing away at the wallpaper until the stripes had all but disappeared. ‘You must have been scared,’ he said thoughtfully, expecting some smart rejoinder. Instead, Molly met his gaze, the blue eyes steely and amused, but the little twitch at the corner of her mouth told him that she had, indeed, been scared and the memory of her own fear disturbed her far more than the strange death on her landing.

  Molly didn’t do scared. Never had. It had come as a shock to her, Alec realized, that she was even capable of such an emotion.

  ‘Let’s go down,’ Alec said.

  They settled once more at the kitchen table and Molly fetched two glasses and a bottle of brandy from the kitchen drawer. Alec smiled. She’d always kept two glasses and a bottle in her kitchen drawer, whatever house she’d lived in. He remembered as a little boy he’d been allowed to keep his own little brandy bottle, filled with pop, beside her alcoholic beverage and the second glass had temporarily become his.

  Molly set the glasses down and splashed rather too generous measures of spirits into them.

  ‘I’m driving,’ Alec reminded her.

  ‘You can at least make a pretence,’ she said. ‘Take a sip or two and make an old woman feel she’s not drinking alone.’

  ‘You aren’t old, Molly.’

  ‘Damned fool. Of course I am. Getting older by the day and resenting it more by the hour.’ She lifted her glass. ‘To the lost ones,’ she said. As she always had, even in the days when Alec toasted in bright red pop. She waited, expectantly.

  ‘May they find their way home,’ Alec completed. He sipped at his drink, letting it evaporate on his tongue, watching as Molly gulped half of hers down. He had asked only once who the lost ones were. Molly had not replied, but there had been something in her eyes, some pain that even a small boy was capable of understanding and which prevented him from asking ever again. He thought about it now; decided against.

  ‘You’re right,’ Molly said. ‘I was scared. When we moved here I thought we’d left those days behind us. I’d seen a lifetime’s worth of killing even before I was twenty-five and married Edward. I saw several lifetimes more in the years we had together. I never thought it would come to find me here.’

  ‘What would come to find you, Molly?’

  She shook her head, took another swig of her brandy and laughed. �
��I’d thought the next time the reaper showed up it would be a personal call to collect yours truly,’ she said. ‘I never expected him to send an emissary with a gun.’

  ‘Did he threaten you directly?’ Alec asked cautiously, surprised at the sudden frankness and knowing that Molly could clam up without warning.

  She swirled the remains of the brandy in the glass. ‘A man with a gun is always a threat to those close to him,’ she said obliquely. ‘If you mean, did he point it at me, then yes, but only briefly. I think he wanted me to share the moment with him, to feel what he felt before he blew out his own brains and spared mine.’

  Alec frowned. It was an odd thing to say even for Molly. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, knowing even as the words fell out of his mouth that they were the wrong ones.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, man, I’m not speaking in Swahili. Or do you not comprehend plain English now?’

  She got up and stuffed the brandy bottle back into the kitchen drawer. ‘You ought to go,’ she said. ‘That wife of yours will be wondering where you’ve got to.’

  ‘Naomi will be fine,’ Alec said, but he knew he’d been dismissed and that he should obey. He’d overstepped some invisible line and Molly would say no more.

  ‘Molly,’ he asked as they reached the front door. ‘Who’s the officer in charge of the investigation?’

  ‘Oh, someone called Barnes,’ she said. ‘Looked far too young to be an inspector. There was an even younger sergeant too, wanted me to call her Delia and kept asking me if I felt all right.’ She inclined her cheek towards Alec and received his kiss.

  ‘You’ve got my mobile number if you need me,’ Alec confirmed.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘And I’ll call back and see you later in the week.’

  ‘If you feel the need,’ Molly said, but Alec knew she’d be glad to see him if he did. He also knew she’d be back in the kitchen and finishing his brandy before he’d left her drive.

  Alec left, his head filled with misgivings. Something wasn’t right here, something apart from the fact that a young man, as yet unidentified, had blown out his brains in such spectacular fashion. For the moment, Alec couldn’t place what it was, but the sense of unease was stronger than that merely prompted by obvious circumstance.