The Shrine: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 16)

by LJ Ross

  He stayed seated like that, hands outstretched, for a long time. Then he leaned over to bestow the gentlest of kisses.

  “I’ll be waiting for you, whenever you’re ready,” he murmured. “Take as long as you need. I love you, Anna.”

  Phillips watched for a moment or two from the doorway, before retreating into the waiting room. Some things weren’t meant to be shared, and it was enough for Ryan to know that he wasn’t far away.

  He’d never be far away, when help was needed.

  * * *

  Samantha had learned much from the first part of her childhood, spent with a travelling circus community. The first was seldom to place your trust in another person but, if you did, always, always to trust the language of their body and not the words that came out of their mouth.

  Words were cheap, and easy to say.

  Actions were harder to fake.

  “How was your day at school, sweetheart?” MacKenzie asked, as they sat down to dinner.

  There it was again, Samantha thought. The words were the same ones she used every night after school, and the tone was similar, but something was different. Denise, the woman she’d come to call Mum seemed distracted, her mind elsewhere.

  It was different to the kind of distracted she and Frank sometimes got, when they had a big case at work. Then, they were, sort of, energetic…as if they couldn’t wait to try and solve it. But this time was different.

  Something was different, and she didn’t know what.

  “Fine,” Samantha mumbled, pushing fishfingers and chips around her plate. “Where’s Frank?”

  MacKenzie looked at her, checked her watch, then got up to put the kettle on.

  “He’s working late,” she lied.

  Samantha frowned.

  “I thought he was going to do some training with me this evening,” she said, stubbornly. Lately, she and her adoptive father had been sparring together in their garage gym, and they both looked forward to it—she, to learn new boxing skills and he, to be reminded of his younger days.

  “Well, I’m sure you can pick things up again tomorrow—or soon,” MacKenzie amended quickly, thinking that none of them knew how long Anna would be in hospital nor what arrangements would need to be made.

  Her shoulders slumped as she worried for her friends.

  “How soon?” Samantha prodded.

  MacKenzie sighed, and turned back to the girl, wondering what the books had said about hormone bursts happening around her age.

  “Sam, I don’t know how soon. We’ll just have to see. You know our jobs can be a bit unpredictable, but one of us will always be here for you.”

  “Why don’t you come and do it, instead?” Sam insisted. “You know all about kickboxing—Frank told me. Why don’t you show me some moves?”

  MacKenzie managed a smile.

  “I would love to, but I’m not feeling up to it, today.”

  Her bad leg was hurting again, as it often did these days. The scar tissue—where a madman’s knife had once pierced muscle and skin—was tight and hard, causing severe cramp throughout the day. It was a source of personal sadness that, as a very active woman, she wasn’t able to do half the things she’d once enjoyed.

  But she didn’t mention that—it would only worry Samantha.

  “Fine,” the girl said, huffily, letting her knife and fork clatter onto her plate. “I’ll just do it, myself.”

  “No, you won’t,” MacKenzie said, and there was a warning tone in her voice, now. “The gym is out of bounds unless you’re supervised, as we’ve told you, before. There are lots of other things you can do before bedtime. Why not read a book?”

  Samantha loved to read—usually.

  “I don’t want to read,” she muttered.

  “I don’t know why you’re in this mood, but you need to snap out of it,” MacKenzie said, annoyed to hear the emotion in her own voice. “We could watch some television, for a while?”

  But the girl pushed back her chair and stalked out, and a moment later Denise heard angry footsteps stomping upstairs.

  On any other day, she’d have followed and given their new charge a few home truths about good manners and appropriate behaviour. But today…

  Today, she couldn’t seem to find the strength.

  Tantrums and tears paled into insignificance beside the anguish Ryan must be feeling, and the worry that he might have lost Anna and the baby.

  She sank down onto a chair and placed her mobile phone on the kitchen table in front of her, willing it to ring with good news.

  When it did, she wept softly in profound relief.

  She didn’t hear the soft footsteps of the little girl, once unwanted and unloved, padding back to her room.

  CHAPTER 8

  Tuesday, 17th March

  Anna awakened to a world of pain, and a view of the damp-stained ceiling tiles above her head.

  Everything seemed to hurt, from her legs all the way to the torn pads of her fingertips—but especially her head, which felt heavy and sore, as though a vice were compressing it from either side. She blinked a few times, trying to clear the cloudy film across her eyes, and tried to swallow, finding the action difficult.

  She closed her eyes again to rest them for a moment, the dim lighting on the ward proving too much, and listened to the humming sound of machines, and the beeping of a heart monitor.

  Hospital? she thought. Why?

  She tried to turn her head to look around, but the action brought a sharp, piercing pain to the right side of her neck and she let out a soft cry. The noise was enough to alert Ryan, who had drifted off in the stiff-backed chair beside her bed sometime after four. He was instantly awake and on his feet beside her.

  “Anna? Anna, I’m here…it’s Ryan, I’m here. Nurse!” he called over his shoulder. “Nurse!”

  His face blotted out everything else, even the pain, and Anna gave a lopsided smile.

  “Can you speak?” he asked, and then it occurred to him that her throat might be dry. “I’ll get you some water—”

  She let out a rasping sound, unwilling to let him go far.

  “Wa—”

  He turned back. “What did you say, my love?”

  She looked up into his beloved face and wondered why he looked so scared, then remembered she was in hospital.

  “Wh—wh’m here?”

  She gave a slight shake of her head, moaning at the dart of pain, and wondered why she couldn’t form the words.

  The nurse rushed in, and Ryan moved back to allow her to step forward. Though the woman had a kind face, Anna’s eyes grew wide and frightened.

  Why wouldn’t anybody tell her what was happening?

  Was it the baby?

  She tried to raise her hand to touch her stomach, but it seemed that her arm was made of lead.

  “All her vitals look good,” the nurse said. “I’ll go and get Mr Barker.”

  At the sound of retreating footsteps, Ryan’s face reappeared, and Anna felt his warm hand cover hers. His eyes shone like silver beacons in his tired face, and she wondered what could have been so bad to cause him to look so grave.

  “Wh—apn’d?” she asked.

  Ryan heard her slur, but he forced a smile onto his face. The most important thing was that she was alive and lucid.

  She’d come back to him.

  “You were hurt,” he reminded her. “At the cathedral.”

  It took a couple of seconds, and then snatched images began to rain down as the door to her memory was thrown wide open.

  Smoke…screams of terror…the explosions…

  The cathedral…

  “Cath’rl,” she said, brokenly, and couldn’t understand why Ryan looked shocked, before his face crumpled into laughter.

  “You nearly died,” he said. “I nearly lost all that’s precious to me in the world, and you’re worried about a few old stones and some mortar?”

  He shook his head.

  “Once a historian, always a historian.”

  The
look she gave him told him clearly that she thought he was a heathen, then the worry crept back.

  “Baby,” she said clearly.

  “Alive—and kicking,” he added, with a smile.

  She closed her eyes again, this time to rest.

  * * *

  “By God, lass, you gave us a hairy moment, back there!”

  Phillips’ booming voice could be heard down the corridors of the ICU and far beyond, but nobody seemed to mind.

  “Sorry,” Anna managed.

  “Don’t be daft,” Phillips said, more softly this time. “D’you know how glad we are, to have you safe and sound? Just don’t go giving me another fright like that, anytime soon. My old ticker can’t take it.”

  She gave a weak smile, and noticed that he bore the look of a man who hadn’t slept in his own bed, which he hadn’t. Thanks to a liberal application of his legendary charm, Frank had been given special dispensation to spend the night draped over three of the chairs in the waiting room, so that he could be on hand, should his friends need him.

  Ryan watched their byplay and felt warmth seep back into his veins.

  Anger followed on swift wings, coursing through his body like white lightning.

  Somebody might have taken this from him, robbing a woman of her life—and, not just any woman.

  His woman. His wife. His love.

  “—Ryan?”

  He glanced up to find Phillips had asked him a question.

  “What’s that?”

  “I was just saying, as soon as Anna’s well enough, how about we all take a nice trip to Bamburgh?”

  “Mm, lovely,” Ryan said.

  Phillips heard the note in his voice again, and judged it time for a man-to-man chat.

  “Mind if we go and get a coffee, love? Can we get you anything?”

  Anna shook her head, very carefully. She might have suffered a blow to the head, but she wasn’t blind. She could see that Ryan had suffered a different kind of torment and needed to walk it off.

  “Choc’l’t,” she said, as an afterthought.

  “There’s a girl after my own heart,” Phillips winked. “Let me see what I can rustle up. C’mon Ryan.”

  “I’d rather stay here,” he said.

  “The nurse might want to give Anna a bath, lad,” he murmured, leaning down to speak quietly in his ear. “Give the lass some privacy, eh?”

  Ryan hadn’t thought of that.

  “I’ll only be down the hall,” he told her.

  She gave him a reassuring smile, and a knowing glance for Phillips which told him clearly that she knew very well that he was a wily old fox.

  * * *

  Phillips managed to persuade Ryan to venture as far as the hospital canteen, whereupon he went about the urgent business of locating bacon sandwiches and chocolate mousse, for Anna.

  “She probably can’t swallow very well, so we need to be careful,” he said to Ryan, who trailed behind him with a tray.

  Phillips looked him over with a critical eye.

  “Better make that extra bacon,” he told the waitress, who nodded sagely.

  Once seated, he thrust a plate in Ryan’s direction.

  “Eat,” he said sternly.

  Ryan lifted the sandwich in his hands and looked at it with a murderous expression, before lowering it again.

  “Frank, they say there’s still a possibility she could lose the baby. They’re keeping her in for observation so she can rest, but I’m staying with her. I don’t want her to be alone.”

  Phillips cleared his throat.

  “And what does Anna want?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Phillips said, taking a healthy bite of his own sandwich. “Seems to me, she’s out of the woods and needing to rest up. She’ll be doing a lot of sleeping in that time, so what are you planning to do? Watch her while she dreams?”

  He had, as a matter of fact, but when Phillips put it like that…

  “What if she wakes up, needing something?”

  “That’s what the nurses are for and, besides, they’re talking about moving her from the ICU to a general ward. That’s an excellent sign.”

  “She might be lonely.”

  Phillips took another thoughtful bite, and realised that his friend was speaking of his own loneliness.

  “Anna’s on the mend now, son—you can see that, just by looking at her. There’s a way to go yet, but she’s got a bit of bloom back in her cheeks.”

  That was true, Ryan thought, and yet…

  “When I think of whoever did this, I want to tear them, limb from limb.”

  He clasped his hands together and forced back the rage bubbling so close to the surface.

  “Aye, I know,” Phillips said quietly, wiping his hands on a napkin.

  “Have you heard anything—from Morrison, I mean?”

  Phillips shook his head.

  “She knows not to disturb,” he said.

  Ryan said nothing, his eyes boring into the wall behind Phillips’ head, where a television bleated the morning news.

  “Around lunchtime yesterday afternoon, explosions shook the ancient cathedral, here in Durham. A cordon remains in place, and access has been denied to all members of the public whilst enquiries are very much ongoing. Specialist engineers have been drafted in to secure the central structure of the building, which is over a thousand years old, but authorities have yet to comment on the fact that priceless artefacts have not yet been removed for safekeeping. It is understood that there was one serious casualty and a number of people who suffered smoke inhalation, but no fatalities…”

  Ryan flicked his eyes back to Phillips.

  “Did you hear that? They reported on the cordon, the architectural stability of the bloody cathedral and its artefacts,” he sneered. “My wife and our baby get third billing.”

  He shoved back from the table.

  “Morrison told me they’re up against it in Durham Major Crimes—that’s why she wanted to draft us in. There won’t be anybody with the experience needed to handle an incident of this scale, and time’s ticking away. If the cathedral is still standing, there had to be another reason for the explosions.”

  “Could be a botched job,” Phillips put in, and reached a surreptitious hand across the table for the uneaten sandwich.

  Waste not, want not.

  “There’s a security team at the cathedral, and eyes everywhere. Whoever did this was professional enough to plan ahead and detonate without discovery. It seems unlikely they’d miscalculate and fail to damage the structure, if that was the intention.”

  “So, what do you want to do about it?” Phillips asked.

  Ryan narrowed his eyes.

  “You planned this all along, didn’t you? You wanted to take my mind off Anna, so I would be focused on the case, rather than worrying about her and all that could still go wrong.”

  Phillips lifted his chin.

  “Would I be so conniving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let that be a lesson to you.”

  * * *

  Much to Ryan’s annoyance, when they returned to his wife’s bedside it became clear that Phillips was right—once again.

  “You sh’d head home for a show’r,” Anna said, enunciating each word carefully.

  The surgeon had told them her speech might be affected following her operation, but she was determined not to be downcast.

  “I don’t want to leave you here alone,” Ryan said.

  “Won’t be,” she replied and, with impeccable timing, one of the nurses popped her head around the door to check if she needed anything.

  Anna tapped the small pot of chocolate mousse and shook her head.

  “It’s f’r the baby,” she said, with a smile that made Ryan’s heart contract.

  She looked across and caught the raw emotion on his face, which was almost as painful as the wound on her head.

  “I only w’nt inside to use the loo,” she said, and grew tearful. “I’m s�
�rry.”

  Ryan took his wife’s hand between two of his own.

  “It’s not your fault. Try to rest—”

  “W’sh I could r’mem’b’r everyth’ng,” she said, unhappily.

  “Was it busy?” Phillips asked, matter-of-factly, and drew a frown from Ryan which he studiously ignored. Anna was a capable, intelligent woman, who would soon start to feel helpless and impotent stuck in a hospital bed. There were many things outside of her control but, at least this way, she could feel that she was helping the police effort.

  She screwed up her face.

  “Yesh,” she replied. “Big gr’p waiting t’ go in, too.”

  Ryan saw the tears evaporate while she focused her mind and understood what Phillips was doing.

  “Do you feel up to giving a statement?” he asked.

  She gave a watery smile.

  “I want to,” she said. “But I might fall a’leep.”

  “That’s enough for today,” Ryan said.

  But she shook her head.

  “I was looking at Cuthb’t’s cross, when the s’plosions came. They w’re so loud…” She gave a small shiver, and her hands crept up to cradle her belly protectively.

  Ryan caught the action and felt a fresh wave of anger.

  “Smoke was ever’where,” she whispered. “I—I jus’ couldn’t see—I tri’d to get out—”

  Tears leaked from her eyes, and Phillips reached for a box of tissues, which Ryan used to dab her skin, very gently.

  “No more,” he urged her. “That’s enough, Anna.”

  This time, she agreed.

  “Fin’ them,” she said softly. “Fin’ them, b’fore they hurt anybody else.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Ryan needed no second bidding.

  He and Phillips left Anna in the capable hands of the ward staff for a short while and made their way out of Newcastle towards Durham. It was a city they both knew well, particularly as Ryan had lived with Anna in the cottage she used to own there, down on the scenic banks of the River Wear. It had been a privilege to awaken each morning to what must surely be one of the finest views in the world and, at times, he missed it. It was a fairytale skyline, bringing to mind images of elven cities in fantasy novels, too beautiful to be real. Each morning, he’d watch the dawn rising up over the towers of the cathedral and marvel at the perfect pairing of Man and Nature. He remembered the sweet, dewy scent of the greenery on the riverbank, and could still hear the buzzing of insects in the marshes as he’d taken his daily jogs along the pathway that ran parallel to the water, which shimmered molten silver as it rippled towards the sea.