It had been a strange funeral though, because Dan felt the gut-wrenching loss he expected, but there were other emotions that he hadn’t expected, and made him feel guilty.
It was a sense of freedom he felt most, as much as he tried to shut it out. The past month had been a series of jolts whenever he thought of wanting to see his father, of turning up with his usual bag of cider bottles to endure his gruffness for an hour or so, brought to an end by the reminder that he’d never do it again. But there was also the realisation that he was no longer tied to Highford. No family. No business. All he had left were memories. He could go where he wanted, Jayne the same.
Barbara’s trial was still a couple of months away, but Dan didn’t think about that. She’d receive her own justice, although Dan wished he’d spotted her ploy before the trial. Nick would still be in prison and Barbara might have had a chance of dealing with her grief. More than that, his father would still be alive.
Jayne being with him had helped him. The move from former client to lover had felt natural, and when he thought of her now the memories of her bloodied and sobbing in a police station were a distant memory. Instead, it was how she looked in the morning, her hair across her pillow, contentment on her face as she slept. Or her laugh, bright and happy. When they were together, it felt like it was meant to be. He wondered now why he’d fought it for so long, but perhaps the time was just right.
Jayne gestured towards the beach. ‘I’m glad it’s worked out okay for him, too.’
Porter was walking Freddie, throwing pebbles towards the sea and watching as he raced into the waves, barking and running around. Porter slapped his leg to bring Freddie to heel before heading towards the seafront and Dan and Jayne.
They’d met earlier and walked to the beach together, awkward at first, Porter wondering what lay ahead. Rodney Walker had saved him, which was a strange fact to acknowledge. Dan had done nothing with the recording, too overwhelmed by his father’s death at first, and then Rodney had asked him to destroy it. Too many lives had been ruined. He didn’t want anyone else to suffer.
As Porter stamped his feet to get rid of the sand, Jayne said to Dan, ‘Do you think Rodney will appeal?’
‘He said not,’ Dan said. ‘And I don’t think so. The decisions he made all those years ago have caused too much havoc. He’s scared of how the world will view him if he’s released. He didn’t kill anyone, but he knows he isn’t guilt-free. Prison keeps him safe, lets him feel he’s where he deserves to be.’
As Porter reached them, bending down to clip on Freddie’s lead, he said, ‘How long are you two staying?’
‘Just a night,’ Dan said. ‘I wanted to see the town, but we’re heading north next. We’re taking a few months off, doing a bit of travelling.’
‘Where to?’
‘Whitby, and then all the way up to Scotland. I want to be where people aren’t.’
‘That’s a good place to be,’ Porter said, and held out his hand. ‘Thank you for everything.’
Dan stood to shake, Jayne too.
‘I don’t blame you,’ Dan said. ‘You were protecting your home town. I might have done the same.’
‘That doesn’t make it right, but how it is now is as good as we are ever going to get.’
There were no long farewells. Dan watched him head towards home, his head down. Dan knew that Porter was feeling guilty for not speaking up. He was a police officer. He was supposed to protect people.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Jayne said.
‘Where to first?’
‘The rest of our lives?’
Dan smiled. ‘That sounds like a great idea.’
A Letter from Neil
Thank you for reading The Innocent Ones. It is always a great pleasure to finally send a book out into the world after so many months of work and revisions.
The Innocent Ones is the final book in the Dan Grant and Jayne Brett trilogy, the first two being From The Shadows and The Darkness Around Her, both also available from Hera.
When I first started writing the trilogy, my intention was to write a legal drama that was different in setting to most legal thrillers, which tend to go for the glamour and the glitz of the big city. I have been a solicitor specialising in criminal law for over twenty years, first as a defence lawyer and then as a prosecutor, and I wanted the books to represent the legal world I moved in: small northern towns.
Although my legal work does take me to the grit and noise of Manchester, most often it is spent in the small northern towns along the Leeds–Liverpool canal, where cotton was king and the towns hung heavy with the clatter of looms and the valleys filled with smoke. That is my legal world in the main, and I wanted to reflect that in the books, the life as a small-town lawyer. Highford is the setting, a fictional town that draws on many of the towns I work in.
My main inspiration for the series was in fact a television series from the seventies, Petrocelli. I used to love them, and what I remembered was the old grizzled investigator used by the defence firm. I wanted someone to have that role, but I wanted it to be a young woman, someone who would spark off Dan.
For those who don’t know the first two books, Jayne is a former client of Dan’s who was accused of murdering her boyfriend, when he was stabbed to death with a large knife that she was holding. Dan secured her acquittal but suggested that she moved to Highford, Dan’s town, to work, to avoid the threats being made by her boyfriend’s family. She changed her name to Jayne Brett and set herself up as a private investigator.
This final book in the trilogy sees Dan and Jayne reunite, after having left Highford to begin again in Manchester, but things hadn’t quite worked as planned. Dan needs her help when a murder case he is working on takes an unexpected turn.
The story involves a little journey into my own past. The story is set partly in a Yorkshire seaside town called Brampton, based on Bridlington, a town I lived in for ten years, during my teens and beyond, and where I still have family. Wakefield makes an appearance too, which I regard as my home town. I can share a secret: the address that appears, 19 Rockley Drive, is the house I grew up in before we moved to Bridlington.
Throughout my writing career, I have always been immensely grateful to the blogging community. They have always been supportive of me, and for a community to exist just so that it can spread the word about books is a good measure of how special the crime fiction world is. I might be a writer, but that’s because I’m a reader most of all, a lover of books, and in the blogging community are the people who share my love.
I hope you enjoy The Innocent Ones. Reviews are great to read and I am grateful for the time you spend writing them. If you want to know more about me, my website is www.neilwhite.net
I am active on social media and I can be found at the following places:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilwhite1965
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neilwhitefanpage
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/author_neil_white/
Neil White
Acknowledgments
I have been a published writer for twelve years now, and this is my thirteenth book. I would like to reassure any new or budding novelists out there that it gets easier, but that would be a lie. Every book starts with an empty page, and what follows is a journey of late nights, revisions, self-doubt, confusion, and eventually the final words are typed. For their tolerance, I am grateful to my family, for living with the absences, the distractions, the frustrations.
Writing ‘The End’ isn’t the end though, because then the guidance of others helps to bring some light into the shadows. Keshini Naidoo and Lindsey Mooney from Hera have both been wonderful in their support for my work, along with my amazing agent, Sonia Land at Sheil Land Associates. Sonia has been there throughout my writing career, and I couldn’t have done it without her.
As for the editing work, Keshini Naidoo has been her usual wonderful self, someone I worked with in the very beginning and I am very happy that we have somehow looped ba
ck to each other.
The main thank you is to anyone who has read any of my books. Before I was published, I just wanted the dream of someone, somewhere reading a book that I had written. If you’re reading this, you are one of those people. Without you, none of this would have had any point.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Hera
Hera Books
28b Cricketfield Road
London, E5 8NS
United Kingdom
Copyright © Neil White, 2019
The moral right of Neil White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781912973071
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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