Dead Silent (A Dylan Scott Mystery)

by Wells, Shirley

“No!” Hunt’s denial came with all the force of a bullet.

  “Yes. You didn’t know that? You didn’t know they were—”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I’m sorry, Sam, but I’m afraid I’m not. Your father’s ex-army pal owns a property in Glasgow and two on remote islands in Orkney. Your father had you taken away—”

  “What?” Marion reeled back as if her ex-husband was a ticking bomb.

  “Yes.” Dylan was struggling to keep the fury from his voice. “It was those postcards, Rob. I saw two from Scrabster and I was told they arrived regularly. I also knew Alan drove his lorry up there. I thought there must be a connection between the two of you, that you were involved in something together, but I was damned if I could figure out what. As soon as I found Sam in Orkney, I knew you were behind it. The postcards—one thanking you for the gift.”

  Hunt gripped the back of a chair as if his life depended on it.

  “Rob, no.” Marion’s voice was a whisper. She tugged on Hunt’s arm. “Please tell me this isn’t true.”

  “And then,” Dylan said, “when Sam told me about the panic caused by Roderick’s murder, and how a couple of foreign girls had arrived—”

  “Rob?” Marion’s hand continued to tug on her ex-husband’s arm.

  “Roderick’s job, as far as I can gather, was to smuggle young girls in from Hungary or Romania,” Dylan said. “They ended up at a sex business in Glasgow. Sullivan ran the place. From a safe distance, of course.”

  “No,” Hunt said, shaking his head.

  If Dylan hadn’t been so angry, so furiously angry, he would have laughed. The irony of Hunt sharing an acquaintance with Alan Roderick, a man he’d always hated with a passion, amused him.

  “No doubt you paid your chum Mattie handsomely for keeping your daughter,” Dylan said.

  “She had to be hidden—the police, you know—but I had to make sure she was well cared for, didn’t I?”

  Dylan couldn’t stand the whining sound of Hunt’s voice. “Well cared for? She was chained like a wild animal.”

  “No. Sam, tell him. It wasn’t like that, was it, sweetheart?”

  “You?” Sam pummelled her father’s chest as she screamed at him. “It was you? You paid him to keep me there? He was going to have me killed. He said I could be disposed of and he’d still get the money. He said he hadn’t expected to have to keep me for so long.”

  “No, Sam!”

  “Yes!” She screamed the word at him.

  “Rob, why?” Marion was disbelieving. Appalled.

  “I did it for you, Marion. For us. For all of us.” Hunt’s voice was pleading now. Sickening. “I thought you’d come back to me. It was going to bring us together again.”

  “What?” Dylan was possibly more shocked than anyone.

  Fool that he was, he hadn’t considered that as a possibility. Truth be told, he’d had no idea why Hunt wanted Sam out of the way, but he’d assumed it had been to keep her away from Jack Fleming.

  But no. Hunt had done this terrible thing believing it would win back his wife.

  “Oh, Christ!” The Partridges’ marriage had been glued back together when their daughter, Fiona, was lost to them. Dylan had seen the reports in the local paper, had seen the photos of the reunited parents holding hands and describing how the ordeal had brought them back together. He should have known.

  No, he shouldn’t. Who but a madman would do such a wicked thing?

  “It wasn’t meant to go on for so long.” Hunt’s voice broke on a sob. “A month, that’s all. But you wouldn’t listen, Marion. You wouldn’t come home.” He grabbed Marion’s hands in his. “I did it for you, sweetheart.”

  “Dear God.” There was no colour in Marion’s face. “You kept suggesting we go to Barcelona to look for her. You even said we should visit London and Paris—and all the while, you could have brought her home.”

  “You total bastard,” Sam said. “You’re mad, you know that, don’t you? Stark, staring, fucking mad.”

  Marion freed herself from his grip and pulled Sam into her arms.

  Hunt dropped to his knees, his hands covering his face, and cried like a baby.

  “You selfish, thoughtless, lying—” Dylan hauled him to his feet and pushed him up against the wall. “You robbed Sam of ten months of her life. You put your own daughter’s life in danger.”

  Before he did something he might regret, Dylan let him go. Hunt dropped to the floor like a sack of flour.

  “I’m out of here.” Dylan needed to get away from the madness that was Hunt. “I have a lot of explaining to do to the men in blue. I need to make a statement—tell them why I abandoned two foreigners in a hospital and how I needed to get Sam back home for her own safety.”

  Dylan walked out of the flat and hoped he never had to see Rob Hunt again.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Dylan had been staring at the rolling departures board for half an hour. It didn’t change. Their plane was still showing as delayed by two hours.

  Across the hall, his mother and his son were standing in the shop doorway, amusing themselves by trying on hats.

  Dylan wished he could amuse himself, but he hated airports at the best of times. He loathed them when long delays were involved.

  “I won’t understand you if I live to be a hundred,” Bev said.

  “Sorry? How do you mean?”

  “Alan Roderick.” She sipped at the coffee they’d bought to pass some time. “If there’s a mystery, you have to worry away at it until you learn the truth. Yet Roderick is murdered and the not knowing who did it doesn’t seem to bother you at all.”

  “Any one of a hundred people could be responsible.” He trusted Bev, knew she wouldn’t say a word to anyone, but there were times when things were best left alone. There was no point telling her all he knew about Roderick’s killer. “He’s no loss to the world. If he hadn’t been killed, the good old British taxpayer would be spending a fortune to keep him locked up for years.”

  “Hmm. It’s still unlike you.” She shuddered. “Just imagine being married to a man like that. It makes my skin crawl.”

  “As I said, he’s no loss to the world.”

  There were no excuses for a man like Roderick. By all accounts, he’d come from a good family. His father was a teacher, his mother a nurse. He was an only child, and reports said he was a lonely child. That was no excuse though.

  He’d played truant when a schoolboy, then joined the army where he’d been involved in every scam going. He’d been attracted to drugs—and young children. From abusing children, he’d progressed to selling indecent images. That had led to a meeting with Mattie Sullivan and, between them, they’d worked out a way to bring in young girls from Romania. Sullivan had soon employed others.

  Thankfully, the police had arrested Sullivan and he was now in custody where he belonged. A man by the name of George Cottle, who’d been living in Romania for almost ten years, had also been arrested. It was he who found the young girls and promised them riches aplenty in Britain before seeing them loaded onto Roderick’s lorry.

  “The man who was running the brothels,” Bev said. “Sullivan. How did he meet up with Rob Hunt?”

  “They were old army acquaintances, but hadn’t kept in touch. It was a chance meeting when Sullivan was in Dawson’s Clough to see Alan Roderick. Hunt had read in the local newspapers about the young girl, Fiona Partridge, who’d gone missing and how it had brought her parents together. Over a drink, he mentioned it to Sullivan. Of course, Sullivan saw a means of making a lot of money and he came up with the idea of keeping Sam hidden for a while, just until Marion came to her senses and returned to Hunt. At least, that’s what Hunt is claiming.”

  “What will happen to him?”

  “Hunt? I don’t know. He’s seeing a psychiatrist at the moment.”

  “That poor kid.”

  Dylan smiled at that. “Sam will be fine.”

  She’d phoned Dylan last week to tell him two things. One, she
and Jack were engaged and he was to expect a wedding invitation. Two, she had somehow, and Dylan still couldn’t imagine how, managed to get her old job back.

  “I begged, pleaded and grovelled,” she’d told him. “Oh, and I’d pinched a couple of his files so I returned those and promised never, ever to suspect him of wrongdoing again.”

  “And he gave you your job back?” Dylan had asked in amazement.

  “Eventually, yeah. I can be quite charming when I try, you know.”

  Dylan could believe that, but he was still amazed that James Carlton was allowing her back. He wasn’t convinced that Carlton was as innocent as he claimed, but there was no proof of any shady deals or dodgy insurance claims. It wasn’t his problem. If Carlton was guilty of anything, Sam would soon be on his case. The knowledge made him smile.

  “And he’s as mad as hell at you,” Sam had said. “Fancy telling him you were a TV producer, Dylan. How crap is that? Still, he fell for it. He’s really pissed off to learn that he won’t be on the telly after all…”

  Dylan looked up at the departures board. Their plane was still listed as delayed. Almost every other plane flying out of Heathrow was on schedule. It had to be an omen.

  “Poor Sam never left home that day,” Bev murmured. “Fancy her own father telling everyone that she’d left the house and vanished.” She frowned. “Who drugged her? Her dad or someone else?”

  “According to Hunt, it was Sullivan. He did the deed, put her in his van and carried her off to Glasgow.”

  “You did well, Dylan. I’m so proud of you.”

  “I got lucky.”

  If it wasn’t for a poor sense of direction, if he hadn’t got himself lost and ended up at that cottage, if he hadn’t seen the horsebox and, more important, found that locket—

  He’d got lucky. If he hadn’t, Sam would still be there. Or she would be dead.

  He didn’t want to think about it.

  But all’s well that ends well, he reminded himself. Sam was back where she belonged and Dylan had been paid in full. It was lucky he’d insisted on a large payment in advance followed by weekly instalments. As he hadn’t liked to present a bill to a man he’d found guilty, he’d been prepared to write off the relatively small amount he was still owed. Marion, however, had insisted on seeing and paying his final account.

  “Anyway,” he said, “you can talk. I can’t understand you either. Why have you turned down that job offer?”

  He’d seen how excited Bev was about it. She’d accepted their offer and he’d been pleased for her. True, he hadn’t known what the hell they were going to do when she was working in Blackburn, but he’d been fairly pleased for her. Then, on a whim, she’d told them she had to turn it down.

  “We could have worked something out,” he said. “You could have stayed in Blackburn during the week or something, just until we sorted things out.”

  That’s what they were supposed to be doing, sorting things out. She’d decided that, so long as they didn’t kill each other on this holiday—and Dylan thought it far more likely this holiday would kill them—then they would get back together and concentrate on being a family again.

  “The job wasn’t for me.” She was looking everywhere but at Dylan.

  “You said it was made for you. It was a head’s job—everything you wanted.”

  “Yes, but—” She broke off.

  “But what?”

  All around them, people rushed to catch their planes. The lucky devils were heading for Spain, Italy, Portugal, New York and every other destination known to man. Except one.

  “Bev? But what?”

  “Something came up,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll tell you after the holiday.”

  “What? Oh, no, you won’t. I’ll spend the entire time worrying.”

  She shrugged at that, but she looked nervous. Very nervous.

  “Should I worry?” he asked.

  Her expression was a mixture of yes and maybe, and his imagination surged into overdrive.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Seriously, Bev. Me worrying to death while riding a sodding camel will not be a pretty sight.”

  She tried to smile at that.

  “Well?” His imagination had already taken him to every oncology centre in the country and robbed Luke of his mother.

  She took a deep breath and leaned back from him. “I’m pregnant.”

  Those words went round and round Dylan’s brain but still didn’t make sense. “What?”

  “You’re going to be a father. That night you stayed—remember? I was drunk—remember?”

  “Hey, Dad, look what I’ve got.”

  Feeling as if he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, Dylan turned to see a shiny mobile phone case Luke was holding.

  “Very nice. Yes, that’s great, Luke.”

  “Bev, they’ve got that perfume you like.”

  Dylan watched as Bev, eager to escape, followed his mother and Luke back to the shop.

  He sat at their table while, all around him, people bought drinks and magazines, checked their watches, stared at the departures boards.

  Pregnant.

  Luke was eleven. They’d tried for another child for years, had both endured dozens of tests and examinations, and had been told that it was very unlikely Bev would conceive again. They’d accepted it. Not happily, but they’d accepted it. That was years ago. Luke was eleven for God’s sake.

  Announcements telling people not to smoke and reminding them to keep hand luggage with them at all times drifted over the PA system.

  He finished his coffee and looked toward the shop. Bev was standing there watching him. She was chewing her bottom lip. He recognised that expression. It was the same one she’d worn when she’d had to explain how she’d driven her car into the back of his Morgan.

  The memory made him smile and, spotting it, her shoulders sagged with relief.

  He wandered over to her.

  “Does she know?” he asked, nodding to the back of his shop where his mother and Luke were inspecting scarves.

  “No. It’s just me, you and the doctor who thought he was doing a routine test for diabetes. It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it?” She grimaced at the understatement.

  “Just a bit.”

  “What will we do, Dylan?”

  “Oh, from memory, I expect we’ll go without sleep and wander around like zombies in a house that smells of baby sick for a couple of years.”

  “Yeah.” Her smile was dreamy, as if he’d just promised her the sun, the moon and the stars. “We’ll get by, won’t we?”

  “Of course we will. So long as we survive those sodding camels.”

  The smallest towns hold the darkest secrets…

  Read about Dylan Scott’s first case in Dawson’s Clough in PRESUMED DEAD, available now.

  About the Author

  Shirley was born and raised in the Cotswolds, where her headmaster wrote on her school report—Shirley is content to dream her life away.

  Years later—as an adult living in Cyprus—it dawned on her that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing and that fellow dreamers, in the guise of fiction writers, had been getting away with it for centuries.

  A move to the Orkney island of Hoy followed and, during the twelve years she spent there, she wrote short stories as well as full-length romantic fiction for UK women’s magazines.

  She’s now settled in Lancashire, where the Pennines provide the inspiration and setting for her popular mystery novels. She and her husband share their home with an ever-changing selection of deranged pets, who often insist on cameo roles in Shirley’s novels.

  When she isn’t writing, Shirley loves reading (anything and everything), listening to live music, watching TV, eating chocolate and drinking whisky—though not necessarily at the same time. She’s also a season ticket holder at Burnley Football Club and can often be seen in the biting wind and pouring rain cheering on her favourite team.

  And she’s still content
to dream her life away.

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  ISBN: 978-1-4268-9210-3

  Copyright © 2011 by Shirley Wells

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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