Fragile Lives

by Jane A. Adams

  Contents

  Cover

  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

  After

  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

  FRAGILE LIVES

  A Rina Martin Mystery

  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 2008 in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

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

  This eBook first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  Copyright © 2008 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-

  Fragile lives

  1. Police - Fiction 2. Murder – Investigation – Fiction

  3. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9’14[F]

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6680-6 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-684-7 (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

  He watched as they fetched the boy up on to the deck. Boy? Coran had told him the kid was twenty-two or twenty-three but to Stan he was still a boy. It seemed a long time since he’d been that age.

  The kid was filthy, dressed in the same jeans and shirt he’d been wearing the day they’d taken him. Only the coat and shoes were missing and he shivered in the chill wind that cut across from the landward side; first time in weeks, Stan reckoned, that it had veered from that direction. That was the only reaction from the boy though, just a response to the cold. His eyes were unfocused and he had little control of his limbs, stumbling between the men that held him.

  Stan looked across at Coran but it seemed the tall, blond-haired man was refusing to meet his eye. The rigidity of his pose told Stan he liked this no better than Stan did. It wasn’t, for either of them, an aversion to killing, it was the whole scenario. It left a bad taste and made Stan wish he’d walked away when Coran had offered a way to make easy money.

  Easy money never was easy in Stan’s experience. There was always a complication. He’d have done well to have remembered that.

  He still couldn’t figure out why the boy had been brought aboard; Haines was usually so particular about keeping a distance between what he called his work and this boat, which he regarded as his home base. Coran, when he could be persuaded to talk about it, had let on that the boss man was acting a bit odd recently. Not so on top of things; not so rational or in control.

  Stan figured that whatever this kid’s family had done, Haines had taken it personally and now the boy was the one to suffer. Stan had chosen to know nothing about him, except that his name was Patrick Duggan.

  He’d fought like a bloody maniac when they’d first brought him aboard. Haines told them to keep him quiet, give him something, he didn’t care what.

  Looking into the boy’s blank eyes, Stan didn’t want to know.

  Haines appeared, standing there, on deck, surveying them all with his usual measured disdain. He was dressed ready for bed, silk pyjamas and monogrammed robe.

  He held a pistol in his hand.

  Reflexively, Stan moved back out of his direct line of sight. He didn’t like the man and he knew it showed. Coran always said he was no good at playing politics.

  A plastic sheet had been placed on the deck, close to the bow rail. Haines signed for the boy to be made to kneel, then he raised the gun and fired a single shot. Those that still held the boy pitched him over the rail and Stan heard him hit the water.

  He turned away, disgusted. Haines walked past him and went below, as casual and unconcerned, Stan thought, as if he’d been somewhere in the suburbs and just put the cat out for the night.

  Coran joined him, leaning on the rail.

  ‘That isn’t what we signed up for.’

  ‘No, we signed up for the money.’

  ‘You bloody know what I mean.’

  ‘And I know I’d rather not talk about it. Neither should you. He has a way of hearing things.’ Coran glanced over his shoulder. ‘Few weeks from now, maybe sooner, and I’ll be gone. You should think about it too.’

  ‘Oh, he’d just love that. You know how he feels about people quitting.’

  Coran grinned. ‘By then he’ll have enough other problems,’ he said. ‘He won’t give the likes of me and thee a second thought.’

  One

  The rain had cleared just after nine and left a clear sky that, further inland, would have presaged frost. Now, closing in on midnight and beneath a coal-black night, bright with frozen stars, Mac stood on the narrow strip of beach and thought about the boy he had left that afternoon. He had taken George up to Hill House just before teatime. Rain beat down so hard against the windscreen he almost missed the turn into the narrow, winding drive. They had joked about the name, ‘Hill House’. The way it sounded like something out of a bad horror film, but Mac knew that for George this wasn’t really such a good joke.

  ‘I felt like I was abandoning him,’ he said. ‘I wanted to turn the car around and bring him back here.’

  ‘You did what you had to do.’ The elderly woman standing beside him shifted her sensibly shod feet against the shingle. ‘George knows he has to have a proper
place to live, for now at least.’ She jabbed hard against the shingle with a walking stick Mac knew she didn’t really need and, one-handed, turned up the collar on her old waxed coat.

  She’s as upset as I am, Mac thought. They had both become very fond of George and both felt responsible for him, Rina because she had been there when Edward Parker, George’s violent father, had fallen from the cliff at Marlborough Head. Mac’s feeling of inadequacy was a little more difficult to define. George’s mother had killed herself, in Mac’s flat, in a place where she was supposed to have been safe. And Mac had not anticipated this; not seen how desperate and lost the woman was. He found it hard to forgive himself.

  Mac thrust cold hands deeper into his pockets and stared harder at the ink-black ocean that dragged at the shingle just a few yards away.

  ‘They were all so damnably cheerful,’ he complained. ‘The carers or whatever you call them. All so “come along in, George, you’ll be fine. Just have some cake”.’ He laughed awkwardly, aware suddenly of how petulant he sounded. ‘I think Paul’s parents would have kept George if they could but they have to jump through the usual hoops first. Seems like a stupid waste of time to me.’

  ‘I suppose social services have to do things according to their own, mysterious plans,’ Rina said calmly. ‘They can hardly hand a child over to just anyone and to them Paul’s family are just that. An unknown quantity. And he could hardly have moved in with you, now, could he?’ She patted Mac’s arm, her bright-red woollen gloves greyed out against the bleak, stark, black of the night sky.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘The boy has survived much worse things than over-cheerfulness and the offer of cake.’

  Mac knew he was meant to laugh but somehow it wouldn’t come.

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘he has friends who will look out for him. I’d even go as far as to call us family, of sorts.’

  Mac nodded, knowing she was right; hoping it would be enough.

  ‘We should go in,’ Rina said. ‘You’re frozen through.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘Oh, I’m rarely cold, you know that.’

  He glanced sideways, taking in the solid figure in the old waxed coat, twin scarves and straight tweed skirt. Topped and tailed by those ugly crêpe-soled boots and that unsquashable, shapeless, red velvet hat. ‘Dressed like that, I’m not surprised. You know,’ he continued as they turned to go, ‘there was a time when I couldn’t even bear to look at the ocean. Couldn’t stand the sound of it.’

  ‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said and nodded emphatically. ‘Do you still dream about her?’

  Mac did not immediately respond. Rina was always direct but this subject – the little girl that Mac had been unable to save – was one that even her straight-to-the-point approach usually diverted around. Mac had confronted her abductor on a beach very like this one. Had seen the child die; forced to watch and been unable to do a damn thing about it. He hadn’t even realized Rina knew until the story had made it into the local papers after someone had taken the trouble to dig into Mac’s past.

  Not that they’d had to dig very hard.

  A quick web search and Mac would be there, staring out of the page, his picture side by side with …

  ‘I don’t need to dream to see her. She’s there, every time I blink, every time I see a little girl in the street, every time …’

  ‘And nothing new on her killer,’ Rina finished for him. She slipped her arm through his. ‘Do you want to stay with us tonight?’

  He thought about the flat above the shops on the promenade. Cheerless and, though his stay in Frantham was still only six weeks old, already full of bad memories. He compared this to Rina’s warm, chaotic household where she looked after a house full of lodgers, all retired theatrical folk. Good food, bizarre but friendly company, no ghosts sitting on the sofa. And he was tempted. Sorely tempted. Mac sighed. ‘I’d best not,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to make an early start and besides, I’ve spent more nights at your house than at mine lately. You’ll be charging me rent soon.’

  ‘Still nothing permanent on the horizon?’

  ‘A couple more places to see.’ He released Rina’s arm so that she could climb the steps on to the promenade. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said. Then go back to the flat and his other, newer ghost. He didn’t want to tell Rina that he saw them all now. It sounded weak and stupid and melo-dramatic to say that they all lay in wait for him these days. The frail old lady and the sad, blonde woman now joined the little girl he had watched die on that other beach in that other time. He glimpsed them out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of them, like a snapshot printed on the inside lids of his closed eyes. Heard their voices in the conversations of those walking along the promenade, and he did not want to admit, either, just how close he had come lately to being tempted back into the bottle. The urge to crawl inside and not come out again until their faces and their voices and the scent of the woman’s perfume and the stink of the old lady’s house had been drowned in alcoholic oblivion.

  But he would not go back there; not give in to those urges. Mac was determined of that. This time he had to face the pain and, he figured, Rina probably did know all about that anyway, without him needing to spell it out. After all, Rina knew everything, didn’t she?

  They paused outside her door. ‘Sure you won’t …?’

  He shook his head. ‘See you tomorrow, probably. Give my best to everyone.’

  She nodded. Stood just inside as she watched him walk away half expecting him to turn around and come back. Then, when he did not, she closed the heavy door to Peverill Lodge and, relishing the warmth and light of the tiled hall, she unwound her scarves and removed her outdoor clothes.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Tim, the youngest of Rina’s assorted residents, appeared in the kitchen doorway, a mug of tea in hand. ‘He’s not come back with you?’

  ‘Oh, he walked me home. Wouldn’t stay. I think he’s afraid that if he spends too many more nights here he’ll never leave.’

  ‘Would that be a bad thing?’

  ‘For us, no. For Mac, yes I think it might. It would be too easy. We’d just become a new crutch for him. Better for him than the alcohol, perhaps, but just as addictive and dependence breeding. No, for his own sake we’ve got to keep a little distance. Everyone else in bed?’

  Tim nodded. ‘There’s tea in the pot. Did he say how George had settled in?’

  ‘Not much. I don’t think he stayed for long. He said everyone seemed nice, but of course he’s feeling bad about abandoning the boy. Not that he is, of course.’

  Tim poured her tea and she flopped down heavily into the Windsor chair set at the head of the table.

  ‘We all feel that way,’ Tim observed. ‘But I don’t see what else we can do.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Rina agreed, ‘except make sure the boy doesn’t feel any more forsaken than is absolutely inevitable.’

  At that moment George was feeling very much forsaken. He knew there was nothing anyone could do about it and the rational bit of his brain told him that everyone had been going out of their way to be nice to him, but that really didn’t help.

  He perched on the windowsill of the room that had been designated his and he remembered another room; that one with a high window that he’d had to climb on the bedhead to reach, but which had a view of the sea very much like this one had. Black sky merged with darkened water and the only way he could define the horizon was to notice where there were no stars. He was relieved that Mac had managed to delay his coming here until the Sunday – actually, everyone had conspired to delay his arrival for as long as they could and he’d managed to spend almost a week longer with Paul’s family than the woman from social services had wanted. To have arrived at the start of the weekend, and have to mix with all of these new people for a whole two days, would have been unbearable. This way, at least, he’d just had to get through tea and a bit of evening telly before being able to escape to his room. Tomorrow he’d be b
ack at school and, though the thought filled him with dread, at least he’d see Paul and at least it would be familiar ground. He never thought he’d welcome the monotony of double maths on a Monday morning, but right at that moment, it sounded almost blissful.

  From his post by the window George surveyed his tiny room. Single bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe crammed into the corner and a desk ‘for doing your homework on’ as Cheryl, his ‘key worker’ had informed him. That left, he reckoned, about enough space to turn around in. No cat-swinging in here.

  To be fair, he’d slept in far worse places, but he missed his own room with his own things and though Mac had promised to make sure the rest of his belongings were brought up to him in the coming week, George despaired of being able to fit them in. He’d never figured that he owned much, but what he did would be hard to cram into this little space.

  Or was he just feeling so down on everything that he was determined it was all going to be bad no matter what?

  George sighed. He supposed he ought to get ready for bed, but despite knowing that he was tired out, he’d never felt less like sleep.

  The worst bit was the whispered conversation he had heard between Cheryl and some other woman. He thought she might be called Christine. This woman must have been away for a couple of weeks or so because when she came on duty Cheryl had taken her aside and told her about George.

  ‘The new boy’s arrived, need an eye keeping on him. Poor kid’s been through it.’

  ‘Oh, the mother … suicide, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. And there’s a history of violence with the father. Apparently he’s recently deceased too.’

  She had spotted George then, standing in the doorway. He hadn’t meant to hear, he’d just been trying to find her to ask if it was OK if he went to his room.

  Cheryl had been all smiles. ‘Course it is. This is home now.’

  No, George thought, this could never in a million years be home. He thought of his mother. Wondered how long it would be before he stopped being mad at her for leaving him. Thought about his dad; no loss there, but George could probably have done without seeing him die. And finally, thought about the one person Cheryl hadn’t mentioned. Karen. At just nineteen she was five and a bit years older than George. His greatest ally through all the years of abuse and the mastermind behind their eventual escape. He missed her most of all and knew that the chances of his seeing her again were less than remote.