BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1)

by Jane Adams

  * * *

  From the writings of Abbot Kendryk of Storton Abbey, Year of Grace 878:

  I had been disturbed by the rumours that were spread abroad from the vill of Theading and the gossip that inevitably reached my ears regarding the new lord of Theadingford. To be more exact, it was gossip regarding the man he had appointed Shire Reeve that troubled me. Treven himself was already, in those first days, gaining a reputation for fair dealing and it seemed this was a man who understood the needs of both land and the people thereon and sought approval from his community. But the same could not be said of the man Hugh de Vries. His scions looked towards Frankish ancestry and tradition and had the wealth and power, even in those straitened times, to satisfy their own wishes and desires, regardless and uncaring of what damage that might do to reputation. Hugh de Vries, in short, was a selfish man. I am myself a son of Frankish lords. I have been always conscious of the power such families wield and what rights they see as theirs to take without thought of consequence.

  I felt most greatly troubled that this man should have turned his attention to the Scrivener girl. The women of that family have long been the wealth of this land, with knowledge and skill passed from mother to daughter such that some men looked askance. It has always seemed to me that the strength and knowledge of men and women both are needed for the health of any community. That the strength of both should be valued. At that time winter and war had both lately taken their tribute and strength of either sort had been diminished.

  This man, this Hugh, such men need firm handling, especially firm should they be placed in position of influence and power and it seemed to me that though the heart of this new lord, this Treven, was reported by so many to be sound, his judgement was not. When the Shire Reeve shows so little concern for those that they are meant to serve, what hope can there be of protection from the evil that waits at every false turn? Such ill consideration feeds the hunger of that which waits for evil to be done. The hunger buried deep within the land, long fed on blood and need and want and desire and waiting always for the careless step.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mrs Chinowski had the chain on the door and peered out cautiously, one pale blue eye framed in the opening. She was a tiny woman, Rozlyn having to stoop so that she could see her face and the I.D. card she held.

  “Can I talk to you?” Rozlyn asked gently. “It’s about Charlie Higgins from upstairs.”

  To her surprise and some alarm she saw the one eye fill with tears. They overflowed and ran down the pale, wrinkled skin of the old lady’s face.

  “He was good to me, was Charlie. Why would anyone want to hurt him?” Her voice was heavily accented and now, thickened by tears.

  “I don’t know, Mrs Chinowski. That’s what I’m trying to find out. Can I come inside?”

  She nodded, then closed the door so she could release the chain. Rozlyn got the impression she was in two minds whether or not to open it again and wished she’d had the foresight to bring Jenny as Mrs Chinowski had already deigned to speak with her. Not that Jenny’d have been too happy about that on a Sunday, she reminded herself. She’d probably have told Rozlyn that some people have a life and would rather spend their Sundays participating in it.

  The door was opened just enough for Rozlyn to slide through. Mrs Chinowski closed it behind her and then stood on the threshold, wringing her hands as though the distress caused by Charlie’s death had been compounded by her having to let this stranger into her home.

  “I don’t have strangers coming in here,” she whispered.

  “Do you mind if we sit down? My colleague, Jenny Harper, she told me you were very upset to hear about Charlie. That he was a good friend to you? Did he come to visit you here?”

  “I only let him in the hall,” she said defensively. “He never asked to come further than that.” She seemed affronted that Rozlyn would want to sit down. “He got that lady in to clean for me. I had forms to fill in. I told him, Charlie, I can’t fill in forms. Not at my age. He did it for me. He stood here in the hall and asked me what he needed to know and I told him and he wrote it down. Then that woman came from Hibbert House.”

  “Hibbert House? Oh, social services.”

  Mrs Chinowski hissed at her. It was a startling sound. Aggressive and surprisingly loud to be emitted from her frail old lady’s body. Rozlyn gathered she had said the wrong thing.

  “No,” she told her stoutly. “Not social services.” She spat the words out as though they tasted bad. “I told Charlie, I wouldn’t have no busy body from there, so he got that woman from Hibbert House. I paid her,” she added proudly. “Out of my pension each week. She did shopping for me and she put the Hoover over and did bits for me. Then she went and that other one came.” She sighed and gestured irritation. “I had to train this new one all over again. Young thing, she is. Young things are so . . .” she sought the word, clawing at the air with bone thin fingers; finally found it. “Deficient.” She concluded triumphantly, closing her hand upon the word so it couldn’t escape. Rozlyn shuddered, momentarily enthralled by the grasp of that fleshed-out skeleton.

  She recovered herself enough to ask how long Mrs Chinowski had known Charlie.

  She shrugged. “Three years perhaps.”

  “How often did he visit you?”

  “When I called him on the phone and said I needed him.”

  So, not often then, Rozlyn thought, casting her mind back to the light use evidenced by the phone bills. “What things did you need him for, Mrs Chinowski?”

  It was clear by now that she wasn’t about to let Rozlyn go further into the flat, so she leaned back against the wall and earned herself another displeasured hiss. Rozlyn ignored it. “Mrs Chinowski?” She prompted. “What kind of things did you need Charlie for?”

  “He helped me,” she snapped. “When that one woman didn’t come any more and the new one came, Charlie talked to her and then when I got this other new one, well, Charlie arranged it all.” She shrugged. “She wasn’t as good, of course, but Charlie said they were short staffed over there at Hibbert House so . . .” She allowed her disapproval to hang between them. Rozlyn could feel it, curdling the air. Then, suddenly, the old lady was crying again. “What will I do now Charlie’s gone? He was like a son to me.” She covered her eyes with her bone white hands. Somehow, she seemed to get smaller, shrinking into herself, diminishing until Rozlyn was possessed of the quite irrational anxiety that, if she looked long enough, Mrs Chinowski would disappear altogether.

  “Can I make you a cup of tea?” Rozlyn asked quietly.

  “What? You mean, in my kitchen?”

  “I won’t make a mess. I’m pretty good with the tea pot.”

  Mrs Chinowski wiped her eyes and sniffed, then felt in her sleeve for a hankie. “That girl. Jennifer, she said you were Charlie’s friend. That’s why I let you in. She was nice to me and she said you’d be calling. A tall lady, she said and she told me you were a black lady so I wasn’t worried.”

  “Would you have been?”

  Mrs Chinowski nodded solemnly. “It’s not your fault,” she told her. Rozlyn refrained from asking if Mrs Chinowski meant that she was black. “You see, when I went out to the shops. To do my own shopping. The last time I went out to do my own shopping. I was robbed.”

  “You had your bag stolen?”

  “I’ve been frightened ever since then.”

  Rozlyn nodded. “Did we catch him?”

  A shake of the head. “He rode a bicycle and he got away. He was laughing at me. I lay there on the ground and he was laughing at me.”

  “Let me make you that tea,” Rozlyn coaxed and Mrs Chinowski nodded finally, pointed a shaking hand towards a door at the end of the hall, then followed her nervously as she went through. Silently, Rozlyn celebrated that small success. The effort it took to be nice to people who were so obviously uncomfortable with your very existence was exhausting, even when that person was an obviously frightened elderly lady. “Connections are what matter,” her grandfather
always told her. “Make that connection, build that bridge. You are capable of doing that when sometimes other people just can’t see the way. You are the strong one here.”

  Living in a rural town in England meant that Rozlyn had to be ‘strong’ a lot. Sometimes, Rozlyn thought, being the strong one just stank. It was something she was getting really sick of having to do.

  Mrs Chinowski’s kitchen was, for the most part, clean and neat, though the units were old and battered and the small table had a folded postcard wedged under one leg to stop it from tipping. From the colour of the card and the evidence of dust trapped beneath, Rozlyn figured it had been there for a long, long time. Evidently, her cleaning lady didn’t trouble too much about the kitchen floor. A quick vacuum and the occasional mop would be about the limit.

  The counters were in a better state; though stained here and there they had been wiped and scrubbed. Rozlyn detected the smell of bleach emanating from the sink and the white plastic of the kettle was spotless. She filled it from a polished tap and followed the old lady’s instructions for the teapot and cups.

  “How did you get to know Charlie?” She asked as they waited for the kettle to boil.

  “It was after I had my bag stolen. He saw it in the papers. He brought me money and I let him into my hall. He was a gentleman, was Charlie Higgins. Never presumed.”

  “Not like me?” Rozlyn couldn’t resist.

  The old lady didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, she regarded Rozlyn thoughtfully. The pale eyes still watered when she talked of Charlie but she seemed more composed. “I’m sure your manners are well enough for a policewoman,” she said. “A policewoman is used to dealing with people who have none, I suppose.”

  Rozlyn made the tea and carried the pot over to the table. The tea bags were some economy supermarket brand, she noted. She wondered if they were Mrs Chinowski’s choice or if they’d been selected by a thrifty home help.

  “Did Charlie ever talk about himself?”

  “He talked. We talked about people who had died and gone. About the old days.”

  “The old days?” Charlie was only fifty-odd, Rozlyn thought. Mrs Chinowski was in her mid-eighties.

  “When we were both young,” she said as though that were obvious.

  “What about when you were young?”

  “Oh, leaving my home, coming over here. Knowing that the family I left behind might not live to see the end of the war.” She shook her head. “It was a dreadful time.”

  “Forgive me, Mrs Chinowski, but Charlie wasn’t old enough to remember that.”

  She hissed again and reached for the teapot. “That didn’t mean he couldn’t listen,” she told Rozlyn acerbically. “Charlie knew how to listen.”

  Did he listen standing in the hall, Rozlyn wondered. But she said nothing, still not certain what to make of this old lady. Instead, she drank her supermarket tea, hating the sweetened taste of it — the old lady had added sugar without asking — and listened as Mrs Chinowski spoke about her childhood in Poland. The family had crossed the sea to England in 1940, when she was just a tiny child. Even so, she could remember her first night on UK soil, sleeping on the floor of a hostel with her brother and sister, and how glad they’d been of the shelter because, despite the bombings, they really believed that they were safe at last. Rozlyn listened as she told how her parents had died and how she’d married and eventually come to live here when the flats were new. She elaborated on how things had changed. She spoke as though recounting a story so often relived she did not even have to think of the words anymore. A story that could only be partly hers; more likely one handed down to her by older siblings because she had been too young to remember much about their journey. A story so threadbare with use that the emotion had long been wrung from the fabric of it because there were only so many times your heart could cry. But when Mrs Chinowski told Rozlyn about Charlie and the small kindnesses of this man she hardly knew, she wept again and, when Rozlyn finally left her, having eventually wrested from her the names of her cleaning lady and a Mr Bishopson — who, it seemed was another beneficiary of Charlie’s kindness — Rozlyn felt exhausted, worn out by Mrs Chinowski’s life.

  It was six fifteen and her route home took her past the Queen’s. She stopped off for a drink, but Big Frank Parker had not yet arrived. Tearing a page from her notebook, Rozlyn wrote a message for him, thinking how to phrase it while she drank her beer, trying Speckled Hen purely because she’d seen Frank Parker drinking it.

  The note she finally left with the barman was cryptic, but she figured Big Frank would get the gist. She left the name of Thomas Thompson and the addresses of the two houses Mouse Man had shown her that day. One was definitely on Big Frank’s patch and the other only a street or so beyond his domain. Beneath that, she drew a large question mark.

  The bar man, recalling Rozlyn from her previous visit, looked over at what she’d written. “You want to leave a number with that?” he asked.

  Rozlyn shook her head. “He’ll know how to get in touch if he needs me,” she said, and the bar man nodded. Big Frank was not known to be big on phone calls. If he wanted someone, he sent someone else to fetch them.

  “He’ll definitely be in later?”

  The barman nodded again and slid the note behind one of the optics. “He likes to watch the Antiques Roadshow first, then have a spot of supper before he comes over here.”

  “The Antiques Roadshow?” Rozlyn laughed. It didn’t quite fit with her take on Big Frank Parker. Rozlyn’s grandfather had liked to watch that, seeing it when he had stayed in England with his granddaughter. Later, Rozlyn recorded episodes for him and sent them over to the States. Later still, her granddad had rung to say he could get it on BBC America or some such. He’d been bugged about that. Rozlyn doubted he watched it now. He watched nothing, just stared into the middle distance at some world no one else could see and sometimes, just sometimes, he would smile as though glimpsing the face of an old friend through that mist of ruined memory.

  Rozlyn, deciding that Speckled Hen was the dry white of beers, finished her drink and took herself off home.

  * * *

  THEADING, YEAR OF GRACE 878

  All night Cate had sat with their neighbour, Aedra. Her son and daughter-in-law had been nursing her for weeks and were worn out with the grief of it. Alwyn was awaiting the birth of their first child and was now heavy and uncomfortable and very much in need of rest. Her man was exhausted by the harvest and the task of rebuilding not only their own home but assisting others before the autumn gave way to winter.

  So Cate, knowing that the old woman had little time left on this earth, had taken on the task of keeping vigil while they both slept.

  Home was a single room, a box bed at one end for the married couple and a heap of bracken and pine at the other on which the old woman lay. A central hearth, the smoke from which lifted into the rafters and filtered out through the thatch, keeping the mice and vermin at bay. The miasma of rot and death rose from the body of the old woman. That Aedra had lingered for so long was, Cate thought, because she had received such love and such care from her family. Though it might have been better for all if she had been allowed to slip from their grasp sooner. It was time for her to be released from the pain of the mass that bulged her stomach and the second that broke the skin of her breast and for which Cate had no remedy. It was time as well for the couple to turn their thoughts and energy to the new life soon to come.

  Aedra roused with a little gasp of pain and Cate knelt down beside her, slipping an arm behind frail shoulders, holding the fragile body close to her own and pressing a cup to cracked lips. “Drink, sweetness, drink and lose the pain for a while. There, that’s good.”

  The lips parted and the woman did her best to swallow the infusion of honey, white bryony and other herbs. It was moot, Cate thought, which would kill her first — the remedy or the sickness — but at least she would pass with less pain.

  Settling her gently, Cate fetched the water she had left to ke
ep warm beside the fire, infused with more herbs to both sweeten the air and soothe the broken skin. Carefully she drew back the rags that absorbed Aedra’s urine, washed her carefully and placed fresh rags beneath her and between the stick like legs. Then she covered her warmly once more.

  Stepping outside to place the soiled cloths in a bucket ready for washing, Cate stood for a while in the cold and the dark and gazed up at the stars. She doubted Aedra would live to see another dawn and she could not regret that. All life ended and Aedra had enjoyed her full season.

  Tears sprang unbidden, but they were not for Aedra. Cate lay a hand on her still flat belly. She had not bled this month, she who was regular as the moon and whose blood kept pace with its waxing and waning could not yet be positive, but she knew her own body and had always had the facility for recognising early pregnancy in others. She was with child and, despite being married, she knew that the child could not be that of her husband.

  CHAPTER 11

  Vivid dreams had been something Rozlyn had endured in childhood but as she’d grown older, their richness of colour and intimidating reality had paled until her dreams were merely pastel-shaded imitations. This one was different.

  A cool breeze blew past her cheeks, cold enough to nip the lobes of her ears, though a warm sun shone on her back and the sky was polished Delft, the exact shade of the blue on her mother’s little bowl.

  They had come to Charlie’s funeral; Rozlyn, Mouse and Mrs Chinowski, the latter dressed from head to foot in deepest black, the depth of mourning relieved only by the dyed purple of the poppies decorating her wide brimmed hat.

  Charlie himself lay uncovered in the grave, still dressed in his pinstriped suit and blood-stained shirt with its frayed cuffs and worn collar.

  As Rozlyn watched, a stranger stepped forward, face hidden from Rozlyn’s view, screened out by a series of blocked pixels, like those used on television to hide someone’s identity. The stranger held the spear that had killed Charlie Higgins. He bent down and placed it carefully, close beside Charlie’s left hand and then, beside his right, a full glass of beer. Rozlyn knew the heavy mug — Charlie favoured glasses with handles — had come from the Queen’s and was filled with Speckled Hen.