BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1) JANE ADAMS (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📖

“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