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) 📖

“Bit of a dive, this, isn’t it?”

Rozlyn nodded. The odour that rose up from the carpet and peeled from the walls, bringing paint and paper with it, spoke of damp and long-term decay, and the stair carpet was so old and rotten that in places it had frayed to holes at the edge of the tread. Very safety conscious landlord, Rozlyn thought, reminded of what Jenny had said about the lack of fire escape.

“You know she won’t be here.”

Rozlyn nodded. “I know she won’t be here.”

Clara’s door stood open. Her keys hung from a nail beside it. The boxes that had contained her clothes were empty. Left behind was only the scant furnishing that came with the flat, the television and a few groceries in the kitchen cupboard.

Rozlyn listed them. Flour, sugar, instant coffee and the same brand of cheap tea bag she had seen at Mrs Chinowski’s. The tiny fridge, on the floor behind the curtain, was empty. What did Clara eat? Was she given her meals at the Larks, or had she taken the rest with her? Did she even use the fridge?

Opening it, she felt a blast of cold, so supposed Clara must have done, and a patch that looked like desiccated milk on the lower shelf indicated that she had stored something inside. She could hear her colleague moving furniture, searching for traces of the missing girl. Rozlyn straightened up, shutting the fridge door with her foot, and went to join her. There was little to examine and her colleague had already completed the task.

“Anything?”

“A magazine, couple of newspapers and a till receipt for milk and chicken breast.” She showed Rozlyn her finds. The receipt was from the local Co-op, the magazine a back issue of Cosmopolitan. The newspapers, dated from just the day before were a copy of the Sun and a broadsheet, which, when Rozlyn unfolded it, turned out to be the Guardian. Rozlyn smiled wryly. Shades of Charlie Higgins, she thought, remembering the man’s insistence that you had to read both types of paper to fully cover the news.

Was it a habit of Clara’s, adopted from Charlie? In which case, did she know him far better than she’d been letting on? Or was that reading too much into such a random find?

“OK,” she said. “Call it in and notify the landlord. Oh, and get Health and Safety and the buildings inspector in on the act.”

“Why?”

“Third floor and no fire escape. I’ll make a bet he’s not declaring income from this excuse for a slum, to say nothing of the state of the rest of the building. It’s rotten through, “

“Oh. Right,” her colleague said. She neither looked nor sounded convinced that this was her responsibility. “Shouldn’t we be out searching for her?” She quailed under Rozlyn’s gaze but then shrugged her shoulders as though to feign indifference. “Don’t suppose she’ll get far anyway.” She sounded satisfied with that conclusion.

“Hard to say.” Rozlyn went to the door, reflecting that in terms of distance, Clara had come right the way across Europe and that had to mean something though in all other respects, she wondered if that distance could be measured in terms of miles northward or a precipitous southward slide.

She paused at the head of the stairs, looking down into the dim, dusty emptiness. After a dozen steps down, the staircase dog-legged at a small landing and turned away, invisible from where she stood. It was an oddly vertiginous feeling, looking down into an empty pit of stairs and landing and then bleak wall, as though Clara’s world had been separated and dissociated from the rest of the house and, by extension, the remainder of humanity.

Did Charlie come and visit her here? How did they meet? She should have pressed Clara about that yesterday.

Why hadn’t she? Why had she left time for Clara to pack her stuff and run without Rozlyn learning anything more about Charlie, or how she had come to be here or her association — and there must, surely, be an association — with the mysterious Thomas Thompson?

Had Charlie met her on one of his cleaning jobs? Had he, despite his warnings to Mouse, gone to one of the houses when there were people there? People like Clara Buranou? Rozlyn reached out for the handrail and then, almost unconsciously, to rest her other hand against the wall.

What, she asked herself, constituted the set or subset of people like Clara Buranou and why would their kind entice the likes of Charlie Higgins to become involved?

With a sudden flash of pained insight she knew what Charlie Higgins had seen in Clara Buranou and in Mrs Chinowski and probably also in the old man he’d visited in the Larks. He’d recognised them. Recognised that something in them that was also at the heart of his own self and, though Rozlyn instantly tried to force the analogy away, saw the same thing reflected in Rozlyn. The shocked realisation dawned that Charlie’s continued association with her had been because Charlie had understood Rozlyn’s need. Her loneliness, her sense of being somehow dispossessed. That was what kept Charlie Higgins coming back to her. Kept feeding her the scraps and shreds of information for the small bills with which Rozlyn had rewarded him.

She’d told herself that Charlie Higgins needed the money. That, Rozlyn knew now, was little more than a convenient fiction. Charlie worked three jobs plus his cleaning for Mr T. Charlie didn’t need Rozlyn’s handouts. It went much deeper than that and the knowledge that Charlie Higgins had pitied her, had sought to make her, Rozlyn Priest, one of his dependants, shocked Rozlyn to the very core.

How dare the likes of Charlie Higgins pity her?

“Ma’am?”

“What?”

“We going or what?”

She’d been standing at the head of the stairs, buried so deep in her shocked response that she’d