For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

I piece things together. Little signs popped up here and there over the years until eventually your special hiding place became obvious to me.’ He handed her the steaming cup. ‘I kept it to myself, of course. Didn’t tell a soul.’ He smiled. ‘Especially not you. Wouldn’t have wanted you knowing your secret hideout wasn’t so secret.’

Quentin was responsible for everything he claimed to have done, he had to be, but could she really have…killed Noah? Or was it another one of his games? The detective’s words glowed with as much warmth as ever, but her eyes were now open to their undercurrent of deceit. This man knew exactly where Noah was. Quentin hadn’t lied about that.

‘Now, Miss Wakefield, you must tell me what happened to you. Why were you in—’

‘What do you know of my brother?’ she interrupted.

The man suddenly became an art lover, Renata the exhibit. He scrutinised her, his yellowed eyes drinking in anything her straight face betrayed. She stared back, screaming inside. You KNOW. Whatever happened to Noah, whether or not Quentin’s telling the truth, you KNOW.

‘I told you, I’ll arrange for the care of your father. You don’t need to stay any longer. Millbury Peak isn’t good for you, it’s—’

‘Why?’

‘Miss Wakefield,’ he began, ‘the detonator recovered from the site of the truck explosion, it’s been analysed further. Firstly, I’ve been told a device such as this had to have been paired with a relatively low powered explosive, not of a high enough amplitude to cause such a blast.’

You KNOW.

Out came the toothpick.

‘Secondly, the detonator’s broadcasting capability was meagre. The explosive couldn’t have been detonated from further away than the convoy itself.’

Whatever happened to Noah, you KNOW.

‘These facts point to the person responsible for the explosion not only knowing there was an explosive substance in the truck to augment the strength of the blast, but also that they must have been nearby.’

‘I thought you were retired, Detective,’ said Renata. ‘Wasn’t that grand gesture in aid of finding my mother’s killer?’

His tooth-picking intensified.

‘There’s a connection between Sylvia’s death and the explosion, Miss Wakefield. I can feel it.’

‘Quentin,’ she began, forcing calm into her words, ‘you’re sure he’s not responsible?’ She curled her toes until they hurt.

‘He’s no more responsible for the truck or your mother’s death than I am for his god-awful books. Quentin’s a good man.’

Why can’t you see him for what he is? WHY? The old fool was as blind as her father. She, too, had been blind. But stopping criminals wasn’t meant to be her damned job. Her toes cracked. ‘You still haven’t answered my question.’ She locked eyes with Hector. ‘What do you know of my brother?’

Hector winced as the pick pierced gum. ‘I know nothing, Miss Wakefield. I’m sorry, but I have to go.’ She clenched her teeth behind pressed lips. He made for the door, then stopped. He popped the broken spring release of his pocket watch cover with the toothpick, then stood staring at its face for a moment. ‘Promise me one thing: think about what I said, about leaving. This town, it has nothing for you.’ He looked at her hospital gown. ‘Whatever happened to you should be warning enough. You have a life, a career. All you’ll find here is pain. I don’t want that for you.’ There was no deception in his pleas for her to leave. In those tainted eyes she saw clear desperation. ‘Leave Millbury Peak.’

Detective O’Connell’s heavy footsteps faded down the spiral staircase. She lifted one of the upturned crates. The red spade Quentin had left on her hospital bedside table lay underneath. It was clean, obviously new. He must have bought as close a replica to the real thing as he could. How could he know so much? What was his endgame?

She looked out of the narrow window in the stone.

The mist was beginning to clear.

18

Her breath became clouds of icy condensation as she entered the house. The air was rancid, as if drawn from the lungs of roadkill. Renata closed the front door against lashing rain.

A dense mustiness hung over the living room. Cold, white moonlight emanated from the windows. The wasted form of her cassocked father awaited her in the armchair, the epicentre of the room’s stenches. The bouquet of smells was its own creature, the sum of its parts beyond dissection. Urine, faeces, vomit: these may all have played a part on the vile stage of the elderly vicar’s abandonment, yet this repugnant collaboration defied definition. The room, too, had become a beast in its own right; Thomas’s gaunt form sat nestled in its bosom, these two monsters’ disparate grotesqueries finally as one. The walls of mould and rotting floorboards were as much the flesh of Thomas Wakefield as the unidentified brown soup running out from under his cassock and down his leg was the house’s lifeblood.

She folded her arms against the shape under her duffle coat, keeping it in place against the hospital gown.

It weighed heavy, so heavy.

‘Good evening, Renata,’ he spoke from the shadows, vapour lurching from his lips into the stagnant air. ‘Nice of you to join me.’

Stepping over the wheezing shape of Samson by Thomas’s feet, she went to the long-dead fireplace and began throwing scrunched up newspaper and kindling into the grate. She reached for a matchbox upon the mantelpiece, but found it to be empty. She remembered the lighter still in her pocket.

One truth: ours. Thank you, Quentin.

Lightning flashed as pain scorched her brain.

she loved him would have done anything for him she—

The lightning subsided.

‘You seem to spend your life leaving, girl.’

Her father’s voice registered but made no impact. His mutterings were meant to be loaded with the weight of a sledgehammer, every word a planetary event. Now, nothing.

Love: ripped from her. Life: a lie. Truth: denied. And