The Marriage K.L. Slater (classic romance novels TXT) 📖

then. ‘You! You’ve encouraged him to humiliate me like this. So you can tell everyone your precious son succeeded where I failed.’ He looked at me with such revulsion, I shrank back outside.

I hovered around the closed workshop door listening to them screaming at each other.

‘Why do you hate me?’ I heard Tom scream. ‘It’s not my fault you’re rubbish at mending clocks!’

It was the first time I’d heard him answer his father back, but Robert’s misplaced anger had loosened something in him.

Voices were raised and Nazreen next door called over the fence to ask if everything was OK. I reached for the door handle, and then I heard it. A tremendous crash followed by a terrible banging.

The sound of a hammer cracking into the precious timepiece. Centuries-old craftsmanship and delicate glass pulverised in a moment of jealous madness.

Tom cried out and I burst into the workshop to see Robert sitting on the floor, crying, the hammer hanging loosely from his shaking hand.

Within a month, the company he’d worked at for twenty years had let him go. The official reason given was redundancy due to a restructure but seeing as the irate clock client had taken his business elsewhere and Robert’s job was the only casualty, it didn’t take much to read between the lines as to the real reason behind his dismissal.

It hit Robert badly. He suffered a period of anxiety and mild depression. Counselling helped with his recovery and inspired him to retrain in the profession himself.

But things were never the same again between the three of us after that.

Thirty-Eight Nottinghamshire Police

October 2019

DI Irma Barrington sighed and pushed away the pile of folders in front of her. She had two members of her team off on long-term sick and a temporary replacement in the DS position, a young woman from London called Tyra Barnes.

When her boss, DI Marcus Fernwood, had retired last year, Irma had been promoted to detective inspector at the age of thirty-eight. She missed Marcus, had learned a lot from him during her days as a DS. Now she was the senior detective in charge of a team.

Tyra sauntered over to her desk. As usual, she was dressed stylishly in a navy fitted trouser suit and a white T-shirt. She wore her hair in a full Afro, which she’d flattened on top with colourful hair slides.

She waved a piece of paper at Irma. ‘New in. We got ourselves a dead body. A woman.’

‘Pulled out of the river?’ Irma said distractedly, leafing through the folders she’d sidelined. ‘An overdose?’

‘Nope.’ Tyra leaned forward and placed the note squarely in front of her. ‘The deceased is a twenty-eight-year-old local woman, single mother of a nine-year-old son. She was found with a fatal head injury. Uniform said it looks like a possible hit and run.’

Irma sighed. What a terrible end for this poor woman, and with a young son, too. Though people were always upset by the thought of a hit and run, they tended not to be as shocked as they were by a face-to-face assault or murder. Yet the cruelty of this particular crime always got to Irma.

Only two years ago, her own dad, an alcoholic, had stumbled in front of a bus and met his end. The bus driver had been inconsolable and completely blameless. But this … to plough into someone knowing at the very least that you were leaving a broken body, abandoning a person who was possibly in tremendous pain and trauma, took a special kind of wickedness in her opinion. Somewhere in the area, a young boy had lost his mother and he didn’t even realise it yet.

Irma picked up the note with details of the identity of the woman. ‘Coral McKinty,’ she said to herself. Frowning, she rolled the name around on her tongue for a second time, a growing feeling of unease taking hold. ‘Coral McKinty.’ Why did it sound so familiar?

‘The body was found in a ditch by a dog walker. It’s the road that skirts the edge of Blidworth Woods. Her car was nearby. She might have been out walking, but officers at the scene said she hadn’t got walking footwear or suitable clothing on.’ Tyra hesitated. ‘They’re checking to see if she’d broken down and was going for help or to get a phone signal.’

‘Go on,’ Irma said, sensing Tyra was suppressing something interesting.

‘Well, I took the liberty of looking up her details, and we’ve spoken to her before. To be precise, you’ve spoken to her before. Ten years ago, in connection with an assault and eventually manslaughter charge involving her then boyfriend, Jesse Wilson.’

‘That’s where I know her name from,’ Irma cried, drawing glances from some of the team working close by. ‘Tom Billinghurst, Jesse’s best friend, threw a fatal punch outside Movers. They were both local boys.’

‘Movers?’ Tyra wrinkled her nose.

‘Used to be a nightclub in the middle of town,’ Irma said. ‘I think it’s a Sainsbury’s Local now or something.’

She began tapping on her keyboard, faintly aware of Tyra saying something about the place being a bit of a backwater, and how she missed the clubs in London. Her voice sounded distant as Irma read and absorbed the words on the screen in front of her.

‘Well I never.’ She gave a low whistle. ‘Coral McKinty turns up dead near a wood with a head injury, and guess who was released from prison less than a month ago?’

‘Let me take a wild guess,’ Tyra said. ‘Tom Billinghurst?’

‘The very same. I haven’t a clue why Billinghurst would want to do her any harm and it might be a coincidence,’ Irma said. She turned off the monitor and stood up. ‘But something you should know about me, DS Barnes, is that I tend not to trust coincidences and so this sounds like a very good place to start.’ Coral McKinty’s son had already lost his father thanks to Tom Billinghurst’s lethal punch all those years ago. The grim reality was that this lad was