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) 📖

this is not the time for decisions to be carried through. Let Hugh sweat for the remainder of the night and think upon his sins. Tomorrow noon we will pronounce our judgement. Now we will sleep. May you fail to dream.”

Treven watched him as he walked slowly and with care towards the rear of the hall and the curtained alcove that contained the brothers’ beds, Kendryk having laid claim to one, leaving the other to Treven. He refilled his cup with more of Osric’s medicine, grown cold now and bitter, reflecting that he should have told him to add valerian root to the mix, the herb that assured deep sleep and fended off the terrors of the night.

CHAPTER 24

Rozlyn had very little sleep. Interviews of those found in the house had gone on throughout the afternoon and into the night. The interviewees might be entitled to proper meal breaks and be subject to regulations defining the length and intensity of their questioning, but the interviewers were not; at least under Brook’s regulations. Though, to give the man his due, he’d worked harder than all the rest of them put together, Rozlyn reckoned. Everywhere she’d looked, Brook seemed to be until Rozlyn began to wonder about the efficacy of human cloning. Rozlyn sat in on several interviews and in between acted as liaison between her section and others still searching the house and with immigration, preparing for the handover. She gathered mental snapshots of these eight people; their distress and exhaustion. The conditions under which they had travelled, crammed, with others into the back of a lorry with little food and almost no water, barely seeing light or breathing fresh air until finally, somewhere in a lay-by in the south of England, they had been transferred to two MPVs. No one seemed to know where the others had gone, only that they had been promised work.

At two o’clock that morning, after ten hours in the police station, they had been moved on again. Preliminary interviews over, Brook and his people had done with them and the folk from immigration taken over. Rozlyn had helped to load the cardboard boxes filled with their belongings into the boot of a car. She’d been touched by the ordinariness of them. The family photos, combs and lipsticks, matches and foreign cigarettes. A key ring in the shape of a teddy bear with one key, small and old fashioned of the sort that might open a jewellery box or even wind a clock. She couldn’t help but wonder where the box was and what might have been inside. Gently, she ran her fingers over the pathetic little objects. She glanced over her shoulder, checking that she was alone and then picked up the key, held it self-consciously in the palm of her hand. The impressions seemed to rise up, flutter and flicker before her. A woman, holding the key, an old man, threading it onto a velvet ribbon. A little box, carved wood, something precious inside. Rozlyn smiled. The ‘precious’ objects contained within were a broken watch, a cheap ring and a bundle of pressed flowers and a photograph . . . a picture of a small child.

Reluctantly, she put the key back into the box and allowed the noise and bustle of her surroundings to break through into her thoughts.

What had she just felt now? Was that real? Or was it just a wishful projection? Induced by lack of sleep and a healthy dose of pity.

Rozlyn sighed. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, just for a second. As kids, they, she and her friends, had played a game. Just imagine, just try and imagine who had owned something before, what they had been like. Try to guess, try to see. Rozlyn had been good at it. Too good. Good enough to scare herself stupid. For the most part, she had pushed the skill away. Rozlyn had learned to filter out the more intense experiences or pass them off as mere imagination, though sometimes the impressions she first received on arriving at the scene of some violent crime or other were overwhelming.

* * *

Rozlyn drove home and grabbed a couple of hours sleep, then early on the Friday morning, a week after Charlie Higgins had been found dead, Rozlyn returned to see Ethan Merrill.

A dank, drizzly night had given way to a bright, if still misty morning. This, Rozlyn thought, had been a magnificent autumn; the red earth of the newly ploughed fields almost matched the hawthorn for brilliance. The gold of the field maples caught the early sun as it broke through the mist and set light to the hips and haws of the hedgerows. There seemed more than usual this year. More berries and seeds and she wondered if her grandfather was right and this presaged a hard winter. The old man reckoned that the land always knew these things, anticipated the cold harshness of the coming season. Though, in her grandfather’s case, Rozlyn thought, this feeling, this knowing, was probably merely a reaction to having moved from the mild south to the cold of New York winters and his observations of nature limited, in reality, to his regular walks in Central Park and the note he took of changes in his tiny, heavily planted yard.

Stamford was still closed when Rozlyn arrived and parked close to the George Hotel as she’d done that last time. She paid for a couple of hours and then set off on a slow walk to Ethan’s shop, realising that she’d misjudged the time and it was only just gone nine in the morning. She noted, glancing at closed doors as she passed, that many of the more tourist-oriented stores didn’t open until ten and wondered if Ethan’s poky little place went by that timing. After all, it was hard to see what anyone would buy there anyway, never mind what anyone would want at nine in