No Place Like Home Jane Renshaw (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📖

to the fireplace, from which you could see an old apple tree and the hedge, and the slate roof of Sebastopol, the tiny neighbouring croft house. Bram loved that name, and the fact that it dated the cottage so precisely to the Crimean War, to the 1850s. A veteran from that war, Bram speculated, had come home and built himself a little croft, and settled down to hoe vegetables and keep hens and a cow and a pig, and never have to fight again. Had the name Sebastopol been a sort of boast, a reminder to his neighbours that here in their midst was a war hero? Or had the name been a reminder of what was now behind him, a reminder to be thankful, every waking hour, that he was here and not there?

Bram had been sentenced to eight years but had already served one and would be home in another three, all being well. He was in Porterfield Prison in Inverness, just an hour’s drive away.

The conviction had been for manslaughter, not murder, given that Finn had been terrorising the family for weeks and Bram had, at least initially, been in fear of his life. He’d got the higher end of the sentencing range, though, because he’d left Finn for dead in the shed and failed to call an ambulance, and then perverted the course of justice by disposing of the body and trying to cover up what had happened.

He had kept Kirsty out of it completely. Kirsty had no idea, he claimed, what he had done. Because Bram had pled guilty there had been no trial, only a sentencing hearing, and it had felt so wrong, sitting there in court listening to Bram take everything on himself. He had stood there so bravely in the dark grey suit she had pressed for him, the new white shirt, the blue tie he had worn at their wedding. Her Bram. Her wonderful Bram. There was no one in the world like him.

She had thought, when she’d first met him in those bleak early days in the halls of residence, that he was like Scott – a good person, a person with integrity – but she’d had no idea just how good Bram Hendriksen was, how selfless and modest and funny and kind and loving.

She had wanted to jump up and tell the sheriff all that, tell him what a good man Bram was, how he had always looked after her and the kids, and that was what he was doing now.

But of course she hadn’t.

Bram had told the police the truth about what had happened to Dad, not expecting to be believed, but after Dad’s body had been found, a witness had come forward who had seen Dad attacking Bram on the bridge. This witness had been a couple of years below Dad at school, been bullied by him, and gone in terror of him ever since. There was no way he was going to try to intervene – or even tell the police what he’d seen, until it had been confirmed that David McKechnie was dead.

Kirsty felt herself tensing up whenever she thought about Dad and what he had done. What he had been. She had loved him, of course she had, and he had loved her – but his love had been a fierce thing, his need to protect her so all-consuming that it had come close to destroying her life, not once but twice.

After Owen’s murder, Kirsty had been terrified to start another relationship in case Dad turned against her new boyfriend too. When she and Bram had married, though, and started their lives together in London, it had seemed possible that it would be okay. Once Dad got to know Bram, surely everything would be fine?

She still couldn’t believe that Dad had tried to kill Bram!

Her stomach plummeted.

But she’d promised Bram she wouldn’t dwell on that.

Onwards and upwards was his new motto. Against all her expectations, Bram seemed to be adjusting well to life behind bars. All her fears that he wouldn’t cope had proved groundless, and really, she should have anticipated that he’d be fine. He was so much stronger than his easy-going personality suggested. And people liked Bram. Even those scary criminals liked him, and Kirsty had helped the process along by chatting to other prisoners’ partners and parents in the waiting room, laying it on thick about how their kids, one only nine years old, had been threatened by the yob Bram had accidentally killed. And he had a lovely cellmate, an older man who was in for fraud, whom Bram was teaching to play the guitar.

Kirsty made herself a cup of cocoa and one for Max, and opened the back door to call him in. He was in the tiny garage that faced the side of the cottage across the gravel drive. The garage was a wooden 1920s original, far too small for the Discovery, so they’d had it insulated and Max and Phoebe shared it as a ‘studio’. Max had partitioned part of it off as a dark room, and the walls of the rest of it were covered in his photos and Phoebe’s artwork. Max had got a taste for photography after he’d started documenting their lives in pictures for his dad, and was now experimenting with old-fashioned film as well as digital.

The double doors were standing open, and there were moths fluttering in the light cast by the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Max was hunched over his laptop adjusting the light in a photograph of a sparrow. He straightened when Kirsty came into the garage, and smiled, and took the mug of cocoa from her.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

She was going to miss him so much!

His gap year was happening, although it had been a struggle to persuade him to go ahead with it; a struggle to persuade him that she and Phoebe would be fine without him.

‘Looks like Phoebe’s burning the midnight oil again,’ he said, nodding up