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

the blood spatters all over the walls, on the ceiling… Of course. That couldn’t have been caused by Finn himself, stumbling about. That had been caused by an attack. By a weapon connecting with a bloodied wound.

‘Then I locked the door and put the key under the stone. Was it…’ Phoebe blinked. ‘Was it manslaughter, what I did, like Dad’s in jail for? If the police find out, will I go to jail too? I hid the hammer. I hid it in my bag and then when I was at Grannie and Grandad’s I took it to a bin on the street. And my pyjamas. They had blood on them.’

Kirsty shook her head, and pulled the covers back up round Phoebe gently, as if to cocoon her from it, from this terrible truth that seemed to press in on them from all sides. ‘Listen, darling. You must never, ever tell anyone else about this. Not even Dad or Max or Grannie. This has to be something only you and me know about.’

‘So I won’t get in trouble?’ Phoebe whispered.

‘That’s right. You won’t get in any trouble if it’s just our secret. You have to forget about it, as if it never happened. As if it was a bad dream.’ Her fingers stroking Phoebe’s hair were trembling.

‘Okay, Mum,’ said Phoebe, with a little smile. ‘It was just a bad dream.’

Kirsty, numbly, took her hand. ‘You were only nine years old. You didn’t understand what was happening. You didn’t mean to hurt him.’

‘Yes, I did. I’m glad Finn’s dead so he can’t hurt Dad or Bertie or Max or the crows again. He was a psychopath. He had it coming.’

Kirsty made a wordless sound and stood, but still she clung on to Phoebe’s hand, still she squeezed it, offering a reassurance that, it seemed, her daughter did not need.

He had it coming.

It was what Dad had said about Owen.

It was what he’d said about Finn. And, in the days leading up to Finn’s death: ‘He’s got it coming,’ she could remember him saying about the intruder, in Phoebe’s hearing. Not once, but several times.

Oh no.

Oh God.

It was as if he was in the room with them, an unseen, triumphant presence.

Dad.

THE CHILD WHO NEVER WAS

Her child has been taken. But no-one believes her.

Sarah’s beautiful baby son Oliver has gone missing. And she will do anything – anything – to get him back.

But there’s a problem. Everyone around Sarah, even her beloved identical twin, Evie, tells her she never had a son, that he’s a figment of her imagination, that she’s not well, she needs help.

And on one level, they’re right, Sarah does need support. She has suffered massive trauma in the past and now she’s severely agoraphobic, very rarely leaves the house, avoids all contact with people.

But fragile though she is, Sarah knows deep in her heart that Oliver is real, that the love she feels for him is true.

And that can only mean one thing – someone has been planning this. And now they’ve taken her baby.

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PROLOGUE

The biggest risk, of course, was that some busybody would see the smoke and in due course mention it to the police. In fact, she wouldn’t put it past the village busybody-in-chief, Mrs Bowles across the lane at The Laurels, to see the smoke and decide to investigate, to come and see what was burning, to ‘pop over just to check everything was okay’ – because autumn or winter was the proper time for a bonfire, not the middle of June. Not the middle of the breeding season. Only a barbarian would cut back and burn vegetation while birds might still be nesting in it.

But it had to be a bonfire.

She could hardly dump a binbag of blood-soaked clothing in the charity recycling bank at the village hall. Or in their own or a neighbour’s wheelie bin. The police were unlikely to devote much in the way of resources to the investigation, but she couldn’t count on them being slack enough to neglect the basics.

If she’d had a bit more time she could have jumped in the car and driven thirty miles and left the bag in a random bin no one was going to search.

But she had no time.

And complete incineration was the safest option.

She wanted to know that it was gone. That all trace of what she had done was gone. Maybe then she could get into the mindset of the person she needed to be when the police got here, like an actor, a method actor inhabiting her role so completely that she almost believed it herself, almost believed that she was just a poor traumatised soul who was as bewildered by the whole thing as anyone else.

The traumatised bit was going to be easy enough.

Her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the matchbox into the tangle of sticks and logs that she’d built up and had to rootle around in them to retrieve it. Striking a match was the next challenge, but she managed it, she managed to hold the wavering flame to the scrunched-up newspaper until it caught and flared.

Only when the fire was roaring away, the centre glowing orange with a heat so fierce that she had to stand back from it, did she throw on the first of the garments.

The saturated T-shirt.

It smouldered for a while, damping down the flames under it, sending streams of billowy white smoke up over the yew hedge that screened this workaday part of the garden from the lawns and the house. Then, when the moisture had evaporated off, the material caught and started to char, permeating the air with the aroma –

She staggered away from the fire, bile rising as, in a vain attempt to dislodge the smoke trapped there, she forced a long breath out through her nose.

But then she had to breathe in again and oh God.

Yes.

What she was breathing, what