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) 📖

Rozlyn smiled weakly. “Richards reckoned he had friends in high places when I disturbed him the other day.”

“Aye, well fuck ‘em.” Brook frowned. “My office, tomorrow. You can’t drive, I’ll arrange a car.” He struggled out of the nursing chair. Standing, he seemed to fill the room, broad shoulders and height obscuring the door. “Tread on some interesting toes, don’t you? You got something against the rich and famous.”

“Oh, not in particular. I just don’t like assholes.”

Brook considered. “Wondered why you were never my number one fan,” he said. “Tomorrow, then, and I want the full story, no political omissions.”

“Would anyone like some tea,” Cassie asked from the doorway. “We’ve got biscuits.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ethan approved. The doorbell rang again. “I’ll get that, Cassie, it’s probably the doctor.”

“I’d better tell the Chief Super it wasn’t you, then,” Brook sneered as Ethan left.

“Not me what?”

“Traipsing about the countryside with a bloke carrying a sword?”

Rozlyn’s heart beat an odd rhythm, but she managed to shake her head and keep her voice steady. “Sorry, can’t help.” She frowned. “What the hell time is it?”

Footsteps on the stairs heralded the arrival of the doctor. He glanced at the uniformed officers and Brook and ordered them from the room. Brook hovered in the doorway. “Really sick, is she?” He sounded disappointed, Rozlyn thought.

“It’s not life threatening,” the doctor said cheerfully, “Actually, I think the fever’s beginning to break. Your skin’s damp. Better than yesterday afternoon.” He turned his attention to Brook and it was clear that he must have been briefed by Ethan. “Better, but certainly not fit enough to be anywhere she shouldn’t. She’s barely capable of making it to the bathroom on her own and that’s just next door.”

Rozlyn watched as the doctor ushered her visitors out of the door. She could hear Brook talking to Ethan, could catch the odd word but that was all. Rozlyn closed her eyes. She heard the shop door open and then close, the bell jangling until Ethan reached to still the sound. She wondered if Brook and co. had passed Jasper the guard cat unscathed and found herself hoping not. The doctor hemmed and hummed as, Rozlyn had found, doctors seemed to do, then told her he was pleased with her progress and went on his way.

Rozlyn could not help but wonder at the strangeness of a doctor making house calls in this day and age and at this time of night and she wondered if that was a favour to Ethan — she vaguely recalled that he had said this man was a good friend — or if she’d be presented with the bill later.

Brook had left the main light on and the only way to switch it off was to cross the room. Slowly, head throbbing like it had the shop bell inside of it, Rozlyn sat up in bed and swung her legs over the side. Something bothered her. She lifted the fingers of her right hand to her face and looked closely at them. Mud caked beneath the fingernails and smeared across the palm. She remembered falling . . . reaching out, her hand breaking the fall and sliding in the mud.

Her coat hung on the back of the door, but her clothes . . . she was sure that Ethan had hung her shirt and trousers on a hanger and suspended that on the wardrobe door. Cassie had lent her a nightshirt and she wore that now, no sign of mud on that at least.

Rozlyn stumbled across the room and fumbled in the pocket of her leather coat. The spear. God, she still had the spear. Brook would go spare.

Then in the other pocket. She had a terrible premonition of what she would find even before her fingers touched that cold surface. She was sitting on the bed with the disk of bright metal resting in her palm when Ethan returned.

“Ah,” said Ethan. “So, that’s what you found.”

“You knew?”

“Not exactly. I went out for a while so I missed you leaving. Clever of you to find your car; you were hardly fit to pay attention when I told you where I’d parked it. Cassie took your clothes to be washed, by the way. They were soaked through and caked with mud. Red mud. I guess from Mark Richards’ land.”

“I thought I dreamed all that.”

Ethan smiled. “Apparently not. What your boss said about a man being with you . . . ?”

“No. No one. I mean who?” she broke off, recalling the image of the red-haired sword-wielding man who had run beside her. “I dreamed of someone,” she said. “And maybe I hit out with my torch, injured someone.”

“My torch,” Ethan said.

“Your torch? I took your torch?”

“We had a major power outage last winter. Cassandra does not like the dark. Since then we’ve kept torches in the bedrooms and on the landing.”

“Oh.” Rozlyn didn’t know what to make of it all. She looked more closely at the brooch. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It is. Do you know how you found it?”

She shook her head and then said, “in my dream, which turns out not to have been a dream, I was trying to think how Charlie would have thought.”

“You think your friend stole this from Mark Richards?”

“I don’t know. I mean . . . Look, we know there have been a series of thefts and that our Art and Antiques division think Donovan Baker was responsible. I found out earlier this evening that Mark Richards and Donovan Baker know one another. And I found evidence that Charlie had been there.”

Ethan looked unsurprised. “Baker and Richards move in the same circles,” he said. “Both are collectors and they belong, or should I say belonged, to the same organisations. Donovan has not