DEAD SECRET a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by JANICE FROST

  Ava’s pride and joy was a long oak table that doubled up as a dining table and work space. More often than not, it was, as it was now, piled up with papers and books, some relating to cases she was working on, some articles that she was intending to look at or was already some way through. It didn’t bother her that it looked untidy; to her it represented her work and leisure and the two were intertwined.

  She had, in fact, never used the table for entertaining; the kitchen was big enough to accommodate a drop leaf table that could sit up to six at a pinch, and Ava could count on one hand the number of occasions when she had had that many guests in her home at once. Perhaps when her brother moved in, she would make more effort.

  Ava opened the door before Taylor had a chance to knock; she noticed how he took everything in as he stepped over the threshold and kissed her on the cheek, handing her a posy of red roses, tied with a velvety red ribbon. They didn’t look like they’d been bought in a supermarket or a garage. How had he managed to conjure them up after the shops had shut up for the night, she wondered; perhaps he kept a supply at home for emergencies.

  “If you haven’t already eaten, I’ve sort of cooked,” she said, after making just the right amount of fuss over the flowers.

  “Sort of?”

  “Marks and Spencer’s — dine in for two. Main course and dessert. All ready to pop in the microwave.”

  “Wine included?”

  “Of course.”

  He followed her into the kitchen and she showed him where to find a vase for the roses, while she took two meals from her freezer and set the microwave timer, and laid the table for two. All the while she was aware of Taylor in her peripheral vision moving, quiet as a cat from cupboard to sink, to table, where he placed the posy in a cut glass vase.

  “Pretty,” Ava said, hoping that the loathing she felt tingle through her whenever he was near wasn’t detectable. Despite her utmost resolve to act normally, she stiffened as he slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him. Then she found herself responding to his kiss, a little shocked and dismayed that she was actually feeling aroused by his touch.

  Even though she had prepared for his arrival, psyching herself up, telling herself that she was working undercover, doing her job, practising detachment, compartmentalising the man and her feelings for him, her assurances now seemed hollow. What she was really doing was justifying the means to an end and it made her wonder what kind of a person she was, that she’d been willing to go so far in the line of duty.

  Shimmying out of Taylor’s amorous embrace, Ava said, “Let’s eat first.” It was at that moment that she realised she had absolutely no intention of having sex with Taylor again.

  “I’ll pour,” Taylor said, picking up the bottle of red wine that had been part of the meal deal. “It’s a little chilly in here, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Sorry,” Ava apologised, “heating’s on the blink. I’ve let the landlord know but he can’t get anyone round ‘til Friday. We can eat in the other room if you like. I’ll put the fire on.”

  Taylor touched the cold radiator, then moved to where the wall-mounted boiler was fixed to the kitchen wall. He said, “In here’s fine. You know, I could take a look at that boiler for you. I know this model; in fact I could probably tell you exactly what the fault is without even taking it apart. It’s one my father recommended not to buy when I fitted mine recently.”

  “I thought you said your dad was a plumber.”

  “Plumbing and heating engineer. Boilers, radiators, gas fires. He’s pretty versatile, and never out of work. Real work, as he calls it. He doesn’t regard a career as an academic and a writer as a proper man’s job. Always hoped I’d go into business with him; I was his weekend apprentice when I was a kid. Boring as hell but it taught me the value of money, saving for university. And the skills I picked up come in useful from time to time, of course.”

  Ava thought she detected a hint of bitterness in his tone. Clearly, Christopher Taylor was contemptuous of what he obviously regarded as his lowly background.

  It was such a mundane conversation that, for a moment Ava nearly forgot that she was almost certainly in the room with a sexual predator of underage girls. That was good. One of the reasons she had invited him to her home was to regain his trust. He had been suspicious of her questions the last time they had been together. She needed him at ease with her again, playful, teasing, but she also needed to be careful . . .

  “I’ll wait for my landlord’s bloke if you don’t mind. He probably wouldn’t approve of anyone else fiddling with his appliances, and besides, we can’t have the great professor and soon-to-be celebrated author getting his hands dirty.” The microwave pinged a second time and Ava took out their meals and gave them a stir.

  Whilst they waited the requisite five minutes for their food to finish cooking and cool, they clinked their wine glasses together and sipped, and Ava encouraged Taylor to talk about his novel. He didn’t need much, and was still droning on about it when she brought out their dessert, her favourite chocolate mousse pudding.

  It sounded unutterably dull, she thought; one of those tedious, plotless, overlong or too-short tomes that seemed to win all the literary prizes. The sort of thing Anna Foster and her friends discussed at her book group, no doubt. No wonder Neal fancied her; his bookshelves were full of that kind of thing too.

  Ava’s mind began drifting to the case, as Taylor droned on and on about his ‘work.’ Careful to smile and nod approval at Taylor as appropriate, she sifted through the layers of facts and information relating to Amy’s murder. For some reason an image of Amy’s pale, stick-thin friend, Becci, kept popping up in her thoughts, feeling puzzlingly like a warning.

  The deaths of Becci and Gary had been a tragic accident, but not suspicious. An examination of the gas fire in their bedroom had revealed a slow, insidious leak, undetectable and deadly.

  Taylor’s voice droned on, “ . . . Booker longlist . . . Not bad for a lad whose prospects, if his parents had had anything to do with it, would have been for him to unblock sinks and toilets and fit gas fires and central heating boilers for the rest of his life.”

  Ava was on the verge of pointing out that making an honest living in that way would be attractive to a lot of people when the words suddenly stuck in her throat, and she experienced one of those revelatory moments that pretentious people sometimes referred to as an epiphany.

  Once, reading a book about psychology, she had come across another word, synchronicity, and she wondered if that, along with the epiphany was what she was experiencing right there and then. A sort of double whammy of intuition and serendipity. At around the very moment that she had been picturing the tragic sight of Becci and Gary curled up together in front of their poisonous fire, Taylor had mentioned fitting gas fires with his father.

  Ava’s senses prickled with a top-heavy rush of excitement and fear. Taylor had her full attention now. As she caught his gaze across the polished surface of her Ikea table, Ava was certain she was looking into the eyes of a killer. Taylor had tampered with the gas fire at Amy’s flat and, instead of killing Amy, it had killed the hapless Becci and Gary.

  All thoughts of regaining Taylor’s trust, or putting him at ease were forgotten. Ava stood up clumsily, spilling red wine across the pretty white broderie anglaise tablecloth that had belonged to her grandmother, “S . . . sorry,” she stammered, trying to be calm but suspecting her dinner guest had already seen the sudden terror in her eyes. At that moment, she caught sight of Camden curled on the floor at her feet.

  “Camden startled me,” she said, simultaneously giving her poor cat a kick that brought him, squealing and startled, to his feet. Camden darted out from under the table and streaked across the kitchen, a whiz of black, white and orange fur disappearing out the cat flap. To her intense relief, Taylor laughed.

  Ava’s thoughts were racing. How could she prove it? Amy and Becci themselves had put off the service appointment arranged by their landlord which might have aler
ted them to the danger.

  It had been an uncommon but not impossible fault that had been found in the appliance. Someone with the appropriate knowledge and skill would have been able to make deliberate tampering look like a tragic accident. Was this enough to build a case for circumstantial evidence around? If Roxy could be persuaded to come forward, if Amy’s extravagant spending the afternoon after Simon Foster had seen her entering and leaving Taylor’s flat could be cited as evidence that she was blackmailing him. So many ifs when what she needed were certainties . . . Ava was paralysed with doubt and indecision.

  Above all, it was important to remain calm. Ava’s instincts were screaming at her to get Taylor out of her home immediately, but how to oust him without raising suspicion?

  It didn’t even occur to Ava that she was in any personal danger from the man sitting opposite her at her kitchen table. So utterly absorbed was she in working out how to expose him for the detestable killer that he was, that she almost missed what he was saying to her as she creamed dark, velvety chocolate mousse across her plate with the back of a silver dessert spoon — another hand-me-down from her grandmother. Slowly, on the back of her delayed processing, his chilling words insinuated themselves into her consciousness and she looked up.

  “ . . . so how should I dispose of you, Ava? Another dodgy gas fire would look far too suspicious so soon after the regrettable deaths of Amy’s young friends. And I doubt whether your dashing Inspector Neal could be convinced that you’re the sort of woman who might stick her head in the oven. That still leaves me with plenty of other options, some more practical than others, that wouldn’t point the finger of suspicion in my direction.”

  Ava stood up abruptly, her chair legs screeching on the flagstone tiles of the kitchen floor. Almost simultaneously, quick as a predator, Taylor was on his feet. Ava rounded the table and made a dash for the opening leading to the other room, Taylor right behind her.

  The killer heels were a mistake but there was no time to kick them off. Ava made it as far as the doorway before her ankle suddenly gave way and she went down with a thud, looking up in time to see the satisfied grin on Taylor’s face as he grabbed her arm and deftly twisted it behind her back, a move that she had executed on others so many times that she knew it was useless to struggle.

  From her undignified position on the kitchen floor, Ava looked up into the amused eyes of a cold-blooded killer.

  * * *

  Jim Neal laid his mobile phone on the desk in front of him, staring at it as though it had been the phone itself that had conveyed Anna Foster’s shocking news to him some hours ago, “Simon remembers what he saw the night Amy’s birth mother died and his sister disappeared. His father beat Debbie up, but he didn’t kill her. It was Nancy. Nancy Hill forced a load of pills down her throat and held a pillow over her face until she stopped moving.”

  Neal and Ava already knew that Nancy had abducted Amy, but the thought that she might have been Debbie Clarke's killer had not crossed his mind for a single moment. An old mentor of his had once cautioned him never to think of the past as ‘another country’ when it came to a murder investigation. Always go back to the beginning, had been his refrain, and Neal had lost count of the times throughout his own career when the old man’s axiom had been vindicated.

  The explanation for Amy’s murder reached far into the past and involved long kept secrets and hidden lies. Amy’s death was the end result of something that had been set in motion years before.

  With a flash of insight, Neal pictured Wade Bolan, heard his protestations of innocence, his sneering words about having the perfect alibi for the night of Amy’s death. He was serving a life sentence for murdering his wife; he had been suspected of abducting and killing Amy, an accusation that he had always denied. He had admitted to beating Debbie, but insisted that the injuries she sustained at his hands could not have resulted in death, maintaining, ironically, that he had beaten her enough times before to know how far to go.

  It had been the overdose that killed her, but had the pathologist overlooked signs of smothering? Neal knew that homicidal smothering was not always easy to detect. The empty bottle of pills together with her injuries might have seemed like proof enough to a tired, overworked or downright negligent pathologist.

  In the hours since Anna Foster’s revealing phone call, Neal had been busy, making calls of his own, forming hypotheses and trying to think outside the box whilst remaining grounded in solid detective practice. He had also been in touch with Ava Merry for an update on her follow up interviews regarding Bradley Turner and his movements the night of Amy Hill’s murder.

  Five minutes ago, he had received a phone call from a contact in the Met who had provided some vital information that was helping him to piece the puzzle of Amy’s murder together. Something had been niggling away at him since his visit to Wormwood Scrubs. It had to do with something the guard had said when they enquired if Simon had been to visit his father.

  No one fitting Simon’s description had visited, but the guard mentioned that Wade had recently had a visit from someone who was not a regular visitor. On a sudden impulse, or perhaps because Bradley Turner was so much in his thoughts, Neal had faxed a photograph of Bradley to his contact, who had shown it to the prison guard and received a positive identification. He had used his mother’s maiden name, Henry, which had not sounded any alarm bells.

  Earlier in the day, Ava had texted him with the suggestion that Bradley might have had time to drive to Stromford, kill Amy and be back in bed in his flat-share in Sheffield in the window of time when his mate was asleep. The pub crawl could have been a carefully constructed alibi.

  Neal sighed. His old mentor’s words about the past impacting on the present kept hammering away in his head. Bradley Turner had a role in Amy’s death, of that he was convinced, but was he the killer? Of that, Neal was less sure.

  Another explanation for Amy’s death was taking root in Neal’s mind; on the surface it seemed preposterous, too far-fetched to be real, but nevertheless . . .

  He needed to speak with Ava, get her slant on things, but he had been calling her number repeatedly over the past hour, and she hadn’t answered. Ava wasn’t the kind of person who switched off her phone on a day off, or let it go unanswered; she was far too conscientious for that. The only time she was likely to part with her mobile, was when she was in the pool and, even then, she would follow up missed calls immediately after retrieving her belongings from her locker, of this he was certain.

  Still, she had let him down on two occasions recently. Neal looked at his watch. It was still early evening. Archie and Maggie were due back from the cinema soon. If he had not managed to contact Ava by the time they arrived home, then he would swing by her place and the pair of them could talk it through.

  * * *

  Taylor smacked Ava hard across the face, bringing tears to her eyes. The force of the blow jolted her neck painfully sideways, but she turned immediately to look him in the eye, with, “Whatever way you play this, Taylor, you’re finished. What’s it going to look like if I suddenly turn up dead? Don’t you think no-one else knows of my suspicions about you?”

  “Shut up, bitch!” Taylor said, jerking her to her feet, shoving her towards a chair, forcing her to sit down, “You’re not in any position to give me advice.”

  “You tampered with the gas fire in Amy’s room and didn’t even bother to go back and repair it after she — so conveniently for you — turned up dead. You killed Becci and Gary.”

  “I didn’t know her stupid little flatmate was going to swap rooms before Amy was even in the ground.” No regret about the deaths he had inadvertently caused, only irritation that things had not gone according to plan, Ava noted.

  “If you’d stopped at raping and molesting underage girls, it would have been bad enough, Taylor, but double homicide? That’s a big step up,” Ava taunted, steeling herself for the inevitable blow.

  “Shut it!” This time Taylor used his fist, and the force of the imp
act of his hard knuckles on her face sent her senses reeling. Ava tasted copper in her mouth and felt warm blood trickling down her throat. Perhaps she would do well to stop antagonising him. Reluctant as she was to follow his order, Ava kept her mouth shut, considering her options, except her head was still befuddled from the blow, and she couldn’t think of a single one that made any kind of sense in the circumstances.

  * * *

  By the time Maggie’s cherry-red Ka pulled into the drive, it was gone eight o’clock and Jim Neal was more than a little irritated at Ava’s failure to get in touch. It wasn’t that he begrudged her a bit of off time, just that she should know that he would not call her at this hour if it were not something urgent. He felt let down again. The door slammed and Archie and Maggie burst back into his life.

  “Dad! Guess what Auntie Maggie said to Ryan Douglas’s mum?”

  “I’m all ears,” Neal said, with a quick look at his sister, who was lurking by the doorway, ready to make a quick getaway by the looks of it. Never one who could be accused of being subtle in her approach to human relations, Maggie’s outspokenness had caused Neal many a blush in front of other parents or even teachers at parents’ evenings, to which she always seemed to assume she had an automatic invitation as a sort of surrogate mother figure.

  “If they’re saying something about Archie, I’ve a right to know what it is,” she had insisted on many such occasions. And Neal couldn’t disagree given the significant role that Maggie had been playing in Archie’s life for some time now.

  “Well, Jordan Prescott tripped me up when I was running for the ball just so he could substitute for me — he didn’t ‘cos I wasn’t hurt that much,” Archie said, looking down at a bandaged knee. “His mum said it was my fault even though everyone was saying it was obvious Jordan did it deliberately. Auntie Maggie got into an argument about it and called Mrs Prescott a bloody lying old cow.”