Hana Du Rose Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4

by Bowes, K T

  “Always paper towards the window,” was Vik’s advice, after she papered the other way and the light cast shadows on the lines where the paper joined. “Next time take the bloody light switches off the wall,” was his other comment, when tired and jet lagged he piled through the door looking for food and a good night’s sleep. But that was a long time ago and they had lived a lifetime since then. He grew into a good Christian husband with a lot of mentoring from some awesome godly men and Hana loved him more in the end, than she ever dreamed she could in the beginning. Why was it that his cruellest words still lingered in her heart, burying the kind moments under resentment and sadness?

  Still, she papered towards the window anyhow and carefully detached the plastic cover from the sockets behind the bed, cutting a cross in the paper with the scissors and then trimming it so the plastic fitted snugly over the gaps. The tiny, delicate pattern required little waste of the expensive paper and matched easily, so Hana used up three of the five rolls and was half way across the second wall, when she heard her phone chirp from the kitchen. The message read, ‘Can’t get in,’ and was from Logan.

  It was dark outside and he probably hadn’t seen the intercom. Hana pressed the remote on the wall, counting the ten seconds it gave visitors to get through before shutting itself again. She wondered what would happen if the vehicle stalled half way through. Would the gates hit it? She didn’t know and could have kicked herself for not asking the fitters, especially as it would undoubtedly be her it happened to.

  By the time Logan laboured up the incline, Hana was already looking out of the front window in the living room, darkness swirling around her. She heard Logan’s bike engine strain up the hill as he kept it in low gear, seeing it finally round the bend, its lights picking out the narrow driveway up to the house. He looked intimidating in his bike gear and his movements as he put the heavy machine on its stand, were slow and careful. His body language oozed tiredness. Logan unzipped his jacket after taking off his gloves. It was cold outside, the temperature having dropped with the sinking of the watery sun and he removed his helmet and sat it on the ground while he stuffed his gloves into the pannier at the back of the bike. He squeezed the bike keys into his tight jeans pocket and picked up the helmet, taking the steps up to the porch two at a time.

  Hana watched him silently with such an overwhelming feeling of safety and happiness, she almost didn’t get to the door before he knocked. Greeted with a smiling face, a hug and a kiss that conveyed raw love, the tired visitor was instantly gratified and glad he had the courage to make some of the phone calls he had that day.

  Logan did not utter a single word of criticism about Hana’s wallpapering. “What an amazing job,” he gushed. “You’re a woman of many talents. You’ve nearly finished.”

  Logan joined in and helped Hana finish the task while they chatted about Friday’s appointment with the registrar. Hana seemed extremely calm about the whole thing and though he watched her carefully, Logan was given no sense of doubt or alarm by her behaviour. Later, brushing a sticky strand of hair away from her face, Logan kept his hand gently on Hana’s cheek, stroking the soft skin with his thumb. He looked at her with such seriousness she felt her heart give a little skip of fear. “Would you be able to put Tiger into the cattery for a couple of nights after the wedding?”

  Hana looked across at the cat, currently sat on the double bed, all four paws underneath him, watching their activities out of half slitted eyes. She pulled a face. “Not sure. Maybe, but only if you put him in the-you-know-what.”

  Displaying his curious sixth sense for trouble, Tiger thudded onto the wooden floor and left the room rapidly. Logan didn’t fancy his chances. “Yeah, bags not.”

  “Why?”

  Logan shrugged, kissed Hana’s nose and refused point-blank to discuss it. Hana tried tickling him, but got paste from his brush on her face for her pains so left him alone, evidently planning some big surprise by the looks of him. The bedroom looked stunning when at ten o’clock, Logan finished putting the last coat of paint on the ceiling. The room glowed with the exquisite colours and if the house had been alive, it would have swelled with pride at the loveliness of its master bedroom. Hana could hardly wait to see the four-poster in it with all its voile swags and side tables.

  “What time’s it coming?” Hana asked for the third time and Logan smiled.

  “Four o’clock on Thursday, same as last time you asked me.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Hana screwed her face up and looked apologetic. “Will we have time to put it all together? It might take hours. My old bed can go into the double spare room.”

  “Good idea,” Logan said, his back to her as he rubbed out the last air bubble, shaking off the image of the Indian man on the tube train. Logan gritted his teeth, remembering how Hana reached out for the long, brown fingers in her distress and Vik had looked out of the window, wiping at his bleeding lip and ignoring her questing fingers. Logan took a deep breath and fought the urge to smash the wooden double bed into pieces and use it for firewood.

  The clearing up operation went slowly as washing brushes side by side in the kitchen turned into something uncontrollably steamy, sparked by a stray kiss. “You have to stop doing this to me,” Logan said, looking distinctly uncomfortable as Hana teased him with a seductive bite to his bottom lip. “Otherwise I’m not going to be able to wait until Friday.”

  “Shut up and wash the brushes,” she ordered, waiting until his hands were fully immersed in the sticky water and raising his tee shirt to bite the skin just above his waist. Logan moaned and diffused his frustration by rubbing sticky fingers through Hana’s hair and making her cross. She wasn’t impressed.

  “Well stop taunting me then,” Logan threatened. “Or you’ll be sorry.”

  Hana stuck her tongue out and then bit him again through his clothes, locking herself in the bathroom until Logan cooled off. “That won’t help you,” he jibed from the hallway. “There’s not many locks I can’t break into, especially stupid ones like that.”

  “Whatever!” Hana giggled from her safe position sitting on the side of the bath.

  After clearing up, Logan made the journey cross country back to Gordonton on his bike, wondering how he could sort out the cat for the weekend without getting his hands scratched to pieces.

  The week crawled by for Hana in a haze of disgustingly early mornings, listening to the international cricket scores on Angus’ car radio at that ungodly hour and late nights when he couldn’t get away before six or seven. For Logan it raced by in a blur of teaching, marking and spending the evening with Hana, while during the day organising some big stuff she had no idea about, mainly on his cell phone in deserted school corridors.

  Wednesday was punctuated by Peter North getting sconned by a cricket ball full in the face and having to be carted off to the emergency room for the morning. He came back from hospital with a very unhappy Dobbs moaning loudly in his ear. “The moral of the story is: don’t be changing the music on your iPod whilst standing in the cricket nets, especially when supervising Year 9s!”

  Pete looked as though his headache was Dobbs induced, rather than anything to do with the blow on the head. “Two bloody hours he’s said the same thing over and over,” Pete grumbled. He hurled himself down at Hana’s desk and she wrinkled her nose as a hail of dandruff fluttered down onto her back rest.

  The child on the handle end of the bat was reportedly devastated, but Pete was upbeat and cheerful, especially after a sympathetic Henrietta informed him by text she was flying up to look after him for a few days. For the love stricken Pete, it was clearly worth the black eyes and cut on his forehead, to be pampered and bacon-buttied to death by his larger than life girlfriend. Instead of the expected reprimand, the careless Year 9 was thanked and offered a fluffy, misshapen Kit-Kat from the teacher’s desk drawer. “It’s all fine, boy,” Pete said, handing over the booty. The boy watched him wide-eyed, the ‘sorry’ dying on his lips.

  “But Mr Dobbs said I had to co
me and...”

  “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about it.” Pete smiled as a globule of blood dangled from the end of his nose, his eyes blood red and eerie looking. “I’m all good, see.” He smiled and the child paled as the stitches on Pete’s forehead did a funny jiggle in line with his eyebrows. He looked down at the bent chocolate bar, the wrapper torn at the corner and the whole thing melted and reformed into something quite odd.

  “Thanks, sir,” he said and backed out of the door.

  Pete’s day didn’t improve much as Caroline Marsh commandeered his chair for a boy she was talking to. “Oh let me tell you something,” he said to Hana, making no attempt to move from her desk. Hana smiled politely and continued handwriting a list at the careers table. “Henrietta washed one of her dresses with our stuff and when she hung it on the line to dry, she discovered four of Boris’s odd socks and one of Logan’s tee-shirts had snuck into it during the cycle.” Pete dipped forward giggling and the blood clot shot onto the floor, unleashing a flood of red stuff.

  Hana stuffed a whole box of tissues under his nose and Caroline and the student stopped to watch. “Do something!” Hana barked at her and the blonde woman shrugged and carried on staring.

  “I thought you would have been used to that by now.” She smirked and Hana detected something else in her demeanour, like she was enjoying a secret at Hana’s expense. The student bounced out of his seat and dragged another box of tissues under Pete’s haemorrhaging nose, in time for Hana to drop the ruined tissue box into the dustbin.

  “It doppin’ dow,” Pete muttered through the mountain of tissues underneath his face.

  “Pardon?” Hana squeaked.

  Pete pulled his face out of the small hole in the box, the blood reduced to a trickle. “I ded it doppin’ dow.”

  “Ok...erm...whatever that was. It looks like it’s stopping now,” Hana said, rubbing his back gently. The Year 13 looked green and ill and excused himself, grabbing his bag as he passed Caroline.

  “Thanks, miss,” he said as he bailed out on her.

  “De dess oz dink,” Pete said and smiled up at Hana. He had blood in his teeth. “It dook dike it dos a derson.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Oh for goodness sake!” Caroline slapped the desk with her open hand. “You really are a stupid bimbo, aren’t you? Logan will never stay with you, not in a million years and if you can’t stand the sight of blood, you’ll be useless around the Du Rose boys.” She gathered up her files and paper, pulling her skirt into place with a sexy wiggle. “And what the dumbass is saying is, ‘the dress was pink! And it looked like it was a person.’ Although who loses that much blood and still wants to talk about his fat girlfriend’s tent dresses, I have no idea. Losers, the lot of you.” Caroline left the room in a huff of perfume and temper.

  Hana bit her lip and looked at Pete, whose face was turned up towards hers like a broken puppy dog. “It’s ok,” Hana patted him on his wispy hair. “You’re not a dumbass or a loser.”

  “Do ar.”

  “Hey?”

  “I du dundass un du de dooser.”

  Hana peered at Pete as his meaning sank in. Then her mouth opened in indignation. She reacted by slapping him on the back of the head. “Charming! I am not a loser. Fine! Sort yourself out now and get off my chair!” Hana’s slap had planted his face back into the hole in the top of the tissue box and he stepped across the room like a blind person, the box stuck over his nose.

  Hana slumped into her chair in horror, ignoring the littering of dandruff on its material surface. She sat transfixed for a moment. Oh my goodness, a dress! What am I going to wear on Friday?

  A decade or two ago there would have been a number of choice swear words in the sentences running through her head, but the older and wiser woman kept those under wraps while she silently panicked. She had no vehicle and only one day left to sort out her disastrous omission of a critical detail. Had she not been desperate, she may never have typed and sent the text which would later cause a number of significant difficulties. ‘HELP ME,’ she wrote, in capitals, sending the message before she really processed the implications. Anka had ignored all previous attempts Hana made to get in touch with her and so part of Hana’s rashness was swayed by the belief she had changed her phone number.

  “Wots wrong?” came the immediate reply.

  Hana felt both gratified and an overwhelming sense of oops at the same time. Now she’d complicated things! How should she reply? Typing and then deleting over and over, Hana realised she had caused herself an enormous problem in her haste. Anka was with Tama who was a relative of Logan’s. If Anka told him about the wedding before Logan told his parents, there would be hell to pay and it would all be her fault. But she had gone so far down the track that tempting as it was to stop texting and delete Anka’s number, an enormous part of her cried out for the friendship that was theirs not so long ago. She ached to feel that genuine female closeness and ease of company they shared. Against her better judgment, Hana replied, ‘Going to a wedding. Need you to help me dress for it. Please don’t ignore me. Help me?’

  There was no reply until just before the last lesson and Hana gave up and put her phone back in her handbag in the bottom drawer. It was only as she crossed the room with some brochures for the bin that she heard the phone’s muffled beep from inside the drawer.

  ‘12 Brook Street,’ said the reply, ‘walk across the back fields through Fairfield School and I will be home by the time you get there.’

  Hana sat for a moment savouring the response she had not expected to get. She left a message with Angus’ personal assistant to let him know she was nipping out but would be back before he left at six and then texted Logan to let him know she would be going somewhere else after work and not to worry.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t noticed her phone only had one battery cell and it died quietly and without fanfare in its little pocket in the mulberry coloured handbag. Hana didn’t get the panicked text from Logan asking what was wrong, nor did she realise she was unwittingly incommunicado.

  Chapter 49

  At the final bell, Hana clattered downstairs on her high heels and clip-clopped across the wet grass, trying not to get her shoes wedged into the soft soil of the playing fields. Boys milled all around and momentarily, she forgot she should have been careful about her own security as she listened to the conversations going on all around her. Boys walked along head down, concentrating hard on some element of their lives which eluded everyone else, while others jostled and chatted in tight, insular groups. At the end of the field Hana was unsure where to go, but followed a group of boys heading to the right.

  After an exceptionally long walk, punctuated by a ride on the Orbiter bus and another long walk, Hana eventually recognised where she was and found Brook Street. Number twelve was undoubtedly a rental property. The grass out front was more weed patch than lawn and the paint work was shabby and in need of loving care on an urgent basis. Paint peeled away from the front door and the bell possibly never worked, as Hana pushed it fruitlessly. Wondering what she should do, Hana hung around awkwardly on the porch until a car spun quickly onto the driveway and pulled up next to the house.

  Anka slipped out of the vehicle. It was an old Toyota, so obviously Ivan got custody of the nice car. She had lost weight considerably but was as slickly dressed as ever, gliding up the steps on shoes which were even higher than Hana could ever dream of wearing, other than in an enclosed space involving herself and a mirror.

  There was no greeting. Anka moved past Hana and shoved her key into the lock, pushing the door open with a great creak. Inside, the house was clean and after she laid her bag down on the hall table, Anka indicated to Hana she should come in. Hana bent down to undo the buckle across her shoes, but Anka said sharply, “Leave them on. It’s cold,” before heading off down the corridor towards another room. Hana hovered, not sure what to do next. Anka’s face popped back around the door to ask, “Would you like a drink?”

  Hana’s fraught n
erves flooded with relief. It wasn’t a truce, but it was a step forward. An hour later, after coffee and a long and detailed explanation of everything that happened in the last few weeks, Hana and Anka went some way towards repairing their fractured relationship. “I’m sorry I abandoned you.” Anka lowered her eyes to the untouched biscuits on the plate between them and looked upset. She clearly had problems of a magnitude unfathomable from her calm exterior. “I work at an osteopath’s offices,” she told Hana, changing the subject. “I’m actually enjoying the job. It’s less stressful. So, whose wedding are you going to?”

  Tama was evidently living in the house with her, judging by the size of the socks on the airer by the back door and the soccer boots on newspaper underneath. Hana was honest about the wedding, but also swore Anka to secrecy about everything she told her. “I won’t tell,” Anka promised and Hana had come too far not to believe her.

  Hana spent most of the next hour in her bra and knickers, trying on outfits one after the other. She began to get desperate, believing she might end up in her jeans and paint stained tee shirt, greeting a bewildered Logan at the registry office. “He’s going to think I didn’t bother!” she wailed.

  From the back of the wardrobe, Anka dug out a bottle green dress which she confessed to having never worn. “Something in the earthiness of the green against my skin made me look dirty, but against your striking auburn hair, it could look beautiful.” Anka held it out to her friend and Hana looked at it and hesitated. “This is it, Hana. This is the only thing you haven’t tried on. I have nothing else.”

  It was fitted and dainty, made of a swishy fabric which swayed when the wearer moved. The material was of a single colour but layered so that shadows were cast, giving darker and lighter tones. It was nipped in at the waist and showed a lot of leg, but it was also long sleeved and would keep out the autumnal chills as Hana came and went from the registry office. Anka broke open a new packet of sheer tights which gave a suntanned look without being tacky and handed Hana two of the three pairs. Hana tried to hand one back, but Anka waved it away. “Take both in case of last minute ladders.”