Funny how life turned out. They were complete opposites. Grace had plenty of money, the mortgage was paid off now, and the bills weren’t too expensive. But Grace was always sad.
Since becoming a widow two years ago, she’d been thoroughly miserable. She’d expected it to get better as time passed. That’s what people said was supposed to happen. But it didn’t.
It wasn’t so bad during the day. She could keep herself busy with gardening and crossword puzzles, and she always had a good book on the go. Books were the only things that made the darkness around her lift these days. Getting away from her own life and entering the make-believe world of fiction was a blessing.
‘Thank goodness for books,’ she muttered as she glanced down at the latest Lucinda Riley lying on the kitchen table. She planned on starting it tomorrow.
When the insomnia had first begun, she’d thought reading would make her sleepy and after a few chapters she’d drift off, but she found herself reading all night and feeling absolutely wretched the next day, dropping off and napping for twenty minutes or so at a time but never getting proper restful sleep.
So she’d given up on that idea and turned to whiskey. It wasn’t immediate, but eventually had an effect.
Jean kept insisting she should go to her GP and ask for some tablets, but there was something terribly scary and artificial about sleeping tablets. Grace had decided she’d only take them as a last resort. Jean suggested that perhaps whiskey wasn’t a wise choice and wasn’t good for Grace’s liver, to which Grace had replied she was sure that the tablets probably weren’t very good for livers either.
She took a sip of the hot milk and looked through the patio doors to her little courtyard garden. She did enjoy spending time out there and had just spent two hundred pounds on new bedding plants. Poor Roger would be turning in his grave. He’d always been a frugal man. She had him to thank for the fact she was so comfortably off now. She didn’t have to worry whether she could afford to buy new plants for the garden.
They’d intended to use some of the money they’d saved to go on holidays once Roger retired. Grace had always wanted to go to Tuscany. But it was too late for that now. She wouldn’t enjoy travelling alone. It would only remind her how lonely she was.
She carried her hot milk through to the living room and settled on the sofa with Dolly curled up beside her. Within seconds, the cat was asleep.
‘If only I found it that easy to drift off,’ Grace said, stroking the cat’s sleek fur.
She lifted her mug to take another sip of hot milk and noticed something very odd. Though the curtains were drawn, they didn’t quite meet in the middle, and there was a sliver of night sky visible from where she sat. She eased herself off the sofa, trying not to disturb Dolly, placed her milk on the coffee table and then walked across to the window.
She pulled the curtains apart to get a better look.
Her driveway faced the main B1188. It was a busy road, but at this time of night was usually very quiet.
Directly opposite was the Premier Inn. It was quite popular with business travellers, and the attached Beefeater restaurant was busy most nights. As expected for three a.m., most of the lights in the building were out – apart from the security lights. All was quiet.
Behind the Premier Inn was The Red Lion pub.
She never went there any more. Back in the early days after they moved to Canwick, she and Roger had often gone for a couple of drinks and chatted to the locals, but when the pub changed hands about fifteen years ago, things went downhill. They’d taken to getting the bus into town or walking to Washingborough instead. The pubs there were nicer.
Now that Roger was gone, she didn’t go to any pubs.
Grace didn’t have a clear view from her living room window, but she could see the roof and the chimneys. It was the strange glowing light emanating from the top of the roof that had caught her attention.
Grace scrunched up her face and stared. She’d left her glasses upstairs, so she couldn’t see properly, but from where she was standing, she could have sworn . . .
Fire.
Grace felt a stab of panic and turned, opening her mouth to call for Roger, forgetting that he couldn’t hear her and would never hear her again.
Her pulse raced, and as she rushed out into the hallway she shook her head in disbelief that she was still doing that after all this time.
Picking up the phone, she tried to keep calm as she dialled 999.
It was still dark when Karen woke. She lay there, heart thudding in her chest, crumpled sheets twisted around her shivering body. After five years the dreams had lessened, but today’s events had brought them back more fiercely than ever.
They always began with Tilly. Not a nightmare at the start, but a memory. Playing in the garden, reading her a bedtime story. Part of Karen never wanted the dreams to fade because she wanted to keep those fragmented memories. They were so real, so vivid. But they always ended with Tilly growing fainter and fainter as Karen desperately tried to stop her disappearing.
Karen stayed motionless in bed for a long time, too tired to get up, too anxious to go back to sleep.
At the first sign of dawn’s grey light, Karen shoved back the sheets, untangling her limbs. She rubbed her face and dragged a hand through her short hair on the way to the bathroom. Purposefully, she turned away from the mirror. She didn’t need to glance at her reflection to know she looked terrible. Her eyes were sore, and her body was crying out for rest.
Karen didn’t want to see the dark circles under her eyes this morning. Stepping into the shower, she turned the temperature to hot and let the spray pummel her back and shoulders. The steaming water eased some of the tension in her muscles and she reached for the shower gel, playing through yesterday’s events in her mind.
After her shower, Karen sat in the cold conservatory looking out at the garden. It was eerily quiet in the early-morning light. Her cup of tea sat on the coffee table beside her.
A blackbird began to sing, and hopped across the lawn.
Karen swallowed the last of her tea and carried her mug into the kitchen. Time for coffee now. She needed to get her mind straight for this case, but she couldn’t get Patricia Perry’s words out of her head.
Should have learned your lesson last time. Those words ran on a loop through Karen’s mind as she made the coffee.
Was Patricia just trying to push her buttons? Very likely. It could have been nothing more than a way to wind Karen up. Something a little nasty, a dig, hoping to get at Karen – and it had worked. The last time she’d interacted with the Perrys had been just before Josh and Tilly died in the car accident on Canwick Hill, and though she’d tried to stop her mind from going to those dark places, it kept returning to linger on her bleakest thoughts.
Immediately after the accident, Karen had been too shocked to think clearly, but as the days and weeks had passed she’d become unhealthily obsessed with the idea that someone else had been involved in the crash – someone important, with power and influence, who’d used their sway to hide the facts. Karen had been desperate to believe it was a cover-up, wondering if someone high-up was involved, pulling strings to make sure it was hushed up. She had gone so far as to track down the whereabouts of the local councillors, MPs, even the chief constable. But her investigations had come to nothing.
Somehow, accepting it had been an accident had been harder than investigating a cover-up. It meant accepting there was nothing she could do to avenge their deaths. She couldn’t search for justice. It was simply a random, pointless accident.