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For All Our Sins. T.M.E. Walsh
Читать онлайн.Название For All Our Sins
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781474038072
Автор произведения T.M.E. Walsh
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Серия DCI Claire Winters crime series
Издательство HarperCollins
Michael’s mind drifted back to one particular memory.
His mother.
She’d been wearing the same dirty clothes for a week. Her hair was tangled, her lips scabbed and sore, her soul torn.
She’d just kicked out another worthless boyfriend and the house looked ransacked, dirty, unloved.
A sad place to be, to exist.
He remembered that they were facing eviction. At the time he’d had no idea what that meant. He’d just wanted his mother to stop crying, something that rarely happened.
There were always tears in their strained existence.
There were no sweet bedtime stories, no teddy to clutch against his young skin to offer comfort from the monsters that were literal, not something imagined.
He remembered the song she used to sing to him.
A beautiful melody that would quickly dwindle into a sorrowful lament.
‘…My breast is as stone, my breath smells earthly strong; And if you kiss my cold clay lips, your days they won't be long…’
Then his mother would kiss him, a cool caress on his lips. It wasn’t the tender kiss that should come from a mother’s love for her child, nor was it born from passion – a sinister unnatural incestuous longing.
Michael closed his eyes.
He heard his mother’s voice in his head, and for a moment he was back there, in that old house, a mere child. He could feel the gentle vibrations of her breath against soft innocent skin, as she leaned over him.
‘…The stalk is withered and dry, sweetheart, and the flower will never return. And since I lost my own sweetheart, what can I do but mourn?’
There was death in her voice. The nightly ritual for her became something entirely different to him, but it was never something he could accurately explain.
‘…When shall we meet again, sweetheart? When shall we meet again?…’
Later he found out that this was an old English folk song. It was about a man who mourns his true love. When the spirit of his lost love complains she cannot rest, he begs a kiss. She tells him it would kill him and he should be content to be alive.
It took Michael about ten years from the last night she sang it to him to realise this nightly ritual was really about his mother’s loss of his father, who had died suddenly aged thirty, while she still carried Michael in her womb. She’d never recovered from it and longed for a way out.
The melancholy that surrounded his mother had threatened to swallow them both whole, and all of it born from her own tormented mind.
Michael’s eyes flicked open.
His mouth was dry and his eyelids were heavy.
He’d tried to erase this memory altogether, but it was as if it was to be forever etched on his soul.
He gazed from the window again. He watched Robby disappear from view.
The sound of his phone ringing brought him back to the here and now. It was Claire.
He didn’t need her messing with his head any more today.
He killed the call.
Claire stared at the screen of her BlackBerry. The call she’d placed moments before had diverted to voicemail too quickly, not leaving much time to ring, so she knew Michael had hung up on her.
She’d spent the day organising her team, and compiling everything they knew about Father Wainwright, and after the draining experience at Gladstone Court, she was exhausted.
She walked out of her office and surveyed the incident room, eyes landing on the photographs on the opposite wall of the room. Photographs of Wainwright were spread out across it, pinned together like some twisted jigsaw, the pieces yet to match smoothly. It was a gruesome collection showing one of the worst traits that lurked inside the rarest of individuals.
Claire had seen some violent crime scenes before, but she was entering uncharted territory with this one.
She checked her BlackBerry in case there was anything from Michael.
Nothing. No email, no text.
No explanation.
She knew it was handing the Hargreaves case over that’d got him pissed at her, something she expected would be the case. But still she wondered if the underlying issue ran much deeper, more personal than either he or she were comfortable to admit to.
‘Guv,’ DC Harper said, interrupting her thoughts.
‘Gabe,’ she said, trying to shake the sadness from her.
‘CCTV picked Wainwright up in Toralei’s restaurant the night before he was murdered. With his housekeeper.’
Claire exchanged a look with Harper. ‘Do many priests go to dinner with their housekeepers, I wonder?’ she said, voice dry.
‘I’m still getting over the fact priests can afford housekeepers.’
Claire smiled. ‘He’s got no dependants, invested his money well…’
‘I’m still having a hard job seeing it.’
Claire’s BlackBerry pinged from inside her pocket. She reached for it, saw a new text message had come through.
Sorry. Bad time to talk. I’ll email you later.
Claire frowned at the words.
‘You all right?’ Harper said.
‘It’s Diego.’
‘I take it he’s no longer MIA?’ he said, smiling.
The BlackBerry pinged again. Claire flushed.
xxx M xx.
‘Give us five minutes, will you, Gabe?’ She walked away before Harper could answer.
It was around 7:30pm when Claire returned home. She was tired and pissed. Michael couldn’t be reached and she was having a hard job explaining his disappearing act to her superiors let alone to her team.
She was eager to leave the office and forget about him for a few hours if she could.
She pulled up the driveway to her detached house in the sleepy village of Hexton, just outside of Hitchin, approximately a half-hour drive from Haverbridge.
Claire knew how lucky she’d been in working her way to the top. Being fast-tracked to a DCI by the age of thirty-seven was definitely something to be proud of and made others envious. Her success was reflected in her appearance and personality. Her home was no different.
She lived in a four-bedroomed house that looked like something out of a Homes & Gardens magazine, with its bay windows and the old country feel about it.
She had of course added some modern elements over time and had had a large extension and double garage built just a few years ago, even though she didn’t seem to spend much time there of late.
Coming home was just a means for her to freshen up and catch some sleep. There seemed little time in her life for much else.
She stifled a yawn as she turned the key in the door and let herself in. She stepped over the day’s mail, which was sprawled across the mat, and kicked off her shoes and went to the kitchen.
She