Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  The Jennie Redhead Mysteries

  THE SHIVERING TURN

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  DEATH’S DARK SHADOW

  SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL

  BEST SERVED COLD

  THICKER THAN WATER

  DEATH IN DISGUISE

  The Inspector Woodend Mysteries

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  The Inspector Sam Blackstone Series

  BLACKSTONE AND THE NEW WORLD

  BLACKSTONE AND THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

  BLACKSTONE AND THE GREAT WAR

  BLACKSTONE AND THE ENDGAME

  THE SHIVERING TURN

  A Jennie Redhead Mystery

  Sally Spencer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and 2017 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great

  Britain and the USA 2017 by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Sally Spencer.

  The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8667-5 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-770-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-837-7 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  In memory of Reg Cooper

  1934–2015

  A loyal reader – sadly missed

  PROLOGUE

  It was a quiet suburban avenue. A few children might play in the street in the daytime, but as soon as night fell, curtains were drawn, doors bolted and living rooms filled with the sound of the television. Thus it was that there was no one to notice the girl when she appeared at the far end of the street.

  She was running as fast as she could – but there was no real purpose behind the effort, no destination she was rushing to reach. She was, in so many ways, like a wounded animal which does not understand why it is in pain, but desperately clings to the belief that one more burst of speed might just enable it to leave that agony behind.

  She was barefoot, but she didn’t take the time to wonder where she had lost her shoes, not even when she stepped on a sharp stone which dug cruelly into her flesh.

  She did not wonder about anything. She was feeling, not thinking – experiencing her nightmare again and again, on a constantly replaying loop of misery and despair.

  Her lungs were on fire, and though her instinct screamed at her not to stop, her body was giving her no choice. She came to a sudden halt, and clutched the nearest lamppost for support.

  Her breaths started to grow more regular, and her brain slowly began to engage again.

  She did not know the name of the street she had stopped on, but she was confident she’d have no difficulty in finding her way from there to one of those places which – until that night – had been the anchoring points of her life.

  For a moment, she considered heading for her school, where she had been happy and felt confident of herself and her small world. But that was absurd, because her school would be bolted and barred – and anyway, it could never be the same again.

  Home, then?

  The very thought of going home filled her with dread.

  Perhaps she would go down to the river. The gentle lapping of the waves against the bank might relax her.

  And if it did not, then she could slip softly into the water, let it gently cover her, and wash away all her cares for ever.

  She heard the sound of footsteps in the near distance. It had never occurred to her that she would be followed – but it would make perfect sense if she had been.

  She gasped once – at the horror of it all – and then began running again.

  ONE

  It’s a grey, depressing morning in Oxford – the sort of morning when even the enchanted River Isis has lost its magic for me. I’m sitting in my one-room office at the unfashionable end of Iffley Road. The calendar on the wall (provided free by the Gordon’s Gin Co. Ltd, in recognition of my substantial contribution to the company’s ever-growing profit margin) says it is 8 May 1974, and I have no reason to dispute that.

  I’m hung-over – thank you, once again, Gordon’s! – and as I look blearily down at my imitation leather appointment book, the blank pages stare reproachfully back at me.

  It’s been a lean business quarter so far. True, I was highly praised for my undercover work in Taverner’s Department Store (Q: How does a shop assistant manage to keep stealing expensive dresses when she is checked by security every time she leaves the building? A: Simple – she doesn’t! All she has to do instead is make it easy for her mates to shoplift them during normal business hours), but that was in the middle of April, and since then there’s been zilch. Still, like Charles Dickens’s admirable Mr Micawber, I live in hopes of something turning up.

  My office door is closed, but that doesn’t prevent me from hearing the doorbell ring down at street level, because we at the unfashionable end of the Iffley Road don’t set much store by sound insulation.

  Next, I hear a click-click-click of almost-impossibly high stiletto heels, which tells me that the tarty secretary from the exotic (or should it be erotic?) goods import-export company on the ground floor has crossed the hallway and is about to open the front door.

  Once inside, the bell-ringer says something in a mumbled voice, and the secretary – who could, if she so chose, seek part-time employment as a maritime foghorn – replies with just three words.

  ‘She’s up there!’

  I can picture her in my mind, gesturing up the stairs with a thumb which is capped with a violently purple artificial thumbnail. It wouldn’t have cost her anything to have been a little less abrupt, I think – to have said, for example, that the visitor would find Miss Redhead’s office at the head of the stairs – but I don’t pay her wages, so I suppose I’m in no position to complain.

  The visitor begins to climb the stairs. I can tell from the sound of the footsteps that it’s a woman wearing low heels, and that, given the rate of her ascent, she’s probably somewhere between thirty and fifty.

  And as always when I’m about to meet a potential client, I am now assailed by a wave of misgivings.

  What will this potential client of mine – this woman who will be older than I am, but maybe not by that much – be expecting to see when she opens the door?

  She’ll already know I’m also a woman – it says that quite clearly in the Yellow Pages telephone directory, and in the small ads in the local newspaper – but, given the ‘profession’ I’m engaged in, hasn’t she the right to imagine a stocky woman with a butch haircut, who dresses in sensible tweed?

  I hope not, because what she will be faced with instead is a slim woman with flaming red hair, who is fighting a desperate rearguard action to stave off the approach of her thirtieth birthday, wearing a black cotton trouser suit (my concession to seriousness) and a lilac blouse
.

  The footsteps draw ever closer.

  When I was first starting out in this business, I would blurt out my qualifications right at the start of an interview.

  I have a degree from the University of Oxford itself, I would say, omitting the fact that it is in English literature, rather than criminology, and – alas – not a brilliant first but merely a competent upper second.

  I worked for six years in the Thames Valley Police, first as a uniformed officer and then as a detective constable, I would add – and then move on quickly, before the potential client had the opportunity to ask why I wasn’t still working for Thames Valley Police.

  I don’t do those things now. Now, I am myself, and if the clients don’t like it, that’s too bad for them (and, of course, for my overdraft).

  The visitor knocks.

  ‘Come in,’ I say.

  She opens the door and steps inside.

  I was right about her age – not for nothing do I have the words ‘Private Investigator’ expensively engraved on the smoked-glass panel that forms most of the upper part of the office door.

  She is, in fact, a thirty-eight- or thirty-nine-year-old brunette. She is wearing a tan jacket (over the collar of which the loose curls of her perm hang effectively), and blue skirt. Both the skirt and the jacket come, I suspect, from Marks & Spencer’s by-no-means-the-least-expensive-available-but-still-not-costing-you-an-arm-and-a-leg range. She has an attractive face, though, for the moment at least, it is overlaid with a mask of worry which does her no favours.

  ‘Miss Redhead?’ she asks uncertainly.

  Of course I’m Miss Redhead! Who else could I possibly be, given that I’m in an office bearing her name, in which, furthermore, there is only one desk?

  That’s what my brain thinks, but my mouth, framed by an encouraging smile, says, ‘Yes, I’m Jennifer Redhead. How can I help you, Mrs …?’

  ‘Corbet,’ she says. ‘Mary Corbet.’ She hesitates. ‘It’s about my daughter – she’s gone missing.’

  I feel my heart sink as I see any chance of making my bank manager a little happier slipping through my fingers, but I invite her to sit down anyway, and indicate the visitor’s chair.

  ‘If you’d just like to give me the details,’ I say, taking a notepad and pen out of my desk drawer and sounding all crisp and businesslike.

  She doesn’t need any more encouragement than that.

  ‘Linda’s seventeen and a half,’ she tells me, and names the school where her daughter is studying. ‘It was last Friday night that she went missing. We were all out that night …’

  ‘All?’

  ‘The whole family – me, my husband … and Linda. I went to my regular meeting of the Oxford Garrick Players. That’s an amateur dramatics society, you know. We’re planning to put on Noel Coward’s Private Lives sometime in the autumn, and there’s a very good chance that I’ll be cast as Amanda.’ She comes to a sudden uncomfortable halt. ‘Oh God, what am I doing? Why am I telling you all this? It’s not as if it mattered, is it?’

  ‘If we’re to get anywhere, Mrs Corbet, then you really do need to relax,’ I say. ‘Just tell the story in your own words, and leave it to me to make a note of the details which matter.’

  She nods gratefully, and takes a deep breath.

  ‘Tom, that’s my husband, is a Freemason, and he had a meeting at his lodge, and Linda was supposed to be going over to her friend Janet’s house straight from school …’

  ‘How far away from you does Janet live?’

  ‘Not very far at all. We’re all in Summertown. She’s not more than a few streets away.’

  ‘I see. Carry on.’

  ‘I got home about ten. It didn’t really bother me that Linda was still out, because it wasn’t a school day the next day, and you know what girls are like when they get together, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree, ‘I do.’

  ‘By the time Tom got home, at about a quarter past eleven, I was starting to get worried, and even though it was quite late, I rang Janet’s house. Janet said she hadn’t invited Linda round at all, and, in fact, she hadn’t seen her since four o’clock, when they parted at the school gates. So then I rang all her other friends, and they hadn’t seen her, either.’

  ‘What was your husband doing while you were making all these telephone calls?’

  ‘He’d got back in his car and was driving around, looking for her.’ Mrs Corbet reaches up, grabs one of her curls, and gives it a sharp tug. ‘I kept telling myself I must have got it wrong – that she’d gone to see some other friend, one she’d never told me about, and that she’d probably told me she was sleeping over, but it simply hadn’t registered with me.’ She gives the curl another tug. ‘I’ve been very distracted recently, you see, because that bitch Cynthia Roberts is determined, by fair means or foul, to pull the rug from under me, and get the part of Amanda for herself. But I’m sure now that I got it right about what Linda said. I’m sure she told me she was going to Janet’s house.’

  I close my notepad as a way of signalling to her that it’s pointless to go any further with this.

  ‘It’s not me you should really be talking to,’ I say. ‘You should report it to the police.’

  Mary Corbet shrugs, helplessly. ‘I’ve been to see the police. They’re simply not interested. They say that she’s probably run away. They say it happens all the time.’

  Yes, they probably will have said that, I think – but, chances are, they won’t have said it without first making sure of their ground.

  ‘Are any of Linda’s clothes missing?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has she been having problems at school?’

  ‘No, she loves school. She’s very popular. The other girls voted her house captain.’

  ‘How about at home?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She knows what I mean!

  ‘Has she been having problems at home?’ I amplify.

  ‘She’s our only child, Miss Redhead. Me and her dad both love her with all our hearts.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ I say, sternly.

  She shrugs again. ‘There’s been the odd bit of unpleasantness with her dad in the last few months.’

  ‘What kind of unpleasantness?’

  ‘They’ve not been getting on.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll really have to be a little more specific than that.’

  ‘Tom wants the best for her. He always has – right from the moment he first held her in the hospital.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The thing is, you see, he’s always been a very serious person, even when he was younger. He wants Linda to be a doctor when she grows up.’

  ‘And what does Linda want?’

  ‘Oh, she wants the same as her dad, but she takes more after me, and she likes having her bit of fun, as well.’

  I put the notebook and pen back in the drawer.

  ‘Listen, Mrs Corbet,’ I say, ‘the police have experience in these matters, and if they think—’

  ‘It’s just occurred to me how funny it is that you’re a redhead and you’re also called Redhead,’ Mrs Corbet interrupts. ‘I suppose there’s a lot of people say that to you.’

  I know what she’s doing, of course. This is her attempt to establish a more personal relationship with me, in the hope that it will make me more empathetic, and hence more inclined to take her case. And if that doesn’t work, well, at least she’s managed to postpone the moment when she hears me turn her down.

  And for the record, it isn’t funny being called Redhead.

  Just having red hair is a big enough cross for any little kid to bear. It apparently gives bus conductors free licence to call you ‘Ginger Nut’ and old ladies the right to accost you in the street and ask you if you eat a lot of carrots. But if, in addition, your name actually is Redhead – well, imagine what kind of target that makes you in the school playground. So it’s no wonder, is it, that as soon as I was old enough to take karate lessons, I signed up straight away?