Scott The Missing and the Dead (DI Thomas Maitland 1) : A missing teacher, a disgraced detective, and a deadly obsession-where guilt and revenge collide.

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-83501-029-7
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'A slew of satisfying narrative twists' Barry Forshaw, Crime Time It appeared that Helen McAllister - for whatever reason - had simply got out of the car sometime the previous morning, taking her keys and bag and phone with her, and walked away... Ten years later there has been no trace found of the teacher who went missing from a small village on the last day of the school year. Her lover Alice Hauser's accusations of impropriety on the part of the senior investigating officer, DI Thomas Maitland, led to his early retirement, his life in disrepair. Maitland now lives alone, consumed with grief over the death of his wife two years ago. Then he's involved in a road accident in which a man is killed. The victim's twin, John, is convinced that Maitland is to blame for his brother's death. And when John meets Alice, they are determined that Maitland should pay the price they demand of him...

Under the names Elizabeth McGregor and Elizabeth Cooke, EM Scott has been writing for thirty years and has some 15 novels and one non-fiction work to her name, as well as over a hundred published short stories. Although having worked in various genres, crime is her first love. She lives in Dorset.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scott, E. M.

Leseproben

1

In those time-frozen seconds, Thomas Maitland saw three things.

The trees beside the road. The slope of the valley ahead. And the red Fiat turning in mid-air, silent, red against white and pale green and grey: as graceful as a dancer, and shocking in its irrationality.

Then he heard the noise. The astounding impact of the Fiat and his own vehicle colliding: deafening, slamming the breath from his body.

He must have stamped on the brakes of the van, because it swerved. He felt it roll about. The road rocked, shattered into fragments, reassembled through a crack in the windscreen. Through it, Thomas could see the sharp bend clearly again at the bottom of the hill. The green fields beyond. The melting snow under the beech trees.

He sat gasping for a moment, then reached in a panic to switch off his engine. He found it hard to turn the key in the ignition. He did not dare to look to his right into the wood. There were other sounds, he realised: car’s brakes squealing as it crested the hill behind him, 40 yards away. Another impact behind him. He saw a lorry, stalled, that had been behind the Fiat; and he closed his eyes.

The Fiat had rounded the bend below almost in the centre of the road. He saw it again, coming towards him, steadily veering. He had put his hand on the horn: he had sounded it, he was sure. He recalled the noise of that and then nothing, a blank, only the elegantly turning Fiat in the air. It reminded him of the kind of car that he had owned at college. A beaten-up thing with a taped-together wing.

A man had been driving. As the car came closer Thomas had seen him looking directly at him for a moment before glancing down to his side.

Thomas had seen the white of the driver’s hands, one skimming the dashboard, one on the steering wheel.

*

Thomas had left his house that morning at 6 o’clock. He had finished the commission for the large painting, and loaded it, with much cursing and difficulty, into the van the night before. He had to go to Gloucestershire via a customer in Claverton Down: it was likely to be a long day.

In the half-light of the morning, he had stopped in the garden to look at the field beyond, waiting to see if the deer would come back to the maize stubble.

A dawn light. Astronomical dawn, the sun 18 degrees below the horizon. Followed by nautical twilight, 12 degrees. Civil twilight, 6 degrees. He rubbed his forehead, frowning quizzically. Emptied of what mattered, his brain had become saturated with pointless information. He was a repository for it; he’d become a place where names and facts and numbers washed up.

Sometimes his old life intruded: 32 years in the police force.

Cases he’d rather forget than remember.

Leaving the force nine years ago, he had visualised what he did now: thinking of landscapes, his drawings alive with contours. Colours to block the grey.

Fran was there only occasionally. She crept back only when his guard was down.

His dog was at his side, and looked up at him expectantly. Thomas glanced down at the terrier, the appallingly named Fish, who had become his shadow, mirroring his footsteps and stance, a canine slow waltz. Fran had named him.

That had been four years ago. ‘You can’t call a dog Fish,’ he’d objected, laughing, when she had stood at their back fence with it, wet from the stream and wriggling as she held him on her hip. They’d only collected him from Rescue the day before. ‘It’s what he was chasing,’ she’d explained. The sunlight was fragmenting and re-forming on the grass under the apple tree.

Fish always sat next to him on the bench seat in the cab of the van, ears pricked. He was a very small dog, intelligent, with a calculating, knowing expression.

He liked to lie on a dusty bed in the studio workshop, watching the easel with half an eye. Only yesterday, he had stood for over an hour by the stepladder in the garden as Thomas tended Fran’s roses while an icy north-east wind blew around them both.

Thomas had kept Fran’s dog at his side at first from duty, and then from gratitude, thankful that his wife had possessed a soft heart. He’d never liked dogs, that was the truth of it; but now Fish lay on his bed, smelling faintly of the mud from the fields, and of wax and sawdust. Fish even lay next to him on the overstuffed couch as he read the evening paper. Thomas smiled whenever he touched him. You had to be grateful for that.

When the roses were done yesterday, neatly tied into their arches and loops, Thomas had stood back and looked at the pattern they made against the 18th-century red brick wall of the house. Then, he had taken the stepladder inside, and swept up the cuttings, sucking the scratches on the back of his hand. He wasn’t by nature a tidy person, but in the last two years he had kept solidly and bloody-mindedly to a routine, the kind of routine in the garden and studio and house that Fran used to have. He was only partially convinced of its usefulness, even when the roses bloomed, and the grass grew, and the blackthorn hedges that he had trimmed became a wash of white in early May.

People had told him that was the secret, the way out of misery. As if they knew; as if anyone had the answer. Only he knew the cause of his sleeplessness, a cause much deeper than his loss. But all he could do was keep to time and routine.

So he kept the house tidy, and he kept the dog’s ridiculous name, and he saw to the roses.

*

It was twelve minutes past eight that Monday morning when the traffic sergeant crested the rise outside Radstock. It was one of the busiest roads in the area: a main arterial route from Bath, north-south through open country.

They had received 14 emergency calls. The fourth had been from the driver of a lorry, saying something about a small red car crossing the road. The sergeant narrowed his eyes, registering a van at a 45-degree angle almost in the centre of the road facing north, leaning to the left, its offside wing and door caved in. The nearside tyre had blown.

There was a lorry with an unstable load facing up the hill, and a second crash facing north. He wove his bike through the cars, stopped and radioed in; got off the bike and walked towards the van.

A man was on his knees in the road at its side, holding something in his lap. He looked up, into the sergeant’s eyes, seemingly perfectly calm, without any definite expression, and away again, shielding whatever it was that he was holding.

The sergeant turned his head. The driver of the lorry was running, waving his arms, shouting about the chemical load. Liquid waste, inflammable. The sergeant had already seen the problem. He looked to his right.

Three or four people were standing on the verge by the trees. A woman held up her arms, a kind of Biblical gesture of prayer, of pleading. He walked over to her, talking to Control on his radio, keeping up a running commentary.

The woman ran forward and grabbed his arm. She looked to be in her early 70s, her face the ghastly colour of shock, her hands fluttering. She was holding a twisted headscarf, and her body shook. He made a mental note to watch her, another potential fatality.

‘A boy,’ she kept saying. ‘He’s only a boy.’

*

It was not quite true. Although he did have a boyish look, with a full head of dark hair, the sergeant thought that the Fiat’s driver was probably in his late 30s, maybe more.

The Fiat had righted itself so that it sat foursquare on its wheels, looking rather odd among the broken branches and the rotted leaves of the previous summer and the remnants of snow in the wood at the side of the road. The windscreen was shattered, and the roof dipped in an almost perfect arc. The driver’s door was open. Someone – surely not this elderly woman – had tried to pull the driver out.

The traffic sergeant made his way across the small drainage ditch at the side of the road, and picked his way through the muddy ground beyond. He saw then exactly what the others involved had seen: that it was hopeless to try and help the driver. His neck was plainly broken. Incongruously, his hands still gripped the steering wheel.

The sergeant leaned carefully inside the car. He saw a CD lying in the footwell.

One visible word on the disc.

Concerto.

*

The angle of the sun had somehow shifted. Thomas couldn’t remember how.

He closed his eyes against the colour.

He was sitting on the road, hoping to be left alone, to be ignored. He had a blinding pain behind his eyes, a migrainous shuttle of light and dark, and felt pressure on the left-hand side of his head. He wanted to lie down, and an incongruous yearning for sleep overcame him.

He didn’t want to look at the ambulances or the fire crews: reds and yellows, green banding. The fluttering of blue and white tape. The jumble of the other vehicles. He rested his...