Someone Who Isn't Me, Danuta Kot [good books to read for adults TXT] 📗

Kay made her way along the path, looking at the muddy ground. It was a bit churned up, but she couldn’t remember how it had been yesterday. She couldn’t identify anything that looked like a footprint.

Milo galloped across to her side, shook himself enthusiastically, then streaked away again. Well, at least he was happy. She followed the path round the side of the house, but there was nothing to see. The door to the fuel store was shut tight and padlocked, which reminded her she needed to get hold of that key.

A quick check round the back where the kitchen offshot was located gave her no more information. Despite the rain, the ground was too firm to take any impressions. She looked at the gutter – the remains of a buddleia sprouted up from it. Something else for the estate agent to fix.

There was no help here. No obvious indication of an intruder, but nothing to say there hadn’t been one, either. Milo came bounding over again, his tail wagging. Then he stopped, and his nose went to the ground. He was intent.

As Kay watched, he followed the trail he had found to the door of the fuel store, where he scratched at the wood a couple of times, then looked at her impatiently.

‘I can’t let you in,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a key.’

What was it he’d found? She’d walked up to that door yesterday, but Milo didn’t get excited about her smell – she was part of the pack. Oliver had… no, he hadn’t come round here. He’d shown her the store from the inside of the house.

She called Milo, who came away reluctantly. It could just be foxes or rats or whatever wildlife inhabited Sunk Island, but the trail led to the door and stopped there.

Or had gone through.

She let herself back into the house, Milo snuffling along beside her.

He stiffened immediately upon entering, and she heard the start of a growl in his throat. His hackles were raised. She stood there quietly watching him. He’d picked up a scent just outside the door under the stairs. She opened it, and he pushed past her, his nose glued to the ground, then to the door that led into the fuel store. He scratched it, looked at her, and scratched it again.

She reached over and unlocked it, switching on the overhead light. The tube flickered and kept on flickering.

Milo changed from a sleekly flowing dog to a jerky figure from a cheap stop-motion animation in the strobing light. He clamped his nose to the floor and started sniffing, moving forward, focused and intent. Then he got to the trapdoor, where he stopped and backed off, shaking his head and sneezing.

Kay sniffed the air. That smell of incontinence, of urine-soaked sheets or clothing, still hung in the air.

Milo had picked up the smell again and was following it intently, until he reached the outside door where he whined again and started scratching, wagging his tail, looking back at her eagerly.

Let me through. Let me through.

Kay felt something cold touch her as she thought about last night, in the kitchen, staring at the back door, listening to footsteps coming closer and closer.

If she was reading Milo right, there was a scent of someone he didn’t know, coming up to the outside door of the fuel store, coming inside and through the door into the hall. She remembered the sound of a door, closing. The sound that might have woken her.

She went back to the cupboard under the stairs and checked it thoroughly. It was exactly as she remembered it: empty apart from a couple of brooms and a bag on one of the hooks which contained dusters and cleaning rags. There was nothing there and nothing looked disturbed.

Frowning, she went back into the fuel store and looked round there.

That was when she realised something was wrong.

The bags that had lined up against the wall – surely there had been more of them yesterday. She checked – yellow bags with a picture of a blazing fire, bags of fuel. But yesterday, there had been bags of compost as well.

Hadn’t there?

If there had been, they’d gone.

Chapter 16

Bridlington

DC Dinah Mason took a seat in the room that was rapidly filling up as the team investigating the murder of DC Andy Yeatson, their colleague, assembled for the first time. She’d been anticipating her involvement in a serious case ever since she’d got her transfer to CID a few months ago now. Be careful what you wish for. She hadn’t wanted this case. None of them did, not a murder where the victim was one of their own, her colleague, a man she’d liked and respected.

She’d worked with Andy Yeatson immediately after her transfer, as part of a small team led by DS Mark Curwen, getting the drug dealers off Bridlington’s streets. She’d liked Andy – he’d helped her and hadn’t treated her like the rookie she was. Curwen she wasn’t so sure about.

‘Good morning, everyone.’ A voice interrupted her thoughts, making her jump. It was DCI Hammond, who was the Senior Investigating Officer on the case. Dinah sat upright and grabbed her pen.

The seats were arranged in a horseshoe shape. Hammond took his place at the front of the room. There was a laptop on the desk, and a screen behind him showing an image of Andy as Dinah remembered him; young, bearded, smiling. ‘Right. We need to get started.’

Hammond was a tall man, his fair hair going a bit thin on top. His glasses caught the light from time to time, masking his eyes. ‘A lot of you knew the deceased, Andy Yeatson, and we all have strong feelings about this case. That’s fine, but let’s use those feelings to make this investigation as professional as possible. No short cuts, no acting on unsupported hunches, just good, thorough detective work. Right. Let’s get started. Here’s what we know.’

Slowly, in detail, the story of Andy’s death began to unroll. A