Condemned, R.C. Bridgestock [most romantic novels TXT] 📗

She had watched those of the cloth who had been found guilty leave the courtroom, those cruel, sadistic people whom Ash, her brother, had trusted and obeyed. Ash had been a good kid, but he’d never got over the abuse he had suffered at their hands, which resulted in his suicide. She conceded that mass suicide of his abusers would be yet another selfish act, for if they threw themselves on their swords it was their belief that it would redeem them from their crimes, and Annie was glad that wouldn’t be allowed to happen.

Cheeks flushed, her voice cracked, she came back to the present-day meeting, and continued, ‘we also know that the preferred weapon of the murderer was a handgun.’

Charley glanced over her, concerned. Annie looked particularly peaky. Was she expecting too much from the youngster who had relocated from the city as a uniformed officer? She had then been catapulted into Peel Street CID because the dinosaurs in the hierarchy, who liked their old style of rural policing, didn’t know what to do with Annie’s vibrant, go-get-’em personality. Charley, on the other hand, liked Annie, and rejoiced in the young detective’s inquisitiveness, especially if Charley’s own enthusiasm was waning. She felt a little fed up now, most probably due to the head cold that was threatening to take hold, and the fact that she had just been informed by Wilkie Connor that a local expert in the field of paganism who they had tracked down looked like a non-starter.

‘I hear on the grapevine that you’re having trouble finding someone who knows a bit about heathens?’ said Winnie following the briefing, as she counted drops of eucalyptus into a bowl of steaming hot water which she then placed on the edge of Charley’s desk.

Charley looked into Winnie’s kind eyes, but she couldn’t help wishing it was her mum who was the one administering the TLC to her.

‘It’s okay, something’ll come up,’ she said, sliding the bowl to one side so she could get to her computer keyboard. She looked at Winnie rebelliously, ‘and I haven’t got the time or the inclination for that sort of malarkey!’

Charley sniffled ungratefully into a tissue Winnie offered her. The bright lights of the computer screen hurt her eyes, and the pain in her head made her nauseous. When the stabbing pain came, it made her flinch as if from an electric shock. She shut her eyes momentarily and cried out loud. Immediately her hands went to her head.

‘Hmm… Well, that’s a matter of opinion,’ Winnie said as if to herself, and after watching the young woman struggle, her voice rose. ‘Charley Mann, you’re as stubborn as a mule. Just for once will you bloody well do as you’re told! Put the towel over your head, like a tent, and breathe in. It’ll make you feel a whole lot better.’

Too tired to argue, Charley moved the bowl closer and inhaled the aromatic odour, before she began to cough incessantly. ‘Well, I wonder who I take after?’ Charley gasped when she caught her breath.

‘Point taken,’ Winnie said, with a slight cock of her head as she thought of Charley’s Dad, Jack, her childhood sweetheart, the love of her life who, at seventeen, had stubbornly decided that if she went away to college, whilst he stayed home lumbered with looking after the family farm, then they were finished.

Then, when Winnie returned home from her adventures, it was to be greeted with the news that Ada, Charley’s mum, was found to be expecting, and given the old-fashioned ways of the family a shotgun wedding was planned. The rest, Winnie had told Charley, was history. One thing you could say about Jack, he never turned his back on his responsibilities. Which had only made Winnie love him more, even it had been from a distance for the rest of her life.

Charley’s spluttering broke Winnie’s reverie. ‘Do you know someone, a pagan specialist, I mean?’ she asked, with more than a little desperation in her voice audible from her position under the towel.

Clutching the duster in her hand tightly, Winnie polished the corner of Charley’s desk with vigour. She smiled. ‘Not quite, but I’m sure if I asked my old friend Josie Cartwright, she’d be able to help you.’

Charley swiftly lifted the corner of the towel. ‘The writer, author, historian Josie Cartwright is your friend, really?’

From the main road Josie Cartwright’s house was too far away, and too small to appear as more than a black smudge on the opposite hillside. Winnie’s directions were to follow the path of a chain of electricity pylons, which swung precariously in the wind, across the bleak valley from one hillside to the next.

A broken five-bar gate leant against a toppled, moss-peppered dry-stone wall. It led Charley, Annie and Winnie down a single uneven farm track which took her to the door of a quaint old cottage overlooking a cobbled courtyard. It was impossible to see what the other surrounding buildings would have once been, as they had already been absorbed back into the landscape.

There were the markings of a flower garden and a vegetable garden which were very obviously lovingly worked by its owner. Charley stood at the cottage door and raised her hand towards the knocker, but before she placed her hand on it, the door was opened by a slight, stooped, white-haired old lady who held a crocheted blue shawl together between her thumb and the first finger of her arthritic left hand.

As soon as she saw Winnie through her watery blue eyes, her smile widened, her arms flew open, and she embraced her friend warmly. Winnie, full of excitement and joy, scuttled ahead of them down the higgledy-piggledy, narrow corridor with doors leading off into other rooms. ‘That sloping floor’ll show you whether you have a small inner ear canal,’ she called to the younger women, and then abruptly vanished through a door under a small twisted