by Paul Charles
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by Paul Charles
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by Paul Charles
|
by Paul Charles
|
The Ballad of Sean and Wilko (Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy Mystery) by Paul Charles |
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Book Description
The Fifth Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy Mystery When a woman’s crumpled body is discovered in a gas-filled flat in the Primrose Hill area of north London, it looks like just another suicide. But Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy isn’t so sure, especially when the dead woman is revealed as famous American singer-songwriter, Esther Bluewood. Kennedy and his regular team of DS James Irvine and DC Anne Coles piece together the life and loves of Esther Bluewood and discover levels of greed, love, jealousy and intrigue that surprise even them. Then, just as the truth looks like emerging, one of the ‘suspects’ is murdered in a bizarre fashion… To make matters worse, Kennedy discovers that his own estranged girlfriend, ann rea – always lower-case "a" and "r" – was a confidante of Esther Bluewood and his investigation leads him reluctantly to her door. In this fifth Christy Kennedy mystery, the Camden Town detective finds himself investigating a case heavy with sudden death and intrigue, that comes with more twists and turns than the road from Kingsmarkham to St Mary Mead. Part whodunnit, part howdunnit, part love story, it again features a unique method of murder that has become Paul Charles’ trademark, as well as characters that practically leap off the page. The five Christy Kennedy novels have established Paul Charles as one of Britain’s most popular crimewriters.
Excerpted from The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room by Paul Charles. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Christy Kennedy was prowling up and down the hallway like a bear with a thorn in his paw. Bear-like, he used the back of his hand to knock on the door of the ground-floor flat. There was a sickly-sweet smell wafting around the hallway, even though the hall door was wide open and the cold winter wind was blowing through. The wind could send a shiver down your spine; chill you to your very bone, but it didn’t seem able to remove the smell of gas from the house.
The house of death.
‘The next-door neighbour, Mrs Mason, says he’s still indoors, sir,’ Detective Sergeant James Irvine began. ‘She says he’s regular as clockwork. Says he, Edward Higgins, wakes up at seven-thirty, turns on the radio, Radio Four. She claims she can hear it clearly through their adjoining wall. He leaves the house at eight; goes up to Primrose Hill; buys a copy of the Telegraph and picks up a cappuccino and a toasted poppy-seed bagel on the way back. He returns home, reads his paper, drinks his cappuccino, eats his bagel and continues to listen to the radio until ten, at which time…’
‘Okay, okay, I get the picture, sergeant,’ Kennedy cut in. He was being uncharacteristically short with his trusted bagman, but having seen the scene upstairs, well… he just ‘wasn’t himself’, as his mother might have put it. ‘If he’s in here let’s make a racket until he hears us,’ Kennedy said, proceeding to bang on the door with his fist and kick it on every third beat.
Perhaps he was trying to use the noise to dispel the scene he’d witnessed twenty minutes earlier, when he’d walked into the first floor maisonette.
An incident had been reported at 123 Fitzroy Road, literally a two-minute walk from Primrose Hill. Just before 8.00am, the children’s nanny, Judy Dillon, had been about to let herself into the first and second-floor maisonette, when she smelled gas. She immediately called the police on her mobile phone. Four minutes later a patrol car pulled up, followed within seconds by a gas company van. The gasman immediately turned off the supply to the entire house. The children’s nanny led the police into the flat, automatically opening the first door on the left. As soon as she had looked into the kitchen she screamed like a banshee and immediately collapsed with an almighty thud on to the floor.
Her employer, Esther Bluewood, lay on the kitchen floor.
The first constable on the scene, PC Allaway, felt Esther’s throat for a pulse. He evaluated no signs of life and granted the gasman access to the property. The gasman appeared very cool under the circumstances, tugging on a pair of polythene gloves, turning off the gas supply to the cooker before opening all the windows in the flat. Meanwhile, Constable Allaway called in the incident to North Bridge House and about three minutes later the back-up team, including Irvine, began to arrive at the scene.
By the time Kennedy arrived, ten minutes after Irvine, the team was so busy, silently going about their business, they’d failed to notice two children standing outside the kitchen door, staring at their mother’s body. Kennedy knew he would never forget the scene for as long as he lived. The boy stood to the right. He wore white pyjama bottoms and a Wallace & Gromit sweatshirt. His long, curly, blonde hair was dishevelled from his recent adventures in dreamland. He was holding, very tightly it appeared, the hand of his sister. She also had a head of blonde, curly hair, was about two-thirds the height of her brother, and dressed in a pair of Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. She was holding her scruffy teddy by its arm. The well-loved and battle-bruised bear was dangling in the air, as lifeless as the body of the woman on the kitchen floor.
As Kennedy climbed the darkened stairwell, the sadness of the silhouette of the two children and the teddy bear hit him with such power that he was momentarily overwhelmed. Images of wasted lives, happy families, laughter-filled rooms, unfulfilled dreams, and broken promises filled his head. He felt his eyes well up and he had to fight back the tears.
Kennedy took a second to compose himself before he proceeded up the stairs, placing a gentle hand on to each of the children’s backs. As they turned towards each other and looked over their shoulders at the new presence, the detective said, ‘Let’s go and find a room of our own.’
The wee girl asked, ‘What’s wrong with our Mummy?’
The boy asked, ‘Why is she sleeping on the floor?’
Kennedy gently broke their clasped hands apart. He had to use a little force, as the boy didn’t seem to want to let go of his sister’s hand. Kennedy took each of the recently freed little hands and led them up the hallway and away from the death scene. As he did, he nodded to WDC Anne Coles to follow him.
They discovered that the living room too was packed with SoC (‘Scene of Crime’) investigators. Kennedy noticed a door that seemed to lead to another flat. He took the children through it and up the stairs that led straight to the children’s bedroom. The wee girl and boy simultaneously broke free from the detective and sat together on the nearest bed. The boy put his arm around his sister’s shoulder and the wee girl hung on to her teddy as if her life depended on it.
She smiled at Kennedy.
Kennedy tried to smile back. He found himself trying to compose what he imagined would look like a smile but because he was so self-conscious of the exercise he felt the grin on his face probably looked hideous.
The boy looked more warily at the policeman.
‘Is Mummy sleeping now because she cries at night?’ the wee girl asked plaintively.
‘No, no,’ the boy answered, wiping the sleep from his eyes, ‘I told you: she cries because Daddy has found a new Mummy.’
The Fifth Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy Mystery When a woman’s crumpled body is discovered in a gas-filled flat in the Primrose Hill area of north London, it looks like just another suicide. But Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy isn’t so sure, especially when the dead woman is revealed as famous American singer-songwriter, Esther Bluewood. Kennedy and his regular team of DS James Irvine and DC Anne Coles piece together the life and loves of Esther Bluewood and discover levels of greed, love, jealousy and intrigue that surprise even them. Then, just as the truth looks like emerging, one of the ‘suspects’ is murdered in a bizarre fashion… To make matters worse, Kennedy discovers that his own estranged girlfriend, ann rea – always lower-case "a" and "r" – was a confidante of Esther Bluewood and his investigation leads him reluctantly to her door. In this fifth Christy Kennedy mystery, the Camden Town detective finds himself investigating a case heavy with sudden death and intrigue, that comes with more twists and turns than the road from Kingsmarkham to St Mary Mead. Part whodunnit, part howdunnit, part love story, it again features a unique method of murder that has become Paul Charles’ trademark, as well as characters that practically leap off the page. The five Christy Kennedy novels have established Paul Charles as one of Britain’s most popular crimewriters.
Excerpted from The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room by Paul Charles. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Christy Kennedy was prowling up and down the hallway like a bear with a thorn in his paw. Bear-like, he used the back of his hand to knock on the door of the ground-floor flat. There was a sickly-sweet smell wafting around the hallway, even though the hall door was wide open and the cold winter wind was blowing through. The wind could send a shiver down your spine; chill you to your very bone, but it didn’t seem able to remove the smell of gas from the house.
The house of death.
‘The next-door neighbour, Mrs Mason, says he’s still indoors, sir,’ Detective Sergeant James Irvine began. ‘She says he’s regular as clockwork. Says he, Edward Higgins, wakes up at seven-thirty, turns on the radio, Radio Four. She claims she can hear it clearly through their adjoining wall. He leaves the house at eight; goes up to Primrose Hill; buys a copy of the Telegraph and picks up a cappuccino and a toasted poppy-seed bagel on the way back. He returns home, reads his paper, drinks his cappuccino, eats his bagel and continues to listen to the radio until ten, at which time…’
‘Okay, okay, I get the picture, sergeant,’ Kennedy cut in. He was being uncharacteristically short with his trusted bagman, but having seen the scene upstairs, well… he just ‘wasn’t himself’, as his mother might have put it. ‘If he’s in here let’s make a racket until he hears us,’ Kennedy said, proceeding to bang on the door with his fist and kick it on every third beat.
Perhaps he was trying to use the noise to dispel the scene he’d witnessed twenty minutes earlier, when he’d walked into the first floor maisonette.
An incident had been reported at 123 Fitzroy Road, literally a two-minute walk from Primrose Hill. Just before 8.00am, the children’s nanny, Judy Dillon, had been about to let herself into the first and second-floor maisonette, when she smelled gas. She immediately called the police on her mobile phone. Four minutes later a patrol car pulled up, followed within seconds by a gas company van. The gasman immediately turned off the supply to the entire house. The children’s nanny led the police into the flat, automatically opening the first door on the left. As soon as she had looked into the kitchen she screamed like a banshee and immediately collapsed with an almighty thud on to the floor.
Her employer, Esther Bluewood, lay on the kitchen floor.
The first constable on the scene, PC Allaway, felt Esther’s throat for a pulse. He evaluated no signs of life and granted the gasman access to the property. The gasman appeared very cool under the circumstances, tugging on a pair of polythene gloves, turning off the gas supply to the cooker before opening all the windows in the flat. Meanwhile, Constable Allaway called in the incident to North Bridge House and about three minutes later the back-up team, including Irvine, began to arrive at the scene.
By the time Kennedy arrived, ten minutes after Irvine, the team was so busy, silently going about their business, they’d failed to notice two children standing outside the kitchen door, staring at their mother’s body. Kennedy knew he would never forget the scene for as long as he lived. The boy stood to the right. He wore white pyjama bottoms and a Wallace & Gromit sweatshirt. His long, curly, blonde hair was dishevelled from his recent adventures in dreamland. He was holding, very tightly it appeared, the hand of his sister. She also had a head of blonde, curly hair, was about two-thirds the height of her brother, and dressed in a pair of Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. She was holding her scruffy teddy by its arm. The well-loved and battle-bruised bear was dangling in the air, as lifeless as the body of the woman on the kitchen floor.
As Kennedy climbed the darkened stairwell, the sadness of the silhouette of the two children and the teddy bear hit him with such power that he was momentarily overwhelmed. Images of wasted lives, happy families, laughter-filled rooms, unfulfilled dreams, and broken promises filled his head. He felt his eyes well up and he had to fight back the tears.
Kennedy took a second to compose himself before he proceeded up the stairs, placing a gentle hand on to each of the children’s backs. As they turned towards each other and looked over their shoulders at the new presence, the detective said, ‘Let’s go and find a room of our own.’
The wee girl asked, ‘What’s wrong with our Mummy?’
The boy asked, ‘Why is she sleeping on the floor?’
Kennedy gently broke their clasped hands apart. He had to use a little force, as the boy didn’t seem to want to let go of his sister’s hand. Kennedy took each of the recently freed little hands and led them up the hallway and away from the death scene. As he did, he nodded to WDC Anne Coles to follow him.
They discovered that the living room too was packed with SoC (‘Scene of Crime’) investigators. Kennedy noticed a door that seemed to lead to another flat. He took the children through it and up the stairs that led straight to the children’s bedroom. The wee girl and boy simultaneously broke free from the detective and sat together on the nearest bed. The boy put his arm around his sister’s shoulder and the wee girl hung on to her teddy as if her life depended on it.
She smiled at Kennedy.
Kennedy tried to smile back. He found himself trying to compose what he imagined would look like a smile but because he was so self-conscious of the exercise he felt the grin on his face probably looked hideous.
The boy looked more warily at the policeman.
‘Is Mummy sleeping now because she cries at night?’ the wee girl asked plaintively.
‘No, no,’ the boy answered, wiping the sleep from his eyes, ‘I told you: she cries because Daddy has found a new Mummy.’
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