Chapters (58)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- Forty-seven
- Forty-eight
- Forty-nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-one
- Acknowledgements
- An Eastbourne Murder Mystery
- Canelo Crime
- About the Author
- Also by Sheila Bugler
‘I think you should go now.’ He started to close the door but Dee put her hand on it, stopping him.
‘If you won’t let me in, then maybe you could pass on a message. Tell Annie she doesn’t need to be afraid of me. I want to help her, that’s all.’
But Hipster Bloke wasn’t listening and was pushing the door closed again. Dee might have put her foot out, preventing him from shutting it fully, but a voice behind her made forget all about the door.
‘Dee?’
She froze. The voice wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Which meant maybe none of this was real, either.
‘Dee. Is that you?’
Slowly, she turned around. Scared of what she’d see, in case there was no one there and all of this was her mind playing tricks with her.
But this wasn’t any trick. He was here. Standing on the street, frowning at her the way he did when she’d done something he disapproved of. Which, as it had turned out, was a lot of the time.
‘Ed?’
‘What the hell is going on?’ he said.
She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.
Ed Mitchell, a detective inspector with East Sussex Police. She hadn’t seen him since their break-up six months ago. Since then, she’d invested a lot of energy in trying hard not to think about him. And if she did still think of him from time to time, and imagined bumping into him, it was never like this.
Twenty-seven
‘I’m going to England to meet Dee and find out for myself what’s been going on.’
‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ Maeve said. ‘How can you trust someone you barely know?’
‘That’s the problem,’ Emer said, ‘I don’t know who I can trust anymore. Until last night, I’d have said I trusted Robert.’
She was walking with Maeve in the grounds of Maeve’s hotel in Clarinbridge.
She’d driven here last night, unable to bear staying in the same house as her stepfather. She’d been halfway to Galway when she realised she had nowhere to go. There was no Nikki to run to anymore. So she’d pulled into the side of the road and called Maeve, who’d insisted Emer come straight to her cosy little house in the grounds of the hotel. This morning, after breakfast, they’d gone for a walk by the river while Emer tried to work out what to do.
‘You can still trust Robert, surely?’
‘He lied to me, Maeve. He told me he’d hired a private detective. Instead, he hired someone to pretend to be me so he could make contact with my cousin.’
‘You don’t know for sure that’s what he did.’