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
She needed to do something, though, to distract her mind. Putting her phone down, she sat at her desk, opened her laptop and scanned the last few chapters of her work in progress. The story was coming together, but writing it had proved harder than she’d expected. Like she’d told Emer, writing a book required a different discipline to writing for newspapers. Plus, she’d now reached the part where she had to decide how much to say about Graham Reed, the young man wrongly accused of one of the murders Dee was writing about. She knew she had to deal with ‘the Graham problem’, as she’d started calling it, but she kept putting it off. Mainly because every time she tried to write about him, she got distracted by thoughts of Graham’s nephew, Ed Mitchell.
‘God damn you, Ed,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Why can’t you get out of my head and stay out of it?’
Ed didn’t answer. Which was just as well, because if he had, Dee would have really started to think she was losing the plot.
She read back through the notes she’d written, expecting to hit the same brick wall again, when suddenly she realised how she could do this. Writing about someone like Graham was what Dee did best – which was unpicking a mystery, digging into people’s lives and motivations, working out why bad things happened to good people. Because whatever way you looked at it, what had happened to Graham Reed was tragic. A young man with learning difficulties who had been falsely accused of a brutal murder, and then killed in a misplaced act of revenge by a gang of local thugs.
Dee spent the next two hours bringing Graham’s story to life, exploring his personality, his strengths and weaknesses and – finally – the tragic circumstances leading up to his death. When she was finished, her fingers ached from typing and her body was crying out for a coffee.
She made coffee and, while she drank it, she read over what she’d written, making the odd tweak but generally satisfied with her work. In two hours, she’d written 3,000 words. One thousand more than her daily word count. Which meant she could stop there for today and not feel bad about it.
Still needing to keep her mind occupied, she carried the laptop onto the deck outside. The deck ran along the entire length of the back of the house, overlooking the shingle beach and the English Channel. This was where Dee liked to sit whenever she needed to think. The clear, uninterrupted views of the ocean, the growling of the waves as they rolled in and out over the shingle, the squalling of seagulls overhead, and the tangy flavour of salt in the air – all of it helped calm the endless swirl of noise from too many thoughts competing for her attention.