Cover

SANDIE JONES

THE BLAME GAME

Dedication page

For Oscar
Watching you grow into a wonderful young man is my greatest pleasure
Follow your dreams and I’ll be right by your side

PROLOGUE

She wants to be everything to everyone, but making yourself indispensable is dangerous.

It means you’re party to secrets that others don’t want you to know. It means you’ll go to any length to keep your own close to your chest. It means that everyone around you becomes collateral damage.

But she’ll not bring me down. I’ll get to her, before she gets to me.

Her need to be essential is about to make her an accessory.

PART ONE

1

I’m sure, as soon as I see the door ajar, that something has happened. I never leave my garden office unlocked overnight, not because there’s anything in there worth stealing, but there’s been a spate of petty shed burglaries around here recently and I don’t need my clients’ files strewn across the manicured lawns of Tattenhall in the hapless pursuit of a mower or power tool.

Though you’d have to be pretty stupid if you honestly thought that the sprawling estate was tended to by a hand-held strimmer kept in my pimped-up shed. The fifty acres of rolling land that surround our cottage are maintained and nurtured by a team of three full-time greenkeepers, who you’re more likely to see astride a sit-on John Deere than hovering a Flymo.

I remember Leon showing me the barn where all the machinery is kept, when we first moved here after he’d become the estate’s manager. My eyes had stood out on stalks, as I’d always been a tomboy growing up and one of the best days I remember having as a child was being taken to Diggerland, where I was allowed to operate a JCB. I’d patiently waited in line for over an hour, just so I could pick up dirt from one pile with the giant bucket and move it onto another. My dad was infuriated that a theme park would charge for such an inane activity, but I’d been delighted.

Pushing the memory to the back of my mind, before it turns sour, I tentatively pull the door open and peer inside the converted outbuilding I’ve grown to love. I expect to see my desk upturned and its drawers thrown across the room in frustration, as the low-life realized that there wasn’t as much as a skateboard on which he could make his getaway. But my workstation is still upright; the framed certificates proving my right to practise as a psychologist still hang, dead straight, on the wall, and the vase of flowers that I’d been sent by a grateful client still blossom, their optimism jarring against the unnerving sensation that is coiling around my stomach.