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Back The Family Next Door Save as PDF
Chapters (117)
  1. Also by
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Epigraph
  5. PROLOGUE
  6. 1
  7. 2
  8. 3
  9. 4
  10. 5
  11. 6
  12. 7
  13. 8
  14. 9
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  115. 110
  116. Teaser chapter
  117. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For a long time, you mended something inside me I believed to be broken. But, as we both discovered to our cost, that repair was only temporary.

21

21

Monday 30th July 2018, 12:04 P.M.

4 Hillside Crescent

The back of the house was cool in the heat. Wildeve Stanton had been resistant to buying it, bemoaning the shadows that lay across the garden and the sunbaked driveway with its cracked paving stones. But now, in the cave of their kitchen, she was grateful to escape the eye-screwing light.

“Here, drink this.” DC Jim Sheridan, who had driven her car home and steered her through the pack of journalists waiting on the pavement for a statement about her husband’s death, handed her a glass.

She swallowed down her tablets with lukewarm tap water, ignoring the taste of chlorine. The pain in her head was like the turn of a screwdriver.

She mumbled her thanks, but the only way back was to try and sleep it off. With her eyes closed, she pointed to the ceiling, trying to convey to Jim Sheridan that she needed to go to bed.

He gave her arm a squeeze. “I’ll see myself out,” he said. She dragged herself upstairs, aware in the vaguest of senses that Sheridan was lingering in the hallway.

When she reached the third stair from the top, she heard the familiar click of the front door opening.

“We’re all with you, Wild,” he called softly. “I hope you know that.”

And then he was gone.

* * *

The shape of the shadows in her bedroom was enough to tell her that a significant part of the day had passed while she was lost in sleep.

Wildeve stayed still, braced for a drill-burst of pain. When it came, she let out a low groan, but the drugs had begun to do their job. She rolled onto her side, stretching out an arm to draw Adam toward her, but the place where he should have been was empty.

The tragedy of sleep was waking up. Turning a new page of sorrow and awareness. A second, perhaps two, of forgetting before the memory of his murder sliced through her with its rusty, serrated blade, designed to cause maximum damage.

She lay still, eyes closed, residual sparks of pain in her head, replaying the sequence of events that had led her to this dark hollow.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Detective Sergeant Wildeve Stanton had been in the Major Incident Room at Rayleigh police station in Essex, rereading the case files of Esther Farnworth, the second victim of The Doll Maker. Esther was a single mother, forty years old, Caucasian, working at the local school. In an investigation as large scale as this, there were thousands of leads to explore. Most led to dead ends. But a handful, those hidden pathways, marked out a map to follow. She just had to find them.

Wildeve had written notes on a pad she kept in her pocket.