BURNT OUT SECRETS an absolutely gripping crime mystery with a massive twist (Detective Rutherford Barnes Mysteries Book 3) by ADAM LYNDON

Author:ADAM LYNDON [LYNDON, ADAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller, mystery and suspense
Published: 2023-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A week or so later, Barnes bribed Kane with breakfast and a semi-decent latte, and the two of them headed off into Kent in Barnes’s Rover.

“Where is this place?” Kane asked.

“Somewhere between Kent and Essex, I think. They were a little vague on the details.”

“I hope this thing makes it. No offence,” he added.

“This thing is about as finely tuned as you can get.”

“You handy with cars?”

“‘Handy’ might be a stretch. I get by.”

“Hobby of yours?”

Barnes looked over at him. “I guess.”

“Cool.”

Barnes faced the road again. “They want me to phone when I’m close, and then they’ll talk me in.”

“Pretty secretive.”

“It’s a purpose-built facility for victims of human trafficking. From the tone of the woman on the phone, they don’t trust cops, much less like them. I would have liked to visit sooner, but I did well to persuade them to let us see her this soon.”

The journey was arduous — it was a fight to get onto the M23, the M25 was down to a two-lane contraflow and the Dartford Crossing was something just the wrong side of carnage. And it was starting to snow again.

Barnes often thought that out-of-county enquiries, away from the office, away from meetings, were a good way to connect with whoever was in the passenger seat — no way was Barnes going to let anybody else drive — but for the majority of this particular journey all he could think about was that the woman on the phone would likely not tolerate any form of tardiness.

Eventually, they broke the back of the journey, and once they were well into Essex, Barnes pulled off the motorway and began to double back towards London. Barnes called the facility while Kane braved the sleet long enough to jump out and grab two foul-smelling coffees in Styrofoam cups from a lay-by tea wagon. Barnes watched him through the windscreen as he waited under an awning of sorts.

The directions from the caseworker took them another forty minutes of driving and practically to the Suffolk border. A-roads became B-roads became country lanes, and eventually they turned down a farm track that appeared to take them towards an abandoned barn.

“Wrong turn?” Kane wondered aloud.

But they continued down the track and then, to Barnes’s surprise, as they rounded the barn, the track opened out onto a service road with a new layer of tarmac. This driveway was lined with neatly planted shrubs and well-tended borders and, after a quarter of a mile or so, rounded in a loop outside a building that looked, from the outside, like a brand-new office block on four storeys.

They shut the car doors and stood for a moment.

“You don’t realise how much you miss silence until you hear it,” Kane said, stretching.

“We could learn a thing or two from their design,” Barnes said.

They were greeted at the door by a security guard who looked pleased to see somebody, gave their names to the receptionist, and then waited on two large green armchairs in the glass-fronted lobby.

“He must be bored to death,” Kane said to Barnes, nodding at the security guard.

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