Detective on the Moor: The mystery of a lockdown party murder (The Yorkshire detective mystery series Book 4) by Ric Brady

Author:Ric Brady [Brady, Ric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE BOOK FOLKS bestselling British detective fiction
Published: 2023-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Henry got showered and changed into some clean jeans and a thin, short-sleeved blue and white shirt. He combed what was left of his greying hair while looking in the steamed-up bathroom mirror, and then sucked in his gut, wondering if it was visible in the shirt he was wearing.

Deciding he didn’t care either way, he went downstairs to his notes on the kitchen table. After pouring away the vile lukewarm coffee down the sink, he checked Tessa was alright in the backyard. She was on her back in the middle of the yard, in full view of the sun, with her legs sticking out and her eyes closed.

Tessa might be lithe and devoid of energy now, Henry thought, but she’d soon want to go for a walk, and he doubted he’d have time. Maybe young Robbie could take her for one later? The lad could do with some fresh air himself.

Then he thought Robbie was more likely to attach Tessa’s lead to that drone of his, and have it walk the dog around the village while he remained on his gran’s couch.

Henry turned to his table and picked up the A3 piece of paper to shake off the remaining toast crumbs, and then put it back down. His to-do list from an hour ago looked naive considering how drastically things had changed.

At the top of the list was finding the GP who’d been at the party, but he questioned if that was worth looking into anymore. He wasn’t working for the Wentworth-Scotts – not that he’d been before – and Lottie was in the frame for murdering Vince.

Slumping down in a wooden chair at the table, he wondered if Lottie was capable of killing someone but couldn’t imagine her doing it.

In self-defence, perhaps.

He thought most people had the capacity to kill, in a life-or-death situation. The primeval instincts learnt when humans fought tigers in rainforests took over. He’d heard it called ‘a red haze’. He knew relatively harmless people who’d killed an attacker when their base instincts chose survival over death.

Could that be an explanation?

Henry didn’t know. He leant over the table to pick up his pen, and then added a new item on his to-do list: ‘go speak to Lottie’.

He tossed the pen across the tabletop, and he recalled Hargreaves’ threat to arrest him if he went to Otley Chevin.

Well, he could go where he wanted. This wasn’t a police state. Far from it.

He stirred Tessa from her snooze and called her inside. She didn’t come at first and had to be persuaded with dog biscuits and a promise of a walk later.

When she was inside, he locked the back door, picked up his notes from the table and folded them up. He then headed out the front door.

The traffic outside on Main Street was calming down from the rush hour earlier. As he passed Jean’s front gate, he heard her door open.

“There you are! What’s going on?” she called out.

Henry considered pretending he hadn’t heard her but knew it would only cause him problems later.

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