Stone Cold Dead: A Pulse Pounding British Crime Thriller (DCI Kett Crime Thrillers Book 6) by Alex Smith

Author:Alex Smith [Smith, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Relentless Media
Published: 2021-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Oh Jesus, Kate,” Porter said, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. “You okay?”

He heard Savage sigh down the phone, and everything he needed to know was in that stuttered breath.

“I will be. But I’ll see his face forever, you know?”

“You want me to come back?” Porter said, blowing out a sigh of his own when he heard how useless his words were. What was he supposed to do to make it better? What could he do? Savage was one of the strongest people he knew, and she certainly didn’t need his shoulder to cry on.

“Sure, Pete,” she said. “Come back and make me a cuppa. That will take my mind off it, at least.”

He wasn’t sure if she was being serious or not until she whispered a sad laugh.

“I’ll be okay. You there yet?”

Porter looked over the steering wheel towards the squat little cottage that sat at the arse end of Dereham. It was the last known address of James Preston, Chase Masefield’s father, and it was pretty evident that he still lived here. The garden was a junkyard of statues that were either half-finished or half-rotted, twisted figures that looked almost human but not quite right, with too many limbs or none at all, their faces split wide by smiles or sobs. They were carved from a white stone of some kind—or moulded in Plaster of Paris, perhaps, Porter couldn’t be sure—dull and yellow with age, and they were all drowning in the long grass and overgrown hedges.

The cottage itself was pretty much derelict, one of the two ground-floor windows boarded up and the other shielded by a curtain so thick it might have been sculpted from the same stone. Ivy had claimed the building as its own, a great blanket of dark veins that gripped the walls and the sagging roof. The car that sat on the side of the road was almost as bad, a shitty Morris Traveller with wooden panels. The rain was doing its best to wash the whole sorry scene away, as if it was a stubborn stain.

The last thing Porter wanted to do was get out of the Ford, but this wasn’t something that could wait.

He reached for the handle, glancing through the window to see a man staring back at him through the rain-streaked glass, so close that his nose was almost pressed against it. The shock of it loosed a bolt of adrenaline and Porter’s knees cracked off the bottom of the wheel.

“Fuck,” he said, his head roaring. He waved his hand. “Back off.”

The man retreated, grinning like the village idiot. Porter opened the door and got out, the freezing rain pissing him off even more than the dickhead who stood in front of him. He was a short, wiry guy wearing cut-off jeans that ended just above his ankles. On his feet was a pair of sandals that would already have been out of fashion when the Romans had settled here. His feet were filthy. Despite the rain, all he wore on his top half was a faded Metallica T-shirt that was covered in paint.

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