DEATH IN THE DUNES a captivating historical mystery (Inspector Ryga Historical Mysteries Book 4) by PAULINE ROWSON

Author:PAULINE ROWSON [ROWSON, PAULINE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller, mystery and suspense
Published: 2023-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Sunday

‘We don’t talk about work or the war in front of my wife,’ Simmonds said when Ryga and he were settled in the small study of his detached house on the outskirts of Folkestone. If Ryga had been a jealous man he would have envied George Simmonds, his study, his home, and his family — a wife and a boy of eleven. But he wasn’t, and he thought that Simmonds deserved it all. But he’d also quickly noted that Stella Simmonds was nervy. Her smile of welcome had been brief and fretful. She was thin with tired, sad eyes, and a lined oval face, which once must have been delicate and pretty. She was dressed carefully and modestly. Her words, like her movements, were precise but jerky. The boy, Colin, had greeted Ryga pleasantly but shyly, before returning to his book.

‘My wife doesn’t want to know what happened in the camp.’ Simmonds handed Ryga a small glass of dry sherry. ‘And I’m sure, like me, you don’t wish to talk about it anyway. Stella found it very difficult with me away.’

And, Ryga thought, it had been hard for them to adjust on Simmonds’s return. Not surprising. They weren’t alone in that. Four years’ absence filled with worry and fear had taken its toll on both Simmonds and his wife. Their way of dealing with it was not talking about it. But Ryga sensed it hung over them like a dark brooding cloud of frozen isolation. Even though Simmonds seemed on the surface the man Ryga had spent four years with in the camp, he could see that he wasn’t. Perhaps Simmonds thought the same about him. How could they not have changed?

Simmonds had seemed confident and in control when Ryga had met him off the train at Greatstone-on-Sea, and he had been. He was a professional, on the job, but if Ryga had looked harder and closer maybe he would have seen, as he did now, that behind the confidence there was a pent-up tenseness. Even Simmonds’s movements as he sat and sipped his sherry had about them a calculating air, as though he were rehearsing a stage play. The flame that had burned inside Simmonds and had kept him going through those long, hard years had gone. He’d returned home to find his wife changed by her experiences of struggling to raise a baby, working, making ends meet, and coping with the blackout and bombing. While Colin, never having seen his father save in photographs, had probably been scared and confused by the thin, aged man who had walked into the house looking nothing like the police officer in the photograph on the mantelpiece.

Now that Ryga looked more closely at his old friend he could see how weary he was, like his wife. He felt deeply sorry for them, and angry that the war had caused such a dreadful strain on their marriage and their lives. They’d make the best of it, of course, like thousands of others. They had to, there was no other choice.

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