THE SISTER'S TWIN an absolutely gripping mystery thriller that will take your breath away (Ray Flowers Book 4) by JANE ADAMS

THE SISTER'S TWIN an absolutely gripping mystery thriller that will take your breath away (Ray Flowers Book 4) by JANE ADAMS

Author:JANE ADAMS [ADAMS, JANE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Book crime thriller and suspense
Published: 2021-03-31T16:00:00+00:00


Chapter 24

Richard Hennessy had once had a comfortable life with a wife and family. He’d been deputy manager at his local bank. He had gardened on the weekends, played the occasional round of golf and enjoyed tinkering with an old car, which he declared was vintage but which his family referred to as ‘the banger.’ He was an ordinary man — quiet, cheerful, friendly enough, but outside of working hours had preferred to spend time with family. When his wife had fallen ill he’d been heartbroken. He had taken early retirement to nurse her, the children having flown and with families of their own now scattered across the country. Five years later she had died, a longer time than the doctors had initially given her, but it seemed that this precipitated a downward slide. At the age of only sixty-eight, to his children watching him standing in the garden of remembrance it had been obvious that this was now a frail old man.

They had done their best for him, visiting and phoning, but their own children were growing and had demands on their time elsewhere. Each time they saw their father they had noticed further decline, until eventually it became obvious that he could not tell one day from the next, one daughter from the other, and was forgetting to eat and even to drink. And so he had fetched up here, in this little council-run home, pleasant enough but basic, and though he had seemed bemused by the move, he seemed to settle. Perhaps he did not fully realise where he was.

By the time Richard Hennessy had reached his late seventies, and a decade had passed since his wife died, he was barely recognisable as the good-humoured, quiet man who had been a cheerful father, an efficient deputy manager and a not-terribly-good mechanic. His health was poor and his key worker was increasingly worried that he was struggling to eat and showing less and less interest in life. No one really expected Richard Hennessy to last too much longer, but they certainly did not expect to find him sitting in his chair, looking out of his bedroom window with a knife-wound in his chest, life extinguished, and what they at first took for a playing card tucked into his hand.

Beckett called Ray and told him that there had been another murder, this one as efficient and practised as that of Bethany Himes.

‘What card was he holding?’ Ray asked.

‘The King of Swords.’

‘That means . . .’ Ray vaguely remembered that Elspeth had used that as his significator.

‘Don’t bother, I looked it up. Alice kept quite close to the original tarot meaning for the King of Swords. It’s usually a man in authority — doctor, lawyer . . . bank manager. Actually, he was deputy manager, but you take my point.’

‘So whoever left the card knew quite a bit about him. Like the last times.’

‘It looks that way, but as I said before, the meaning of the cards is flexible enough to fit whoever.



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