A Killer in the Family: A Novel

Book 5: Jonah Sheens Detective

by Gytha Lodge

Genres: Crime Fiction; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

Someone in your family isn't who they say they are...

Aisling's two sons, Ethan and Finn, mean everything to her.

Ever since becoming estranged from her own parents, though, she's always felt like a piece of her is missing.

Desperate to find answers - about her family, and herself - Aisling uploads her DNA to an ancestry website, and is thrilled when it finds a match.

But instead of finding answers, she comes face to face with a detective. Aisling's DNA is a match for a recent crime scene - the latest in a string of murders by a dangerous serial killer, known as 'the bonfire killer'. And the police have three lead suspects: her father, or one of her two sons.

Aisling would do anything for her family - but can she protect a killer?

Praise for Gytha Lodge

'A novel that literally makes you hold your breath then gasp out loud' VAL McDERMID
'Gripped me from the first page and kept me turning the pages long into the night' ERIN KELLY
'Smart, moody, intense and tangled. I loved it' GILLIAN McALLISTER
'With clues and twists to keep you absolutely hooked from the first page to the last. I can't wait for her next book' JANE CASEY

©2023 Gytha Lodge (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Release date: August 8, 2023

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 405

Sample

New Year’s Eve

Lindsay was laughing—really, genuinely laughing—for the first time in months. Possibly even for the first time in years.

This wasn’t the kind of thing she did. The car. The man. The intoxicated flight through crowded streets.

She hadn’t been out on New Year’s Eve for decades. Not since Peter. Even then, it had only happened in the early years. They’d met at a New Year’s party, and for three or four years afterward they’d each forced themselves out to go out for the love of the other. They’d booked a babysitter to look after the child neither of them had planned on but both of them adored, and each pretended to enjoy themselves.

But they’d each eventually admitted that the kitchen table and a game of Risk held more appeal than the fireworks and the crowds, and from then on they’d stayed in, with Dylan always begging to stay up until midnight with them. He made them party a little, at least. He’d persuade them to get the Twister mat out or dance around to Pink Floyd.

Then, after Peter’s slow decline and death and Dylan’s departure for university in Dublin, it had mostly been Lindsay alone. Not even forty and left to ring in the New Year with a jigsaw, the TV, and a lot more wine than she was used to. Every year had been the same: a flood of memories from that first night, when she had fizzed with the hope that Peter might kiss her at midnight, and a sense of profound loss that she was moving into a new year without him.

It might have been easier if Dylan had chosen to stay within easy visiting distance. But he’d met the woman of his dreams and decided to start a new life in Dublin. And so each New Year’s Eve before this one had been marked, for Lindsay, by aching loneliness.

She wasn’t sure what had changed tonight. Any other year, she would have been out for the count by now, numbed into oblivion by wine. She wouldn’t have been in an unfamiliar car, going to watch fireworks with a man she barely knew.

She glanced over at him, this other man, who had been as tentative at first as she had. A man so clearly as full of hope, but also of anxiety, as she was.

She watched the intelligent, attractive lines of his face as he maneuvered the big vehicle past a crowd of revelers that had spilled onto the road. And she felt a sense of the serendipity in everything.

She had gone for a long, hard walk until dusk. It had left her tired but also, somehow, enlivened. She’d showered and gone in her dressing gown to pour herself a glass of wine, and realized that she had somehow run herself dry. It had seemed the right thing to do, tonight, to put on her nicest black sweater and jeans with the heeled boots she hardly ever wore, and walk to the wine shop on South Parade.

Those decisions had sent her straight into his path. And him into hers. There had been no question in her mind that this was what was meant to happen: for her to meet someone on another New Year’s Eve, somewhere else she’d never really intended to go, and for the two of them to be the obvious outsiders. Clear soulmates.

Lindsay didn’t know exactly where they were driving to, and it didn’t worry her. He’d told her he knew where to get the best view of the fireworks, his voice full of energy and a delight at sharing this, and she believed him.

She felt a wave of joy at the trust she felt. At the fact that she’d at last, at last, felt

that same warmth and willingness she’d felt toward Peter. A hot, gut-deep excitement. A feeling of wanting to give someone else control.

“Here,” he said, as he pulled up at a temporary traffic light. He was holding a small thermos flask out to her, and she took it with a smile. Tipped it back without needing to think.

“Spiced rum and apple,” he said. “Is that OK?”

“Definitely,” she said. It was strong but comforting. She could feel the heat of it spreading down and into her stomach, adding a sense of comfort to the jubilant feeling that had built in her all evening.

She glanced out of the car at a ruckus going on. There was a group of twentysomethings on the sidewalk, drinking out of cans and yelling at one another instead of talking. On any other night, she would have felt irritated by them. Threatened maybe. Whereas tonight, she was part of an exuberant whole. She raised the flask to them and drank again, more deeply.

He grinned and said, “I might have some soon. If you’re OK to stay out for a while so I don’t have to drive for a bit.”

“I am,” she said without hesitation. And this, again, wasn’t the Lindsay who had spent the last seven years making excuses to be alone. This was the Lindsay of her past life. Perhaps an even bolder version.

He lifted his hand from the gear stick and squeezed her fingers just as the lights changed. They moved off, away from the hubbub. The bypass was quiet as they joined it and began to fly past illuminated houses. Just their car and one farther ahead.

It wasn’t far off midnight, and everyone who wasn’t spilling out of pubs was at parties or on sofas; on riverbanks or clustered in gardens.

She realized she should send something to Dylan, before the mobile networks jammed up. Her son would scoff at any suggestion he was sentimental, but he would mention it if he didn’t get a message from her tonight.

She pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket, and found it surprisingly hard to focus on the screen. It made her laugh.

“God, can hardly read,” she said.

“Are you calling someone?”

He asked it lightly. Without jealousy.

“Just messaging Dylan.”

She glanced over to see him smiling and was glad when he said, “I’d like to meet him sometime.”

“He’d love you,” she said. “You’re just his kind of person.”

Then her focus was on the screen for a few minutes as she laboriously typed:

Happy New Year! Hope

 you’re all having a great time.

She scrolled for a while until she’d found a few celebratory emojis. They weren’t in her most frequently used list, something she found herself thinking firmly, happily, that she was going to change. She was going to be the sort of person who was excited, happy, and celebratory again. She’d never believed in New Year’s resolutions, but she was making one now.

In a determined move, she turned the phone off. The rest of the night was going to be about her and him and nothing else. She could catch up with Dylan in the morning.

By the time she looked up again, they’d left the town and were driving between trees, the road dark on either side. She squinted out through the windscreen, disoriented, until she recognized a junction. They were already at Ashurst. Had it really taken her that long to write the message?

They turned a slight bend in the road, and Lindsay’s phone slid off her lap into the gap between the seat and the central console.

“Bugger.”

“What’s up?”

“My phone is…” She waved, her hands feeling only vaguely connected to her. God, she was drunk.

She reached over to get it just as he lifted his arm to look underneath it, and her head collided with his elbow, hard.

“Eesh,” he said.

Lindsay found herself laughing. “Sorry.”

“You shouldn’t be apologizing.” He shook his arm, glancing at her. “That must have hurt. You OK?”

“I’m fine,” she said, grinning at him. “I can’t even feel it.”

“Good,” he said, shaking his head slightly as he looked back at the road. “You’re clearly tougher than I am.”

She reached down for the phone again, her fingers finding it but not able to grasp it. She succeeded only in shoving it backward, until it was pushed into the rear of the car.

“Sorry. Hang on.”

She pulled on the seat belt to give herself more room, and half turned in her seat. Twisting her right arm, she could just about reach down to where the phone now sat.

In this contorted position, she could see into the rear of the car, and at first it meant nothing to her: neatly bound piles of wood wedged front to back, one

of which stretched out toward her. The can of kerosene. They were just things. The sorts of things people had in their cars sometimes.

But then she found herself thinking about a woman, and a murder, and a bonfire. A lonely fortysomething woman whose photo had appeared again and again in the papers and online. A woman who had reminded Lindsay of herself in painful ways. A woman whose killer hadn’t yet been found, though everybody had tried.

The happy, detached contentment suddenly shifted. She felt it for what it was: a fog of confusion that was descending and overtaking her, as he drove her god knew where. And with it came the most crushing sense of dread.

He’s drugged you, she thought, furious with herself. Though the fury was hard to hold on to in the haze that was wrapping itself around her. You shouldn’t have had the drink.

Then she thought about the three drinks she’d already accepted from him, and she realized that he might have been drugging her for hours.

She briefly imagined the other woman, Jacqueline, drinking with him too. Getting into the car with him and taking the flask. And then being unable to defend herself as he dragged her out into the middle of the woods.

Still there was a part of her that wanted to let him kiss her. That hoped she was wrong.

No. You have to get out. You have to get out now.

The thought was almost enough to keep her focused. She needed to do something to make him pull over.

But she might not be able to make him stop. She needed the phone. It was her one chance to call for help. If he knew she’d done that, then maybe she’d be safe.

She reached farther, ignoring the kerosene and the wood—a piece of which pressed into her head as she turned—and stretching out with her fingers. She could feel how close he was to her now. How vulnerable she was. It was no longer exciting.

But somehow it was hard to hold on to her fear. Even to concentrate. She found herself staring into nothing, even while her body was twisted uncomfortably, her arm out toward the phone.

“You OK?” he asked, his voice rumbling close to her. It jolted her, kicking a little fear back into the haze.

“Just trying to reach it,” she said, and she tried to laugh. And then she found herself laughing for real, for some reason. It was so stupid, not being able to get her hands on the bloody phone. What a ridiculous way to end up dead.

The tips of her fingers slid on it, barely able to grip. She’d only shoved it farther away

“It’s OK; we’re nearly there,” he said.

She became aware that the car was jolting now. That it was tipping and rolling over something bumpy. The phone slid beyond the touch of her fingers.

She put a hand out to the wood to steady herself, but the nearest piece wasn’t very well tied. It started to come out of the bundle.

She found her hand gripping it as she faced forward again, and tried to remember to be afraid as she saw that they were driving down a high, open track over heathland.

“We’ll get a great view up here,” he said.

She saw that he was smiling. It was a surprisingly warm smile.

You need to get away, she thought. Get away from him, Lindsay.

She sure as hell couldn’t fight, with her limbs feeling loose and her thoughts foggy. And she wouldn’t have stood much chance anyway. As fit as she was, he was clearly stronger, his muscles used to activity.

There was a stand of gorse ahead of them, suddenly, and he swung the car around to park next to it. They were on the brow of a hill, looking out over woodland below. It was familiar to her. Lindsay had walked here.

“Lyndhurst Heath,” she said out loud, unclipping her seat belt clumsily and letting it slide across her.

“I love it up here,” he said, turning to her.

He looked as though he might kiss her. And for a moment a surge of longing made her hesitate.

What if he meant everything he said? What if he really feels this?

But even through the haze, she saw a flicker of something cross his face. Something anticipatory. Faltering. Something that wasn’t adoration.

Suddenly Lindsay wanted nothing less than his kiss. She pointed past him, and said, “Look!”

As he turned, she pulled the piece of wood free and jabbed it at him as hard as the confined space and her loose-feeling arms allowed. She felt it jar as it connected with the back of his head and heard him cry out.

She didn’t wait for him to react further. She dropped the wood and opened the door. She slid out and then she ran for the trees, down a path she knew well.

She heard the car door opening a ways behind her. Then there was another shout. It was angry this time. She hadn’t injured him; she’d only pissed him off. 

She just had to make it to the trees. That was all. Get there, and hide.

She looked up at them, their shadowy shapes seeming close but also impossibly distant, and she could feel the fuzziness closing in. Her legs were almost entirely without feeling as she ran, every bump in the ground sending her bouncing over it.

“Lindsay!”

He was behind her, and he was closer. So much closer.

Lindsay tried to focus on the blurring trees, fighting the exhaustion and the part of her that told her to give up.

No, no, no, the stronger, more stubborn part of her repeated. And as she tripped and stumbled to her knees, it was that part of her that let out a howl of fury at the unfairness of it all.

1

January 1

He’d watched them ever since that first fire back in October. Followed their little team from scene to scene as they tried to unpick it all.

He’d been with them, in an ironic sort of camaraderie, while they’d walked it over and attempted to work out who had been burned to ashes in the forest. Though none of them had seen him. He was good at being invisible when he wanted to be.

He’d been with them, invisibly, for most of the three months since. Always watching them. Always unseen. He’d followed them to the victim’s house, and on visits to bars and shops and cafés. He’d followed them as they’d gone to interview possible suspects, and smiled to himself as he’d seen them leave with expressions of frustration.

He hadn’t just watched them, of course. He’d read about all of it, in print and online. He’d known the moment they’d identified the victim as forty-six-year-old Jacqueline Clarke. He’d read all about her lonely life in Brockenhurst, as viewed through the eyes of a journalist.

He’d cut around each photograph of striking, sandy-haired Jacqueline and kept it. And each photograph of the team too.

One of the local press had used the term “Bonfire Killer” in a follow-up piece, and even though it hadn’t been picked up elsewhere, he’d liked it and started using it privately.

Two weeks after Jacqueline Clarke had been found, he’d watched them rush to a second pyre, this one still burning. He’d seen them douse it, even though it was abundantly clear that there was no body on it this time. And then he’d smiled to himself at their confusion. Their consternation.

He knew what they were thinking. He was too far away to hear most of their conversation, but he could read their expressions in the harsh lights that arrived with them.

They think it might happen again, he told himself. They’re expecting another Jacqueline Clarke now. Another Bonfire Killer victim.

The little team had begun to travel farther afield as they tried to tie in other crimes, and he’d followed them. Many of them had been laughably dissimilar, but as some of them had picked over the burnt remnants of a house in West Gradley, where a woman of Jacqueline Clarke’s age had died, he’d enjoyed their angst. Their uncertainty about whether to investigate it further.

Their agitation had been clearer still at the next two sites. Two more fires, each without a victim. And at each one their movements had been faster, like ants disturbed by a stick. He’d found it all amusing.

The thing he hadn’t expected to feel, however, was an increase in his own sense of camaraderie toward them. Somehow, in watching them all work, he’d developed an odd sort of affection. For DCI Jonah Sheens and his wry thoughtfulness. For DS Domnall O’Malley and his warmth.

Maybe even for DS Ben Lightman, whose model-handsome looks had produced an immediate revulsion in him. As though he were some Hollywood actor pretending to be a police officer. He’d hated him on sight.

But it had been hard to keep up the same level of distaste when he’d seen Ben Lightman pull on Wellingtons and wade through mud, and then stand in drizzle for an hour and a half at an extinguished pyre. 

That hour and a half of standing in the rain was an experience the two of them had shared, despite Ben Lightman not knowing it.

And then, of course, there was Juliette. He thought of her as Juliette, not her title. She was different. So easy to watch. To be drawn to. He found himself watching her even when the action was elsewhere. When more interesting things were going on.

Things had shifted for him after the third pyre, too. He’d left before the team, heading back to the four-by-four he’d hired for the occasion, using a fake driver’s license. He’d parked it farther up the track, to be out of sight, and as he walked back to it he’d passed Juliette’s little Nissan Micra, which she’d parked off to the side of the poor-quality road.

The Micra was clearly, profoundly, and irretrievably stuck in the mud. Something Juliette was going to discover when she tried to drive it away.

He looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. She’d be making that discovery at close to one a.m., at a guess.

He went to the car and tried the door. It was, he realized with a shiver of excitement, unlocked.

A strange, thrilling thought had run through him. He could actually help her. He could help Juliette. Do something kind for her. And if he did it right, she might suspect that it had been him, but never know for sure.

He’d glanced back toward the lights of the crime scene, way back down the track beyond a locked gate. They were half a mile away, and most of the forensics team would be there for hours.

Without any further hesitation, he’d gone to get the rental four-by-four with its steel-cable pulley, attached it to the Micra’s tow bar, and pulled it clear of the mud. He’d done it with his lights off, the revs low, and his gaze half on where the police might return from at any moment. But by the time he’d dragged the car onto the stony road, nobody had come.

With a smile to himself, he’d unhitched the cable and driven away, feeling a bond that he’d not expected connecting the two of them. A strangely satisfying one.

Now, as he dressed carefully, he thought of the help he’d given her. It warmed him as he pulled his shirt on in the chilly bedroom.

He wondered, idly, what she’d think of his outfit. Though what he really wanted to know was what she would think of the little surprise he had in store for her today.

 

2

The best thing about not going out on New Year’s Eve, Aisling had decided, was how much nicer it made the bank holiday. Gone were the days when she would wake up at ten, her head full of pain and a vague sense of shame and regret hovering. Admittedly, she still had a slight headache from the bottle of Chablis she’d drunk most of on the sofa. But she was confident that would be gone after a few hours and a couple of ibuprofen.

It was so much better to really enjoy a morning spent with her boys, even if Ethan was clearly struggling with a monster hangover. Her older son had barely managed to make it out of his war zone of a bedroom by noon, his face pale and his mop of blond curls standing up like it had been back-combed.

He’d given monosyllabic answers to Aisling’s cheerful greetings. This was out of character enough for her to say, “Aww, good night, was it?”

Finn, by contrast, had been up since before Aisling and was now almost offensively full of energy. He bounced around the kitchen, fetching ingredients for their customary eggs Benedict and keeping up a stream of chatter about all the big events from the night before. Aisling hadn’t really been following, but the main gossip seemed to be his friend’s girlfriend deciding to switch her attentions to the friend’s older brother.

“I mean, in all honesty, he might be a really decent guy,” Finn told her, at the point when she had zoned back in, “but I just can’t see how that’s ever worth it for either of them. I mean, Chris’s completely bruk, and can’t even look at his brother, and Lauren’s now basically lost her whole fam.” He heaved a big sigh. “I know people think it’s love, and you can’t help it when it’s love, but you have a choice, right? I mean, there were points where both of them could have gone, ‘You know what? I’m not going to flirt with, like, my brother’s girlfriend,’ or whatever. I just—I can’t see Marian doing that. Or Ethan being happy to go along with it either.”

“Definitely would,” Ethan called from the table.

Finn just grinned at him. “You’d have to start doing some exercise to be in with a chance. Marian’s not massively into the whole deadbeat rock-star thing.”

“That’s just what she tells you,” Ethan retorted.

Aisling turned to shake her head at him, and realized that he was slumped almost entirely onto the tabletop. He looked rough, and like he was in the throes of proper hangover depression too. His attempts at their usual banter were not matched by his expression at all.

God, how much did he drink? Aisling wondered. Was he sick?

At nineteen, Ethan was technically old enough to look after himself, but he had a thoughtless streak that made him in many ways more of a worry than his seventeen-year-old brother. This was attested to by the number of times he’d set fire to things in his room, or thrown away objects he’d then needed, or ended up stranded after not considering how he would get home from an impulsive trip. It didn’t help that he was by nature a people-pleaser, and would sometimes agree to do ridiculous things just to avoid killing the vibe.

Finn was a very different person. Despite being two years younger, he was a great deal more definite about what he wanted, and always had his eye on the long game. He was hard-working, responsible, and dead

set on a career in professional tennis. Which meant he was never going to get himself so drunk that he was sick, or call Aisling at three a.m. from a car park in Lymington.

“What time did you crawl in?” she asked Ethan, wanting to go and ruffle his hair but unable to leave the eggs at the critical stage of poaching.

Ethan gave a shrug. “Don’t know. Two? Something like that?”

“Did you leave your car at Matthew’s?”

“Er, yeah.” Aisling stayed looking at him long enough to see that he glanced toward his brother. “I’ll pick it up after rehearsal.”

“I’d suggest much later,” Aisling said. “Like, maybe tomorrow.”

“I’ll be OK once I’ve eaten something,” Ethan said a little tetchily.

Aisling decided to ignore this rare bad humor. She finished cooking and served up two plates of eggs. She let Finn add bacon and dribble his homemade Hollandaise sauce over the top.

“You two start,” she said. “Mine’ll only be a minute.”

She watched Finn pick the plates up to carry them to the table, and saw that he had what looked to be a fresh bandage on his left leg.

“Did you cut yourself last night?” she asked, waving the egg spoon at him.

“Oh, no,” Finn said with a slightly brittle laugh. “Just from running the other day. I trod on a stick, which jumped up and bit me.”

“Poor stick,” she said with a grin.

“Marian says, ‘Happy New Year,’ by the way,” Finn said, dumping the plates and picking up his phone.

“Tell her the same back,” Aisling told him. “When’s she coming to stay again?”

“Probably not until February realistically,” Finn said with a short sigh. “Too many weekend commitments for both of us.”

Aisling felt a squeeze of sadness for him. She had never pushed him to excel at tennis. The drive came purely from within, but it didn’t always make his life easy. And falling for another very driven tennis player who lived halfway across the country didn’t help much, either.

She served herself and joined the two of them at the table. Finn had already managed to eat half of his four-egg plate. Ethan, on the other hand, was looking at his barely touched food with a slightly queasy expression.

She was about to ask

him if he needed painkillers when he pushed the plate away and said, “Mummo, have you seen that Amazon package that came for me?”

“No.” She started eating. “Hasn’t crossed my radar. What’s in it?”

“Guitar picks.”

Aisling raised an eyebrow at him. “I gave you some for Christmas. Can’t you use them?”

“I can’t find them,” Ethan said with a slightly sheepish look. “I’m going to need some for rehearsal later. I owe Dan a couple too.”

“Of course you do,” Aisling said. “How big is this package?”

“It’s like…postcard-sized?” He gestured with his hands.

“And it definitely arrived?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was in the hall.”

“Where presumably you decided it would live until you needed it.” She shook her head with a half-smile. “Did you ask your brother? Finn, have you seen this Amazon package of your useless sibling’s?”

Finn was doing a good job of ignoring them both as he ate, but he paused long enough to say, “Oh. Yes. I put it in your room.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Ethan said with only a trace of humor. “I’ll never find it now.”

“True, that,” Finn shot back. “You could lose actual small countries in there.”

Barks, their miniature schnauzer, rose from his basket at that point and climbed delicately onto Ethan’s lap. Ethan, who usually made a huge fuss over the dog, didn’t seem to notice.

Aisling looked at her older son more carefully, wondering whether he was just hungover or actually unhappy. He’d been to his so-called friend Matt’s house for a party, but Aisling knew full well that that friendship was extremely unreliable. Matt could be a full-on arsehole at times, though he was mostly just irritating. Ethan sometimes had to rely on him to step in and play when they were a band member short, but she didn’t see why he spent time with the guy beyond that.

Though, in fact, most of Ethan’s friends were a little grating. Aisling couldn’t help preferring Finn’s sweet if hopelessly posh friends to Ethan’s self-absorbed musical ones.

“Ooh,” Finn said suddenly, leaning forward onto the table with his phone in his hand

“There are loads of police on the heath. Look.”

He held his phone out toward Aisling, who peered at a photograph that had been shared on Twitter. It showed an elevated shot of the far end of Lyndhurst Heath, toward the woods. Right by the tree line was a cluster of police cars and vans, and there were two figures in white who looked like forensics officers.

“Is that from today?”

Finn nodded. “Yeah. I might run over that way. Go and see what’s going on.”

“Don’t be a ghoul,” Aisling said. But then she found herself pulling out her phone and googling for articles about events on Lyndhurst Heath. Nothing came up.

It was unsettling to think about a crime happening so close by. Forensics teams implied something serious.

She’d always thought of the New Forest as safe, at least from serious crime. But that had changed three months ago, when a lonely fortysomething woman had been murdered not far away. An ordinary, average person named Jacqueline, who could so easily have been Aisling herself. She felt a little skip of her heartbeat at the thought that this might be another woman dead. Another murder. Was there really nothing online about it yet?

She tried searching a few different terms, but only came up with articles about the original murder. Which might mean it was unimportant, or simply that nothing had made it into the press yet.

Ethan rose to make himself coffee, and Aisling turned her phone over. She shouldn’t be thinking about murders. She should be focusing on her sons. On today.

She found herself watching the two of them, for a moment, with a strange sense of nostalgia. Almost as if this scene were already done and she was looking back on it with longing.

She often felt a hint of sadness at the dawn of a new year. It had to do with saying goodbye to all the festivities and time with her boys. But the New Year was always spiced up, too, with a back-to-school feeling. A forward-looking determination to shake off the booze and the indulgence and get to work.

But right now that energized feeling was absent. She felt, instead, a sense of loss. Perhaps, she thought, it was because they might have only one more Christmas together in this house. If they were lucky.

She almost wished she could trust her sons with the truth of their financial situation. It would have been such a relief to share the burden of it, but that wasn’t something she was willing to do to either of them. Ethan had none of the skills necessary to help, and Finn had the right to a proper childhood and adolescence, free of the worries of adulthood.

Which meant it was Aisling alone who knew the reality facing them. Her sons assumed that with one mega-hit game under her belt and a steady stream of work coming in, Aisling was very comfortable. She’d never admitted to them how little she’d actually made from Survive the Light, or how many things she’d gone without to keep 

them at their private school. They didn’t know how much juggling she’d had to do to keep funding Ethan’s touring with his band or Finn’s tennis lessons and tournaments.

She’d sometimes asked herself if she was mad trying to send them to a private school when she had nowhere near that kind of money. The whole idea of Hanyard House had come from Stephen, her charming but ultimately selfish ex-husband, who had chosen to walk out on them when the boys were two and four, rather than face up to his responsibilities as a father. She suspected now that he had signed them up for Hanyard Nursery School in the hope that they might stay on and eventually start boarding, freeing him from most of his parental obligations.

Pride had made Aisling settle for far less in the divorce than she should have. It was clear to her now that she should have demanded support for their school fees right up until they turned eighteen. But, of course, she hadn’t been sure she wanted them to stay at that school. So she’d decided, for continuity, that she’d just stick with it while they were in the nursery and then the adjoining junior school, where they had already been told by Stephen that they were going to go. She wanted to make her sons’ disrupted lives as easy as possible by letting them stay at the place they were used to for the time being.

But they’d each, in turn, been put forward for scholarships to the senior school and won them. Ethan had been awarded a huge music scholarship and a small academic one, and Finn had followed that up with almost half his fees paid by a sports scholarship and with more offered for his academic ability.

It had made Aisling feel duty-bound to send them there. She felt as though they’d earned it, and she’d vowed to somehow manage the five thousand a year she still had to find for each of them.

She’d done it too, but only by using up her full inheritance from her mum, and then by gradually sinking further and further into overdrafts and loan debts. There had been heart-stopping moments, like when she’d been refused an increase on a loan to bridge a gap and had looked around frantically for a solution with a feeling of impending doom.

She’d felt incredibly alone. With no parents to turn to, no partner, and a friendship group that consisted entirely of parents who had no concept of financial issues, she’d known that it was all on her.

Her biggest fear had

been losing the house. She’d worked so hard on this little place to make it perfect. To make it theirs. It had been a tired, depressing building when they’d moved in, and she’d sunk hundreds of hours into stripping off old wallpaper, painting, and creating perfect lighting.

The place was beautiful now, she thought. Comfortable and airy. And it made the most of the view of the fields behind too. She could sit in her kitchen and gaze out at them whenever she wanted, and it had made a lot of things better over the years.

Even now, with her sons all but grown-up, the thought of having to move out broke her heart. Though she knew it would solve a lot of their financial problems. She could sell the house at a significant profit and start again, buy another fixer-upper somewhere promising and slowly make it hers. She’d be able to reduce their mortgage and her debts all at once. But it would still tear her up to do it.

But I might not have to, she thought, as breakfast turned into a good-natured argument over the washing-up, if I can sell SINN.

SINN was her new game. Her secret, cherished project. She’d worked at it for the past year. Around all the board meetings for the start-ups she’d sat in. Around the management of her house and her sons.

She knew it was brilliant. That it was as good as or better than Survive the Light. It was just about convincing Sony, and getting them to pay her what it was worth this time.

As Finn bullied Ethan into helping wash up, she pulled her phone out of her dressing gown pocket and looked through her emails again, uncertain why she was checking. Sony weren’t going to reply to her message now. It was New Year’s Day. She just had to wait until the right people were back from leave, and then they could set a date to meet. She knew that she’d piqued their interest already.

She found herself glancing through the few emails that had landed between Christmas and New Year. She hadn’t really looked at any of them. Most were threads about the new start-up whose board she’d joined, a very eager little game developer called VePlec, based in Holborn.

She found herself sighing over the ambitious tone of their emails. Aisling usually loved that aspect of start-ups. The way their enthusiasm hadn’t yet had a chance to meet hard-hitting reality. She loved the way their ideals meant more than money.

But the founder of this company was full-on arrogant. He seemed to think he was Steve Jobs crossed with Elon Musk, when he was actually just a fairly ordinary nerd who’d teamed up with the right people. He also had a habit of annoying potential investors with blithe statements about how much better this game was going to be than everything that had come before.

She shook her head over the most recent thread. The CEO suspected someone was sharing concepts and code with a rival developer. An idea Aisling thought about as likely as Sony sitting in on their first board

meeting.

There are clear signs from recent Adelpho announcements that they are imitating details of our new game platform in ways that go beyond coincidence.

Except, Aisling thought when he went on to list them, that they were so vague as to sound exactly like coincidence. And, in fact, like another firm developing another slightly retro platform game.

“Oh my god,” she said out loud with a grin, as she read on. “The founder of this start-up is nuts. He thinks someone’s stealing the IP of a game nobody’s ever heard of. He’s even hiring a private investigator to go undercover in the firm.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Ethan said, looking animated for the first time this morning. “They could hire me. I could totally get away with being a developer for a week. A lot better than some PI who knows nothing about games. And I can always tell when someone’s sneaking around.”

“I’d hire you,” Aisling said, and then, reading on, added, “Ahh, shame. They already hired someone. Your big break, ruined.”

She scrolled down through the email, intending to read out the name of the PI so they could all have a laugh about it. But instead she found herself looking at one sentence, over and over, her heart tightening in her chest.

Jack O’Keane, from O’Keane and Ross, will be working undercover within the firm.

She found herself remembering, in a sharp rush, a fifteen-year-old boy with dimples and a tolerant smile. Him taking her hand. Him laughing at her as she spun off the track in Pole Position. Thoughts of his breath mixing with hers on a cold night.

They were memories she had never really allowed in. Not for thirty years. And they left her heart speeding like she’d run for miles.

 

3

The wind over Lyndhurst Heath was cold. Unforgiving. It ripped at exposed skin, and Jonah felt an urge to cover the woman they’d found lying here. But the blueness of her skin was more than simple cold. It would never warm back up to a healthy color.

McCullough was here, of course, though as Hampshire Constabulary’s in-house forensic scientist, she wasn’t meant to be. They had a chief forensic officer who was nominally in charge of the process of gathering evidence. But Linda McCullough was obsessed, hyper-conscientious, and incapable of trusting anyone not to spoil the samples that would go to her for analysis. She had also taken scene of crime training specifically in order to feel qualified to interfere.

She did at least restrict herself to the serious crime scenes. Which meant that Jonah was entirely used to meeting her at places like this. At places of murder. Of violence. Of suffering that had grown cold with time.

They had their roles mapped out precisely. Well, McCullough had them mapped out. Jonah’s role as DCI and senior investigating officer was to take a cursory glance and then keep well out of the way. She and the forensic science team would secure the scene and get to work. Jonah would watch, perhaps drinking coffee, while they photographed, took samples, and discussed their findings among themselves. With a murder like this, a pathologist would also be brought in. Once they were ready, Linda McCullough would run Jonah through it all, letting the chief forensic officer listen in if he or she was lucky.

Jonah stepped farther away from the scene, trying to keep his hastily pulled-on trainers out of the patches of standing water that were scattered around the heath. He hadn’t been prepared for this today. He’d woken at nine, thinking about a bike ride and then cooking a roast, possibly while also trying to entertain Milly. At almost six months old, she was nothing if not demanding.

He’d been looking forward to eating and then collapsing in front of a child-appropriate film with Milly and his partner, Michelle. Some genuinely nice time together, in contrast with what had felt like fleeting, practical interactions for the last three months.

But there were some calls you couldn’t ignore, and this had been one of them. It had set up a dull, beating thrum in him the moment he had answered it.

Forty-six-year-old woman…Body left on a pyre…

That’s what they’d said, but what he had heard, insistently, was the phrase: Serial killer. Serial killer. Serial killer.

They had known they might find themselves here. Ever since October, when Jacqueline Clarke’s barely recognizable remains had been found on a pyre near Longbeech Campsite. And increasingly, as they’d chased empty pyre after empty pyre across the New Forest.

They’d been desperate to stop it happening, and they had failed.

He’d seen the same knowledge in Domnall O’Malley’s eyes as his sergeant had arrived on scene. The heavy tiredness. The feeling that this was their failure.

“Found by a dog walker,” Jonah told him. “He’s over by the squad car, being given tea. He looks freezing and fed up. Want to put him out of his misery?”

O’Malley had nodded, pulling out his iPad to take notes. Jonah could have spared

the dog walker a few minutes in the cold and talked to him before O’Malley arrived, but he’d felt instinctively that this was a place for his friendly detective sergeant. For O’Malley’s warm, mates-together banter and his Kilkenny brogue. Not for a senior officer who would be the focus of his irritation and complaints.

O’Malley had headed over to the witness and Jonah had been left with a rapidly cooling takeaway cup of coffee rustled up by a constable. That and his thoughts, many of which were bleak.

The sound of a car engine reached him a while later, and he saw Juliette Hanson’s Nissan Micra arriving at the top of the hill, struggling up the bumpy track. His detective constable parked close to Jonah’s own Mondeo and climbed out. She was still several hundred meters away, but it was as far as any car could go without some serious tires and four-wheel drive.

Jonah went to meet her at the bottom of the slope. He was relieved to see that she had changed into hiking boots, though they looked a little odd with her knee-length black-and-white dress and thin wool jacket. It made him feel all the worse about dragging her away from the funeral.

She nodded to him. “Chief.”

“Sorry about this.” He tried to read her expression. “How did it go? Was Ben…?”

“He did perfectly, of course,” Hanson said with a wry smile. “Amazing speech, everything organized flawlessly. The wake was lovely too. Country pub. You know.”

Jonah gave a small smile. He could well imagine. Ben, the fourth member of their team, was one of those people who seemed to achieve perfection without trying. From his movie-star good looks and athleticism to his absolute self-control and organization, he was a model officer. But he was also, Jonah had long suspected, someone who struggled to be open about the feelings that bubbled away underneath, and the death of his father couldn’t have been easy on him.

He wanted to find out more, but it wasn’t the time. Instead he asked, “Have you got more layers with you?”

“Umm…I might have something in the car,” Hanson offered. “I can have a dig around if we’re here long.”

“I would. I’m freezing

 even in my big coat. I’ll talk you through and then you should layer up as much as you can.” He glanced up toward the hill, and realized that there was someone standing close to where Hanson had parked. A bird-watcher, by the looks of it, in a woolly cap and wax jacket with a pair of binoculars. He might not have been exactly invading the crime scene, but with binoculars he’d be able to see a lot of the activity from up there.

“Hey,” he called to the closest pair of uniformed constables. “Can you move him on?”

The two officers nodded and started up the hill, but the bird-watcher turned and ambled away of his own accord. Hopefully, Jonah thought, before he’d had time for a ghoulish look or to take a photo. The thought of a high-quality image appearing before they’d had the chance to contact the victim’s family made him feel decidedly uneasy. But there was only so much they could do in a very open public space.

He turned back toward the cluster of white suits, and Hanson followed. “OK,” he said. “So she was found at eleven.”

“Another pyre?” Hanson made an effort to tuck her blond hair out of her eyes. It was being whipped around by the wind, and she was wearing it loose today. Part of her funeral look instead of her practical policing one. “We think it’s the same perp?”

“Yes,” Jonah agreed. “And yes. But it didn’t burn this time.” He felt, all over again, the rush of incremental yet tainted hope he’d felt when he’d first arrived at the pyre. “For reasons that aren’t clear, it looks like he or she doused the fire just after it began to catch. There’s been a fire extinguisher used. The body is untouched.”

He glanced at her. “And there’s blood. It doesn’t look like it’s the victim’s.”

“So there’s a chance of DNA?” Hanson asked.

“Maybe,” Jonah said. “Though I haven’t been close enough to the scene to know.” He gave her a wry grin. “McCullough’s been on the warpath.”

He watched Hanson’s reaction, seeing that same complex reaction he’d had. The deep-rooted anxiety over this being, almost without doubt, a serial killer at work would have hit her too. Hanson would know, as he did, that this second death made a third enormously more likely. ...