Why She Died

Book 3: Detective Rachel Hart

by J.G. Roberts

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

'Captivated me straight away... I devoured this book in one sitting, it was a thrilling read that was difficult to put back down.' Hannah May Book Reviews. "It was a person after all, but she was suspended in mid-air. Abi's heart began to thump against her ribcage as the full horror of what she was seeing became apparent. Her shrill scream pierced the silence, startling birds into taking flight. 'Help me!' she cried. 'Somebody please help!'"When beautiful and bright Hannah is late for their morning run, her best friend Abi thinks nothing of it. Hannah isn't always that reliable – she's probably just overslept.But as Abi runs through the woods, following the same route she always does, she is greeted by a horrifying sight: Hannah's body, swaying in the breeze.Detective Rachel Hart is called to the scene. Something seems wrong from the start. Hannah's friends and family insist that she had everything to live for, and no one has a bad word to say about her. But when murder is confirmed, and Rachel starts digging, she soon realises that there were plenty of people with a reason to want Hannah dead.Then a second woman is found strangled in the same wood, and everything Rachel thought is thrown into doubt. Is there a serial killer at work?Rachel is determined to find answers before another life is lost – all the time unaware that the killer's sights are focussed firmly on her.Can Rachel unravel the deadly game before she walks into a trap?A breathtakingly twisty thriller for fans of Rachel Abbott, Cara Hunter and Angela Marsons.What readers are saying about Why She Died:'In my top 10... kept me guessing from start to finish with a great twist at the end.' Goodreads Reviewer'The amount of plot twists and turns will give you whiplash (but in a good way!)' Tamsterdam Reads'This series just gets better and better!... awesome... a fast, exciting read!' Goodreads Reviewer.The Detective Rachel Hart series has sold over 30,000 copies-

Release date: May 29, 2020

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 274

Sample

6.25 a.m. – Saturday

Abi Wyett pulled her waist-length blonde hair up into a ponytail, securing it with a bright yellow spiral band before perching on the edge of her bed to tie the orange laces on her trainers. She smiled. The only thing bright about me this morning is what I’m wearing, she thought, checking her watch. It was twenty-five past six. She shuddered. Abi had always been a night owl and before February she would only ever have seen 6.25 a.m. on her way back from a night out, but since she had agreed to help her best friend Hannah with her training programme, lie-ins were a thing of the past. It wasn’t so bad now that the mornings were lighter and warmer, but there had been times in the depths of winter when her exhaled breath formed clouds in front of her and her cheeks were numb with the cold. At those moments, she had regretted agreeing to help Hannah with her hare-brained plan to be the youngest British woman to conquer Mount Everest.

Abi tucked her mobile phone into the zip-up compartment on the waistband of her leggings and pulled the lead of her earphones out from under her vest top, leaving them dangling from the neckline. Although the two girls ran together, both found that the time passed more agreeably if they were listening to music. They rarely spoke after their initial greeting until they finished their run. She probably won’t even say hello to me this morning after I pulled out of working at the club last night, Abi thought as she closed the door to her room and jogged along the corridor to Hannah’s. She continued jogging on the spot to warm up her muscles while she waited for Hannah to answer. After a few moments she knocked again and called out, ‘Come on, Hannah, time to get moving. I’ve got a Leavers’ Ball meeting at half past nine.’ There was still no reply.

Hannah hadn’t missed an early-morning run since she had started her training regime back in February, even going on her own on the few occasions when Abi had cried off. Checking her watch, Abi realised she was a few minutes later than their usual 6.30 a.m. meet-up. Surely she would have come and knocked on my door, unless she was madder with me than I thought. She knocked for a third time, but when there was still no response, Abi presumed Hannah had left without her. After a moment’s hesitation when she seriously considered returning to her room and getting back into bed, she decided to try and catch up with Hannah. The girls always followed the same route, past the university football and rugby pitches and into the woods beyond. If she left at the same time as usual, I can catch up with her before she gets to the trees, Abi thought, putting her earphones in and hitting the play button halfway along the lead nestled against her chest.

The morning was crisp and fresh, but the blue skies overhead held the promise of another warm spring day as Abi ran down the steps towards the playing fields, her eyes scanning the perimeter path. There was no sign of Hannah. She quickened her pace. Abi hated confrontation, and hoped any awkwardness over her last-minute decision not to work the previous evening could be defused more effectively if she could catch up with her friend and fall into step at her side.

Abi had been faced with an impossible choice. Phil, her boyfriend, was supposed to be travelling to an away game for the university rugby team on Friday, but he’d been injured in the final practice session on Thursday evening and they’d taken him to hospital for observation. When Abi visited him on Friday afternoon, he’d asked her to stay until visiting hours were over and she’d felt she couldn’t refuse. Hannah had made out it didn’t matter after Abi messaged to tell her that she wouldn’t be going in to work, although the final line of her reply – ‘he and Jamie would have a photo finish for most jealous boyfriend’ – had suggested that she thought Phil was deliberately preventing her from working.

Maybe Hannah has a point, Abi thought. It was Phil’s plans that changed, yet he expected me to just drop everything to be with him. I doubt if he’d have done the same if it had been the other way around.

The ground felt hard and unforgiving underfoot. Abi tried to remember the last time it had rained as she pounded the cinder path at the side of the rugby pitch, already breathing quite heavily and beginning to perspire. April was renowned for showers, but she couldn’t recall any significant rainfall the previous month and certainly none at all so far in May. It was more pleasant for running but not so kind on her joints.

There was still no sign of Hannah up ahead when Abi veered off onto the hardened mud path, strewn with twigs and dried leaves, that led into the woods. Before the trees became too dense, sunlight was able to force its way through the leafy canopy overhead, creating a dappled effect on the ferns and bracken growing in abundance beneath, but the further into the woodland Abi ventured, all sunlight was extinguished. In the gloom, she had to concentrate more fully on the path to ensure there were no branches obstructing her way that might cause her to trip and injure herself, particularly as she was running alone. From past experience she knew her mobile phone signal was virtually non-existent the deeper into the woods she went, so if she did fall badly, she could be there for hours, if not days, before someone found her.

Unlike her daredevil friend, Abi wasn’t a fan of going through the woods, and had only been persuaded to change from her usual route along local roads when the two of them started running together. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest and knew that it wasn’t only because she had been running faster than normal to try and catch up with Hannah. Abi was always fearful of someone lying in wait, ready to pounce on them in the half-light of the woods, but Hannah reassured her by saying the two of them were more than a match for some sad pervert. Maybe that’s why I’m feeling nervous, Abi thought, without Hannah I feel more vulnerable. Despite knowing that she should keep her eyes trained on the uneven path, Abi risked the occasional glance ahead, hoping for a flash of her friend’s bright running gear. But there was no sign of her.

Perhaps she didn’t come out running after all. Maybe I should turn back, Abi thought, rounding a turn in the path. She managed to stifle a scream as she came abruptly to a halt. Off to the left of the path some fifty metres away, Abi could make out a shadowy figure. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom and in the split second before she turned to run from whoever it was, her brain registered that it was too tall to be a person. Fearfully backing away while still peering at the outline, trying to make out what it was, she felt the blood in her veins turn to ice. It was a person, after all, but they were suspended in mid-air, hanging by the neck from the branch of a tree. Abi’s heart began to thump against her ribcage as the full horror of what she was seeing became apparent. She recognised the navy-blue hoodie, grey tracksuit bottoms and lime-green running shoes that should have been pounding the paths through the woods with her that morning.

Abi’s shrill scream pierced the silence, startling birds into taking flight and filling the air with the sound of their flapping wings. She turned and began to stumble back along the path towards the university, tears blinding her eyes, her legs threatening to give way beneath her. ‘Help me!’ she cried. ‘Somebody please help! I think my friend has killed herself!’

The Day Before – 4.00 p.m. – Friday

DCI Rachel Hart was feeling a bit of a fraud. Although she had been back at work for a week, it was obvious to her that her second in command, DI Graham Wilson, was bearing the brunt of the workload and only passing minor things in her direction. She appreciated his kindness, but there wasn’t enough to occupy her mind and stop her thoughts drifting to her twin sister, Ruth, and her possible whereabouts. For almost six weeks she had been missing from Mountview Hospital where she had been a resident in the psychiatric wing for the previous ten years after a failed suicide attempt. Ruth had never fully recovered from the horror of the kidnap and sexual abuse she had been subjected to as young child, and Rachel had never truly got past the guilt she felt as a result of the kidnapper abusing her sister but not laying a finger on her. Rachel had thought she was doing the right thing for Ruth, paying the extortionate monthly fees not only for her to be looked after, but also to protect her from herself. Her sister, it seemed, viewed things differently. There had been no communication from Ruth other than a text message the day after she had left, stating that she was finally free.

The message had completely devastated Rachel, who had repeatedly said to her boyfriend, Tim, ‘Why didn’t she tell me she was unhappy? We could have worked something out.’

The days following Ruth’s disappearance had passed in a blur. She was wrapping up the final details on a triple murder case, while desperately trying to locate her sister. By the end of the week, after encouragement from Tim, Rachel had visited her GP, who said she was not in a fit state to work and signed her off with stress for a fortnight. The fortnight stretched to three weeks, then four, at which point Rachel insisted she needed to keep busy or she would lose her mind. Reluctantly, the GP had allowed her to return to work, but had made it clear that she believed Rachel was in a fragile state and might benefit from medication or at the very least some therapy. The doctor’s advice was ignored.

Rachel picked her phone up to check for text messages, even though she knew she would have heard the alert or felt the vibration. It was a habit she had got into while she was off work, and now she was finding it very difficult to break. At first, she’d had several messages a day from her newsreader friend, Maddy, and the occasional ‘how are you doing, Guv?’ from her DI, but Maddy’s life was busy and now that Rachel was back behind her desk there was no need for Graham to message her. More often than not, she found herself looking at a screen displaying the time in very large numbers. As if I’m not already aware of how slowly time is moving, she thought, returning her phone to the desk, screen down. Even Tim, who had texted her on the hour, every hour while she was off work, had obviously decided that she needed to regain some semblance of normality and restricted himself to once or twice a day. It didn’t really matter. It wasn’t any of them that she wanted to hear from. Rachel was hanging onto the faint hope that her sister would realise she had made a dreadful mistake and call her asking to return to Mountview. Each passing day with no word from Ruth made that less and less likely.

As Rachel struggled to refocus on her paperwork there was a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ she called.

‘I’m just getting myself a coffee, Guv. Do you fancy one?’ Graham said.

Rachel glanced down at the barely touched coffee he had brought her an hour earlier. There was a film across the surface of the liquid and the brown line just above it served as an indication that she had allowed her drink to go cold before she’d had more than a sip of it.

‘I think I’ll pass, thanks, but come in and tell me what’s going on. Any interesting cases on the go?’

‘Nothing much, to be honest,’ he replied, closing the door behind him and crossing the room to sit down opposite Rachel. ‘I’ve sent a back-up team over to Egham at their request to help them evict some travellers off the big field by the Runnymede roundabout. They’ve been there a couple of weeks and were refusing to move on, but I think it’s all in hand now. Apart from that it’s just the usual: petty burglary and domestic violence, nothing to get our teeth into.’

‘I don’t suppose Missing Persons have come up with anything on Ruth?’ Rachel could see the pity in Graham’s eyes and hated herself for bringing her personal life into work. But if I can’t use my police contacts to try and find my sister, what’s the point of it all? she thought.

‘No, sorry, Guv. We’re still checking all the shelters in the area regularly and asking around and showing Ruth’s photo, but nobody seems to have seen her at all. My gut feeling is that she left the area after sending you that text.’

There had been a moment of real hope when the techie boys had been able to trace Ruth’s mobile phone to its last-known location, until it became apparent that it was somewhere in the shrubbery close to the entrance of Mountview. Rachel suspected that Ruth had watched her go into the hospital, sent her final communication and then deliberately discarded the phone for them to find. Even the television appeal instigated by her friend Maddy on News 24/7, the channel she worked for, had drawn a blank. There had been several sightings of a woman fitting Ruth’s description, but they had all turned out to be Rachel, unsurprising as they were virtually identical. ‘Like two peas in a pod’ had been a phrase bandied around throughout their schooldays, but their likeness didn’t extend to their personalities. I would never have put Ruth through all this anguish, Rachel thought. It’s as though she has simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

‘I know it’s a long shot, but please keep trying, Graham,’ Rachel said, trying to control the wobble in her voice.

‘Of course, Guv. I was wondering whether you’ve signed Eleanor Drake’s application to train as a detective?’ he asked, adeptly steering the conversation in a new direction.

‘I’ve just done it. I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be approved, can you?’

‘No. She’s certainly at the top of my list for thoroughness and efficiency, although she could try and open up to her colleagues a bit more. She’s not the most popular officer because she’s clearly hell-bent on climbing the career ladder. I think a few of the others think she’s using them as rungs.’

‘I’ll have a quiet word,’ Rachel said, while thinking, that’s exactly what people used to say about me. ‘It’s hard being young and ambitious without coming across as a cold fish,’ she added, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

‘I couldn’t possibly comment. I’ve only known you at the top of the ladder.’

‘Hardly the top, but I take your point.’

‘Are you sure I can’t get you a coffee? Or maybe a tea?’

‘No, honestly. I’ll probably call it a day soon. I’m supposed to be cooking tonight and I’ve got nothing in.’

‘Why put yourself through the hassle, Guv? Just do what I do when it’s my turn to cook.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Get a takeaway,’ Graham said, grinning broadly as he left her office.

As the door closed, a text message alert sounded on Rachel’s phone. She grabbed for it, but such was her hurry that she sent the phone flying to the floor along with a pile of papers.

‘For God’s sake,’ she muttered under her breath, dropping to her knees to retrieve the phone from under her desk. Please let it be her, please let it be her, she silently prayed, but once again her prayers went unanswered. It was Tim.

So sorry Rachel, but I’m not going to make it for dinner tonight. I’ve got a meeting with a prisoner who’s due for release soon out in the sticks and I can’t see me getting back much before midnight. I hope you hadn’t gone to too much trouble buying stuff in for dinner. Maybe we could have it tomorrow instead of eating out? I’ll try and call you later, Tim xxxx

Rachel suppressed a pang of disappointment. She had been looking forward to seeing Tim to take her mind off the looming weekend. Sunday had become the worst day of the week for her; it was the day she used to visit Ruth at Mountview. How many times over the years did I wish for a Sunday to myself? she reflected guiltily. I guess it’s a case of be careful what you wish for. She tapped out a quick message in response and hit SEND, before gathering up the papers she had knocked to the floor in her haste. She stacked them neatly on the corner of her desk and checked the time. Although it was only 4.30 p.m., she decided to finish early and head home, despite the prospect of a solitary evening and a less than appetising supper of beans on toast.

6.45 p.m. – Friday

Tim Berwick sat at one side of the small grey table, drumming his fingers on the shiny surface and tapping the toe of his black brogues on the tiled floor. He hated coming to this place, with its overly bright lights, clanging doors and the constant sound of jangling keys. It was one of the reasons he had become a defence lawyer, to keep as many innocent people as he could out of prison. Mind you, he thought, watching a man who looked a lot older than his sixty-three years shuffle across the floor in his direction, it would help if people didn’t break the law in the first place.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked, as the prisoner sat down opposite him on the uncomfortable wooden chair.

‘Same as I’m always doing in this shithole,’ the old man replied gruffly. ‘The beds are hard, the showers are cold, the food is like eating puke and the screws are more corrupt than the inmates. Apart from that, everything is just fine. You said you’d got some news?’

‘Yes. We’ve heard back from the parole board.’

There was a glimmer of interest in the old man’s green eyes. ‘And?’

‘We should get the official notification first thing on Monday morning, but I wanted to come and give you the news myself. You’ve been granted conditional release. Well done, Jack.’

There was a sharp intake of breath before a slow smile spread across Jack’s face. ‘I’m the one that should be saying well done, boy. You knew all the right things to say to get me released. It’s a shame I didn’t have you as my lawyer earlier.’

Tim cast his mind back to their first meeting almost two years previously. Jack had seemed something of a lost cause, constantly in trouble for petty misdemeanours. He’d had parole denied on several occasions because the board didn’t feel confident in his ability to integrate back into society without reoffending. Tim had gradually persuaded Jack that there was a way to regain his freedom if he changed his attitude. When a slot with the parole board had unexpectedly become free after one of Jack’s fellow inmates had his hearing cancelled as a consequence of slashing another inmate with a razor, Tim had immediately driven out to the prison to tell Jack the good news.

‘I know it doesn’t give us much time to work on what you need to say if you want to have a chance of getting out of this place early,’ he had said, ‘but it was too good an opportunity to miss. Do you think you can be ready?’

‘I know what to say, you’ve told me often enough,’ Jack had said. ‘“I’m sorry. I’ve learned the error of my ways and I promise to be a model citizen if you release me”.’

‘That won’t cut it because they won’t believe you. I’ve told you before, you have to think of specific things that have helped change you while you’ve been in prison.’

‘Like what?’

His tone needs working on too, Tim had thought. It had always been brusque and confrontational, right from the very beginning. ‘Well, give examples of some of the ways you’ve interacted with other prisoners over the years, so that the board will be confident in your ability to integrate back into society.’

‘I don’t think some of those do-gooding old dears on the parole board would take kindly to hearing about my interactions with other prisoners, if you get my drift,’ he had cackled.

Tim had fought back the urge to be sick. Had Jack learned nothing over his thirty years of incarceration? But he had promised to get him released when he had first taken him on as a client, and that’s what he intended to do; failure wasn’t an option. The problem was it had become increasingly apparent to Tim that despite his early optimism that he could influence him to be a better person, Jack was not a reformed character and he had no intention of changing his ways.

‘Don’t look like that, boy,’ Jack had growled. ‘I’m not a piece of dog shit on the sole of your expensive shoes. I was just having a little joke, all right?’

‘In pretty poor taste, if I’m honest with you,’ Tim had replied. ‘If you really want me to help you get out of here, you’re going to have to do as I say.’

‘Don’t you worry about me, I’ll be good. I’ve learned my lines and I’ll come up with some believable examples of how prison has made me a better person. I’ve waited a long time for this.’

‘You wouldn’t have been in here so long if you’d behaved better in the early days of your sentence,’ Tim had said, thinking and if you hadn’t committed such disgusting crimes. ‘With good behaviour, you’d have been out years ago.’

‘But I didn’t know that until you became my lawyer.’

‘Well, you know now, so don’t do anything to screw it up.’

To his credit, Tim thought, looking at Jack’s smiling face across the table, he had given a very impressive performance at the hearing. And now, six months later, he had finally been granted his partial freedom.

‘Is everything ready for me on the outside?’

‘Almost. Look, I’ve another appointment I need to get to, so I have to go,’ Tim lied.

‘At this time on a Friday night? Are you sure about that, or is it just that you can’t stand being around me?’

Is it that obvious? Tim thought. His visits with Jack always made him question his own integrity. ‘I didn’t say it was a work appointment, did I?’

Jack sniggered. ‘A lady friend, eh? Young, is she, and pretty? Or maybe it’s a bloke,’ he said, misunderstanding Tim’s look of revulsion. ‘I’ve often wondered if you bat for the other side.’

Tim stayed silent, choosing not to dignify t. . .