Drown My Books

Penny Freedman

Description

Prolific crime writer Penny Freedman returns with her fifth novel in the Gina Gray series: Drown My Books. The narrative follows the story of Gina Gray, a woman who is disappointed by work, love and life. She has settled on a bleak stretch of the Kent coast where she walks her surly dog, coaches unpromising A-level students and teaches English to asylum seekers in Dover, whose stories break her heart. The one bright spot in her life is the community library and the book group she organises; however, on one grim February morning, her dog finds a body on the beach and her source of comfort turns into her biggest threat...Alarmingly, Gina learns that the dead woman is the second member of the book group to be killed, making Gina convinced that the book group is being targeted. DI Paula Powell, the lead of the police investigation, also happens to be Gina's old rival in love, and Powell breaks the news that the killer is believed to be among Gina's class of asylum seekers. With or without the help of DI Paula Powell, Gina has to move fast to find the truth. Could it be one of her asylum-seeker students who she admires so much that is actually a cold-blooded murderer?Drown My Books will appeal to those who enjoy crime and mystery fiction, as well as fans of Penny's former books. The book will also appeal to fans of Kate Atkinson and Susan Hill, authors that have inspired Penny's writing.

Sujets

• Kent

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785896255
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A GINA GRAY MYSTERY


DROWN MY BOOKS




Penny Freedman
Copyright © 2016 Penny Freedman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781785896255

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
This book is for the people with whom I have read and talked about books over the past thirteen years:
For Mary, Janet, Jane, Sue, Robert, Sarah, Rosie, Jonathan, Joyce and Jan.
For Chris, Jan, Rose, Judy, Sally, Ann, Joan, Shelagh, Gloria, Celia and Jill.
And for Jan Dawson and the Warwickshire Super-readers.

My thanks, too, to the volunteers and readers in Studley, who introduced me to the pleasures of the community library, to Jan Sewell, who set me thinking about a murder in a book group, to Mary Wells for research trips and to Melinda Wells for willingly modelling Freda.
PREAMBLE
The events I record here happened early in 2014. You will be reading about them later, through the prism of events of 2015, the daily horror of thousand upon thousand would-be immigrants – many from Syria – dying in the seas of southern Europe. These deaths produced a change, of sorts, in the UK government’s attitude to Syrian refugees. In the first half of 2014, however, only 24 Syrian refugees were admitted to Britain under the government’s programme for the relocation of vulnerable refugees. In that competition, my student, Farid Khalil, stood very little chance.

Gina Sidwell
Contents
PREAMBLE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Headings
Chapter One
THE SEA
Tuesday 28 th January 2014
When people ask me – and they certainly do ask me – how I come to be living here, I tell them that in the course of a single week I lost my mother, my job, my lover and my home. That usually shuts them up. My answer is disingenuous, of course. I did lose my mother; she died, quickly and quietly, while sitting in her chair one summer afternoon. The job, the lover and the house, though, were less straightforward: the job was a question of jumping before I was pushed, and the lover likewise, really. As for the house, well, with everything else gone, there really seemed no point in holding on to that.
I don’t tell people all this, nor do I add that when your life is all washed up, there is nowhere better to find its concrete metaphor than in a scabby little house so close to the sea that when I step out of my front door my mobile phone sends me a message welcoming me to France.

I had an image of the home I was seeking – the Platonic ideal of a seaside refuge – but I’ve had to lower my sights, of course. I have the sea-bound cottage I was looking for but without the picturesque isolation I had envisaged. My gimcrack little house sits squeezed into the middle of a cliff-top terrace in which one house or another invariably sports overbearing scaffolding. The economical and ecological driftwood fire I saw casting its soft, flickering glow has been downgraded to an electric one since a surly chap called Gary told me my chimney would need a total rebuild – arm and a leg job if I wanted to do anything as reckless as light a fire in my grate. I am too much of a snob to go for coal-effect so mine is an uncompromising two-bar fire with no flickering glow, soft or otherwise.
The dog and the cat don’t mind, anyway. They are stretched out on the hearth rug now, as the rain hurls itself at the window and the sea boils beyond. I promised myself a dog as part of my new life and I’ve been as good as my word, though I don’t really like them much; their neediness gets on my nerves. Fortunately, Caliban doesn’t ask for much and doesn’t pretend to any great affection for me. He is a lugubrious, heavy-jowled beast whose default manner is weary acceptance of whatever life throws at him; the occasional gesture of affection from me is met with wary indifference. Having started on the Tempest theme, I had to call the cat Ariel, of course, though she is no airy spirit. In the course of sixteen months, she has gone from being a weightless ball of fluff to a solid beast with the shoulders of a wrestler and the facial markings of a gangster’s mask. The dog is terrified of her.
If they don’t mind the two-bar fire, nor do I. I’m happy enough with my experiment at living poor. When my daughter, Ellie, first saw this house she looked round in open dismay and asked what I was punishing myself for. Annie, my younger daughter, won’t come here at all; she has not forgiven me for selling her childhood home, even though she is living in London with her boyfriend and has no need of said home. Freda, my granddaughter, reacted best. ‘It’s like a caravan, Granny,’ she said, ‘only with an upstairs and no wheels.’ You can trust Freda to get to the heart of the matter.
I don’t think I’m punishing myself; testing myself maybe, yes. I was shocked, you see, after my mother died and I sold her London flat and took ‘voluntary’ redundancy from my job and sold the family house in Marlbury, which had appreciated absurdly in value with the introduction of a fast rail route between Marlbury and London. I was shocked to find myself rich, the possessor of wealth in the region of a million pounds. The discovery was deeply unsettling. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was not that I feared I would run amok and fritter it all away on yachts and designer shoes, but that I feared becoming a different person. I had always been short of money: a job in the public sector and two children to bring up alone meant that life was always a bit hand to mouth even if we were some distance from the actual breadline. An eye for a bargain and the feeling of not being among the privileged has always been part of my sense of identity, so faced with all this money I had an insane urge to give it away to a good cause and pretend it had never happened. I was stopped, of course, by the girls, who cornered me and demanded to know my plans. Forced to admit to my confusion, I was marched off by them to seek help from a most unlikely source.
They took me to see the Rev Peter Michaels, the vicar of St Olave’s church, Lewisham, who conducted my mother’s funeral. The girls got to know him and like him when they were organising the service, and they were convinced that he was the man to help: spiritual enough to understand my qualms but worldly enough not to let me throw away their inheritance in a quixotic panic. They were quite right, as it happens: he sent me in the direction of ethical investments and I deposited the lot once I had forked out the peanuts required for my current hovel. I still worry that one of those ethical companies will turn out to be employing trafficked children or keeping slaves in mines but I have done my best. And since interest rates are at rock bottom, I get very little income from my money. I am quite satisfactorily poor.
I have found it surprisingly easy to be poor. Without children, who grow out of their clothes, need three square meals a day and require endless handouts for sports equipment, school trips, dental treatment and the latest must have without which teenage life is insupportable, without a job that requires respectable clothes and regular haircuts, it is amazing how little one needs. I have turned the garden over to vegetables. They are not a great success since the ground is chalky and the produce salty and windblown. I have done quite well with root vegetables, though, even if my parsnips seem to have taken their inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch. I buy up bargains in the Co-op and drink cheap plonk. I brought with me only clothes for slobbing about in (except for one silk suit which will have to do for any remotely smart occasion – there have been none as yet) and I have no intention of buying more. What makes it easier is that everyone in St Martin’s-at-Cliffe is poor, really, so expectations are low. The name is deceptive. I know – it’s that ‘e’ on the end of ‘Cliffe’ that does it, evoking a quaint Agatha Christie charm that it entirely lacks. It is, in fact, nothing more than a bedraggled outpost of Dungate, a seaside town going rapidly to seed with the decline in popularity of the windbreaks-and-sand-in-the-sandwiches English holiday. It is a straggle of battered dwellings, clinging to a crumbling clifftop, with a hinterland of boxy 1980s housing, one shop, an unwelcoming pu