One Hot Summer

Anita Waller

Description

'A great cast of characters, a riveting storyline, a nail-biting climax' Valerie Keogh

'By page 3 I was hooked. By the end I was addicted' Owen Mullen

A city on fire. A killer who can’t be stopped. Who will be next?

When two teenagers are found dead in a fire, DI Laura Henshall and DS Will Peters are called in to investigate. They believe it was a revenge attack gone wrong.

But soon fires are cropping up everywhere, and the police suspect they’re dealing with something much bigger . . . something that could bring the city to its knees.

With time running out, can the detectives find the arsonists before the city goes up in flames?

What readers are saying about Anita Waller:

'I was completely hooked'

'She just gets better . . . An absolutely fabulous read'

'Grabs you from page one'

'Absolutely phenomenal'

'A cracking good read'

'Honestly, I cannot get enough of this author'

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Policier
• Thriller
• Vie de famille
• Soutien psychologique et conseils familiaux
• Mashups
• Psychological
• Private Investigators
• Hard-Boiled
• Traditional
• Thrillers
• Bereavement
• Suspenso
• Friendship
• Street crime
• Domestic
• Corporate crime
• Psychology
• Organized crime
• Grief
• Crime
• War
• Suspense
• Death
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Boldwood Books
• Date de parution: 25 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781804152928
• Langue: English

Extrait

ONE HOT SUMMER



ANITA WALLER
CONTENTS



Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Epilogue


Acknowledgments

More from Anita Waller

Previously published works:

About the Author

About Boldwood Books
To Dave, for his unending support.
My love as always.
Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn – exactly like its enemy, life. Thereby are life and flames so often compared.
OTTO WEININGER
1

‘Stop it, Ad!’ Fourteen-year-old Shannon Ramsden tried to make her voice as firm as possible, but she was all too aware of the sensations at the bottom of her stomach and wasn’t convinced she really wanted him to stop. ‘My mum says I’ve not to let lads touch me, so just stop.’
She pushed him away, and for a moment he let her. She straightened her top, shoving her small, firm breasts back into the bra cups that had somehow ended up around her neck.
‘Can I put my hands in your knickers?’
‘No, you bloody can’t! My mum would go mad.’
‘She won’t know.’
‘You don’t know my mum. She knows everything.’
‘She doesn’t know we’re in here.’
She looked around the creepy room again: all harmless enough in daylight, but the dim light from her phone made the shadowy stack of lilos and kids’ toys in the corner look spooky. And what if someone heard them? They were far enough away from her mum’s watchful eye, perhaps, but the building was in someone’s back garden.
‘You been here before?’ she asked. ‘With another lass? You knew how to get in.’
He shook his head. She must be mad thinking that. He’d only ever wanted her since they’d started at infant school. ‘’Course not. I come in here when it’s raining, me and the other lads, but we have to be quiet. He don’t know that side door’s got a broken lock. He’s a nasty piece of work, him that owns it.’
She settled back on to the sofa. ‘My mum knows him. He built it for his sister to live in. Her and her kid. They lived here for about six months, then t’council gave her a house.’
‘It’s as big as a house. You been upstairs?’
She shook her head. ‘No, and I’m not going up. I know what you’ll be thinking, Adam Lawton. Get me upstairs, and I bet there’s beds up there. It might be a wooden hut, but it looks like a house. I’m staying here.’
His hands went once again unerringly to her breasts, and she turned towards him. ‘You can touch me there, but nowhere else, right?’
‘Right,’ he said, and bent his mouth to her nipple. She gasped at the intensity of the feeling and shoved him away again. ‘I’ve got to go home.’
‘Aw, not yet.’ He took hold of her hand and held it tightly against the front of his jeans. ‘Feel that?’ he asked.
‘Bloody ’ell, Ad.’
‘That’s you doing that to me. Take your knickers off, Shannon, just for two minutes.’
‘No!’ She struggled to her feet, trying to sort out her bra, while he was clearly trying to get the offending knickers off her body and onto the floor.
They heard the first bang and stopped. She looked at him. ‘What was that?’ she whispered.
‘Fuck knows,’ he said, and returned to the issue of her knickers. A second bang was followed swiftly by two more.
Flames whooshed from floor to ceiling in seconds, carried by the fumes of petrol. Shannon screamed once, then clasped her head as the flames turned her long brown hair into a halo of orange fire. She knew no more. Didn’t feel any pain as her clothes ignited into a huge ball. It took Adam twenty seconds longer to die than it did Shannon.
The fire quickly spread throughout the wooden building. Neighbours who had heard the bangs and assumed they were gunshots, came tentatively outside of their homes to see what was happening. Immediately five different mobile phones rang 999, and ten minutes later, two fire engines were on scene.
The flames were huge, as befitted a bonfire of this stature. The firefighters searched for water hydrants, and a way of safely getting into the rear garden of the house where the structure had been built. It wasn’t easy and was hampered by the difficulty of access. One engine tried a different route when it became clear it wasn’t a simple shed fire, as had originally been reported. When the summer house and decking in a neighbouring garden also caught fire, the second engine found a way around to the bottom of the garden via a derelict garage site.
The first bangs had been heard at around ten at night, and the fire was eventually under control by one in the morning.
Alice Ramsden had watched the drama unfold with her neighbours, standing in the street sharing bottles of wine, with the odd tipple of Jack Daniels thrown in for good measure, enjoying the unexpected party atmosphere. She had briefly wondered why Shannon hadn’t joined her, but guessed she preferred to stay in her bedroom, her location of choice these days, listening to her music. She wondered if every fourteen-year-old was like her daughter.
She felt quite tipsy as she staggered back down her own path, trying to remember how many times her plastic tumbler had been filled over the last three hours. She hadn’t had this much excitement in years. All the neighbours called loud good nights to each other, and eventually the street returned to normal.
Climbing the stairs made Alice giggle. The treads seemed a bit wobbly, just like her legs, she decided, and she eventually reached the landing. She couldn’t see a light under Shannon’s door, so reckoned she was asleep; her daughter wouldn’t appreciate being woken by a tipsy mother.



Alice didn’t surface until almost ten on that overcast Sunday morning, and her first port of call was the medicine cabinet for the paracetamol. She switched on the shower and set it for hot, then had ten seconds of cold. That was enough. She was now awake.
She went downstairs to try to persuade Shannon to do her a bacon sandwich and a coffee, but the curtains were still closed, so she headed for the kitchen. There was silence from the downstairs rooms, so she called Shannon’s name from the hallway. Surely that girl didn’t intend spending the whole of Sunday shut away in her bedroom.
There was no reply and Alice wearily trudged back upstairs, her head beating a rhythm all of its own with every step.
She knocked and pushed open her daughter’s bedroom door. ‘Shan, you getting up yet?’
Her daughter was still in bed, the duvet covering her entire form. Alice reached over and pulled it back but saw only cushions. ‘What the…?’
She checked the bathroom, then ran downstairs. Grabbing her phone, she felt her legs begin to tremble, and she sank on to a kitchen chair. Why had she refused to give Shannon a mobile all these years? She’d call her now and give her merry hell, but at least she’d be able to find her. Instead, she called the first person she could think of. ‘Trev? Is Shannon with you?’
Her ex-husband laughed. ‘Hardly. We had a proper fallout on Wednesday. Didn’t she tell you?’
‘Oh… erm… yeah, she did. You don’t know where she is, then?’
‘No idea. What’s wrong, Al?’
‘She’s not in her room. She went up about seven last night, said she was going to watch Netflix. Then we had that big fire across the road, and I was outside, big crowd of us, from about ten when it all kicked off, to one this morning. I thought she was in bed, Trev.’ The last part came out as a wail.
‘You want me to come over?’
‘Of course I bloody do. She’s your daughter as well, you know.’ Alice could hear her voice rising higher with each word she spoke. ‘We need to find her.’
‘Give me quarter of an hour.’ And Trev disconnected.



Alice went back upstairs to Shannon’s room and opened her wardrobe. There didn’t seem to be any clothes missing, so she began to rifle through the chest of drawers. Nothing out of kilter there either, but finally she struck gold when she checked Shannon’s desk. The central drawer contained a small diary, slim and about the size of a playing card.
Alice glanced through it, but nothing much registered until she saw the entry for the previous night. Seeing Ad. 8 p.m. in park.
Park? Which park? And then realisation hit. It had been called the playground when they were in junior school, but now at fourteen it had morphed into ‘the Park’, playground being a bit too childish a word for teenagers. So Shannon had gone to meet Ad, who Alice presumed to mean Adam Lawton, in the broken-down old playground where children rarely played because of the smashed bottles and empty beer cans lying around.
Where the hell was she now? She ran downstairs again and once more hit the call button, this time connecting with Kate Lawton. ‘Hi Kate, it’s me.’
‘I know it’s you, I can see it is,’ Kate laughed. ‘You okay after last night?’
‘Bit headachy. Is Adam there?’
‘He’s not up yet. Can he ring you when he’s awake?’
‘Kate,’ Alice said, trying to fight the panic she was feeling, ‘can you go and check on him? Make sure he’s okay?’
There was a brief moment of hesitation, and Alice heard Kate speak to Harry, her partner, asking him to nip upstairs to check Adam was okay. ‘What’s wrong, Alice? You’re spooking me a bit.’
‘It seems Shannon was meeting Adam last night, but Shannon isn’t home. I’ve only just found out.’
‘Hang on, I’m going upstairs.’ There was a clatter as Kate put her phone on the table, and then Alice heard her say, ‘Shit!’
‘Kate, you there?’ Alice yelled down the phone, and then she heard the unmistakable sound of it being picked up.
‘Alice? He’s not in bed. I didn’t check he was in last night