Someone Who Isn't Me by Danuta Kot (romance novel chinese novels .TXT) 📕

again. Never. And no one hurt the things she cared about. They’d hurt the kitten. They’d planned to hurt it worse.

The red mist that was rising in her head smothered the thoughts. All that was left was anger. And a sudden understanding of what Matt had meant when he’d told her not to waste her anger, but to use it. She wanted to smash broken glass into the face of whoever it was who hurt her kitten. But she wasn’t going to do that.

As she swallowed the last of her paracetamol, she made her decision. It didn’t matter that getting the cellar keys would be difficult – she’d do it. She’d find a way to get in there and then she was going to get some proper photographs and give them to Curwen.

Andy might have been a creep, but she was going to find out who had sent that text message – who had sent all of them because she knew now it wasn’t him. Someone had been watching them, someone knew what was going on, and they’d used it, used her to hurt Andy. She’d find out who it was, who had killed him, who had left his little girl without a dad. He’d lied to her, but that didn’t matter, not right now. What mattered was that now he was dead.

She’d get the answers, and then she’d make them sorry.

Chapter 26

Dinah had wasted no time the night before when she’d spotted the car leaving Sunk Island. It was long after her shift finished, but she couldn’t leave it. She’d called Dave Sykes.

‘Good work. I’ll let the boss know. Get onto the Manchester people and get them round there. Find that car, find out who’s been driving it and where it’s been. OK?’

But after that, it had been frustration. By the time she made contact with the Greater Manchester force it was after midnight, and now, the next morning, she still hadn’t heard anything.

The briefing was about to start – she couldn’t go in there with her job unfinished. She called the Manchester number again, but the man she’d talked to the night before was off duty, and it took several frustrating minutes to find someone who even knew what she was talking about.

‘It’s a car that’s involved in a murder enquiry,’ she kept saying. ‘A police officer was killed.’

Eventually, she found herself talking to someone who knew about it. ‘It isn’t your car,’ the man said briskly.

‘But it was there,’ Dinah insisted. ‘I saw it.’

‘Not this one. I’ll send the report through.’

She couldn’t wait. Someone offered to bring the report through to the briefing, and she ran down the corridor, arriving just as Hammond was about to start speaking. He waited, pointedly, she thought, until she found a vacant chair.

She sank into her seat, still trying to make sense of what she’d heard from Manchester.

The findings from other parts of the investigation were proving depressingly thin. There was no trace of Andy’s phone – it was almost certainly in the estuary and irretrievable. His car had been taken apart and every bit of it checked, but the search had come up with nothing, or nothing useful. ‘There was a chemical trace,’ Dave Sykes said. ‘Alpha PVP – that drug we’ve been having trouble with, the one that sends the kids crazy. At some point, Andy must have had some in his car.’

Dinah remembered what Curwen had said, about Andy being on some kind of mission, and how it could be misinterpreted. But Hammond had to be told. And he had to know about Becca at the pub.

As if he’d read her thoughts, Hammond turned to her. ‘Dinah, how are you getting on with the car searches? DS Sykes said you’d identified a car that might be of interest.’

‘I’m waiting for a report on that one, sir.’ She explained the focus of her searches and got an approving nod from Hammond. ‘Show us on the map, please.’

Dinah found herself standing at the front of the room. She regretted her hasty dressing that morning – trousers and a sweatshirt, rather than her smart trouser suit. Looking professional was important. She called up the map on the laptop and showed them the turn-offs and the different routes that might take a car into the heart of Sunk Island. ‘We don’t know where he was killed,’ she said, ‘but it’s reasonable to assume they came down close to the water.’

Her pointer followed the banks of the estuary. ‘Andy was found here – that’s the Spragger Drain sluice. There’s no road, but there are tracks. The closest you can get to the estuary by car is here, Old Hall Road. It actually crosses Spragger Drain. After that, it’s rough tracks. You’d need an off-roader or a bike.’

‘We talked to the people at the farm the day after we found him,’ Innes said. ‘They say no one went past that night, and that’s probably right. They’ve got cameras on their gates after all the thefts, and the dogs are out.’

‘You can bring a car down here to Stone Creek,’ Dinah went on. ‘It’s about three and a half kilometres from there to the sluice. So what I’m saying is that these roads here, here and here are the best way in to get down to Old Hall Road, or to Stone Creek. I looked at the other roads as well, but these were the ones I went to first.

‘This car is the one I think we need to focus on.’ She showed them the images, the red Fiesta turning onto Sunk Island road, followed by the bike that had slewed round.

‘A bike,’ someone said, linking it to what she’d said previously. ‘Have you got any more information on that?’

‘Not yet. But what I did find…’ She showed them the picture of the red Fiesta leaving Sunk island by a different road. ‘It turned west, towards Hull, but the owner lives near Manchester.’

Hammond was sitting forward, his gaze intent. ‘You’ve been