DETECTIVE JEFF RICKMAN BOOKS 1–3 three totally gripping crime mysteries box set Read online

  DETECTIVE

  JEFF RICKMAN

  BOOKS 1–3

  Three totally gripping crime mysteries box set

  MARGARET MURPHY

  CLICK ON THE BOOK YOU WANT TO GO TO:

  Book 1: SEE HER BURN

  Book 2: SEE HER DIE

  Book 3: DON’T SCREAM

  This box set first published 2021

  Joffe Books, London

  www.joffebooks.com

  SEE HER BURN first published in 2004 as The Dispossessed

  SEE HER DIE first published in 2005 as Now You See Me

  DON’T SCREAM first published in 2020

  © Margaret Murphy 2021

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The spelling used is British English except where fidelity to the author’s rendering of accent or dialect supersedes this. The right of Margaret Murphy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78931-740-4

  CONTENTS FOR ALL BOOKS

  BOOK 1: SEE HER BURN

  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 TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BOOK 2: SEE HER DIE

  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 Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BOOK 3: DON’T SCREAM

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  ALSO BY MARGARET MURPHY

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  GLOSSARY OF ENGLISH USAGE FOR US READERS

  BOOK 1:

  SEE HER

  BURN

  A totally gripping chilling crime thriller

  MARGARET MURPHY

  The Murphy Clan — thanks for everything

  CHAPTER ONE

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  Jeff Rickman watched the blood seeping from him and was hit by a wave of nausea. Saliva flooded his mouth and he forced his gaze away from the steady, sickening pulse up to the high hammer-beam vault of the church. The building reeked of old wood, candlewax and incense: the odour of sanctity that years of neglect and even deconsecration could not displace.

  From the gothic arch of the west window the resurrected Christ smiled down at him, his arms open in welcome, palms upturned. October sunshine dazzled through the stained glass and red light spilled radiant from Christ’s wounds.

  Rickman b
egan to feel a detachment, a light-headed clarity. Each dusty mote in the shafts of evening sunlight became a particle of dancing light, the shift and settle of timbers seemed to follow the tracking of the sun’s rays, and the inching of the sun across the waxed floor was discernible to him. He closed his eyes and fancied he could almost hear the sighs and whispers of generations of penitents.

  The pulse throbbed thickly in his throat and Rickman opened his eyes, unable to ignore the steady loss of blood. Swallowing hard, he fought the sickness, focusing instead on the pink granite pillar three feet away. In its polished surface he discovered flecks of white and gold and grey among the pink crystals. He looked downward to the carved marble vine leaves at the base and upward to the grey clusters of grapes at the head of the column, pale against the vivid warmth of the granite. Gradually, the nausea subsided.

  It’s all about blood, he thought; the giving and taking of it. Religion was founded on it and steeped in it. Church was all very well, but blood ties were the strongest, they said: the ties of family and of nation. Not for Rickman, though. For him, family was no more than a name, and one that could not be relied upon at that: Rickman, Reichmann, or Richter — one theory even held that the family name was originally Lichtmann — the combination of an ancestral lisp and an immigration official’s indolence had resulted in the current spelling distortion — or so the story went.

  Friendship had always meant far more to Rickman than church or family or nation. He turned his head a little. Next to him, close enough to touch, was Lee Foster. He lay with his left arm flung out and his right crooked over his eyes. Rickman had known Foster a long time and had worked closely with him over the past two years. He knew that this ordeal was far worse for Foster than it was for him. Foster would never have set foot inside this building if Rickman hadn’t bullied him into it. Neither man looked at the other, nor spoke. They bled silently, each preoccupied with his own thoughts.

  A light tap on his shoulder. A dark-haired woman in a white lab coat stood over him. ‘You’re done,’ she said, clamping and disconnecting the tube attached to Rickman’s arm and skilfully removing the shunt from it.

  ‘I’m blaming you for this, Jeff,’ Foster said.

  Rickman turned to him. Tie loosened, shoes tucked under the trolley, Foster still managed to look smart.

  ‘You volunteered for this, Lee — remember?’

  ‘Yeah, well, if I ever volunteer for anything again,’ Foster said, his voice slightly muffled by his shirtsleeve, ‘Lock me up till the urge goes away, okay?’

  ‘We’re thinking of having the next session at police headquarters,’ the woman said. ‘If Inspector Rickman can fix it for us to use the cells, you could kill two birds with one stone.’

  She smiled at Rickman and he felt a momentary quickening of his pulse. She was pale — invalid pale, as if she had spent all of the summer indoors — but her skin had a luminous quality, and her eyes, large and long-lashed, were the colour of polished oak in sunshine. She finished taping Rickman’s arm and moved on to Foster.

  Rickman noticed that Foster had arranged his right arm so that it wouldn’t flatten his hair. Foster’s hair was carefully tousled, as always; he gelled and sculpted it till it gleamed in dark-brown spikes. Lee Foster was apt to be vain — a characteristic that both amused and infuriated women.

  ‘Be gentle,’ he said, ‘I hate needles. He threatened to tell the whole station if I didn’t do this,’ he went on, peeping out from under his arm. ‘That’s despicable, that, isn’t it? Using a man’s phobia to blackmail him.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe he used to be a marine, would you?’ Rickman said.

  ‘Go ’ead, rub it in,’ Foster said. ‘Expose all my little foibles to ridicule.’

  Amusement sparkled in the woman’s eyes, but she didn’t comment, instead allowing them to argue back and forth while she clamped off the blood flow and disconnected the tube.

  ‘Best you don’t watch this bit,’ she said, when she had finished. ‘I’m about to take the shunt out.’

  ‘Nobody takes the shunt out of Lee Foster,’ he said, lifting his arm from his face and turning his smile onto full beam. ‘That’s my name, by the way.’

  She leaned closer and whispered, ‘You’re not my type.’

  He struggled onto one elbow. ‘It wasn’t a marriage proposal,’ he replied. Then, ‘What is your type?’

  Both she and Rickman heard the plaintive note in Foster’s voice, and they exchanged a quick, amused glance. Foster misunderstood.

  ‘Him?’ he exclaimed. ‘The rugged Roman profile was all very well in Gladiator, but we’re in the twenty-first century now, love.’

  ‘Funny,’ she shot back, ‘I keep getting a whiff of caveman. Just so you know — the shunt’s the bit with the needle attached. But if you want to watch, it’s up to you . . .’

  ‘I thought you nurses were supposed to reassure your patients,’ he said, still trying it on, but Rickman saw he had lost some colour.

  ‘I’m not a nurse, I’m a phlebotomist and you’re not a patient, you’re a donor,’ she said. ‘Now — are you going to close your eyes?’

  ‘I’d rather look into yours.’

  Those eyes . . . They crinkled at the corners, and Rickman was reminded for a moment of someone, but the likeness was gone before he had the chance to fix it in his mind, leaving only a vaguely disturbing after-image.

  ‘You want to look in my eyes?’ she asked.

  The wide-eyed innocence in Foster’s dark blue eyes made him look younger than his thirty years. He gave her his sick-puppy smile and gazed adoringly at her. She stared back at him, her mouth turning up into the suggestion of a smile, then she gave a little tug and Foster yelled.

  ‘That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?’ She lifted his hand and placed the first two fingers over the cotton-wool ball in the bend of his arm. ‘Press firmly,’ she said.

  ‘Press firmly?’ Foster scowled. ‘I might just press charges.’

  She chuckled, taping the dressing in place.

  ‘Don’t lift anything heavier than a pint for the next hour or so, okay?’

  Foster shook his head doubtfully. ‘I think I need watching,’ he said. ‘By a professional.’ He paused a second. ‘When do you get off?’

  The wintry pallor of the woman’s skin suffused momentarily with annoyance. ‘Where do you?’ she asked.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was a chill in the air. Grace Chandler hesitated on the doorstep, wondering whether to go back inside for a jacket.

  The sun was just visible as a milky disc behind a thin cloud layer. Grace decided to take a chance on it breaking through. She skipped down the steps, feeling a thrill of excitement at the freshness of the morning and the promise of fine weather. She dumped her briefcase in the boot of the car and tucked her handbag behind her seat, within reach.

  Mossley Hill to Liverpool city centre was a twenty-minute drive, but she was late, and the rush hour had begun, which could double her journey time.

  She turned the car toward Sefton Park and skirted the top of the lake, following the kidney-shaped contours of the park along with a steady stream of rat-runners who were also trying to avoid the traffic lights and hold-ups on the main roads.

  As she drove, she daydreamed pleasantly, thinking of Jeff sitting in the bedroom armchair as she towelled dry after her shower, love and lust in his hazel eyes.

  For a few minutes she had pretended not to notice; he was already washed and shaved, smartly dressed, ready for work. A colleague described Jeff as looking like a bruiser in a suit: his nose had been broken at some time and badly reset, and he had accumulated a number of scars, one of them bisecting his right eyebrow. He wore his chestnut-brown hair short, as did most police officers she had met, and she supposed that anyone seeing him for the first time might mistake him for a tough nut. If he was tough, Grace never saw it in him, but she found reassurance in his strength of character as well as his physical strength.

  ‘See anything you like?’ sh
e asked, with a sideways glance at him.

  He smiled. ‘Oh, yeah.’

  He caught her hand as she crossed to the dressing table, pulling her onto his lap to kiss her lips, her throat, her breasts. Then he lifted her and carried her to the bed. Her fingers found the buckle of his belt and she sighed, rising to meet him as he went south.

  * * *

  The sun was stronger already. In the five minutes it had taken her to reach Sefton Park it had burned off the misty layer of cloud and now filtered through the sycamores and horse-chestnuts around the perimeter, dappling the honey-coloured shingle on the pavements and warming the frontages of the Victorian mansions that formed the crust of the inner gem: the geode of grass and trees and water that Grace thought of as the lungs and heart of the city.

  Traffic was backed up at the main road and she flicked her indicator right, jinking across a gap in the stream of cars and escaping the jam into one of the avenues. It was narrow and cars parked along both kerbs constricted it further. She edged into a gap to let an oncoming car through. Thirty yards from the end of the road, a bin lorry was idling, skewed at an angle to the kerb. A bit of a squeeze, but room to pass. Suddenly, the lorry pulled out, blocking the way through. The driver looked at her in his mirror; she could almost see the glint in his eye.

  ‘Damn,’ she muttered, leaning forward to switch the radio on. A cool rap version of ‘Summertime’ blasted out and she settled back in her seat, ready for the long haul.

  The outriders dragged two bins over and hooked them to the apparatus. The accumulated stench of decayed food, sweet and sickening, belched out from the rear of the lorry. Bags and loose rubbish tipped into the filthy cavity, sending a bubble of foul air so thick she could almost see it.

  ‘Thanks, fellas,’ Grace muttered, shutting off the fan.

  The lorry lurched forward three yards and then shuddered to a stop.

  ‘Damn it!’ She yanked on the handbrake with more force than was necessary and glared at the driver; he stared back at her in his wing-mirror.

  Two more bins were brought, and the empties trundled back to the kerb side. The hydraulic lift whined and grumbled, lifting the two bins. Suddenly, the inane prattle of the presenter became unbearable; Grace felt in the door pocket for a CD and came up with Peggy Lee. She looked down to slot the CD in the player then sat back to enjoy it as the bins tipped their contents into the cavity of the lorry. Bags, newspapers, empty cartons, potato peelings. The contents of the bin on the left remained stubbornly in place, then a square of carpet fell out.