The Coldest Blood

Your letter was the most wonderful surprise. Of course I’ve never forgotten you, and you’re right, you did cause me a lot of pain, but not the pain you think. I shouldn’t have let you go, and it’s something I’ve always regretted. I’m alone now, so do come.

Love

Grace.

‘Will you go?’ asked Dryden.

Marcie nodded, putting the card carefully away. ‘If you’ll come too. I want her to know the truth.’

Suddenly she was there: Ruth Connor stood below them, skin dry despite the sweltering city heat. She held out her hand for Dryden’s and let go almost as soon as they touched. ‘Perjury’s a crime,’ she said.

Marcie stiffened beside him, but Dryden could see Ruth Connor’s eyes, and the smile on the thin red lips.

The Capri crunched against the kerb and Humph hooted the horn twice.

‘Alone?’ asked Dryden, looking beyond her.

Ruth Connor glanced down at the deep shadow crowding in around her feet. Then she said what she’d wanted to say the night Paul Gedney died for the second time: ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, and walked away, the tap of the high heels scattering pigeons into the sky.

THE SKELETON MAN

Jim Kelly

Now available in hardback Michael Joseph £16.99

For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude’s Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for military training in 1990. The isolated, 1000-year-old community was famous for one thing – never having recorded a single crime.

But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blown apart. For the TA’s shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck.

Two days later, a man is pulled from the reeds in the river near Ely – he has no idea who he is or how he got there. But he knows the words ‘Jude’s Ferry’ are important, and he knows he is afraid…

As the police launch an investigation into the skeleton in the cellar, Dryden is convinced the key to the mystery rests in the last days of the village when passions, prejudices, guilt and hatred all came to a head. Everything leads him back to Jude’s Ferry. But who is waiting for him there?

Read on for a taster…

Prologue

St Swithun’s Day Sunday, 15 July 1990

It was a child’s high stool, commandeered for the execution.

I stood with my back to the wall, part of the crowd, not the mob, but even then I knew that such a line could not be drawn: a line to separate the guilty from the innocent.

Twelve of us then, and the accused on the stool, the rope tight to the neck.

Again the question. ‘Why?’ Each time marked by a blow to the naked ribs, blood welling up beneath the skin.

I could have answered, ended it then. But instead I pressed my back against the cool wall, wondering why there were no more denials, wondering why life had been given up.

The victim’s knees shook, and the legs of the stool grated on the cellar’s brick floor. Outside in the night there was a dog’s bark, heard through the trapdoor above, and twelve chimes from the church on the hill.

Then the ringleader did it, because he had the right that was in his blood. Stepping forward he swung a foot, kicking the stool away.