A Question of Guilt Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles by Janet Tanner from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Postscript

  Recent Titles by Janet Tanner from Severn House

  ALL THAT GLISTERS

  THE DARK SIDE OF YESTERDAY

  FORGOTTEN DESTINY

  HOSTAGE TO LOVE

  MORWENNAN HOUSE

  MOTH TO A FLAME

  NO HIDING PLACE

  THE PENROSE TREASURE

  PORTHMINSTER HALL

  A QUESTION OF GUILT

  THE REUNION

  SEAGULL BAY

  SHADOWS OF THE PAST

  THE TRUTH GAME

  TUCKER’S INN

  THE YEARS TO COME

  A QUESTION OF GUILT

  Janet Tanner

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  First published in the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Janet Tanner.

  The right of Janet Tanner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Tanner, Janet.

  A question of guilt.

  1. Women journalists–Fiction. 2. Arson investigation–

  England–Somerset–Fiction. 3. Romantic suspense novels.

  I. Title

  823.9'14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-359-4 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8234-9 (cased)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  One

  Have you ever seen an avalanche? I have. I’ve heard it too, and it’s the most awesome, terrifying thing. The roar of it vibrates in the air and that wall of snow rushing down the mountainside makes the whole world shake and tremble. I only saw it briefly, over my shoulder, as I skied for my life, and I promise you, I never want to see it again. But that roar, like a wild animal about to devour you, I still hear that in nightmares.

  I could so easily have died that day, buried beneath goodness only knows how many feet of snow. I try not to think about it, but I know it will be a long time, if ever, before I can get up the nerve to ski off-piste again. And I’ll probably never be up to it physically, anyway. I shattered my leg as well as breaking my wrist and my collarbone when I shot over the overhanging rock that saved my life and where I lay stunned whilst the snow roared past, a foaming white ocean I could no longer see.

  When I woke up in hospital I was grateful for the pain because I was alive to feel it and I might so easily not have been. Later, as the weeks and months dragged by, I became awfully tired of it, and frustrated. Let’s face it, I’m no saint. When my leg throbbed relentlessly and I had to have more surgery I had to work very hard to keep reminding myself how lucky I had been. I had. I had! But there were times when I felt I was being sucked down more surely than if I’d been buried alive that day.

  I never did find out what started that avalanche, but I know it could have been something quite insignificant. Like a pebble starting a landslide, when a little shower of rubble becomes a cascade, so that ocean of snow may have begun with one little breaker. But of course it didn’t end there. Long after the snow had settled, the chain of events that avalanche started was rolling relentlessly on. Leading me, though I didn’t realize it, into a web of blind alleys and dark secrets towards a nightmare that would put my life in danger all over again.

  Everything that happened began with the avalanche. My questionable decision to go off-piste that day was the catalyst. If I’d stayed on the slopes, I wouldn’t have ended up badly injured; if I hadn’t been injured, I wouldn’t have been at home in Stoke Compton, bored and frustrated, looking for something to help the days pass more quickly. I’d have been simply getting on with my life. Tim and I might still have been together, and I’d have been too busy with my job – a reporter on the regional daily, Western News – to think of anything beyond Crown Court cases and the regeneration plans for the city docks area and the occasional interview with some local celebrity. I would never have begun asking questions about an old case of arson that had happened in my home town, thirty miles away.

  Would I have pursued it if I’d known what lay in store? The answer to that has to be yes. I’m a journalist first and foremost; I’m nosy and persistent. And I have a strong sense of justice. But I had no idea, none at all, of the nightmare I was letting myself in for. Or that I was to discover, the hard way, that sometimes the very people you think you can trust turn out to be those you can’t trust at all.

  But I’m going too fast. If I’m to tell you what happened, make any sense of it, I have to start at the beginning. Well, what was the beginning for me, anyway.

  When I got out of hospital I was still incapacitated to a certain degree, and definitely in need of some tender loving care. Coping by myself in the city flat I shared with Tim was barely practicable given the way things were. If he had been in a nine-to-five job within striking distance, I could probably have managed, but he wasn’t. He’s a captain with one of the budget airlines, which means he works irregular shift patterns and is often away overnight. Tim in a luxury hotel in Malaga or Madeira with the rest of the flight crew wouldn’t be a great deal of help to me if I needed urgent help.

  I wasn’t sure, in any case, if I wanted to rely on Tim. For some reason I was having second thoughts about whether he was the right one for me. I couldn’t actually pin down what had changed, only that it no longer felt right. Perhaps it was just that I was unsettled after the accident, depressed and seeing things through a dark haze; that was probably it. But I would have expected to want to cling to security, not push it away. I looked at Tim and felt this nagging doubt in the pit of my stomach; wondered if it had been the glamour of his job that had attracted me, not the real man inside the smart black uniform with gold braid on the shoulders. All sorts of things about him started irritating me, just silly little things really, like the way he raised a critical eyebrow and turned down the sound system whenever he came into the room, as if I w
as noise-polluting the planet all by myself, or tidied the magazines and newspapers I’d been leafing through into a neat pile or even whisked them away altogether. Once upon a time I’d found such habits endearing, now I prickled with annoyance. And I didn’t like it. If I was going to spend my life with this man, it didn’t bode well.

  I couldn’t help wondering if I was irritating him too. There was an impatience in his manner, as if he blamed me for what had happened – and perhaps he did. He hadn’t wanted me to take the skiing holiday at all and I knew he didn’t think I should have ventured off-piste. He’d said so often enough. Foolhardy, he’d called it.

  ‘Surely there must have been weather warnings?’ he’d said. Weather warnings loomed large in his life as a pilot. ‘Surely you checked?’

  ‘Of course I did. I’m not stupid.’ I sounded petulant, I knew. Being incapacitated and in more or less constant pain wasn’t doing much for my temper, however hard I tried to remain positive.

  Tim’s expression told me he wasn’t altogether sure he agreed.

  ‘The trouble with you, Sally, is that you don’t always stop to think about the consequences of your actions. When you get an idea in your head, you do tend to jump in with both feet.’

  ‘Not any more,’ I retorted ruefully. ‘Not with a metal pin in my leg and a plaster cast.’

  ‘That,’ Tim said, ‘is a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest Tim, please! We can’t all be perfect like you.’ I snapped. And immediately felt guilty and miserable. I wasn’t the only one affected by this. It wasn’t a lot of fun for Tim either. And however much I might protest that I’d taken all the right precautions, that the avalanche was a fluke and I hadn’t been the only one caught out that day, I still felt like a naughty child who’d brought all her troubles on herself by her disobedience, and inconvenienced everyone else into the bargain.

  ‘The best thing would be for you to go home for a while, until you’re stronger and more mobile,’ Tim said, and I knew he was right.

  Twelve years ago I’d been only too ready to leave; the family farm on the outskirts of a small country town, which my father ran himself with the help of just one regular farmhand in winter and some casual local labour in summer, had felt like a prison when I was eighteen. Now, battered and bruised mentally as well as physically, I longed for peace and tranquillity and the time and space to consider my future. I looked forward to Mum fussing over me, cooking the delicious meals I’d sorely missed, putting hot water bottles in my bed, bringing me a mug of warm milk with a tot of whisky in it. I thought nostalgically of cows in the lane, jostling as they were driven in for milking, instead of city streets with nose-to-tail traffic. And I pictured the night sky inky black and studded with stars instead of the orange street-light glow I’d grown used to.

  ‘It would be the answer, wouldn’t it?’ I said.

  Mum had offered, of course, when she and Dad had come to visit me in hospital, but I hadn’t been quite ready then to sacrifice my independence. Now I was. And the fact that Tim seemed pretty relieved at the thought of getting shot of me and the difficulties I was causing him made up my mind.

  I went home to Rookery Farm, Stoke Compton, ensconced in the rear seat of Dad’s comfortable 4 x 4 and for the first few weeks it was heaven on earth, balm for my battered body and soul. But as I began to get better the rural idyll began to pall, and I found myself remembering just why I’d been so keen to leave in the first place.

  I missed my job as a reporter on a regional daily; I missed my friends; I missed the hum of the city; I even missed arguing with Tim. I was going crazy with boredom – there’s a limit to how much daytime television you can take – and I was even fed up with reading, though it had been such a luxury in the beginning. When I moaned about it to him on the phone, Tim suggested I should use the time to try to do some freelance journalism, maybe a magazine article instead of the hard news that was my bread and butter when I was at work, and I did toy with the idea. But I couldn’t think of a single thing to write about. Nothing ever seemed to happen in Stoke Compton; I couldn’t imagine editors falling over themselves to buy pieces on Mum’s WI meetings, or the price of animal feed, and the same torpor that was driving me crazy seemed to have sapped my ability to think outside the frame.

  And then fate took a hand.

  It was a wet February day when rain was pouring down relentlessly from a leaden sky. The gusting wind threw it in angry flurries against the windows and roared like a dragon in the chimneys. Last year’s leaves lay in sodden piles in the farmyard, mixed with filthy bits of straw and silage and the gateway leading to the lane was ankle-deep with churned-up mud. There was no way I could take my usual constitutional – a short walk to exercise my leg and try to get some strength back into the muscles – and I was feeling even more fed up than usual.

  By four o’clock it was almost dark outside, hardly surprising, since it had not been properly light all day. It was warm and bright in the kitchen, though, where I was helping Mum prepare the vegetables for supper. The Aga emitted a comforting glow and the hidden lighting Mum had had put in when they were redecorating a couple of years ago supplemented the big old central fitting that had been there, I sometimes thought, ever since the farm house was built, and which I imagined had once supported an oil lamp.

  The small digital radio on the window sill was tuned to the local news programme, but I was only half listening. I’d been away from Stoke Compton so long that the items really struck no chords with me at all, and I found it hard to summon up any interest in road works on the bypass, or a traffic light failure in town. I was far away, in a world of my own.

  It was my mother’s voice that caught my attention.

  ‘You have to admire that woman, don’t you?’

  ‘What woman?’

  For a moment, Mum didn’t answer; she was clearly listening intently to the broadcast, and, curious, I began listening too.

  ‘I’ll never stop fighting for Brian. I’ll never give up as long as he’s in jail for something he didn’t do, while the real culprit is still out there walking free.’ There was fervour and determination in the disembodied voice, a fervour that rang out over the air waves. ‘Brian is innocent. I know that as surely as I know anything!’

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked as the interview concluded.

  ‘That was Brian Jennings’ sister. The chap that started that terrible fire in the High Street – you remember.’

  I scraped a satisfyingly long ribbon of skin from a carrot with my vegetable peeler. ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Oh, you must remember! It was a terrible to-do.’

  I stripped another peeling from the carrot. ‘Mum, I’ve covered dozens of fires. After a while they all blur into one.’

  ‘Well, you should remember this one!’ Mum sounded a bit put out. ‘Two girls almost burned to death in your own home town! And I’m surprised you haven’t heard about the campaign Brian Jennings’ sister is running to try and get the case looked into again. She’s often on the radio, trying to get someone to listen to her. She’s even got the local MP involved, I think, but it doesn’t seem to be getting her very far.’

  The first little prickle of interest stirred somewhere deep inside me, a sensation I hadn’t felt in months.

  ‘She thinks he was wrongly convicted?’

  ‘That’s what she thinks. I suppose she would, being his sister. And she says she won’t rest until justice is done. Like I say, you’ve got to take your hat off to someone who just refuses to give up, whether they’re right or wrong. It can’t be easy for her, taking on the powers-that-be as she has.’ Mum cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘Have you finished those carrots?’

  ‘Last one.’ I chopped the carrot into roundels and scooped them into the casserole. ‘There you go.’ I wiped my hands on the big navy-blue cook’s apron I’d borrowed from its place behind the larder door, and perched on one of the high kitchen stools, looking at Mum quizzically.
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  ‘Tell me about the fire, then. What the story was. I know you think I should know, but just refresh my memory.’

  ‘Let me get this in the oven, and then we’ll have a cup of tea and tell you all about it.’

  Mum was smiling faintly. I think she was pleased and relieved that at last I was actually taking an interest in something!

  The terrible fire started late at night, in an electrical-appliances shop in the High Street, apparently the result of petrol-soaked rags being pushed through the letter box, and had quickly become an inferno. Two girls who shared the flat above the shop had been lucky to escape with their lives. They had been in bed and asleep when the fire started, and if it had not been for a baker on his way to work raising the alarm and managing to get a ladder up to one of the rear windows, the fire would almost certainly have had the most tragic consequences.

  ‘There was never any doubt but that the fire was started deliberately and eventually Brian Jennings was in the frame,’ Mum said, sipping her tea. ‘To begin with everybody assumed it was down to yobs – they were always smashing up the bus shelter or putting a brick through one of the shop windows, that sort of nonsense. Most of the shops in the High Street had got those metal security blinds, but not that one. All he had was a row of concrete bollards to stop ram raids. I think he was struggling, to tell the truth.’

  ‘So perhaps he started it himself, for the insurance money,’ I suggested.

  ‘That was another theory that was going around, of course,’ Mum said. ‘I never did believe it myself, though. He wouldn’t risk it – not when he knew there were two girls asleep upstairs.’

  ‘People do awful things if they’re desperate,’ I said. I’d come across quite a few instances of unbelievable ruthlessness in the course of my career.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t that, anyway,’ Mum said. ‘It turned out he’d let his insurance lapse – couldn’t afford to keep up the payments. The fire ruined him – the shop never reopened, not as an electricals store anyway. It’s a café now. Very nice, too, they say. They do quite a trade on a Saturday, coffee and cakes, and toasted sandwiches. It’s one of the girls who used to rent the flat upstairs that’s got it, funnily enough. You’d think she’d have wanted to get as far away from the place as possible, wouldn’t you? I know I would, if I’d had an experience like that . . .’