Heatwave

Heatwave
A DI Mitchell Yorkshire Crime Thriller


Davies


Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
A Message from the Author


Prologue
“I’ve never seen the grass so brown.”
I looked up from where I was kneeling in the soil, which was dry as biscuit crumbs and coarse beneath my bare knees. My wife came over with a tray of ice water, and I accepted one gratefully.
“Thanks, love.” I got to my feet with a grimace and brushed the dirt off myself as I looked over the parched lawn. “It’ll need watering again tonight.”
“If they don’t put out a hosepipe ban.”
I drained half of my glass, the condensation dripping down the sides. It was another broiling summer day, with the endless blue skies and unrelenting sun that felt so foreign. It felt very much like someone had hopped off to Greece or Spain and smuggled the weather back to rainy old Yorkshire.
My gardening was making me sweat, my upper lip tasting like salt, and I moved over into the shade, joining my wife in one of the creaky deck chairs that were still dusty and mothballed from languishing in the garage for months.
Off in the distance, there was an ice-cream van tinkling away, plying its sweet treats. Closer by, a mower was grumbling away, the neighbour’s children were playing in their shallow paddling pool with happy squeals, and hovering flies whined above my head.
“How long d’you think it’ll last?” I asked my wife, pressing my glass of ice water to my cheek and relishing the numbing cold.
“Oh, a week, perhaps,” she guessed.
“We should have a barbeque.”
“We’ll have to get to the shops early. Everyone else will have had the same idea.”
The ice had melted in my drink, and I finished it off, savouring the coolness. The ice blocks had dissolved in minutes, even here in the shade, and the washing we put on the line seemed to dry almost as fast as you could string it up, especially when there was a warm, sluggish breeze like today. The weather forecasters had been talking about the heat in London topping thirty-five degrees this weekend, and it didn’t feel much cooler here.
“When’s your lad due round?” she asked after a few quiet minutes. The mower had stopped, and the quiet that hung over the garden felt physically laden by the heat, pressing me down into my seat and making me reluctant to lift a finger. It took an effort to open my eyes and turn my wrist to look at the time.
“Twenty minutes or so,” I said, resting my head back and closing my eyes.
“Don’t go falling asleep, you old lump.” My wife prodded me teasingly in the side, and I faked a wounded groan. “Go on, up you get.”
“You’re a cruel woman,” I complained good-naturedly before dragging myself upright and grimacing at the way my shirt stuck to my back.
I’d not travelled a great deal in my life, and I’d always been more at home in the cold, blustery wet than any type of heat. This hot weather seemed to turn the air into a whole different beast with its syrupy substance, a film of fine dust hanging on the wind, and a smell like an open oven and overripe fruit.
I made my way slowly into the kitchen to put a bottle of lemonade in the freezer to cool it down in time for Liam’s arrival and climbed the stairs to freshen up. Inside the house, with its thick brick walls and the curtains all pulled closed, it was cool and dark and felt far more familiar than the sunshine outside.
The doorbell went as I was drying my face, and I slung the towel over the rail and headed downstairs. Out in the garden, my wife probably wouldn’t hear the doorbell, so I was alone as I opened the porch door and greeted Liam and his dad. The boy had grown another inch or so, and he’d turned brown as a nut in the time since I’d last seen him, even though I could see the oily smear of suncream on his face.
“Hi, Mr Mitchell,” Liam said cheerfully, all but vibrating with energy. The heat piled lethargy on me, but the kids seemed to soak the sunlight up like plants, charging them up to a fever pitch. Or it might be all the ice creams and fizzy pop they got this time of year, I thought wryly.
“You’re looking tanned, lad,” I said, stepping back to let them into the house. “Come on through to the back. We’ve got lemonade and strawberries if you fancy it.”
“And chocolate sauce?”
“No, sorry, kid,” I said, amused. “But I can probably dig up some ice cream if your dad doesn’t mind.”
“The kiddo must be ninety per cent ice cream at this point,” Douglas said, taking off his broad-brimmed hat to fan his red face. “Another scoop won’t do any harm.”
I showed them through to the garden, where the chairs were set up in the minimal shade cast by a parasol and our rickety wooden shed. The grass felt stiff and bristly under my sandals, crunching beneath them in a manner that reminded me oddly of fresh snow. Not that I could hardly imagine the sharp, biting scent of winter at this time of year. Strange, I thought, how a week or two of consistent weather, be it heavy rain, or snow, or boiling sunshine, felt unending, like the country had never been anything but dry and simmering with heat.
I fetched the lemonade from the freezer and fixed up four bowls of strawberries and ice cream. I made Douglas an iced coffee and carried the tray out into the heat, ice cubes chinking quietly against each other inside the glasses. The ice cream melted into liquid almost in the time it took to cross the grass, and Liam wolfed it down, along with