Blood Substitute

Contents

Cover

Recent titles by Margaret Duffy 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

TAINTED GROUND

COBWEB

BLOOD SUBSTITUTE

SOUVENIRS OF MURDER

CORPSE IN WAITING

RAT POISON

STEALTH

DARK SIDE

ASHES TO ASHES

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 2008 in Great Britain and the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

This eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2008 by Margaret Duffy.

The right of Margaret Duffy 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

Duffy, Margaret

Blood substitute

1. Gillard, Patrick (Fictitious character) – Fiction

2. Langley, Ingrid (Fictitious character) – Fiction

3. Women novelists – Fiction 4. Detective and mystery stories

I. Title

823.9'14[F]

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6688-2 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-689-2 (ePUB)

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.

D
etective Chief Inspector James Carrick stood in the driving rain, hands on his knees, blood dripping from his mouth on to the wet grass. The cut to his lip, not the reason for his stillness, would require several stitches, an assessment I had just made after looking at him through my binoculars. Having scored a try a few minutes previously – his police team, the Ferrets, were winning by some margin and the game was well into the second half – he had nothing to be ashamed of by coming off to have the injury attended to. But he appeared reluctant to give up nevertheless, even though also slightly stunned from the crashing, illegal tackle he had just endured, resulting in his head colliding with someone's boot. But the substitute was already running on to the field and the spectators cheered as the casualty, a little unsteady on his feet, was escorted off. A penalty was awarded to his team.

‘I never thought he'd get back to the standard of fitness required to play again,' said the person on my right: Patrick, my husband. ‘Or fully recover from being shot, for that matter.'

I thought that Carrick, a friend of ours, could well have been inspired by Patrick himself, who was badly injured when he was an army officer with Special Services. Having subsequently worked for D12, a department of MI5 where we both worked, he then resigned his commission and is now, as he puts it, ‘helping SOCA with their enquiries', with his wife acting as ‘consultant'. It appeared, when I first agreed to assist, that this novelist acquiring valuable material and ideas for her books, as a by-product, so to speak, would merely be on the end of a phone to offer advice and support. In reality my role is usually more along the lines of passing the ordnance.

SOCA, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency, is an amalgamation of the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the investigations divisions of H.M. Customs and the Immigration Service. The organization appears to value Patrick's experience and expertise garnered during his army and MI5 days, although someone did once remark that his main value lay in an ability ‘to get the opposition shit-scared'.

Right now though we were in Somerset on holiday – or at least visiting Patrick's parents over an extended weekend.

The wind increased, the rain battered down harder and began to seep through the hood and shoulders of my anorak, but we stuck it out. Carrick, his lip neatly hemmed, returned to the field for the final ten minutes of the game and then it was all over, his team winning by twenty-three points to ten.

‘A pub; beer,' Patrick said succinctly as we made our way out of the Bath ground.

I had been rather hoping for a hot cup of tea and something home-made, squidgy and loaded with calories in Sally Lunn's.

‘We
are
going out to eat tonight,' I was reminded when I had voiced this wish.

‘I shall be dead of cold and starvation long before then,' I promised mulishly.

In the end we compromised and went to a city-centre hotel where it was possible to accommodate both preferences. Patrick gave James time to have his bath, sing rude songs with his team-mates – or whatever rugby players do these days – before he rang him with our congratulations on his performance and commiserations for the cut lip, this being the first time the DCI had taken the field since stopping a bullet in the chest during an investigation the previous year. James had almost died.

‘He would like to have a chat with us about something when we're not on holiday,' Patrick reported when he had rung off.

‘But if he wants to talk face to face then it's easier while we're here than for anyone to have to make special trips,' I pointed out. We live on Dartmoor; Patrick works mostly in London.

‘Yes, I know. It's just that he's aware that we're here this weekend because it's our wedding anniversary today and we're going out to dinner with Mum and Dad.'

‘Why don't you ask him and Joanna to have a meal with us somewhere on Monday?'

‘I rather got the impression this problem of his doesn't involve Joanna.'

‘So it's work?'

‘And private – I
think.
He didn't go into details, probably because he wasn't alone.'

Patrick and I have been married twice – to each other, that is – the first time when we were in our early twenties after falling in love when we were in our teens. Although I did not disgrace myself at school I am sure that if I am remembered at all it is not for anything of a scholarly or sporting nature but that I nabbed the Head Boy. Patrick was pretty heady stuff even then and the main reason the marriage failed was that neither of us had had time to find out what the other was really like, being too busy – with our careers, having a good time and, frankly, in bed. When I recollect the household climate at the time it seems a miracle that we remained together for so long. But perhaps ‘together' is the wrong word, for Patrick was away a lot with his regiment; too much to do, too many places to see, the whole world waiting to be explored. Eventual difficulties between us meant he cultivated an insufferably superior manner when we were in one another's company while the up-and-coming writer secretly went on the pill because she did not yet want children. He did, he found out and there was one terrible last row during which I threw his classical guitar down the stairs, smashing it. Then I threw him out too: it was our first home but paid for entirely with money my father had left me in his will and royalties from my books. Eventually we were divorced.

Patrick, then the second-youngest major in the British Army, was in the Falklands when the divorce papers came through and, leading a small undercover unit, was involved in an accident with a grenade that seriously injured his legs. Now, the lower part of his right leg is of man-made construction, just about the best in the world, thereby costing a small fortune and I was glad to atone for my previous bad temper by helping him pay for it. Before then, however, he had arrived on my doorstep, limping heavily, with an offer of a job working with him for MI5 – a strictly platonic arrangement, he had stressed – this his own idea because there had been other serious injuries that meant he had completely lost confidence where women were concerned. He thought I was the last female on the planet who would want to sleep with him. What I had known, even as he spoke, was that here was a man making a silent plea to me to take him back. Perhaps I had day-dreamed of him eventually turning up on my doorstep like a whipped cur and of sending him away again, but as with lost kittens, dogs with thorns in their paws – even worms drowning in puddles – I could not just walk away. Feminist friends' lips curled when I lamely explained the situation by saying that he needed me. Very lonely, feeling dreadfully guilty about the way I had treated him and not very good at wrestling with things like cars going wrong and coping with Dartmoor in winter, in truth I probably needed him far more.

Human nature being what it is we soon tossed the platonic stipulation out of the window. But I had found myself back with a man vastly changed. Gone was the supercilious manner, and here again was the boy I had met at school, but now someone who had discovered that he was not immortal. Probably a lot more mature myself by this time – and having to be after accepting the job offer and thus putting my name down for nightmarish MI5 training sessions – I did not hesitate when he proposed to me a second time. I suppose I had fallen in love all over again. The date of that ceremony in an insufferably hot registrar's office somewhere in a back street of Kensington was not the one we would be celebrating this evening but rather the first, a church wedding at Hinton Littlemoor in Somerset where Patrick's father John is still rector. For, as John himself once said, ‘Divorce is only a piece of paper.'

Despite Patrick's injuries, which had led him to be told that he probably could not father children, we went on to have Justin, who is now six, and then Victoria, a toddler. Then, when Patrick's brother Larry was killed we adopted his two; Matthew, now thirteen, and Katie, who is ten. That meant converting the barn on the other side of the courtyard at our Lydtor home into living accommodation for Patrick and me and building a large conservatory on the rear of the cottage which is for everyone, but, as far as the older children are concerned, is limited strictly to peace and quiet, reading and homework.

‘When do you want your present?' Patrick asked suddenly, breaking into my reverie.

I had already given him his present: some new tack for his horse, George.

‘Silly question,' I said, with a big smile. He smiled back, sparks of laughter in those wonderful grey eyes, and took a tiny package from his jacket pocket.

Moments later I gazed, dumbstruck, at the solitaire diamond ring it contained.

‘I never got round to buying you another engagement ring.'

He knew that I had genuinely lost the first. But I had kept my wedding ring, not thrown it at him as some women might have done. Why?
Why?
A subconscious wish that the break between us was not final, or merely the action of a practical person who would never discard anything she could sell if she was ever stony-broke?