Sins of the Father Read online

  Books in Detective Inspector Matthew Adams Series:

  After She’s Gone

  Sins of the Father

  Deadly Intent

  Sins of the Father

  Sheryl Browne

  Book 2 - Detective Inspector Matthew Adams

  Gripping edge of your seat reads!

  Copyright © 2017 Sheryl Browne

  Published 2017 by Choc Lit Limited

  Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB, UK

  www.choc-lit.com

  The right of Sheryl Browne to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Barnards Inn, 86 Fetter Lane, London EC4A 1EN

  MOBI: 978-1-78189-343-2

  EPUB: 978-1-78189-342-5

  What People Are Saying about ‘Sins of the Father’:

  A roller-coaster of a read which you won’t want to put down!

  Former Police DCI Stuart Gibbon

  Sheryl Browne writes punchy revenge thrillers with family at their heart, and she writes them well.

  Crime Hound

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Professional Book Reviewer at Breakaway Reviewers Rony G Cambell, who not only believed in me, giving After She’s Gone an outstanding review, but convinced me to believe in me too.

  Thank you for the pep talk, Rony.

  For you and all those friends and family who have cheered me on.

  Contents

  Detective Inspector Matthew Adams series

  Title page

  Copyright information

  Endorsements

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Thank You

  About the Author

  More Choc Lit

  Introducing Choc Lit

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to former Police DCI Stuart Gibbon at GIB Consultancy for his fabulous advice on Police actions and procedures.

  Thank you too so much readers and book bloggers for your wonderful support and taking time to leave a review.

  Special thanks to Shell Baker at Chelle’s Book Reviews who selected the first in the Detective Inspector Matthew Adams series, After She’s Gone, as a TOP 20 BEST READS OF 2016

  And to Alison Daughtrey-Drew at Ali the Dragon Slayer who selected After She’s Gone as one of her FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2016.

  Huge thanks also to the members of the Choc Lit Panel (Jenny M, Jenny W, Rosie F, Kate A, Peggy H, Stacey R, Jo O, Katie P, Linda Sy, Sigi, Betty S, Ruth N, Els E and Joanne B) for recommending Sins of the Father for publication

  I’m thrilled and humbled. I simply could not do this without you.

  Keep safe all.

  Chapter One

  Matthew studied his foster daughter thoughtfully over his wine glass. She was still shy, retreating under her curtain of hair whenever she felt embarrassed or nervous, but Ashley had grown into a beautiful young woman. She wasn’t entirely confident in company yet, but that would come. Thanks to the counselling sessions, which he and Becky had made damn sure Ashley had attended after the kidnapping, she finally seemed comfortable in her skin, which she was revealing plenty of on the dance floor. The last thing Matthew wanted to do was play the heavy father and try to dictate what she wore, but he couldn’t help wishing she was wearing a little more of it.

  Glancing around, he noted more than one or two blokes eyeing her up as she moved sensually to the music. Late teens, early twenties most of them, Matthew had absolutely no doubt what would be going on in their testosterone-fuelled minds.

  Berating himself, he took a sip of his drink. He really needed to stop doing this. He was getting paranoid, imagining every male who came near her was a threat. Too many years on the force, he supposed. Too many years seeing young girls falling prey to perverts. He’d never forgiven himself for what happened with Patrick Sullivan. Matthew closed his eyes, attempting to shake his head free of the image of the pimping, drug-pushing piece of scum, down on his knees, begging for his miserable life, swearing he hadn’t touched Ashley or his wife. Hadn’t touched them? Matthew swallowed back the bile the memory brought to his throat. Even realising he was on the wrong end of his own shotgun, Sullivan hadn’t been able to resist digging the knife in, twisting it, claiming the ‘accident’ that had previously taken the life of their innocent five-year-old daughter had only meant to be a warning. He’d engineered it, the bastard. In prison at the time, he’d pulled strings, murdered Matthew’s child, and he’d made damn sure he knew it.

  Knocking back the contents of his glass, Matthew tried to oust the sour taste from his mouth. He could still hear Sullivan’s taunting voice now, dishing out his own brutal brand of mental torture as he’d held them captive. Oh dear, is that a little wheeze I hear, Adams? He could feel the constriction in his chest, the heart-crushing hopelessness as Sullivan had kicked away his asthma meds. See his wife, petrified, pregnant, the rope cutting into her flesh, the livid bruising around her neck. He could hear the shot. Like a thunderclap in his head, night after night, it exploded, ear piercing, final. Matthew had tried to put it behind him, pretending to everyone that he had, but still the nightmares came, relentlessly, staccato images looping around in his head like sick movie stills. Desperately trying to claw his way back to consciousness, Matthew would feel the cold steel of the shotgun slide icily across his cheek, hear Sullivan’s calculated malevolence as he’d delivered his death sentence: Payback time, Matthew. Comprendre? The words ricocheted around in his head until they drove him halfway insane.

  The corpses would follow then, a succession of sordid, stomach-churning snapshots searing themselves onto his brain: the young girls he hadn’t been able to prevent Sullivan squeezing the life from. Broken bodies, eyes vacant, opaque and empty. Limbs fractured and at impossible angles. One shoe taken and replaced with a single red stiletto.

  The man had had a daughter around the same age as those girls, incomprehensibly. Matthew had never been able to get his head around how Sullivan had reconciled his conscience when he’d obviously doted on his daughter. Whatever Sullivan had been, as deranged as he’d been, to Taylor Sullivan her father had been everything. Something else Matthew would never forgive himself for was the part he’d played in her eventual suicide. Now, distractedly watching
the girls on the dance floor, he couldn’t help but wonder again how devastated, lonely and desperate she must have been to have deliberately thrown herself in front of a tube train.

  ‘Hello, earth to Matthew.’ Becky appeared in front of him, cutting his meandering thoughts short.

  Forcing himself back to the present, Matthew blinked and focussed on his wife, on her smile, which always reached her beautiful aquamarine eyes when she smiled at him, and wondered again what she saw in him, why she’d stayed with him, when he’d been the cause of all the pain she’d been through. Try as he might to ‘forgive himself’ and ‘move on’ with his life, as the police psychiatrist had urged him, Matthew simply couldn’t. Walking out of one session, when the woman had insisted on raking over old coals until he’d wanted to scream, he’d eventually gone back, determined to tick all the right boxes in order to be able to carry on with his job. He’d listened to what the psych had to say, which on the surface made sense, yet made no sense at all. And then, scraping through his evaluation, he’d washed his hands of it. The recommended further counselling wasn’t going to help. How could it? There would never be a day when he didn’t regret not telling Becky he knew in his gut it had been Sullivan who’d orchestrated the hit and run that had taken their first daughter away. That he’d suspected that Sullivan, who’d borne a hatred of him since childhood simply by nature of the fact that he was a copper’s son, had been determined to seek retribution for the death of his drug dealing brother, along with other perceived sins against him – that is, Matthew doing his job and trying to rid the streets of the piece of scum. His hands had been tied, tied by the law, ironically. With no proof he’d had any involvement in the ‘accident’, Sullivan had walked away. Walked out of prison, which had been his cast-iron alibi, as free as a bird to do what he liked to whom he liked. He’d wanted to destroy Matthew. He’d chosen to kill him slowly by torturing his family. He should have warned her.

  ‘I’ve been trying to attract your attention.’ Becky held up two drinks, non-alcoholic for her, as she’d volunteered to do the driving. Another wine for him, which he should really decline if he was going to live up to his promise to himself not to indulge too much, given his previous love affair with the bottle. He doubted Becky would be encouraging him if she knew he’d just downed his previous glass in one gulp.

  ‘Sorry.’ Matthew mustered up a smile. ‘Miles away.’

  ‘I gathered.’ Becky gave him a knowing look. ‘Do you want to share?’

  Matthew quickly shook his head. ‘It’s nothing,’ he assured her, not wanting to drag her down bad memory lane with him.

  Narrowing her eyes, in that way she did, which told Matthew she was on to him, Becky sighed. ‘Hmm?’ she hummed, obviously not convinced.

  Matthew averted his gaze. His worries were his to cope with, not hers. She’d already had enough worry to last a lifetime.

  ‘Not spoiling the view, am I?’ Becky asked after a second, nodding over her shoulder, towards the dance floor.

  ‘Well, if you could just move slightly to your left.’ Matthew gestured with a finger.

  Becky arched her eyebrows. ‘Do you want to drink this, DI Adams?’ she asked him, looking suitably po-faced. ‘Or wear it?’

  ‘Drink, I think. Red will clash with my tie.’ Promising himself to go on to soft drinks after this one, Matthew smiled and reached for his glass. He was sure Becky knew him well enough to know he wasn’t ogling. ‘That’s a bit short on material, isn’t it?’ He nodded towards the girl Ashley was dancing with, who was wearing a dress the size of a postage stamp and who actually looked vaguely familiar, though Matthew couldn’t place when or where he might have met her.

  Becky followed his gaze. ‘It’s a sheath dress, the height of cool, apparently,’ she informed him, coming to stand by his side.

  It was certainly that. The dress seemed to be moulded to the girl’s every curve, and what little there was of it was more see through lace than dress. His gaze drifting back to Ashley, who looked as if she could do with taking a break and rehydrating, Matthew took a slow sip of his wine this time. His predilection when he was worried was to go back to his old habits and drink too much, and the murder scene he’d been called out to recently had definitely given him cause to worry: a young girl, Caucasian, a street girl possibly, but not one known to Matthew. An abject feeling of failure washing over him, as it always did when one of these girls turned up bruised and beaten, raped or worse, Matthew had viewed the body and experienced an acute sense of déjà vu. Face down, head twisted to one side, her eye sockets had been purple and swollen, her nose broken, her lip split. He’d noted the ligature marks on her neck, meaning death had probably been from asphyxiation, with a growing sense of foreboding, but what really shook him was when he’d registered the missing shoe.

  ‘Coincidence, boss,’ his former detective sergeant, who still insisted on calling him boss, had assured him when Matthew had rung him. Aware of everything he’d been through, was still going through, Steve was the one person Matthew felt safe confiding in. Shot while on unofficial duty trying to cover Matthew’s back when his DCI and most of his colleagues had turned theirs, labelling Matthew obsessed with Sullivan, Steve hadn’t judged him. He’d simply done what the man did instinctively and been there for him. Still, he didn’t judge him. He wasn’t slow to point out his paranoia, however. ‘Apart from the red stiletto, I agree it’s a similar MO,’ he’d conceded, ‘but there are always going to be similar cases, aren’t there?’

  He’d paused, and Matthew, sick to his gut though it made him, had known there always would be, and that every single such case might remind him. Still, though, he’d been uneasy.

  ‘Sullivan’s dead, boss,’ Steve had gone on in that gruff, blunt way he did. ‘Let it go, yes, or you’ll drive yourself nuts.’

  Which is precisely what Matthew was doing, obsessing, when he was supposed to be relaxing and enjoying himself at a wedding. Also in danger of doing what he’d just cautioned himself not to and anaesthetising himself with booze. While he was proud to be a copper and a ‘chip off the old block’, he’d no intention of following his father’s road to self-destruction, which his old man had seemed hell-bent on when he was forced out of the police. He’d watched his sister start down that route too, before he’d finally convinced her to go to rehab and stay there. It hadn’t been pretty.

  ‘She is gorgeous, though, isn’t she?’ Becky nodded towards the girl, who was definitely attracting admiring glances. Matthew noticed the male audience at a nearby table nudging each other and all but drooling into their lagers.

  ‘Very,’ he replied, looking back to his wife, who was most definitely gorgeous, particularly in her also revealing short dress, which showed off her shapely legs to perfection. From her fabulously wild hair, tamed for the evening, but which she normally wore tumbling down her back in all its fiery auburn glory, to her freezing cold toes, he loved every inch of her. Could quite fancy kissing every inch of her in fact, now he came to think about it, though possibly not here.

  ‘But not as beautiful as you, Mrs Adams,’ he assured her, relieved they’d managed to kiss and make up last night after a stupid argument about nothing. Not nothing in reality, though, Matthew knew. Becky had wanted him to stick at the counselling. She broached the subject again when he’d woken in a cold sweat beside her, urged him to confide in her what was haunting him so violently in his sleep. Matthew had brushed it off, but Becky wasn’t buying it. He was shutting her out, making himself emotionally unavailable, she’d said, clearly hurt by his inability to talk to her. He was. Matthew was aware that was what he seemed to be doing, though he desperately didn’t want to. He’d almost lost Becky once because of his tendency to withhold information he considered would do her more harm than good. But how the hell did he share what was concerning him now without dredging up painful memories for her?

  Oblivious to his deliberations, Becky eyed him amusedly. ‘Flatterer.’ She laughed.

  Self-effacingly, Matthew note
d, amazed at her ability to laugh at all, given what she’d been through. Her complete lack of pretentiousness. She didn’t deserve to be ‘shut out’. But then she didn’t need any more worry heaped on her shoulders. He would talk to her. He’d have to, somehow. But not tonight.

  ‘Will it get me anywhere?’ he asked hopefully, pushing his worries aside for now and threading an arm around her waist.

  Becky snuggled into him. ‘Depends on what you have in mind, Detective.’

  Matthew traced the jut of her hip and then allowed his hand to stray around back and just a little bit lower. ‘Everything,’ he whispered, close to her ear. ‘I want to take you home and do terrible things to you.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘He’s good-looking, isn’t he, your dad?’ Jasmine observed as they came off the dance floor and headed to the bar.

  ‘Yeah, not bad.’ Ashley looked past her to where Matthew and Becky were now seated at a table talking to the mother of the bride, one of Becky’s old friends whose daughter was also a girl Ashley and Jasmine knew from college, who’d decided on pregnancy as a career option.

  ‘Not bad at all.’ Jasmine gave him a coquettish little wave, as Matthew glanced in their direction.

  Matthew smiled and waved back and Ashley tried not to mind that her female friends tended to get the hots for him. Matthew was okay. He didn’t stray, Ashley was pretty sure of that. Nor would he ever. He’d been through the worst kind of crap, losing his daughter, then almost losing Becky. He’d taken everything that sadistic freak Sullivan could dish out to save Becky and her. He’d lied for her. Matthew had almost lost his job because of all that had happened, and his mind. Ashley had heard him, shouting out in his sleep, knew he still had nightmares. They’d all struggled in the aftermath. She certainly had with all the schizophrenic shit they’d labelled her with, determined that the voices she heard were all in her head. Ashley still wasn’t convinced about that. Matthew had been there for her though, made her go to all her appointments. Ashley was glad he had. She hadn’t known how to handle it at first, having two parents who actually cared, where she’d only ever had a mum too drunk to notice she existed. Ashley hadn’t seen her since the day she’d walked out in search of a quick fix and never come back.