Celina Grace was born sometime towards the end of the last century and wrote her first story, The Blue Ruby, at the age of seven. Although this early masterpiece was inexplicably ignored by the literary establishment, Celina persevered with her craft and *ahem* quite a few years later, writes full time as the author of The Kate Redman Mysteries, the historical mystery series Miss Hart and Miss Hunter Investigate, The Asharton Manor Mysteries and various standalone psychological thrillers. She lives in the historic market town of Hitchin in the UK.
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The sixteenth in the Kate Redman Mysteries series, Undertow, will be published early in 2024.

Prologue

CASEY FULLMAN OPENED HER EYES and knew something was wrong.

It was too bright. She was used to waking to grey dimness, the before-sunrise hours of a winter morning. Dita would stand by the bed with Charlie in one arm, a warmed bottle in the other. Casey would struggle up to a sitting position, aying to avoid the jab of pain from her healing Caesarean scar, and take the baby and the bottle.

You're mad to get up so early when you don't have to, her mother had told her, more than once. It's not like you're breastfeeding. Let Dita do it. But Casey, smiling and shrugging, would never give up those first waking moments. She enjoyed the delicious warmth of the baby snuggled against her body, his dark eyes fixed upon hers as he sucked furiously at the bottle.

She didn't envy Dita, though, stumbling back to bed through the early morning dark to her bedroom next to the nursery. Casey would have got up herself to take Charlie from his cot when he cried for his food, but Nick needed his sleep, and it seemed to work out better all round for Dita, so close to the cot anyway, to bring him and the bottle into the bedroom instead. That's what I pay her for, Nick had said, when she'd suggested getting up herself.

But this morning there was no Dita, sleepy-eyed in rumpled pyjamas, standing by the bed. There was no Charlie. Casey sat up sharply, wincing as her stomach muscles pulled at the scar. She looked over at Nick, fast asleep next to her. Sleeping like a baby. But where was her baby, her Charlie?

She got up and padded across the soft, expensive, sound-muffling carpet, not bothering with her dressing gown, too anxious now to delay. It was almost full daylight; she could see clearly. The bedroom door was shut, and she opened it to a silent corridor outside.

The door to Dita's room was standing open, but the door to Charlie's nursery was closed. Casey looked in Dita's room. Her nanny's bed was empty, the room in its usual mess, clothes and toys all over the floor. She must have gone into Charlie's room. They must both be in there. Why hadn't Dita brought him through? He must be ill, thought Casey, and fear broke over her like a wave. Her palm slipped on the door handle to the nursery.

She pushed the door. It stuck, halfway open. Casey shoved harder and it moved, opening wide enough for her to see an out- flung arm on the carpet, a hand half-curled. Her throat closed up. Frantically, she pushed at the door, and it opened far enough to enable her to squeeze inside.

It was Dita she saw first, spread-eagled on the floor, face upwards. For a split second, Casey thought, crazily, that it was a model of her nanny, a waxwork, something that someone had left in the room for a joke. Dita's face was pale as colourless candle wax, but that wasn't the worst thing. There was something wrong with the structure of her face, her forehead dented, her nose pushed to one side. Her thick blonde hair was fanned out around her head like the stringy petals of a giant flower.

Casey felt her heartbeat falter as she looked down at the body. She was dimly aware that her lungs felt as if they'd seized up, frozen solid. She mouthed like a fish, gasping for air, but it wasn't until she moved her gaze from Dita to look at Charlie's cot that she began to scream.

Chapter 1

ATE REDMAN STOOD IN THE tiny hallway of her flat and regarded herself in the full-length mirror that hung beside the front door. She never left the flat without giving herself a quick once-over-not for reasons of vanity, but to check that all was in place. She smoothed down her hair and tugged at her jacket, pulling the shoulders more firmly into shape. Her bag stood by the front door mat. She picked it up and checked her purse and mobile and warrant card were all there, zipped away in the inner pocket.

She was early, but then she was always early. Time for a quick coffee before the doorbell was expected to ring? She walked into the small, neat kitchen, her hand hovering over the kettle. She decided against it. She felt jittery enough already. Calm down, Kate. It was awful being the new girl; it was like being back at school again. Although now at least, she was well-dressed, with clean hair and clean shoes. It was fairly unlikely that any of her new co-workers would tell her that she smelt and had nits.

Kate shook herself mentally. She was talking to herself again, the usual internal monologue, always a sign of stress. It's just a new job. You can do it. They picked you, remember?

She checked her watch. He was late, although not by much. The traffic at this time of day was always awful. She walked from the kitchen to the lounge - living room, Kate, living room - a matter of ten steps. She closed her bedroom door, and then opened it again to let the air flow in. She walked back to the hallway just as the doorbell finally rang. She took a deep breath and fixed her smile in place before she opened it.

"DS Redman?" asked the man on the doorstep. "I'm DS Olbeck. Otherwise known as Mark. Bloody awful parking around here. Sorry I'm late."

Kate noted a few things immediately: the fact that he'd said 'bloody,' whereas every other copper she'd ever known would have said 'fucking"; his slightly too long dark hair; that he had a nice, crinkle-eyed smile. She felt a bit better.

"No drama," she said breezily. "I'm ready. Call me Kate."

When they got to the car, she hesitated slightly for a moment, unsure of whether she should clear the passenger seat of all the assorted crap that was piled upon it or whether she should leave it to Mark. He muttered an apology and threw everything into the back.

"I'm actually quite neat," he said, swinging the door open for her, "but it doesn't seem to extend to the car, if you see what I mean."

Kate smiled politely. As he swung the car out into the road, she fixed her mind on the job ahead of them.

"Can you tell me " she began, just as he began to ask her a question.

"You're from–"

"Oh, sorry."

"I was going to say, you're up from Bournemouth, aren't you?" Olbeck asked.

"That's right. I grew up there."

"I thought that's where people went to retire."

Kate grinned. "Pretty much. There's wasn't a lot of, shall we say, life when I was growing up." She paused. "Still, we had the beach. Where are you from?"

"London," said DS Olbeck, briefly. There was a pause while he waited to join the dual carriageway. "Nowhere glamorous. Just the outskirts, really. Ruislip, Middlesex. How are you finding the move to the West Country?"

"Fine so far."

"Have you got family around here?

Kate was growing impatient with the small talk. "No, no one around here," she said. "Can I ask you about the case?" "Of course."

"I know it's a murder and kidnap case "

"Yes. The child - baby - belongs to the Fullmans. Nick Fullman is a very wealthy entrepreneur, made most of his cash in property development. He got married about a year ago - to one of those sort of famous people."

"How do you mean?" Kate asked.

"Oh you know, the sort of Z-list celebrity that keeps showing up in Heat magazine. Her name's Casey Bright. Well, Casey Fullman now. Appeared in Okay when they got married, showing you round their lovely home, you know the sort of thing." Kate smiled. "I get the picture."

She wouldn't have pegged DS Olbeck for a gossip mag reader, but then people often weren't what they seemed.

"And the murder?"

"The nanny, Dita Olgweisch. Looks incidental to the kidnapping at this point, but you never know. What is known is that the baby is missing and as it - he's - only three months old, you can imagine the kind of thing we're dealing with here."

"Yes." Kate was silent for a moment. A three-month-old baby...memories threatened to surface and she pushed them away. "So on the face of it, we're looking at the baby was snatched, the nanny interrupted whoever it was, and she was killed?"

"Like you say, on the surface, that seems to be what's happened. We'll know more soon. We'll be there in," he glanced at the sat nav on the windscreen, "fifteen minutes or so."

They were off the motorway now and into the countryside. Looking out of the window, Kate noted the ploughed fields, shorn of the autumn stubble, the skeletal shapes of the trees. It was a grey January day, the sky like a flat blanket the colour of nothing. The worst time of year, she thought, everything dead, shut down for the winter, months until spring.

The car slowed, turned into a driveway, and continued through formidable iron gates which were opened for them by a uni- formed officer. After they drove through, Kate looked back to see the gates swung shut behind them. She noted the high wooden fence that ran alongside the road, the CCTV camera on the gatepost. The driveway wound through dripping trees and opened out into a courtyard at the front of the house.

"Looks like security is a priority," she said to her companion as he pulled the car up by the front door.

He raised his eyebrows. "Clearly not enough of a priority."

"Well, we'll see," said Kate.

They both got out of the car. There was another uniformed officer by the front door, a pale redhead whose nose had reddened in the raw air. He was stamping his feet and swinging his arms but stopped abruptly when Kate and Olbeck reached him. "DCI Anderton here yet?" said Olbeck.

"Yes sir. He's inside, in the kitchen. Just go straight through the hallway."

They stepped inside. The hallway was cavernous, tiled in chilly white stone, scuffed and marked now with the imprint of shoes and boots. Kate looked around. A staircase split in two and flowed around the upper reaches of the hallway to the first floor of the house. There was an enormous light shade suspended from the ceiling, a tangled mass of glass tubing and metal filaments. It had probably cost more than her flat, but she thought it hideous all the same. The house was warm, too warm; the underfloor heating was obviously at full blast, but there was an atmosphere of frigidity nonetheless. Perhaps it was the glossy white floor, the high ceilings, the general air of too much space. A Philip Starke chair stood against the wall, looking as though it had been carved out of ice.

"Mark? That you? Through here."

They followed the shout through into the kitchen, big on an industrial scale. It opened out into a glass-walled conservatory, which overlooked a terrace leading down to a clipped and manicured lawn. Detective Chief Inspector Anderton stood by a cluster of leather sofas where a woman was sitting, crouching forward, her long blonde hair dipping towards the floor. Kate looked around her surreptitiously. The place stank of money, new money: wealth just about dripped from the ceilings. It must be a kid- napping. Now, Kate, she chided herself. No jumping to conclusions.

She had only met the Chief Inspector once before, at her interview. He was a grey man: steel grey hair, dark grey eyes, grey suit. Easy to dismiss, at first.

"Ah, DS Redman," he said as they both approached. "Welcome. Hoping to catch up with you later in my office, but we'll have to see how things go. You can see how things are here."

He gave her a firm handshake, holding her gaze for a moment. She was surprised at the sudden tug of her lower belly, a pulse that vanished almost as soon as she'd registered it. A little shaken, it took her a moment to collect herself. The other two officers had begun talking to the blonde woman on the sofa. Kate joined them.

Casey Fullman was a tiny woman, very childlike in spite of the bleached hair, the breast implants and the false nails. Kate noted the delicate bones of her wrist and ankles. Casey had bunchy cheeks, smooth and round like the curve of a peach, a tip-tilted nose and large blue eyes. These last were bloodshot, tears glistening along the edge of her reddened eyelids.

"I don't know," she was saying as Kate joined them. Her voice was high, and she spoke with a gasp that could have been tears but might be habitual. "I don't know. I didn't hear anything and when I woke up, Dita," she drew in her breath, "Dita wasn't there. She would normally be there with a bottle and Ch- and Ch-"

She broke down entirely, dropping her head down to her bare knees. There was a moment of silence while Kate watched the ends of Casey's long hair touch the floor.

Anderton began to utter some soothing words. Kate looked around, her eye attracted by a movement outside on the terrace. A man was walking up and down, talking into a mobile phone, his free hand gesticulating wildly. As Kate watched, he flipped the phone closed and turned towards the house. He was young, good-looking and, somewhat incongruously given the early hour, dressed in a suit.

"Sorry about that, I had to take it," said Nick Fullman as he entered the room. Kate mentally raised her eyebrows, wondering at a man who prioritised a phone call, presumably a business matter, over comforting his wife after their baby son had been kid- napped. Not necessarily a kidnapping, Kate, stop jumping to conclusions. She thought she saw an answering disapproval in Olbeck's face.

Anderton introduced his colleagues. Nick Fullman shook hands with them both, rather to Kate's surprise, and then finally sat down next to his sobbing wife.

"Come on, Case," he said, pulling her up and encircling her with one arm. "Try and keep it together. The police are here to help."

Casey put shaking fingers up to her mouth. She appeared to be trying to control her tears, taking in deep, shuddering breaths. "Perhaps you'd like a cup of tea?" said Olbeck. He caught Kate's eye, and she immediately looked away. Don't you bloody dare ask me to make it. He looked around rather helplessly. "Is there anyone who could, er "

"I'll make it."

They all looked around at the sound of the words. A woman had come into the kitchen. Or had she? Kate wondered whether she'd been there all along, unnoticed. There was something unmemorable about her, which was odd because she too was dressed in full business attire, her face heavily made-up, her hair straightened and twisted and pinned in an elaborate style on the top of her head.

"This is my PA, Gemma Phillips," said Fullman. There was just a shade of relief in his voice. "Gemma, thanks for coming so quickly."

"It's fine," she said with a brilliant smile, a smile that faded a little as she surveyed Casey, huddled and gasping. "It's terrible. I came as quickly as I could. I can't believe it."

"If you could make tea for us all, that would be wonderful, Miss Phillips," said Anderton.

"It's Ms Phillips, if you don't mind," she said, rather quickly. "Or you can call me Gemma. I don't mind."

Anderton inclined his head.

"Of course. We'd like to talk to you as well, once we've been able to sit with Mr and Mrs Fullman for a while."

He turned back to the Fullmans. Gemma shrugged and began to make tea, moving quickly about the room. Kate watched her. Clearly Gemma knew her way around the kitchen very well. What, exactly, was her relationship with her employers like? Had she worked for them long? Presumably she didn't live on the premises. Kate made mental notes to use in her interview with the girl later.

The tea was made and presented to them all. Casey took one sip of hers and choked.

"Oh, sorry," said Gemma. "I always forget you don't take sugar."

There was something in her voice that made Kate's internal sensor light up. Not mockery, not exactly. There was something though. Kate scribbled more mental notes.

Nick Fullman had been given coffee, rather than tea, in an elegant white china cup. He'd swallowed it in three gulps. Kate noted the dark shadows under his eyes and the faint jittery shudder of his fingers. A caffeine addict? An insomniac? Or something else?

"I heard nothing," he was saying in response to Anderton's question. "I was sleeping. I sleep pretty heavily, and the first I knew about anything was Casey screaming down the hallway. I ran down and saw, well, saw Dita on the floor."

"Do you have any theories as to who might have taken your son?"

Casey let out a small moan. Nick pulled her closer to him.

"None whatsoever. I can't believe anyone "His voice faltered for a second. "I can't believe anyone would do such a thing." "No one has made any threats against you or your family recently?"

"Of course not."

"Who has access to the house? Do you keep any staff?"

Fullman frowned. "What do you mean by access?"

"Well, keys specifically. But also anyone who is permitted to enter the house, particularly on a regular basis."

Copyright: Celina Grace