Long Time Lost by Chris Ewan Read Free Book Online Page B

you’re in control here.’
    Russell waited until he was gone before looking up with a slight smile. He rubbed at his wrists, stepping closer to reach for Renner’s hand and pull him off the desk into an embrace.
    ‘How are you holding up?’ Renner asked, slapping his back, pushing him away so he could search his face.
    But Russell didn’t answer. He just swiped at his nose with a knuckle, then sniffed and pointed at the book. ‘What did you bring me?’
    Renner unfurled the paperback. The colours were faded, the pages yellowed, the spine splintered and cracked.
    ‘Think maybe I’ve read this one before.’
    ‘I think maybe you have, too. But it’s a good one.’
    The book was a Western, taken from the collection Renner stored in a pile of boxes in the shed at the bottom of his garden. Renner had been loaning the books to Russell since the boy was a teenager. In the years after Larry and Diane had disappeared, he’d often walked the grounds of the Lane estate with Russell, or watched over him as he built dens in the nearby woods, talking through the stories together, sharing which parts they liked most, the characters they admired, the women they lusted after.
    Renner missed those days. He’d been blessed with two daughters but the bond he shared with Russell was something beyond that. It felt purer and more profound than his sense of loyalty and responsibility towards Connor. Something more, truth be told, than he’d ever experienced with either of his girls.
    Larry’s vanishing act had given him the precious gift of his relationship with Russell, and there were times when he was shamed by how happy it made him. But to see him here, now – to look at his pallid skin, his sunken cheeks and the dark whorls around his eyes; to hear the broken quality of his voice – was almost too much for Renner to take.
    ‘Anyone giving you trouble?’
    Russell fanned the pages of the book, shaking his head. Connor’s money had paid for his brother’s safety inside. Renner had made sure that word got around Strangeways fast that Russell Lane was off-limits. But there was always the danger that some young punk looking to build a reputation for himself might decide to have a go.
    ‘Your brother says your legal team are really shaping up.’
    Russell gave him a familiar one-eyed squint and tapped the book with his nail. ‘There’s something about the sheriff, isn’t there? A secret in his past?’
    So Renner quit trying to have a real conversation, motioned for Russell to hop up next to him on the desk and started talking about the book instead. But as he gave his take on the plot and the characters, saying how he still thought the sheriff was a fool for setting off to hunt down the crew of bank robbers instead of bunking down with the raven-haired rancher’s girl, all he could really do was think about Russell.
    He thought of Anna Brooks, the teenage runaway who’d accused him of violent rape four years ago; of how he hadn’t believed it then and couldn’t believe it still. And he thought of Helen Knight, the young lawyer who’d been found dead not two months ago now, her bloated body washed up on the shores of Lake Windermere, less than a mile from the Lane estate. Russell was the last person known to have seen her alive. Patrick Leigh had watched Helen get into Russell’s car on the day she went missing. Kate Sutherland had witnessed them arguing.
    Renner sneaked a look at the man sitting beside him, the lost boy he still reminded him of in so many ways, and something in his heart told him that Russell had been unlucky two times over, accused of sickening crimes he didn’t have the capacity to commit.
    But also, deep down, he couldn’t ignore a stirring of unease; the thought that somehow, biologically speaking, the meek lad he knew, the sweet kid who liked to build dens and talk Western stories, might also have inherited Larry’s lust for violence and destruction, just as Connor had inherited his ruthless