Absolution

Neither Tobias French nor David Samson went looking for absolution. Never in either of their wildest nightmares had they contemplated it. Both approached the situation from different perspectives, but in the end absolution came looking for them. The code didn’t break when they found Mary Andrews hanging from a cord in the rented house on Tower Close in 1989. It didn’t break when her mother, Margaret, passed away in 1995. It was only just before George Hayward died in 2017 that the truth that had lain buried for almost fifty years finally emerged. Gillian Rodway had sat at the blank computer screen for many a day waiting for a flash of inspiration that would signal the beginning of her next novel. Ramsey and Macdonald, her two feline companions, had failed miserably to provide any ideas. The woman struggling through the snow to her door had a story to tell. One million pounds. The prize hung tantalizingly close, and Judith and Edward Hawksworth were on the verge of taking down the TV network’s top game show and exposing its host, Mike Barton, for the charlatan that he was. Just sixty seconds separated them from that dream.