The Rain Over Leeds
Chapter Seven — The Missing Hour
← Liam Barrantine / The Rain Over Leeds
The truth emerged slowly.
Mercer had not been killed at the market.
He had met Pennington earlier.
They had argued.
Mercer had been threatening him.
Something from their shared past had resurfaced, something connected to an old business arrangement and a disappearance which had never been properly explained.
Pennington had believed Mercer was going to destroy him.
At eleven eighteen, the argument became violent.
Mercer died.
But Pennington did not leave the body where he had killed him.
He transported it into the city centre and constructed the false murder scene.
He wanted the police to believe Mercer had been attacked by a stranger.
He had then returned to Seacroft and deliberately stopped his clock.
But Salters had understood the mistake.
Pennington had been thinking like a man trying to construct a story.
Salters had been thinking like a man reconstructing a night.
And stories, unlike reality, required everything to fit.
About Liam Barrantine
Liam Barrantine is 56 and lives in North Yorkshire with his family. He holds a degree in criminology and worked for many years as a forensic investigator, an experience which informs the procedural detail and the slow unravelling of evidence in his fiction. He has a particular interest in murder mysteries, the mechanics of a crime, the inconsistencies in witness accounts, the small things that do not fit. The Rain Over Leeds is his first novel.
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