Body Line by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page A

shan’t keep you long.’
    He could do as good an unyielding as her any day, and did it now. Unwillingly, she let them in. The house had been refurbished to a high standard of what passed these days for luxury – that is, all the floors had been stripped and polished and left bare, the walls were painted white, the furniture was modern and minimal, and an extravagant number of walls had been knocked out, so that the downstairs into which they were led formed a vast L shape with the sitting-room, the short leg, leading through to a kitchen-diner that stretched across the whole back of the house, and had glass doors across most of the width. Slider guessed they would be both sliding and folding, so that in summer almost the entire back of the house could be opened on to the patio. If ever the weather was hot enough. For the rest of the year, it seemed to him, the set-up would be pointedly un-cosy. It struck him that the current fashion for vast open spaces inside houses was an import from a country with a very different climate. But of course, the Amanda Knox-Sturgesses of this world had never set great store by comfort.
    Her heels clacked aggressively on the bare boards; Slider’s and Atherton’s police rubber soles were soundless behind her. No cat or dog came to greet them; the air smelled only of potpourri, not supper; there was no visible food preparation going on in the kitchen; and the sunless rooms were chilly. It was not Slider’s idea of a home; but he was a farm boy from the sticks, so what did he know?
    She turned to face them at the point where the sitting-room turned into the dining end of the kitchen and, menacingly tall under the RSJ, said, ‘Very well. Please be brief. What has David done now?’
    No please-sit-down, no cuppa. There was nothing for it: Slider said, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead.’
    He was watching her face, and it went stationary with shock; though again he felt there was a flicker of something – guilt or fear? – before she regained her icy mask. ‘I suppose he crashed his car. He always was a careless driver,’ she said as if indifferently, but she was not unaffected. Her eyes seemed blank, and her voice was by the tiniest degree not steady. She sat abruptly in the nearest armchair. Thus licensed, Slider and Atherton sat too.
    ‘One of the things we hoped you might be able to tell us,’ Slider said, sidestepping the car crash thing, ‘was, who is his next of kin? He seems to have been living alone. Did he remarry after your divorce?’
    ‘Neither of us remarried,’ she said, a little absently, surveying some inner landscape.
    ‘So you did keep in touch with him,’ Slider said. She looked up sharply. ‘If you knew he hadn’t remarried, you must have had some contact with him.’
    ‘We sent birthday and Christmas cards. And occasionally we spoke on the phone – about once a year. He would have told me if he was getting married. But that’s all. I haven’t seen him in years, and I know nothing about his present life.’
    ‘Are his parents alive?’ Slider asked, pursuing the next-of-kin line.
    ‘No. His father died in nineteen-eighty-eight and his mother in ninety-four. They were quite elderly when they had him.’
    ‘Brothers and sisters?’
    ‘He was an only child. And his parents were only children as well. He had a quite remarkable lack of relatives. It made his side of the church look very empty at our wedding.’
    An extraneous comment! Slider was glad of this evidence of softening. ‘At Holy Cross?’ he suggested beguilingly.
    ‘You know Sarratt?’ she asked, but not warmly – almost suspiciously, as if she suspected he was sucking up to her.
    Which he was, of course, though she wasn’t supposed to know it. ‘I know that part of the world. It’s a lovely church. And you and David didn’t have any children?’ Somehow he knew that: there was nothing maternal about her shape or her manner.
    ‘No,’ she said shortly, and in such a