Broken Voices (Kindle Single) by Andrew Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

the
diocese from here. I tried to count the churches I could see. But I soon gave
up and thought instead about Jesus in the wilderness, and how the devil took
him up to a high place and tempted him.
    If I had been
Jesus, I would have struck a deal with the devil. In return for my soul I
wanted not to be at school; I wanted to live at home with my parents; and I
wanted to have a dog called Stanley.
    I remembered
all that as I stood by the stove with my bloody hands. I was still thinking
about it when I saw the man. He was walking from left to right, quite slowly,
along the walkway behind the lower arcade, perhaps 90 feet above our heads. The
light was so poor I couldn’t see him clearly. When he passed behind one of the
pillars he seemed to dissolve and then reconstitute himself on the other side.
    ‘Can you hear
it?’ Faraday said.
    Irritated, I
glanced at him. ‘What?’
    ‘Those notes.’
    ‘Shut up,
Rabbit.’
    I looked back
at the arcade. The man wasn’t there anymore. It was conceivable he had put on a
bit of speed and reached the archway at the northern end. Or he might have
stopped behind a pillar. Or, and perhaps this was most likely of all, he hadn’t
been there in the first place. The Cathedral at dusk was full of indistinct
shapes that shifted as you tried to look at them.
    Faraday nudged
me. ‘There it is again.’
    ‘What are you
talking about?’
    ‘The four notes
I heard last night. Remember?’ He hummed them, and they meant nothing to me.
‘It’s like the start of something.’
    ‘You’re barmy,’
I said. ‘Come on, I want some toast.’

*
    There was an odd sequel to this a few
hours later, when we were having our evening meal at the Veals’.
    While we ate,
Mr Veal was in the parlour with us. He had begun to relax in our company, as we
had in his.
    ‘This place
would fall apart at the seams without the Dean and me,’ he said with obvious
satisfaction. ‘Some of these clerical gents would forget who their own mothers
were. Heads in the clouds. And your masters aren’t much better.’
    I told him
about the glorious ratting we had had at Angel Farm.
    ‘So you missed
the rain this afternoon?’ he asked, for the minutiae of the weather’s
fluctuations fascinated him, as they did most grown-ups.
    ‘Just about. It
was beginning to spit as we were going back to Mr Ratcliffe’s so we cut up
through the Cathedral.’
    ‘We’ll have
worse tonight,’ he said. ‘Mrs Veal feels it in her bones. Her bones are never
wrong.’
    ‘I saw someone
up the west tower,’ I said.
    ‘Up the west
tower?’ Mr Veal shook his head. ‘Not at this time of year.’
    ‘Well, I
thought I saw someone.’ I shrugged. ‘But it was already getting dark. I
could’ve been wrong.’
    ‘No one was up
there,’ Mr Veal said. ‘There wouldn’t be. You can take it as Gospel, young man.
Not without me knowing.’

8
    That evening Mr Ratcliffe made cocoa
again. The three of us — four if you counted Mordred — sat close to the fire.
    The weather had
changed during the afternoon. It was still cold, but clouds had rolled in from
the south-west, bringing with it a wind that blew in gusts of varying strengths
with lulls between them. The wind carried raindrops with it, with the promise
of more to come. It rattled doors and windows in their frames. It sounded in
the wide chimney.
    It was Faraday
who reminded Mr Ratcliffe about his promise.
    ‘Please, sir — you
said you’d tell us about Mr Goldsworthy.’
    ‘Did I?’
    ‘Yes, sir. You
said there was a real story about the ghost.’
    ‘Real? To be
perfectly truthful, Faraday, I can’t be absolutely sure which parts of the
story are real and which are not. I don’t think anyone can after all this
time.’
    ‘When did he
live, sir?’ I asked.
    ‘Nearly two
hundred years ago. He was the Master of the Music, one of Dr Atkinson’s
predecessors. He was a composer, too. You remember the anthem we have on
Christmas Day? The Jubilate Deo? He wrote