Burley Cross Postbox Theft: A Novel by Nicola Barker Read Free Book Online

– manufactured
in situ
, no less – from recycled egg boxes, which makes it ludicrously absorbent and fractionally stiff). There’d be hell to pay if I wasted a piece.
    Enough of my waffling, though (I know how much you hate my waffling – my ‘pointless flummery’ as I believe you once called it!). Can I just say how broken up we all still are about your mother? We miss her horribly. Chester’s inconsolable (although he stole – and devoured – a whole partridge earlier. It was sitting on the sideboard, covered with a tea towel, resting,after I’d plucked it. I didn’t think he could get up there – he’s still huge; over three stone, but somehow he contrived to. It’ll be tomato omelettes, all round, for dinner again tonight, I fear). The parrot still won’t speak (and his chest is now completely bare). Even Rhona (who isn’t, as you may recall, much given to emotional displays) was heard to mutter over her salted oats at breakfast how much she ‘missed the silly old trout’.
    Of course I don’t mind in the slightest that you didn’t respond to my last letter (although there was the nagging doubt that it might’ve gone astray, but then Mr Baquir, your lawyer, kindly told me that this was not the case. I really appreciated that. And he seems a very charming man, Mr Baquir. He and Rhona spent some considerable time on the phone reminiscing about Egypt. It seems he was growing up in the outskirts of Cairo during the late 1960s at almost exactly the same time she was working as a volunteer there with Christian Aid).
    It’s only natural that you would feel angry, Donovan. And, of course, you feel hurt – even betrayed. Anyone would. In fact we were all perfectly miserable when we found out about the funeral – especially Rhona, who sets great store (well, greater store than I do) by these formal occasions. ‘We have an inalienable right to say goodbye,’ she harrumphed, ‘and now she’s snatched that away from us. It just doesn’t seem fair.’
    Fair or no – I imagine it must be hard for you to get any real sense of closure. If it helps at all, William Dunkley (the funeral director) told me, in strictest confidence, how he took it upon himself to say a little prayer over the coffin (and recited a Psalm, I think, although I’m not sure which one). He had been strictly prohibited by Glenys – on pain of death (or worse, he said!) – from doing so, but that didn’t deter him.
    I spoke to him on Tuesday at the Christmas Fair. He was quite shame-faced about the whole mess, but I assured him that we bore no grudges (although I didn’t absolve him on your behalf, obviously. It would hardly be my place to do so).
    He was only fulfilling her wishes, I suppose. He said she hadmade all the arrangements in mid-2005 (after her main diagnosis), and then had rung him up – twice, on subsequent occasions – to stress the finer details. It wasn’t a fly-by-night decision, in other words. She had insisted on perfect secrecy and he had decided – with some serious pangs of conscience – that it was his professional duty to respect that last request.
    Bill was very fond of Glenys himself (I don’t know if you remember him well – he’s quite a few years younger than we are – the nephew of Arthur and Polly). He said she beat him black and blue as a boy after he released her dog – Trumpet – from the special hook outside the shop and he ran riot on the main street, then careered up on to the moor where he savaged a moorland sheep and was shot (this was a while after you’d left home, I think, and some time before Rhona and I arrived at Threadbare, but I know she doted on that dog – he sounds extraordinarily unlovable! – and often referred to the incident in barbed tones).
    I asked about the ashes. Bill said they’d been scattered ‘locally’. I tried to press him further on the point but he wouldn’t budge. I’m guessing it was on the moor, near the war memorial (what better place than where