Cold in Hand by John Harvey Read Free Book Online Page A

overhanging branch at first, before darting down to grab a seed, then skittering away. Five minutes later, it was back, and this time not alone. Within the space of a week there were great tits, a pair of blackbirds, robins, a wren, and once, a goldfinch, with its red-banded head and the fierce yellow of its wings.
    Occasionally, either Dizzy or Pepper would gaze upwards wistfully, attracted by the quick flutter overhead, but other than that, they seemed to pay little heed.
    "Happy now?" Resnick had said one morning, stopping behind her as she stood at the kitchen window, looking out.
    "Yes." She twisted her head to give him a kiss. "Reminds me of home."
    "I thought that's what this was," Resnick said.
    She turned it over in her mind, now as she had then: how long did it take, living with someone, living in their house, before you felt that you belonged?
    Lynn walked out into the garden, shoots already appearing here and there, fresh buds on the roses well ahead of their time, the pink flowers of the camellia scattered over the ground. New growth enough on the lawn for it to need a trim. Careful not to lean too heavily on the wall, loose bricks shifting slightly beneath her hand, she looked down on to the allotments of Hungerhill Gardens and watched for a moment as a man wearing an old, patched tweed jacket, grey trousers tied above the ankle with string, paused in his digging long enough to lift his grey herringbone cap from his head, wipe an arm across his brow, then replace his cap before resuming digging. The man sufficiently like her father to make her catch her breath.
    The last time she had seen him, almost five years ago now, he had been sleeping, oblivious, thankfully, to pain, to every-

thing, his skin a murky bilious yellow, the cancer eating into his liver, kidneys failing, a mask of hard unforgiving plastic over his mouth and nose.
    "No heroic measures," the doctor had said. "He's lived a good life. You have to let him go now, in peace."
    And she had continued to sit, holding her father's hand, talking every now and then, saying the first things that came into her head, not supposing the words mattered, if anything now did, other than the sound, perhaps, of her voice.
    Once or twice, he had moved his head, as if to speak, and she had lowered her face close to his and, for a moment, lifted away the mask; but all there had been was a faint, dry gurgling deep in his throat and the smell of rot and decay: his teeth, yellow and crooked, and the parched skin flaking back from his lips.
    Had he squeezed her hand before the end, or had that been her imagination, her need?
    They had buried him on a cold day with the wind eddying the shallow topsoil into dusty circles and the rooks loud and restless in the trees.
    In the allotment below, the man had set his spade aside while he rolled a cigarette.
    A good life, the doctor had said. Well, yes, good, perhaps, hard certainly, but not enough. Barely scratching sixty when it was over. These days, when so many continued, relatively fit, into their eighties, it was no life at all.
    And her mother, who had married him at twenty, the only man she had ever seriously been out with, had been left bereft by his death. Age claiming her, too, before its time. Her face, her body shrivelling, closing in upon themselves as her life shrank down to the few daily tasks she performed now more or less by rote.
    Lynn felt guilty that she did not visit more often, that she begrudged, sometimes, her mother's regular Sunday-morning
calls, the enquiries after hers and Charlie's health, the regaling of news that was the same as it had been the week before.
    At the sound of the doorbell, Lynn went back into the house.
    The woman on the doorstep was wearing a green tunic with the same name embroidered on one side as had been painted on the van standing at the kerb.
    "Miss Kellogg, is it?"
    She was holding up a large bouquet of flowers, cellophane wrapped.
    "Yes." Lynn's face broke into a smile. It