Dead Silent by Neil White Read Free Book Online Page B

theory was one he had gone over in his head countless times.
    ‘I don’t know for sure,’ he said. ‘He got on the ferry, but he had a head start on us by a few days, and life was different then. You paid by cash and so were harder to track. You didn’t have to give up an email address or do it on a computer. All he would have needed was his passport, or any passport, and he would be in Europe straight away. What happened after that is something we’ll never know. Perhaps he had friends who helped him out.’
    ‘His old school friends? The head-boy clique?’
    ‘I don’t know, and you would be a brave man to print it; those people have got the money to ruin you,’ Hunter said. ‘But if you want my theory, I’ll tell you: Claude Gilbert is dead.’
    I raised my eyebrows. ‘You sound pretty certain,’ I said, and hoped that he wasn’t, because that would be the end of my story, apart from some human interest piece on a female hoaxer.
    ‘He boarded a ferry, I’m certain of it, and that’s why his car was left behind,’ Hunter said. ‘Remember that he wouldn’t know his wife’s body would be found. It’s a long voyage from Newhaven to France, plenty of time to think about things. Where was he going? How would he live? How much had he left behind?’ Hunter shrugged. ‘So he jumped.’
    ‘Killed himself?’ I queried.
    Hunter nodded. ‘Gilbert was a cowardly man. He hid behind his father, and then behind his wig and gown. He buried hiswife because he couldn’t cope with the killing part, and so he let Mother Nature do the job. But when it came to it, to the thought of life on his own, maybe even some guilt, he couldn’t cope.’ He raised his cup in salute. ‘I think he ended up in the English Channel somewhere, drowned by his own misery.’
    But if that was true, I thought to myself, who was in London trying to get me to broker a newspaper exclusive?

Chapter Nine
    Frankie Cass was looking out of his window, as always. In winter, the hills that overlooked Blackley glistened like sugar when it was cold, the parallel strips of stone terraces like slashes in the ice, but he preferred it like this, in the summer, when it was warm enough to open his window and let the sounds from outside waft into his room. Birds sometimes rested in the sycamore and horse chestnut trees outside his window, and in spring he watched the gardens around come alive with flowers.
    He checked his watch. It would be change of shift soon at the rest home across the road. There had been some new staff members, pretty young girls. Polish, he thought, or Romanian, judging from their accents as they walked past his house, laughing and talking, their speech fast and clipped. Sometimes they didn’t bother to close the curtains when they got changed in or out of their white uniforms. If it was hot, they showered.
    His tongue flicked to his lips as his binocular lenses crawled along the wall, looking for a glimpse, a flash of skin.
    He heard the car before he saw it. It was the way the engine strained that caught his attention as it battled to climb the steep hill. He swung the binoculars to the road and smiled. A convertible, bright red, a seventies relic, the number plateshowing white on black. He scribbled down the number and made a note of the time, before watching as the driver climbed out. He saw the camera and notebook and made another note:
reporter.
    He raised the binoculars to his eyes again. He would keep watch. It’s what he did.
    Claude Gilbert’s house wasn’t what I expected.
    I had always known of the story—most people did around Blackley and Turners Fold—but I’d never had cause to visit the house. It was on a road that climbed a steep crescent away from the town centre, the houses large and imposing, shielded by trees and bushes, just the high slate roofs visible and the occasional bay window.
    The Stag didn’t enjoy the climb though; I could hear every rattle with the roof down, every scream of the engine. But