Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron Read Free Book Online

any of her business. But the image, the overalls, the jellies, nagged at her like an unquiet conscience. This was what she got for thinking children obnoxious. Something very like guilt.
    Down by the exploded house, busy teams still sorted through wreckage. One or two individuals stood to one side, heads cocked, as if trying out a new perspective which might make sense of the strewn rubble: like puzzlers newly arrived at a half-completed jigsaw, they were looking for the important pieces that made sense of the rest. And with sudden clarity it came to Sarah what had been unusual about the bearded man, the man who had stood on the grass apron watching these professionals. It was that he was the only one there who looked like he knew what he was seeing. As if such damage were as much a part of his everyday as any other element in that scene: the river, the bridge, the swans who had not been fed.
    III
    She did not like hospitals, and with reason. All one winter she’d spent incarcerated in one, feeling – she’d wished – like a princess in a tale; her view a dismal car park, though at least it had had an ornamental fountain as its centrepiece. And out of nowhere, now, as she parked her car, she remembered waking one morning to see that this had frozen, and a rather dour piece of statuary become a thing of beauty. Encased in ice, as if a glacier had swooped on it overnight, the statue might have been the relic of a long-gone society, preserved by chance and freak weather; its survival made possible by the forces that sought to destroy it. A bit like those mammoths people were always finding, or hoping to find. Had that ever been true, the deep-frozen mammoth discovery? She didn’t know. But it made a good story.
    That was then and this was now. Three days had passed since the night of the explosion, the first of which had seen a flurry of press interest. But the story had dwindled, relegated to small paragraphs on inside pages, all of which explored different ways of saying the same thing: that no progress had been made; that nobody knew who the dead man was. Dinah’s existence had been established that first day, and the child not mentioned since.
    At any other time Sarah might have found it odd, this hasty burial of what was surely a major story. But the wind from the East was blowing all other news from the headlines: Iraqi troops had been mobilized in defiance of Western dictates, and the mutterings of US hawks were growing shrill, if mutterings could do that. Last year’s news was being dredged up once again: the old accusations about missing Iraqi soldiers. The Guardian covered this one in detail, even giving the names of the six conscripts Iraqi ministers claimed were being held – claimed had been murdered – by Western troops. But the conclusion remained that these soldiers had perished in the storm they’d been lost in, on the Syrian border, a couple of years ago; their ‘disappearance’ simply a useful legend to a government hostile to UN inspectors.
    All of which mattered more than two deaths and one small child. But it was happening in other time zones, whereas this was a short distance away. She locked the car, and went in to Reception.
    Where she found a lone harassed woman dealing with three telephones and a short queue. The latter dissipated after a while; the telephones remained substantial and in full working order, and it was against their clamour that Sarah made her request: to see, talk to, Dinah Singleton. A child. No, she did not know which ward, though the children’s would be a good guess. Yes, this was the little girl who had been brought in after an explosion.
    ‘Are you a relative?’
    ‘A neighbour,’ she said. ‘A friend,’ she added.
    ‘You’re not press, are you?’
    ‘Do I look like press?’
    The woman didn’t appear to want to comment.
    ‘I’m not press,’ Sarah said firmly.
    ‘You’d better take a seat. I’ll see if there’s someone can talk to you.’
    So Sarah