Full Fury by Roger Ormerod Read Free Book Online

I went. That’s Karen Gaines. Her father was hanged. I could feel the stares, the… the… not contempt, but the kind of gloating horror. It was a morbid thrill for them.’
    ‘ I hadn’t realized.’
    ‘ I’ve grown up with it, Mr Mallin. It followed me through school, college—mother sent me to the U.S.A. in the end—but it followed me there. Karen’s father was hanged for murder.’
    She turned on me with a burst of righteous anger. ‘I was only nine! What had it got to do with me? Why should it haunt me?’
    ‘ I can see you wouldn’t want the old mud stirred around.’
    She dismissed that as too obvious and facile. ‘It’s not that. Not just the resurrecting of it all. I can face it now. You get a hard shell in the end. Yes, I could face it.’
    ‘ But you changed your name to Finn.’
    She gave a short bark of angry, mirthless laughter. ‘His name! Yes. But not to run away from Karen Gaines. Oh no. It was just because he wanted it.’
    So much affection for her? ‘You must be very close?’
    ‘ He hates me.’ She spat it out, turning her face to me, two heavy lines between her eyes.
    I tried to look blank, while my mind was racing. Carter Finn was jealous of Karen, who was much too close to Myra for his liking. This name business had been just a tiny lever. It brought Karen within his own sphere; it inferred he shared her equally with Myra, dividing the influence. But it hadn’t worked. Their mutual hatred kept them worlds apart.
    ‘ So it didn’t help, changing your name?’
    Dark fortress walls reared between us. She turned to me and the boiling oil was canted ready to pour. ‘My father was hanged. Nothing can change that. Nothing can help.’
    ‘ Such as proving he was not guilty?’
    She was startled. ‘There was no suggestion of that. How could there possibly be?’
    ‘ Then of what?’ I thought for a moment she was not going to answer. I added: ‘Paul must have come to your mother with at least a promise.’
    ‘ I don’t know what he said to mother,’ she replied in a flat, defiant voice. I was losing her. The portcullis was down.
    ‘ But he perhaps gave you a hint?’
    Then it tumbled out in a chaos of anger and distress. ‘A hint! Yes, but you couldn’t tie it down. Suggestions… inferences. He was so proud of it, and… secretive.’ Both hands now gripped the wheel firmly, knuckles white with little peaks of reflected light on each knuckle. ‘He thought he was doing me a favour! My God, a favour! What good was it to me if he could have proved my father should not have been found guilty?’
    ‘ Just that? No more than that?’
    Her voice sounded weary, lacking in emotion. ‘I’d live then with the knowledge that he could have gone free.
    ‘ And I was expected to be pleased.’ The small laugh was sickly.
    ‘ To some people it could matter.’
    She looked at me blankly. ‘What sort of people?’
    ‘ If he’d promised more—that he could prove your father was definitely innocent—you could claim his body from the yard in Pentonville and bury him in the family vault.’
    Her breath hissed with shock from between her teeth.
    ‘ Get out of the car,’ she said softly.
    I had the door lever well over, ready to get out of there fast. ‘But he never promised you that?’
    She whirled out of the driver’s side, slamming the door nearly through the bodywork. I’d really got to her. I watched her stalk away, her head high, the floodlights catching tossed highlights in the soft gold of her hair. As she penetrated the deeper shadows I saw the red arc of her cigarette, flung high and wide.
    I got out of the car, not feeling too good.
    Troy was standing by the Porsche. One hand was negligently in his trouser pocket, but there was nothing negligent in his bunched jaw muscles as he glanced after Karen.
    ‘ You’re upsetting people, Mr Mallin.’ And he stabbed out his cigar in a shower of sparks against my paintwork.
    ‘ There was only one way of telling her Paul’s