Pig Island by Mo Hayder Read Free Book Online Page B

homework and seems like he topped himself.” I looked across the table at the bloodless faces of the women eating, one of them methodically working a piece of gristle out of her teeth with a broken fingernail. “Can’t think why. On this Paradise.”
    “No, no, no.” He flashed me that cookie-cutter smile—the one the missionary had just wheeled out for me. “Our founder is not yet with the Lord.”
    I paused. Now this was interesting. “He’s alive?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “Then where the hell—‘ I stopped. ”Then where is he?“
    “He’s—he’s gone. Gone, a long time ago.”
    “Where? New Mexico?”
    Silence.
    “London?”
    “Gone,” he repeated, the smile fixed, a veil coming down behind his eyes. “Thank you, Joe, for your interest. In God’s good time I will tell you all you wish to know about Malachi Dove. All in God’s good time.”
     
     
    While the sun crossed the zenith and the shadows of the trees on the cliffs moved like the hands on a clock, I met at least half of the community: big-chested men in denim smocks and Birkenstocks, who put their heads sympathetically on one side when they spoke; an elderly ex-professor of theology in wire-framed glasses, who had located the fresh-water well they used and created the pumping system that fed the community; serious-faced girl students in flowery skirts, who could talk intensely for hours about the theory behind the Psychogenic Healing Ministries.
    I’ve got a trick, a way of nodding and keeping up the small-talk while another part of me detaches and floats free. I was smiling and nodding but inside I was off, unravelling what Blake had said: Malachi not dead. Was that why I still had my peace of mind? How had he just slipped off the radar like that? If he’d started up another ministry somewhere else I’d have known about it. I thought of all the places he could have gone, the connections he had. He was from London. Weird if he’d been living in the same town as me for the last twenty years.
    Whatever had happened to their founder it wasn’t on the minds of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries members. Once you tuned into it, it was as plain as anything. There was something else happening here. There was a division. Trouble in Paradise.
    At the far end of the table a group of about eight people sat morosely, not making the effort to come and introduce themselves. I noticed them whispering nervously among themselves, and some couldn’t resist glancing over their shoulders up at the cliff when they thought I wasn’t watching. Blake saw I’d clocked them. He took his glass, patted my arm, and said, “Come on. Let me introduce you to the Garricks. It’ll have to happen sooner or later.”
    Benjamin Garrick, the centre’s treasurer, was a tall, pinched-looking man with a severe haircut and a buttoned-up grey shirt. His wife, who sat to his right, was big-boned, man-faced, dressed in a kingfisher blue kaftan and headscarf, gingerish ringlets peeking from the headscarf. They nodded, they greeted me, but I wasn’t welcome. You could just tell. Susan Garrick especially would’ve liked to see me dead. She sat stiffly, pointedly averting her eyes, while her husband gave me stilted details of the community’s financial situation, saying nothing, until about five minutes into the conversation she lowered her fork and sniffed the air. “It’s a southerly,” she said, the ringlets shivering and bouncing. “We shouldn’t have come out here if there was a southerly due.”
    “Not now,” muttered a nearby woman in a battered straw boater.
    Benjamin Garrick dropped his face, and subtly covered his mouth with his napkin, murmuring under his breath, “Darling, let Blake deal with that.”
    But she’d started something. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other women making faces and wrinkling their noses, one or two turning so their backs faced the cliff. I put down my fork and sniffed the air. There it was—the smell of something rotten.