Rainstone Fall by Peter Helton Read Free Book Online Page B

do it all over again as soon as we know who he was.’
    Naturally I didn’t say so but I had the unenviable certainty that the dead man’s name was Albert.
    The one good thing about autumn and winter as far as I could make out was the plentiful and cheap supply of pheasants. For many landowners it was the shoots that kept them from going under and new ones were springing up everywhere. Pheasant shooting had become the fashionable pastime for townies now. At some companies it had even replaced paintball games as a team building exercise. They taught their employees to shoot, then took them to the country and let them blast pheasants out of the sky to boost their morale. The staff’s, not the pheasants’, obviously. (It struck me that you had to be quite sure of your staff’s loyalty to hand them all a shotgun, though.) It was rumoured that at some shoots the bag was so great that the majority of it was simply buried. The upshot (sorry) of all this was that the price of pheasant was tumbling and had now fallen to that of non-cardboard chicken.
    It was dark and still raining by the time I left Manvers Street behind. By now I was seriously hungry. I just made it to Bartlett & Sons, the butcher’s in Green Street, before they closed their doors, then rattled home on the Norton with a brace of pheasant strapped to the tank. When I splashed into the waterlogged yard I could see light up in the studio – Annis was working late. I was thoroughly wet and cheesed off with the day, and famished. I stabled the Norton and promised myself that I’d devour the first edible thing I clapped eyes on when I got inside. I walked into the kitchen. At the end of the long table stood a big stripy pumpkin, an annual gift from one of our neighbours in the valley. Not exactly convenience food. Okay the second thing then. I found some seriously ripe cheese oozing on to a plate in the pantry and set to work on it. I instantly felt better. Not exactly at one with the world but better. I could faintly hear the phone ring in my little office in the attic but had no intention of answering it. Now or ever.
    There’s nothing wrong with just shoving pheasant in the oven as long as you drape some streaky bacon over it to stop it from drying out but I felt I needed a serious treat. After a shower and a change of clothes I grabbed the big oval casserole, browned one of the birds in oil and butter on top of the stove and flamed it with a good splash of brandy. Then I chucked in some herbs from our straggly herb garden by the kitchen door and ladled in a couple of pints of stock. Some double cream, just a criminal amount, would finish it off nicely. I stuck the lid on and shoved it on the back of the stove to simmer. Then I poured myself a brandy, put my feet up on another chair and tried to relax while listening to the pot bubbling on the Rayburn. It didn’t work.
    Dead bodies, especially bloody ones, can have that effect on me. So who was the dead old boy in the back of my car? How did he get there? What had killed him? I could leave that question safely to Prof Meyers. But should I have told Needham about Albert, about Cairn and Heather’s attempt to hire me? Should I have told him about ‘the witch’ and the conversation Cairn overheard? It would have sounded like I’d made the whole thing up and I’d probably still be at Manvers Street answering useless questions. I sat up again and gulped my brandy. It didn’t have to be Albert, did it? No. It was the same area Cairn had been talking about. So what? And even if it was the aforementioned Albert what was I supposed to do about it?
    I exchanged my empty brandy glass for a bottle of Pilsner Urquell and started wandering restlessly about the house. I continued the discussion with myself since I had the not unreasonable suspicion that I was going to have to give this talk for real in the near future. By the time I’d climbed all the way up to my cluttered little office in the attic my Accumulated