Running Girl by Simon Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

lay on the sofa in silence, staring up at the ceiling. He was not the worst boy in the world. But he couldn’t stop thinking about those autopsy reports, photographs, Chloe’s body on a slab. After five minutes he got up off the sofa and made his way upstairs.

7
    UNCLE LEN’S STUDY was a small room created out of a partitioned spare bedroom, next to the room where Bojo slept. Garvie opened the door and peered in. In the shadows he could see a desk with a computer on it under the window, a grey filing cabinet and several shelves filled with medical and legal books. Flipping on the light, he slipped inside and shut the door behind him.
    There was a smell in the room. It was his uncle’s smell: peppermints and liquorice.
    He started with the easy things. The filing cabinet was a disappointment: everything in it looked old, and the headings on the file dividers – Committee Meeting Minutes, Budget Reports, Annual Reviews – suggested general business rather than specific cases. He turned to the desk drawers. Two were empty, the third filled with back issues of an old magazine called Calypso Magic! That left only the computer.
    He turned it on, and for a moment sat staring at the password field. Then he went into the bottom drawer of the desk again and got out one of his uncle’s old magazines and browsed through it until he found what he was looking for: a piece on Grand Kadooment Day, the calypso carnival celebrating the end of the traditional sugar crop in Barbados. Every year – he read – the carnival took place on the first Monday in August. In the year the magazine was published – 2007 – the date had been the 6th. What Garvie wanted to know was: what had it been in 1962?
    He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and slowly blinked. In 2006 the first Monday would have been the 7th. In 2005 the 1st. In 2004 the 2nd. So: a recurrent series of 7 integers beginning with 6 and ending with 5 in a sequence 46 integers long. Nice. Add an extra day for each of the eleven leap years. Divide by the number of series: eight times with one left over, the first number in the next series, which is ... 6.
    Uncle Len was born on the 6th of August.
    That was the easy part. For the next ten minutes, in mounting frustration, he plugged into the password field every possible variation of the words ‘Maxie’, ‘Bojo’, ‘Leonard’ and ‘Barbados’, together with 06, and got nowhere. He was just about to give up in disgust when he realized what he was missing. He was overlooking what Smudge liked to call the ‘bleeding obvious’. He typed in Calypso06 and unlocked the machine.
    The last item in his uncle’s Sent Box was headed Dow: Preliminary Autopsy Findings . It had an attachment. For a few seconds Garvie sat very still, listening for any noise from downstairs. Briefly he wondered what he was going to see. Her body on the autopsy table? That body with its pale and flawless skin? Was he going to see those arms again, that throat, the almond-shaped navel? He took a deep breath and opened it quickly, and frowned.
    It was a short plain document, completely unillustrated, less than two pages long, and he saw at once that it was exactly what his uncle had described. Headed simply Clothing , it contained eight paragraphs of text tediously itemizing facts such as size, material and colour, and two virtually unintelligible comments added in the margin (Check microbial damage and Non-component debris?). It was very dull. There were no photographs of the clothing, no photograph of Chloe, no description of her injuries, no account of discovering the body – nothing Garvie had hoped to find. Pushing his chair away from the desk, he went to stand at the window, staring out at the empty street below in disappointment.
    After a while a thought came to him. Not a thought; a feeling. Not really a feeling but a sort of mental itch. He tried to catch the tail of it,