Shadows on the Nile by Kate Furnivall Read Free Book Online

darkness, the forbidden candle late into the night. The tremors of excitement as Sherlock tracked down his prey, a delicious fear of what the next page would bring.
    ‘You kept them,’ she smiled.
    She wanted to leave but the memories coiled through her head, holding her there. The books were copies of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though now she noticed that Tim had added several volumes to them – Conan Doyle’s autobiography,
Memories and Adventures
, and right at the end of the shelf stood Conan Doyle’s final books –
The History of Spiritualism
and
The Edge of the Unknown
, the ones he wrote after the death of his beloved son Kingsley during the Great War. The great writer had died two years earlier in 1930 but his stories were still immensely popular.
    Her hand suddenly reached up and took down oneof the early books. She studied its title:
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. She lifted it to her face and inhaled. Its well-remembered scent made her head spin and her hands were no longer steady as she turned the front cover. She stared down at what she knew she would find on the frontispiece.
    This book belongs to George Ambrose Kenton. If you steal it from me, I will track you down
.
    Jessie turned abruptly and left the bedroom, thebook thrust deep inside her coat pocket.

5

    Georgie
    England 1932
    ‘Where are you?’
    The words lie like dust in my room.
    I shout them. Hot pokers in my chest. It’s Saturday, I know it’s Saturday, I know it is. I have counted back the days and ticked off each one with a pea-green pen on the calendar that I made and which lives under my mattress for safety.
    Saturday. Unless I missed a day. Sometimes it happens if I have a bad week and the needles come for me. They seek out my thigh, my buttocks, my arm, the way hunting dogs sniff out badgers with their sharp vicious wet noses. Sinking in their teeth.
    It’s afternoon. I can tell by the sunlight outside the window, even though today they have drawn a blind across the glass to try to fool me into thinking there is no sun out there, just a gloomy soul-stealing twilight. But I know better. I flick the light switch on and off and on again, on and off and onagain. Brightness, blackness, brightness. If you’re outside, in the garden, striding over the finicky gardener’s weed-free lawn, you’ll know it’s me. You’ll come.
    Nothing.
    No footsteps outside my door. The rattle of a metal trolley further down the corridor makes me shout louder.
    ‘Where is he? Where is he? What have you done with him?’
    No answer. Not even a
Stop that noise, George
. I feel the straight lines inside my head starting to twist and buckle and I crash a fist against the door, against the panel that is already cracked in places because my fist and the wood are old friends. I press my head against the moulding around the panel, so hard it carves dents in my forehead, but still the straight lines are buckling. I whisper to the door. I feel my panic seep into the cracks.
    ‘Please,’ I beg. ‘Please. It’s Saturday. Let Timothy come and I promise I will eat that foul slop you call food.’
    They give me paper. Clean white sheets of it, quarto size, no lines, just as I asked. Dr Churchward pushed it across his desk at me and did that odd thing with his mouth that I used to think was a snarl but you explained to me that it is what is called a nervous tic. What has he got to be nervous about? Does he still think I will jump on his desk and kick my bare foot in his face the way I did when I was twelve and he told me that none of my letters to Jessie had ever been allowed to reach her? I broke two toes but I broke his nose too. I didn’t like his blood on my skin.
    Sometimes during our interviews I stare hard at the bump on the bridge of Dr Churchward’s nose where it is not straight even now, thirteen years later, and I watch the veins in his neck thicken and the colour of his cheeks change to plum red. He doesn’t like me.