Smoke and Mirrors by Elly Griffiths Read Free Book Online Page A

inhabitants with something almost approaching affection. They were company, at least. Please, he prayed to Chief Constable Solomon and the unnamed monks, please help me find the children. But the low ceilings and heavy brick walls gave nothing away. Everything was silent, waiting. Even the rodents that usually scuttered along the skirting boards appeared to be asleep.
    He found the electric fire in the reception area and decided to stay there for a while. At least there was some light here, even though it was rather eerie and blue, the lamp above the porch reflecting the snowy street. He switched on the fire and pulled it as close to the desk as he could.
    What would his mother think, if she could see him? It would probably confirm her belief that he should never have joined the police, that he should have gone into some comfortable white-collar job with luncheon vouchers and the possibility of a pension. It was for this that she had made him stay inside and do his homework rather than playing in the street with the other children, not so that he could go to Oxford. ‘People like us don’t get degrees,’ she said when he got the letter with the Balliol crest. Well, Oxford had only lasted two terms because of the war, and afterwards he had just felt too old to go back to university, though many people did. He had argued with Max about it, he remembered, in the bar at Victoria Station, Edgar saying pompously that he wanted to do a job where he could help other people. Max had retorted that he, for one, was going back to his old life and was never going to think of anyone else again.
    Maybe it was the cold that was making him think of his childhood. One of his earliest memories was of lying in bed in the house in Willesden watching his breath billow around him and wondering if he was on fire. Jonathan was in bed next to him but he had been very little, probably only a toddler, and so too young to be any comfort. The downstairs of that house had been fairly warm, with open fires in the kitchen and front room, but upstairs was arctic. Just getting out of bed was a trauma, your feet freezing as they touched the floorboards. Lucy was always suffering from chilblains. They had moved from Willesden to the bungalow in Esher when Edgar was ten, Lucy eight and Jonathan five. For Edgar’s mother, Rose, the move meant she’d arrived: central heating, fitted carpets, tiled bathroom. But it had seemed a flimsy, shoddy place to Edgar, not substantial enough to be a home somehow. The terraced house in Willesden had been home, solid, unmoving, comfortable in a stern, parental way. But all the years that Edgar had lived in Esher he had never felt that he really belonged there. Perhaps that was why he visited so seldom now, even though Rose was alone in the house; her husband dead, Jonathan dead, Lucy married, Edgar selfishly pursuing his own life.
    He could feel his head drooping forwards. He mustn’t go to sleep. Memory shifts and he’s at Oxford, coming home after an all-night party. That heightened sense of reality, the honey-coloured buildings and soft ochre river more beautiful than ever. He could be there now, fast asleep in his rooms facing the quad, or even in a little house in Jericho with a wife asleep beside him. He had gone into the police because he wanted to do some good, because life had become very serious and the thought of going back to academic research while his brother and the woman he had loved lay dead seemed self-indulgent and pointless. But was he doing any good now, sitting at a desk waiting for bad news to come, powerless to prevent it?
    He must have fallen asleep. He dreamt of ice floes, of Jonathan lying asleep, of faces looking up from frozen water, of a puppet theatre, of a child with an adult’s face, of hands reaching up and voices calling.
Children, children, say your prayers. Children, children, stay upstairs.
    He woke with a start. The phone was ringing and sparks were coming from the fire. It was still