Stone's Fall by Iain Pears Read Free Book Online Page B

imagine she is paying you a fortune and you will gain inestimably from the experience as well. On top of that, there was something strange about Ravenscliff’s death, and I want to know what. You were the best person I could think of to discover it.”
    “I thought he fell out of a window.”
    “So he did. Open window of his study on the second floor. He was working alone and his wife was out. Pacing up and down, tripped on a carpet.”
    “So?”
    “He hated heights. He was terrified of them, and deeply embarrassed by the fact. He never went near an open window if it was anywhere but on the ground floor, and used to insist that all windows were tightly shut.”
    “And does Lady Ravenscliff share your worries? She never mentioned anything to me.”
    He gave me a sidelong look, and I realised what he meant.
    “You think…?”
    “All I know, Braddock, is that this is a matter of the utmost importance.”
    He said it with such intensity that I didn’t quite grasp his meaning. “Why?”
    “Because,” he said quietly, “Ravenscliff owned the Chronicle. And I don’t want it falling into the wrong hands. Find out for me, please, what his will said, where his assets go. Who is our new master.”

CHAPTER 6
    I walked back to my lodgings, something I often did when I needed to think. It was more than six miles, from the city to Chelsea, and it took me well over an hour even though I walked at a fast pace all the way. The sight of the black-painted front door gave me none of the pleasure that the prospect of home should give a man. It was all that separated me from the boiled cabbage and wax polish, the smells that gather in an overoccupied house whose windows have not been opened for a quarter century. It was a dingy house, in a dingy street, in a dingy part of town. Nearly every second house, I believed, was occupied by widows who let out rooms to people like me. Opposite was one that functioned as a school for young ladies, turning them into operators of the typewriter, so they could push men out of their jobs as copyists and clerks. A few houses were owned by shopkeepers or clerks desperately clinging to respectability by their fingertips. All of human life, from a particular stratum of society, could be found in Paradise Walk, behind the grubby windows and cracking stucco. Paradise Walk! Never was a street more badly misnamed. I can only assume that the speculative builder who threw up the ill-built, utterly anonymous houses some half century previously had possessed a strange sense of humour.
    Even worse was that my window, second floor at the back, looked over the grand gardens and opulence of bohemian London. Successful artists had congregated in Tite Street, parallel to my own, but lived in a very different fashion. One garden in particular I could see, and used to gaze at the two children—a boy and a girl, dressed in white as they played in the sunshine—the lovely woman who was their mother, the portly father who was a member of the Academy. And dream of such an idyllic existence, so unlike my own childhood, which had contained no sunlight at all.
    Not all journalists are editors, not all artists are members of the Academy. John Praxiteles Brock, my fellow lodger, was not then a success; his torment at having to look out every morning at the proof of unattainable glory in the next street was balanced by his desire to rub shoulders with the famous, who might assist him in his career. He would come home occasionally bubbling with excitement and pride: “I said good morning to Sargent this morning!” or “Henry MacAlpine was buying a pint of milk in front of me today!” Alas, it was rare that either said good morning in return. Perhaps his desperation frightened them; perhaps the fact that his father was a sculptor (hence his unfortunate middle name) of retrograde opinions and unpleasant temper put them off; perhaps they felt that youth has to fight on its own. Now he is more successful, Brock gives little