The Bird That Did Not Sing (DCI Lorimer) by Alex Gray Read Free Book Online Page A

lorry drove on and on into endless night. At home Asa would be walking barefoot to the well as the sun rose steadily, warming her arms. The other girls might be chattering as they walked; if one of them began to sing, then all would raise their voices, joining in one of the ancient songs that girls always sang. And they would laugh together as they stepped out across the dusty landscape, happy in the way of innocent young women who were still unaware of what happiness was.
    Asa had grown up so fast in the last three days, no longer a girl untouched by the world but brushed by experiences that were making her into a woman. Now she knew what happiness was. She had thought about this for hours, ever since she had been bundled roughly into the truck and taken to the airport.
    Happiness was something you did not know you possessed until it was stolen from you. The simple joy of walking freely under the African sun, the certainty of every day arriving with its pattern of fetching water, cooking the mealie meal for breakfast, shaking her sleeping mat, then sweeping out the dust from her home: these had all been little acts of happiness.
    The noise from the lorry’s engine grew quieter as it sometimes did, but then the vibration stopped altogether and Asa heard the sound of the cab door being slammed up ahead. Had they arrived? Was this the promised destination? A flicker of hope entered her thoughts as the girl lay against the straps that confined her.
    There had been barely enough space for her to squeeze between the hulking boxes piled up to the roof and the wooden ribs that fretted the metal side of the lorry. She had protested when the driver had pushed her to the floor, struggled to rise when he had buckled her arms to the rattling chains. At first she had yelled and screamed, kicking out at the hard boxes. But nobody would hear her over the engine’s roar, she realised at last, and her toes had become sore and bruised.
    Then the door swung open to reveal a cavernous place full of light so dazzling that Asa screwed up her eyes. When she opened them again she could see hands reaching out for her, hear the chains as they fell from her arms, feel the pain in her legs as she tried to stand.
    ‘Grab a hold of her,’ someone said, and Asa felt her body being lifted out of the narrow space. Then she was being carried, the rough cloth of a man’s jacket against her cold cheek.
    ‘Get her into the back,’ a voice commanded.
    Asa did not protest as she was bundled into a car and strapped into her seat belt, one man on either side of her.
    She glanced at them by turn, wide-eyed, but neither man was looking at her face, just straight ahead as if she wasn’t there at all.

CHAPTER NINE
    ‘ A sudden heart attack,’ Dr Calder said at last, rising to his feet. ‘Probably felt unwell and went early to bed. Looks like he died in his sleep, poor soul.’ He stepped back, still looking closely at the man he had been summoned here to examine.
    Lorimer nodded, following the doctor’s gaze. Charles Gilmartin’s eyes had been shut when the detective superintendent had first seen his body. He still looked quite peaceful, lying on the bed as though he had simply sighed one last time, drifting for an instant to the place between life and death.
    ‘It’s the way to go,’ the doctor said brusquely. ‘What
I’d
want. What everyone wants, eh?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Lorimer agreed, though dying suddenly in his fifties like Gilmartin seemed a bleak prospect. And it would be of little comfort to Vivien to be told that her husband’s death was, in the scheme of things, a good death.
    ‘Any history of heart problems, d’you know?’
    ‘She said there wasn’t any,’ Lorimer replied, his mouth tightening.
    ‘Need to report it to the Fiscal, then,’ Calder said, reaching into his case for an envelope containing an A4 form, something to be filled in as the necessary procedure began.
    Lorimer nodded again. It had been as he’d suspected, a