The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson Read Free Book Online

happened in the romantic paperbacks she read, the ones thatmade her blush and look over her shoulder in case her granny could see her reading them. But Sam had been presentable enough—a cocky young bantam with curly chestnut hair and a warm, boyish smile. A real charmer.
    He had asked her out for a drink three times, and three times she had said no. She had never set foot in a pub. Her granny had taught her that they were all dens of iniquity, and Katie herself held alcohol responsible for her father’s wickedness and for the misery of her mother’s life. Katie didn’t realize at the time that her refusal of a drink was taken as a rejection of Sam himself. If only he would ask her to go for a walk, she had thought, or perhaps to the Kardomah for a coffee and a bite to eat after work.
    Finally, in exasperation, he had suggested a Saturday afternoon trip to Otley. Even though Katie was over eighteen, she still had a difficult time persuading her grandmother to let her go, especially as she was to ride pillion on Sam’s motorbike. But in the end the old woman had given in, muttering warnings about the Serpent in Eden and wolves in sheep’s clothing.
    In Otley they had, inevitably, gone for a drink. Sam had practically dragged her into the Red Lion, where she had finally broken down and blurted out why she had refused to go for a drink before. He laughed and touched her shoulder gently. She drank bitter lemon and nothing terrible happened to either of them. After that, she went to pubs with him more often, though she always refused alcohol and never felt entirely comfortable.
    But now, she thought, turning over again, life had become unbearable. The early days, just after their marriage, had been full of hope after Katie had learned how to tolerate Sam’s sexual demands. They had lived with his parents in a little back-to-back in Armley and saved every penny they earned. Sam had a dream, a guest house in the Dales, and together they had brought it about. Those had been happy times, despite the hours of overtime, the cramped living-quarters and the lack of privacy, for they had had something to aim towards. Now it was theirs, Katie hated it. Sam had changed; he had become snobbish, callous and cruel.
    Like every other night for the past few months, she cried quietly to herself as she tried to shut out Sam’s snoring and listen to thebreeze hiss through the willows by the nameless stream out back. She would wait and keep silent. If nothing happened, if nothing came of her only hope of escape, then one night she would sneak out of the house as quiet as a thief and never come back.
    V
    In room five, Neil Fellowes knelt by the side of the bed and said his prayers.
    He had woken from his drunken stupor in time to be sick in the wash-basin, and after that he had felt much better. So much so, in fact, that he had gone down and eaten the lamb chops with mint sauce that Mrs Greenock had cooked so well. Then he spent the rest of the evening in his room reading.
    And now, as he tried to match the words to his thoughts and feelings, as he always did in prayer, he found he couldn’t. The picture of the body kept coming back, tearing aside the image of God that he had retained from childhood: an old man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud with a ledger book on his lap. Suddenly, the smell was in his nostrils again; it was like trying to breathe at the bottom of a warm sewer. And he saw again the bloody, maggot-infested pulp that had once been a face, the white shirt rippling with corruption, the whole thing rising and falling in an obscene parody of breathing.
    He tried to force his mind back to the prayer but couldn’t. Hoping the Lord would understand and give him the comfort he needed, he gave up, put his glasses on the table, and got into bed.
    On the edge of sleep, he was able to reconstruct the sequence of events in his mind. At the time, he had been too distraught, too confused to notice anything. And very soon his head