The Horse at the Gates by D C Alden Read Free Book Online Page B

quality there to be admired, a rebellious spirit that, in another time and place, could have been put to good use.
    The car was where he’d left it, a Golf hybrid, parked in a supermarket car park over a mile from the Longhill. He started the engine, slipped it into gear and pulled out onto the main road. He wrinkled his nose in disgust, the stink of the King’s Head still wrapped around him, the stale odour of alcohol and smoke clinging to his clothes. He powered down the window to get some fresh air, his fingers drumming the steering wheel as he crawled through the traffic. Now that the pieces were in play he felt excited at the thought of what was to come. There was much at stake; lives would be lost, many of them believers, but every jihad involved sacrifice, whether intentional or not. It was the way of things, from the earliest days.
    And the cause this time was more righteous than any before it. The Minister had described it best; he’d likened Europe to a piece of fruit, ripened by the sun, dangling seductively from a thin branch.
    Soon it would be picked.

Guildford, Surrey

    His close protection officers kept a discreet distance as Bryce approached the grave, easily distinguishable from its moss-covered neighbours by the glint of white marble and a colourful splash of flowers. Still fresh, noted Bryce. That would be Jules, Lizzie’s green-fingered sister who lived a few miles from the cemetery just outside Guildford. He never brought flowers himself, mindful of Lizzie’s hay fever and the discomfort it brought her. Jules was a decent woman, but Bryce had never really clicked with the rest of her family, the pressures of his work and their strong Conservative values denying them the common ground that neither party had really sought.
    Lizzie was different, the rebel of the clan, a political science student when they’d first met at Cambridge. The relationship had quickly blossomed into something more serious, the firebrand socialist and the daughter of a Tory Peer proving to be a real power-couple at Emmanuel College. Marriage followed shortly afterwards, the joy of their union tempered by the revelation of Lizzie’s inability to conceive. She’d made up for the disappointment by enthusiastically supporting her husband through his career, from junior political analyst to head of the party’s Policy Unit, after which he was elected to parliament for the Wiltshire seat of Swindon North. She never saw him enter Number Ten, the cancer that killed her discovered during a routine doctor’s appointment less than eight months before the general election. The cruelties of fate; not God’s will, as some of Bryce’s friends had suggested, reasoning that a divine hand had other plans for the only woman he’d ever truly loved. Bryce believed that any God wouldn’t be that cruel.
    He squatted down and tidied the grave, carefully, brushing away the twigs and fingering the wet leaf mulch from the inscriptions on the smooth white slab. The marble was cold to the touch, a sensation that Bryce always found mildly unsettling, a reminder of the frozen eternity of death, of the pale bones that lay a few feet beneath his fingers. He withdrew his hand and stood, his knees cracking painfully in protest. He took a few steps and sat down on a nearby bench, pulling his overcoat tightly around him and thrusting his hands deep into its pockets. At either end of the row his security people watched from behind dark glasses, ready to turn others away, selfishly guarding Bryce’s quiet contemplation. Lately it was making him feel guilty, denying others access to their loved ones’ final resting place. During his first visits he couldn’t have cared less if the queue went twice around the cemetery, consumed as he was by grief. Yet now, as the years passed, he had become sensitive to the inconvenience his security arrangements inflicted on others.
    As if on cue, he saw an elderly lady turned away by one of his bodyguards. She was a