The Houdini Effect by Bill Nagelkerke Read Free Book Online

the old bugger’s still alive, do we?’ He directed this
question at May but without really looking at her or giving her a
chance to answer. ‘Grumpy old sod. Never heard from him once he’d
gone. No loss really. Never got on well
    with him.’
    ‘ He would rather have gone
to the rest home
    nearby,’ said May. ‘Stately Havens.’
    I knew the place although not as well as
Harry did. (‘The oldies were asleep most of the time,’ he had told
me. ‘Was that before or after you started doing your tricks for
them,’ I had riposted. Verbal fencing. How I love it. Jab, stab and
touché! Harry No-Chance, if I’m lucky, which isn’t that often.)
    ‘ But Mitchell wanted him
close,’ May finished.
    ‘ If they loved this place
so much why didn’t they look after it properly?’ said Harry sourly.
Hearing him ask a question when I thought he must have tuned out,
surprised me almost as much as having heard the soft but intensely
serious sound of May’s voice a few seconds earlier. I would not
have blamed Harry if he had fallen asleep standing up, like a
horse. Even for a writer, despite people dynamics being of no small
interest to me, the conversation up to now appeared to have taken a
tedious turn for the worse. I couldn’t have been more
wrong.
    May’s muted voice
eventually sounded again, answering Harry, by the time the rest of
us had just about forgotten what his question had been. ‘Laurie
couldn’t do much anymore. He’d had bad arthritis for years. It
became a lot worse after Iris died. Before that, the house was very
well looked after.’
    Harry shrugged. He didn’t really care.
Neither did Barry, it seemed. He said something to Dad about the
barbeque and then they were off discussing the latest makes and
models and how Dad had an idea for making a permanent place for the
new machine he was almost certain to buy in
    the very near future. (First we’d heard of
it!)
    Dad insisted that Barry follow him down
into
    the garden so he could
show him the proposed spot. Harry, after muttering something about
having to practise his magic tricks, also sloped off, proving my
point about how good he is at certain kinds of escapology. (Even
before the talent quest Harry was always practicing. He claimed it
was one of the burdens of being a prestidigitator. Practise makes
perfect he always said. Actually, I understood and agreed. The same
thing goes for writing.)
    Mum and I were left alone with May.
    ‘ Boys and their toys, eh?’
laughed Mum. May smiled back self-consciously. Then followed, as
the books say, an awkward silence. May didn’t seem the sort of
person who’d be interested in a lengthy discussion about
barbecues.
    ‘ How long ago did Iris
die?’ I asked for the sake of saying something.
    ‘ Quite a long time before
Lawrence went to live in the home,’ May answered after more long,
dreary moments of silence, during which I started to wonder if
she’d even heard my question. ‘It must already be more than fifteen
years ago. They were both in their late sixties then. She
got
    cancer. It hit Laurie very badly when she
died. Then, on top of that, his arthritis became worse and worse
until in the end he found it very difficult to get around.’
    Mum nodded glumly. ‘Even the late sixties
aren’t very old these days,’ she said.
    Mum and Dad were both on
the wrong side of forty themselves so the combination of the words
‘old’ and ‘age’ did not appeal to them at
all . Hence
    my warning to Harry about his ‘old’
Houdini.
    Based on Mum’s comment, Houdini was
still
    positively youthful when he died.
    ‘ You’re right,’ said May.
‘But there’s no such thing as a disease that stops to consider its
victim’s age.’ (Yes, I know. HEAVY stuff. Sorry about that. One of
the burdens of being a writer. It’s not all sweets and confetti.
I’ll try to keep my narrative as light as possible but I suggest
you skip whatever bits you feel you need to.)
    That was the end of that particular
sentence,