The Killing Club by Angela Dracup Read Free Book Online Page B

arse of Africa. Which just shows he’d got a lot of guts. He was rather handsome in those days, solid, but not fat. He had really lovely dark eyes; you noticed his eyes because he was the kind of guy who really looked at people. And he had lovely thick brown hair.’ She looked again at the photograph and gave a grimace of dismay.
    ‘It sounds as though you had rather a fancy for him,’ Swift commented.
    ‘Does it?’ She slanted a sly glance at him.
    ‘OK, then. Did you have an affair with him?’
    ‘Hey! That’s off limits.’
    ‘Fair enough … I apologize.’
    ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I didn’t ever hop into bed with him. He’d had a steady girlfriend for a year or so before he joined our team. He told me that they’d been planning to get married, but she got killed in an accident. They were at a barbecue at some posh house with a swimming pool. She jumped off the diving board and it was faulty, not fixed properly. Her head was split open when she got hit by it, and that was that. What bloody awful bad luck. I think after that he was a bit wary of getting in deep with anyone else.’ She stopped, chastened by her unthinking pun. ‘Sorry.
    ‘He always struck me as, kind of, rootless,’ she continued. ‘He didn’t seem to have any family, which I used to consider was rather cool and made him gloriously free. But thinking it over, I’m not so sure.’
    ‘What was he like at his job?’
    ‘Well, I can only offer my own opinion,’ she pointed out. ‘But, in my book, he was almost too talented for our rag. He wrote some great articles based on his experiences in Africa. I mean, he’d witnessed some terrible brutality, women who were raped and murdered, children who were mutilated, whole villages set on fire. If you’ve witnessed those kind of scenes up close it inevitably shows through in your writing, and with Christian the power and pathos of what he had witnessed simply shone through in every line. The trouble was the readers could only take so much of it, and I think it got to be the same for him. In time, he got offered the sports section, strictly on the understanding that he left the misery issues behind and became more upbeat.’
    ‘And did he succeed on the sports page?’
    ‘Yeah. He had that canny ability to turn his hand to different styles of writing.’ She helped herself to another biscuit, and munched as she cogitated further. ‘His sports reporting was biting and witty and lots of fun,’ she said, ‘and it generated quite a bit of fan mail. I think that’s probably what sparked off the idea of trying his hand at writing a novel. We used to tease him about it, of course. A very high proportion of journalists aspire to write a novel, but not nearly as high a proportion actually get around to it. However for the ones who do, the pickings can be pretty good, and so we were all both pleased and as jealous as hell when he got his advance cheque. Christian was tickled absolutely pink about the whole thing; it really perked him up a lot.’
    ‘And when did all this happen?’
    Georgie helped herself to another biscuit and ruffled the spikes of her hair as she tried to remember. ‘He got his cheque around two months ago, and the book’s due out in the spring of next year.’
    ‘Have you read it?’
    ‘Yes, I have. He was very secretive about it until his contract was signed and sealed. But after that he was happy to show a copy of his manuscript to anyone who was interested.’
    ‘And what did you think of it?’
    She grinned. ‘It’s one of those quirky, murky, foxy-poxy tales – full of sex, cute phraseology, snappy one-liners and a heap of improbabilities.’
    ‘You wish you’d written it yourself?’
    ‘Hah, don’t I just? If he’s lucky he’ll make a packet.’ She paused. ‘Oh hell, he’s dead.’
    There was a short respectful pause. Swift broke the silence. ‘So, despite a number of setbacks along the way, during his last months Christian appeared