The Killing Season by Mark Pearson Read Free Book Online Page A

sitting back in the caravan, nursing a bruised stomach and a bottle of Fullers Honeydew beer, watching a stable girl walk across the yard to the farmhouse.
    Jodhpurs, riding boots, a green waterproof jacket, long blonde hair tied back in a shaggy ponytail. Time was, I would have invited her into the caravan to join me for a drink. I wasn’t even considering it now. Well, not seriously. But a man’s eye is drawn to the female figure as a moth is drawn to a flame, as some poet might have remarked once. I took another sip of my beer and smiled inwardly. I may still shoot the occasional glance but I had no desire to act. I wasn’t lying when I said I loved Kate. Everything had changed with her.
    Like I said, I used to hate the taste of real ale. Maybe they served it differently down south but since moving to the North Norfolk Coast I had acquired a taste for it. Maybe my metabolism was changing. Probably some science in it – I would ask Kate but she’d only make me laugh and I was forbidden to do that. Maybe it was just because most people round here drank it, including a many the women. When in Rome drink like a Roman. Kate thought it was part of a psychological shift, a metaphorical putting-down of roots. I reminded her that she had qualifications in medicine and forensics, not in psychology or psychiatry, and she had simply smiled at me in a way she had that made me feel too good about her to be irritated. Who knows, maybe she was right. In the cold winter nights at the farthest outpost of civilisation, with nothing between me and the North Pole except thousands of miles of hostile sea, there was something comforting about sitting in front of a real fire in an old pub, listening to the wind howl and drinking something that had its roots in the first intoxicating beverages made by man.
    I looked out of the other window, the one at the far end of the caravan, at a herringbone sky flecked with veins of crimson as the weak sun dipped towards the horizon. Halloween would soon be upon us and then Bonfire Night and looking at that sky I felt the power of forces that shaped the personality of this landscape and its people. A pagan power rooted in flame and ceremony, dating from long, long before the birth of Christ. I took another pull on my Honeydew ale and shook my head, smiling wryly. Saints alive, sure I’d be drinking mead next. I put the bottle down as the door opened and a woman walked in without waiting for an invitation.
    She was in her late thirties, maybe mid-forties. I may be a detective, but what with Botox and fillers and who knows what monkey-gland elixirs nowadays I sure as hell wouldn’t like to stake my life on making a completely accurate guess at a woman’s age. Bad manners, too. She had brunette hair, cut short in a Louise Brooks-style bob, and wore a dark charcoal dress suit whose hem came just above her shapely knees. She had great pins. Like I said before, moth to flame and all that, but in my defence I
am
a detective – I am paid to notice these things. She was a good-looking woman and knew it. She wasn’t shy about make-up but it was subtly applied, although her lipstick was a cherry red that accentuated the blueness of her eyes, eyes that were looking at me with a degree of confidence that signalled she was used to getting her own way. I could see a lot of men would be happy to do her bidding. She was a snap-her-fingers-and-see-them-run kind of woman. She exuded sex, confidence, authority. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
    Maybe this time she would say ‘I’ve come to see you, Mister Delaney, because I think some men have been following me.’ In a husky whisper just like Marilyn Monroe’s in some 1950s film noir whose title I forget.
    ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Delaney?’ she said instead, exploding my flights of fancy.
    ‘Afternoon, Susan,’ I replied giving her the benefit of the full wattage of my smile. ‘How’s your day going?’ The full wattage had no effect on her.