The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

leave you to open it then.’
    Freya hesitated. Going into Angela Randall’s house, even searching through her drawers and cupboards,had seemed a job; she had not felt like an intruder simply because there had been nothing private or personal to make her feel that she was prying. Searching for a contact name and address, or some clue as to where the missing woman might have gone, was routine. But opening this ostentatiously wrapped parcel felt like an invasion of privacy, and something Randall would have minded very much.
    Freya still hesitated, smoothing her thumb over the mirrored paper, and then took a paper knife to the neatly taped edges. The gold paper sprang open, revealing agold box. Inside it, among crisp tissue and deep in a nest of blue velvet, was a pair of gold cufflinks, set with deep blue lapis lazuli.
    Not
for
Angela Randall then, but
from
her, ‘To You,’ an unnamed man, ‘with all possible love’.
    Freya looked at the cufflinks, and at the box, the silk-lined lid, the tissue … an intimate secret exposed on her desk. A sad secret, too, an extravagant gift from a lonely woman in late-middle age … to whom? Not a relative. A lover? Obviously. Yet, if so, why had there been no other indication of a man in Angela Randall’s life?
    She went to fetch coffee from the machine. Without any clue as tothe woman’s whereabouts or movements, with no reported sighting, no suicide note and no body, she knew perfectly well she could not justify spending any more time on the case … she had probably spent too much on it already. Angela Randall had disappeared, and until she turned up again in some form, she was merely the number she had had assigned to her … Missing Person BH140076/CT.

Six
    The last week before Christmas and a clear, cold night, so that at dawn, the slopes of the Hill are thinly iced with frost and the Wern Stones gleam with rime like snail trails over their backs. The ground is too slippery at this hour, the runners are not out, but the mountain bikers strain up the slope, their breath pluming up white in the crackling air.
    The woman with the Dobermanns isnot on the Hill yet but Jim Williams with the Yorkshire terrier is out because he can’t sleep. For the past week or two he has come here earlier and earlier, sometimes long before dawn, both of them bundled up into warm coats. Jim had promised his sister that he would take care of Skippy, though he knows he will never love the dog, whose breath smells fetid and who snaps at him when he puts on thelead. But Phyl could not have died comfortably unless she had been sure Skippy would not be sent to strangers or be put down.
    This morning the mountain bikers whisk by, heads down. With no runners to chase and no other dogs outyet, Skippy can be let off the lead, though Phyl would never have done such a thing. She’d petted the dog too much, kept him under her eye more like a child than an animal;but that was what had made her happy.
    Now, Jim Williams watches the little dog break into a quick trot, heading towards the undergrowth, and then on into the trees. It seems to him Skippy has a better life now, freer, enjoying what an animal should.
    The wind is sharp as a blade on his face up here on the Hill, but as the dawn comes up, the view of Lafferton, the dark line of the river and thecathedral rising out of the frosty air, is worth the climb and the cold. Now, from somewhere on one of the paths below, Jim Williams hears the barking of the Dobermanns.
    ‘Skippy … Skippy …’ He hears his own voice ringing round in the bitter air, and his whistle that sets the Dobermanns off again. ‘Here, boy … Skippy …’
    But there is no sound from the little terrier and no sign of him, there areonly the yelping Dobermanns coming nearer, up the slope, and the faint rumble of a vehicle going away down the road.

Seven
    Cat Deerbon stood at the window of her consulting room, looking out through the slats of the blind to the surgery car park. Rain