This Thing of Darkness by Harry Bingham Read Free Book Online Page A

nothing.’
    As he’s talking or, to be more precise, not talking, Mike swings up onto the wall. Same basic body posture, same rhythmical, controlled movement. He doesn’t worry at the lichen, just climbs smoothly up the corner. He inspects the cornice and descends.
    ‘OK. You’ve got this horizontal part about so big.’ Mike holds his finger and thumb about four or five millimetres apart. ‘If you had anything for the feet, or if the wall was more slabby, if it was lying at more of an angle, the hold might be enough to keep you on. As it is, though, there’s just not enough there. If anything, you’d have to aid it.’
    ‘ Aid it?’
    ‘Cheat, basically.’
    He explains. I don’t follow everything, but the gist is that the good old days were really the bad old days, and when climbers couldn’t get up a particular route, they’d just invent some gizmos to help them do it, but these days nobody does that, except maybe in California, but then what are ethics really, when you think of sports climbing, after all?
    My face expresses the degree to which I have understood him.
    He says, ‘Look, you can’t climb out along there cleanly. But if you came with some skyhooks, you could do it, all right.’
    ‘Skyhooks?’ I ask, not sure if he’s being serious. Then, when it’s clear that he is, I ask if he can show me, but no, he doesn’t have any skyhooks, no, climbers round here wouldn’t typically have them or use them, and no, he can’t think of anyone who would be able to demonstrate.
    I would ask more, but all this time Rhod has been chucking stuff – mats, towel, boots, chalk bag – into the back of Mike’s tatty-looking Mazda and looking pleadingly at his companion.
    He says, ‘We can still get something in on Witches Point, if we bomb it.’
    Mike shoots him a look, to remind him that I’m a police officer with, no doubt, ferocious views on road safety, but I wave them off without making any arrests.
    Rhod chalked up to make the climb, but Mike seemed happy to do without and in any case you could probably colour the chalk so it was more or less invisible against the stone.
    Ollie appears from somewhere. Lockwood’s son.
    I say, ‘Your mother’s OK, is she?’
    ‘She’ll live.’
    ‘Listen, your sister, Francesca. She was here on the night of the burglary, wasn’t she?’
    I know she was. Our files record all the names of all family and staff. Short statements from most of them.
    Ollie says, ‘Cesca? She’s – she’s in London now. Art student.’ When my face reminds him that that is not an answer to my question, he adds, ‘I think so, yes.’
    ‘We might need to interview your dad too. I’m hoping not, but it’s possible.’
    He shrugs.
    ‘You don’t care?’
    ‘Not particularly.’
    I raise my eyebrows at that, nudging him to expand, but to start with he offers nothing. Just gazes out at the lawns. The dark topiary pillars. Clipped yew and regimental box. Then he says, ‘Thing is, my dad’s OK, but he is a bit of a dick.’
    We laugh.
    I think Ollie’s summary rates somewhere between accurate and flattering. Ollie’s dad, Galton Evans, made his money in agricultural insurance, then sold up and now passes his time screwing girls only a few years older than his son and dabbling in property and investment projects.
    I don’t really care about Evans’s bedroom habits, but he’s been a target of mine for two years now. I’ve watched him. Gathered data. Tried to find a route into the privacies of his life. Not because I’ve known anything bad about him directly, but because he was a close friend of a man called Brendan Rattigan, because Rattigan was an evil man, and because I have fair reason to believe that Evans knew about that evil and did nothing to stop it.
    That’s how they started, my little private investigations, but they’ve deepened since. My second big case fingered a man called Idris Prothero – another of Rattigan’s circle – and Prothero only escaped justice