Turnstone by Graham Hurley Read Free Book Online Page A

parents after she’d died. They’d both come over for the funeral, staying with Faraday and the baby in the damp little bungalow on the Isle of Wight that he and Janna had turned into their first real home. It had been obvious to both Julie and Frank that Faraday was going to have trouble coping with a four-month-old baby, and after their return to Seattle they’d sent him a long letter and a cheque for two hundred thousand dollars. Within a year, Faraday had become a police probationer, posted to Portsmouth, and the prospect of a career had encouraged him to put down roots. The bulk of the money had paid for the barge-master’s house and with the rest he’d hired a nanny to look after Joe-Junior when he was on shift.
    Several months after they’d moved in, Faraday had taken photographs of the house, trying to frame it the way that Janna would have done. Janna had made a name for herself as a professional photographer with a very distinctive take on her subjects, and one of her many bequests to her husband was the equipment she’d collected over the years. Faraday had used the simplest of the cameras, rising early to capture the spill of the yellow sunrise over the front of the house, and he’d sent half a dozen of the resulting photos across to his in-laws in Seattle.
This is your investment in our future
, he’d written. Too damn right.
    He gazed at it now through the binoculars, his elbows braced against his knees, half-imagining the shelves of books against the back wall, and the big roll-top desk where he and J-J had first tiptoed into the world of birds.
    Confirmation that the child was deaf had come days before his first birthday, and for years after that Faraday had knocked on endless doors, hunting for advice. He’d wanted a way of talking to the child, a way of getting through. Signing was fine, and – once J-J was established at the special school – the daily diary they’d shared had been a godsend, but Faraday had never been as close to any other human being, not even Janna, and he sensed instinctively that there had to be a better way.
    In the end it had been a friend’s suggestion that had taken him to the city’s Central Library. She’d faced a similar challenge and she recommended a particular bay on the second floor, three along from the photocopier. Faraday had found it in minutes. The middle shelf was full of picture books. About birds.
    He’d brought them home by the armful – and early evenings and weekends had found Faraday and Joe-Junior sprawled in various corners of the study or the downstairs lounge, poring over shots of waders and warblers, of harriers and kites. The beauty of the house was its harbourside location. The view from the window was the pictures brought to life. Shelduck, mergansers, godwits, curlews, all real, all moving, and – as far as J-J was concerned, – all totally mute.
    For the boy, though, that hadn’t mattered in the slightest. What he woke up to, what he pressed his nose against on cold winter mornings, was a world that belonged exclusively to himself and his dad. Faraday understood this, not because some expert had told him, but because he’d seen it in the child’s eyes, heard it in the strange, tuneless cackle that served for him as laughter. J-J loved his dad very much, and the birds – with their thousand different shapes, plumages, habitats, breeding patterns – were the messages they passed back and forth.
    By the time J-J was ready to leave the special school and ride his luck with ordinary kids, those messages had become a language, expressive, flexible, capable of infinite nuance. When J-J made gannet wings, his arms arrowed back from his thin little shoulders, it meant that he was hungry. When Faraday posed as a heroin, one leg tucked up as he fought for balance in the middle of the kitchen, it signalled another trip to Titchfield Haven, a bird reserve along the coast where J-J had made special friends with the man who sold the ice