A Fatal Verdict Read Online Free PDF Page B

car, opening the door with one hand and talking into the phone with the other. ‘What’s he doing there? She’s left him!’
    This question was beyond Jane Miller, so she ignored it and responded instead to the panic in her friend’s voice. ‘Kath, for heaven’s sake drive carefully, will you? Think what you’re doing - you won’t help Shelley by causing another accident. Is Andrew there with you?’
    ‘No. I’ll call him.’ She clicked the phone off and drove out of the car park, not even noticing the young man who had to skip for safety into a rose bed as she spun the tyres on the gravel. Shelley, in Casualty, with cut wrists - a transfusion! Thank God she was so close. The health club was in the Swallow Chase hotel by York’s Knavesmire racecourse, only a couple of miles through the city centre to the hospital. It was a pleasant, sunny evening in May; as she accelerated towards the city she saw a father holding up his daughter to pat the noses of some horses under the trees, and children flying kites and playing football on the Knavesmire beyond. The sight seemed surreal to her, an insult - people casually going about their normal business while Shelley was bleeding to death. No, don’t say that! This can’t be happening, she thought - I’ll get there and find it’s all a joke, a misunderstanding.
    But Jane Miller wouldn’t joke about a thing like this, and the fact that Shelley’s boyfriend David was there in the hospital too added a macabre touch that terrified her as much as the news itself.. Ever since she had met that boy Kathryn had loathed him. He was rude, arrogant, idle, and apparently committed to turning Shelley not only against her own parents but also against all the habits of industry and self-reliance which she, with a little help from Andrew, had worked so hard for so many years to instill. In a few weeks, beginning last December, Shelley had changed from being a moderately confident, communicative young woman to someone they hardly recognized - anxious, withdrawn, obstinate, nervous as she had been in the worst of her teenage years, prone to increasingly wild mood swings and defiant in her defence of this new and unpleasant boyfriend.
    That, at least, was how Kathryn saw it. Shelley had begun at university last October, and all had gone well until six weeks later her steady boyfriend of several years, Graham, had met another girl from Sheffield and, in the cruel modern jargon, ‘dumped’ her. This, of course, had sent Shelley into a depression, but instead of seeking comfort from her mother, as she would have when younger, she set out to deal with matters on her own, and, to Kathryn’s horror, had somehow come up with this arrogant, manipulative, pretentious boy David Kidd. Every time she thought of him her blood boiled and her mind seethed with anger and frustration - how any daughter of hers could be duped by such a self-regarding, deceitful ... the adjectives piled up like stones she would hurl at him if only she could.
    And yet he was Shelley’s choice, so she had tried to respect it. And not everyone loathed him as she did. Shelley’s father Andrew, whom she worshipped, had welcomed David into their house at Christmas, being charming and pleasant as he so easily could. When David had seemed rude, Andrew excused his lack of manners as mere awkwardness, telling Kathryn he hoped that Shelley’s love would transform him from a toad into a prince. It was a naive hope which had failed as Kathryn had always known it would. Even though, just as in the fairy tale, Shelley had not only kissed the toad but no doubt made love to him many times as well, it hadn’t transformed him at all; he remained just what he had always been: an arrogant, deceitful fraud who should have had no place whatsoever in their bright, intelligent daughter’s life. If any transformation had taken place it had been the other way: his slime, his idleness and cynicism had rubbed off on her, making her a stranger to