A Nice Place to Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

coloured lights, gave a real feeling of community. There was a placard beside the tree announcing that everyone was invited to an open air carol concert on Christmas Eve.
    Tim Baker must have organized that, Rachel Moody told herself.
    In contrast, there was not even a token sense of community in Forester Close. No one had got around to putting up decorations yet.
    â€˜They’ll have to cancel the carol concert,’ Rachel said suddenly. ‘It wouldn’t be proper, would it?’
    Sergeant Reid didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘I like a good carol concert myself,’ he said. ‘The kids love it when they sing a very odd version of Good King Wenceslas . And, of course, Shepherds wash their socks by night .’ He laughed.
    The DCI wasn’t listening. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘that woman who called the ambulance? There was something odd about her.’
    â€˜The blowsy bleached blonde job, you mean?’ the Sergeant said.
    Moody thought how odd men’s perception of women was, so subjective and always sexually coloured. What she had noticed about the woman from Number Two, Forester Close, was the desperate expression of fear in her eyes. Of course Donna Miller had been very shocked by what she’d seen, traumatized, practically. She’d been extremely pale under her make-up, and she couldn’t stop shaking, which was natural enough. But to Rachel her eyes had told a different story. It was as though something she had long expected had happened at last and it was that which scared her. She was frightened, and she was defensive.
    â€˜That woman’s hiding something,’ Rachel Moody said. ‘We’ve got to find out what it is she’s not telling us.’

FOUR
    A mile or so away from Forester Close, on the other side of Old Catcombe, young Mark Pearson was on his way to the village rugby club to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.
    He drove slowly round the bends in the narrow twisting lane. He’d almost knocked the vicar off his new blue bicycle the day before. He wondered where Mr Baker was off to, cycling away from the village like that as if the devil were after him. That’s all we need, Mark thought, vicars on bicycles wobbling all over the road in front of farm vehicles.
    Mark had lived in Old Catcombe all his life, as had his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather. Like them, too, he played prop forward for Catcombe Corinthians rugby team, and batted number three for the village cricket XI. He was big and strong with a mop of curly dark hair, not all that dissimilar from the Aberdeen Angus and Hereford beef bullocks he and his father raised on the family farm. Most of the residents of Catcombe Mead would dismiss him as a simple-minded son of the soil, an obsolete relic of a dead and irrelevant time.
    Mark shared his family’s attitude, which dismissed the incomers of Catcombe Mead as an unwelcome infestation of parasitical vermin who made no effort to control their sheep-chasing dogs, and habitually left gates open whenever they slipped into a field to trample on a crop.
    But even so, for Mark’s generation of the Old Catcombe order, there were already changes under way. The future for farming looked bleak. Many of Mark’s friends who had been at school with him had tried to find work in the area, but failed and moved away to the city, or to another country.
    Bert Pearson, Mark’s father, assumed that he and his son would work together on the farm and then Mark would take over and employ a future son of his own in turn. Mark wouldn’t say so to his father, but he couldn’t see this happening. It was becoming more and more difficult to make a living from the land. And he couldn’t help but resent the kind of money his former school friends were earning in the city. They came back on visits driving new cars, wearing sharp clothes. Mark wanted these things. He began to feel that life was