An Absence of Natural Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t mention it to Tom, she decided. Mysteries could be completely harmless. They weren’t necessarily sinister, were they? But her hearing that sound had followed the basement jazz he’d heard and the sketch that had appeared and then apparently vanished. These oddities seemed to be increasing. Tom was going to cuddle up with Simon Schama and his
History of Britain
. Rebecca thought she might do a bit of digging closer to home, concerning the history of the property itself.
    He’d put on a tracksuit by the time she’d readied herself for work. She looked at her watch. It was 7.15 a.m. Her car was in his parking space. She asked where his gym was and he told her, and she offered him a lift there since it was as good as on her way to the office and she thought saying goodbye on his doorstep might be slightly awkward. She really didn’t do one night stands and that’s what this was, until it proved to be otherwise.
    â€˜I still think it’s brutally early for the gym,’ she said, at the wheel of her car, en route.
    â€˜Full day,’ he said.
    â€˜Really?’ She was unconvinced and knew she sounded it.
    â€˜I’ve got a meeting in Bloomsbury this afternoon,’ he said, ‘Great Ormond Street Hospital. I set up a charitable foundation, football-based, most of the Premiership sides contribute financially and there are exhibition games staged and a lot of the lads put in guest appearances on the wards when they can. Players get a bum rap. Most of them are genuine guys, pretty solid, generous with their money and their time.’
    It was the most she’d ever heard him say at once. She said, ‘It seems very empathetic, doing all that for sick kids when you’ve never had any of your own.’
    â€˜My brother’s lad was my godson as well as my nephew,’ he said. ‘Leukemia took David when he was six. Before David passed away, I got to know the hospital quite well.’
    They were there. She pulled up, he grazed her hair with his knuckles and reached across and kissed her on the cheek. She said, ‘You’re a good man, Tom Harper.’
    â€˜I’m just lucky,’ he said, ‘and my luck seems to be holding.’
    She smiled at him. ‘You think so?’
    He said, ‘I’ve met you, haven’t I?’

Two
    Even after Absalom Court largely declined into a run-down warren of student conversions, there’d been two residents left over from its more affluent period on ninety-nine-year leases that still had some way to go before they expired. They were a Mrs Georgia McConnell and a Mr Arthur Fleetwood. But Mrs McConnell had died in the winter of 2011, and Mr Fleetwood had been offered a care-home by the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham when he’d been judged too elderly and infirm to continue to live safely alone.
    Before the restoration, number 7 had been three separate self-contained flats one above the other. The cat sketch encouraged Rebecca to think art student, if she was going to entertain Tom’s only half-serious theory that a ghost was responsible for the unexplained phenomena. Rebecca thought he might be completely serious if he’d been awake to hear that husky bark of sardonic laughter she’d heard the previous night. But she didn’t identify any art students in the records. In the 1960s, in the period when students would have had
Kind of Blue
rotating under the needle of their Dansette record players, all the conversions were let to students from the London School of Economics.
    With her lunch hour of research freelancing almost up, Rebecca called the LSE. She got through eventually to an alumni archivist. She’d thought they might employ such a person because their alumni were so distinguished. They boasted a long list of global movers and shakers. And there was Mick Jagger, who could still shake a bit when the moment called for him to do so. She remembered he’d studied at the