Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller) Read Online Free PDF Page B

pint of Guinness, and talk to Emily when she had time for me. We had been at Durham for two months now. It seemed an eternity. Mother and home were light years away. I walked the cobbles from my room at Nightingale, over the bridge shading the River Wear below, down to the lecture halls and back, day after day. Often I’d run past the weir, my trainered feet slapping against the sludge of wet leaves which inundated the path. I could hear my breath coming hard, the sky grey with the north, geese hovering and honking. I thought about W. B. Yeats and ‘Ephemera’.
    I had been running on my third day there when I next saw Emily again after our train meeting. I was sprinting up the steps to Framwellgate Bridge andwas going to take a left, past the cinema, and stop off at the newsagent’s to get a bottle of water. As I emerged up from the riverside, though, I walked straight into her.
    ‘Hi!’ she had exclaimed. ‘How are you?’
    Her voice had already changed. Although she had been well-spoken previously, her sentences were now further punctuated by the ‘ah’ sound, the form of diction handed down in a thousand public schools across the country, swathes of their inhabitants congregating here in Durham, generally at Joyce College.
    ‘I’m good,’ I said, breathing hard and bending over, my hands on my knees.
    ‘Running,’ she stated the obvious. ‘Admirable.’
    I straightened up, rueing my thin frame, my gawky chest. ‘Yep.’ I controlled my breath and managed to smile. ‘How are you? How are you settling in?’
    ‘Really well, thanks! I don’t know what I was worried about, really. Everyone’s so nice. I’ve made some great friends already.’
    I continued to smile while at the same time thinking that any friends I made in the first three days of anything would never last the distance; they would be comrades in arms, a fellow body to walk in a room with, to pretend to laugh with. But they wouldn’t be friends, not really. Did Emily really think these people would be life-long compatriots? Or was her naivetygenuine – a lone petal of innocence in a field of scrub?
    ‘Which way are you going?’ she asked.
    I pointed towards the cinema.
    ‘I’ll walk with you. It’s a beautiful day for once.’
    We walked together over the bridge. Emily was shorter than me, she only reached my shoulder. She had that petite frame I’ve always found attractive. I had some desire in me to put my arm around her or pat her on the back perhaps. A kind of contact nevertheless. I controlled it, and we walked side by side.
    ‘What’s your room like?’ she asked brightly. ‘Are you sharing?’
    I described to her the shoebox I shared with a physics student named Zack. He had already put up numerous
Doctor Who
posters, installed decks at the bottom of his bed and situated a large collection of vinyl records along the only free wall. I wasn’t sure if this meant he was a pirate DJ looking for gigs or was planning a rave in our room at a later date. I had said nothing to him about it, though, and merely unpacked my box of books on to the shelves on my side of the room. My toiletries I kept in a wash bag under the bed, not wanting Zack to see my toothbrush for some reason. My only real problem was my towel, which never seemed to dry out. We had a small electric heater whose minimal effect was instantly negated by the fact that it was situated underneaththe room’s only window. This wasn’t double-glazed and sucked the heat out of the room with all the vigour one might expect of a black hole. Zack had been at great pains to tell me, however, that the ‘suck’ of a black hole was an extreme gravitational effect, whereas what I was describing was merely a transfer of thermal energy.
    Emily laughed. ‘He sounds a nightmare.’
    ‘No, he’s okay really. My towel, however, is growing mildew on it. Along with the bottle of milk in the downstairs kitchen which nobody wants to claim.’
    ‘I know what you mean,’ Emily said.