Come to Grief Read Online Free PDF

the watertight lid, showing her daughter the shining black and silver fish that swam vigorously inside.
    Rachel relaxed. “I’m going to call him Sid,” she said.
    She’d been a lively, blonde, pretty child once, according to her photographs: now she seemed all huge eyes in a bald head. Lassitude and anemia had made her frighteningly frail.
    When her mother had first called me in to investigate an attack on Rachel’s pony, the illness had been in remission, the dragon temporarily sleeping. Rachel had become someone special to me and I’d given her a fish tank complete with lights, aeration, water plants, Gothic castle arches, sand and brilliant tropical swimming inhabitants. Linda had wept. Rachel had spent hours getting to know her new friends’ habits; the ones that skulked in corners, the one who bossed all the rest. Half of the fish were called Sid.
    The fish tank stood in the Fernses’ sitting room at home and it seemed uncertain now whether Rachel would see the new Sid among his mates.
    It was there, in the comfortable middle-sized room furnished with unaggressively expensive modern sofas, with glass-topped end tables and stained-glass Tiffany lamps, that I had first met my clients, Linda and Rachel Ferns.
    There were no books in the room, only a few magazines ; dress fashions and horses. Shiny striped curtains in crimson and cream; geometrically patterned carpet in merging fawn and gray; flower prints on pale pink walls. Overall the impression was a degree of lack of coordination which probably indicated impulsive inhabitants without strongly formed characters. The Fernses weren’t “old” money, I concluded, but there appeared to be plenty of it.
    Linda Ferns, on the telephone, had begged me to come. Five or six ponies in the district had been attacked by vandals, and one of the ponies belonged to her daughter, Rachel. The police hadn’t found out who the vandals were and now months had gone by, and her daughter was still very distressed and would I please, please, come and see if I could help.
    “I’ve heard you’re my only hope. I’ll pay you, of course. I’ll pay you anything if you help Rachel. She has these terrible nightmares. Please.”
    I mentioned my fee.
    “Anything,” she said.
    She hadn’t told me, before I arrived in the far-flung village beyond Canterbury, that Rachel was ill unto death.
    When I met the huge-eyed bald-headed slender child she shook hands with me gravely.
    “Are you really Sid Halley?” she asked.
    I nodded.
    “Mum said you would come. Daddy said you didn’t work for kids.”
    “I do sometimes.”
    “My hair is growing,” she said; and I could see the thin fine blonde fuzz just showing over the pale scalp.
    “I’m glad.”
    She nodded. “Quite often I wear a wig, but they itch. Do you mind if I don’t?”
    “Not in the least.”
    “I have leukemia,” she said calmly.
    “I see.”
    She studied my face, a child old beyond her age, as I’d found all sick young people to be.
    “You will find out who killed Silverboy, won’t you?”
    “I’ll try,” I said. “How did he die?”
    “No, no,” Linda interrupted. “Don’t ask her. I’ll tell you. It upsets her. Just say you’ll sort them out, those pigs. And, Rachel, you take Pegotty out into the garden and push him round so that he can see the flowers.”
    Pegotty, it transpired, was a contented-looking baby strapped into a buggy. Rachel without demur pushed him out into the garden and could presently be seen through the window giving him a close-up acquaintance with an azalea.
    Linda Ferns watched and wept the first of many tears.
    “She needs a bone-marrow transplant,” she said, trying to suppress sobs. “You’d think it would be simple, but no one so far can find a match to her, not even in the international register set up by the Anthony Nolan Trust.”
    I said inadequately, “I’m sorry.”
    “Her father and I are divorced,” Linda said. “We divorced five years ago, and he’s married