Cradle to Grave Read Online Free PDF

Tam MacNee. The knot of nerves in her stomach, which had dissipated slightly while she talked to Bailey, gave another twinge.
     
    Music with a heavy beat was, as always, playing when Alick Buchan opened the door to Gillis Crozier’s office, having been kept waiting in the kitchen by the Filipino who always came up from London with Crozier, and in Buchan’s eyes looked down on the peasants who were outdoor staff.
    The office had stark white décor, furnished in the minimalist style with a lot of glass and steel, which quarrelled with the original Victorian features. Buchan always felt uncomfortable in this room and it wasn’t entirely due to the way his boss affected him.
    ‘The Rosscarron Cottages?’ Crozier, unshaven and showing signs of having dressed hastily, looked stunned as he was told what had happened. He was a big, powerfully built man running a little to fat, with dark hair gone grey, and a long face seamed with lines, which gave him a saturnine appearance. ‘That – that was where my parents stayed, where I grew up! Who’s living there now?’
    ‘Kind of hard to tell. The girl was in shock. She says there’s a woman stays in one and maybe a couple and their baby in a holiday let.’
    ‘No time to waste, then. Let’s get things moving.’ He went over to his desk, picked up the handset, listened, then frowned. ‘It’s out – no Internet either, then. OK, you get down there and check it out, Alick. I’ll send someone into Kirkcudbright to alert the police and rescue services. Then I’ll be right behind you.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ Buchan went out, resentfully experiencing the slight easing of tension he always felt on leaving. He’d no reason for it: Crozier was a good employer, paying a fair wage and not making unreasonable demands – even ready to say thanks for a job well done. But Buchan liked to think he tugged his forelock to no one, yet somehow here he was doing it: ‘Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir!’
    They’d been in the army together, though the other man had gained a commission. Crozier hadn’t had any more advantages than Buchan had himself, growing up in the Rosscarron Cottages out there at the end of ‘the road to nowhere’, as the locals called it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so galling if he’d relied on privilege to get him where he was now, rolling in money – though Buchan had resented the toffee-nosed bastards who’d had it all handed to them on a plate too.
    Up here on the headland, the bruise-coloured clouds seemed to wrap him like a shawl. With the wipers going at double speed, Buchan pressed on down the narrow road, which ran for a mile across bleak, featureless moorland, ducking into a passing place as a large silver Mercedes drove up towards him. Oh, he knew his place! But there’d be some fun when people started arriving for the festival.
    Lower down, the visibility was better, but all he could see was drifts of rain sweeping in from the sea, below on the left there, a sheet of gun-metal grey. On that side, a smaller road – barely more than a tarmac track – led down a slope, then along the river to where the flooded houses had so mistakenly been built. Straight ahead was the Carron itself.
    The bridge that crossed it was a wide, sturdy structure set on wooden struts embedded in concrete piers with elaborate wrought-iron railings and a tarmac surface laid across the wood and metal of the bridge itself. It was a version of the bridges built on estates all across Scotland by Victorians for their posh shooting parties and the lorry loads of slaughtered birds being ferried south.
    With steeper, shelving banks here topped by low bushes, the river was contained and the bridge was still well above even its present high level, but even so Buchan cast an anxious glance at it as he drove across. The flood water was gushing angrily along, frothing and bubbling, with small rafts of branches and debris collecting round the base of the piers.
    Standing water splashed around