Crime Read Online Free PDF

him. It was the sort of hat that might by worn by someone who had been to neither a baseball match nor New York City. The sort of hat Mr Confectioner might have had in his wardrobe.
    — What’s wrong with it? Trudi asks.
    — I don’t like the Yankees. No Boston Red Sox hats?
    — There’s loads in there, I didn’t know what you wanted. I just got it to keep the sun from burning out your brains! It’s New York, she urges.
    — This is Florida, Lennox shrugs. He tried to think of a Florida baseball team. The name Merlins seems to ring a bell.
The Magical Merlins
.
    — Yes, but it’s all American and that’s where we are, she says, then sips her Sea Breeze and returns to her notes. — Go and see if they’ll change it if you want … I think Mandy Devlin and her boyfriend should be at the evening do, rather than the church and the meal … what do you think?
    — I agree, Lennox says. He gets up, stretches, and steps next door. Some football shirts: Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona, AC Milan. The baseball caps. He chooses a Boston Red Sox number and puts it on. Returning to the patio, he sticks the Yankees one on Trudi’s head. Her hand goes to it, as if he’s messed up her hair, then stops.
    She simpers at him, squeezes his good hand. Something rises in him, a surge of optimism, which is crushed when she speaks. — I’m really happy, Ray, she says, but it sounds like a threat. — Are you winding down?
    — I need to get the Hearts score. We’re at home to Kilmarnock in the Cup. Shall we find an Internet café soon?
    Trudi’s expression is briefly acerbic, then her face lights up. — There’s some stuff I want to show you on this website, some really good ceilidh bands.
    She is reading in another magazine about the television actress Jennifer Aniston; her recovery after her divorce from the actor Brad Pitt, now with a different actress, Angelina Jolie. Lennox glances at each magazine on the table. Both were about relationships: one focusing on a day of happiness, the other dealing with a lifetime of misery and uncertainty. He’d glimpsed at it on the plane. Jennifer Aniston was supposed to be with another actor now, whose name he couldn’t recall. Trudi points at her picture on the cover. — It must be so difficult for her. It just goes to show: money can’t buy happiness. She looks at Lennox, who has caught the waitress’s eye and ordered another two Sea Breezes. — We’re okay though, aren’t we, Ray?
    — Hmm, he muses to himself, trying to think of the last decent film Brad Pitt was in. Decides that the remake of
Ocean’s Eleven
wasn’t too bad.
    — Well, thank you for that vote of confidence! We’re only going to be spending the rest of our lives together! She looks at him, harsh, shrew-like. He can see the old woman in her. It’s like she’s fast-forwarded forty years. She throws the notepad on the table. — At least
pretend
to be interested!
    Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. Different women, faces, bodies
.
    The body had seemed to shrink in death, washed up on the rocks at the bottom of that cliff. It was strange, but it hadn’t bothered him at the time. Well, it
had
bothered him, but not obsessively. He thinks of his old mate, Les Brodie. How they used to shoot seagulls with their air rifles. How, when you shot a gull, it was different from shooting a pigeon. Les and his pigeons. The gull, though, it just reduced, went into nothing, like it was a balloon, all air. The difference between a dead adult body and a dead child’s (and Britney was the first dead child he had seen) was that sense of reduction. Maybe you were just seeing for the first time how small they really were.
    Lennox feels his heartbeat rising again, as sweat coats his palms. He forces down a deep breath. That cyanic corpse and its mysterious, unyielding opacity; it was just a body though, Britney had gone; what counted was bringing the bastard who had done her to justice. But now he can see it as vividly