Daggers and Men's Smiles Read Online Free PDF

threw Aristotle’s logic on the topic of Good out the window.
    Shifting gears, Moretti headed up the Grange past Doyle Road, named for an earlier lieutenant-governor. Up here, he was in the Regency and early Victorian suburbs into which St. Peter Port had expanded from its narrow sea-edged site, with spacious homes built from the profits of smuggling and privateering, surrounded by gardens verdant and beflowered with subtropical plants and trees like camellia and palm that flourished in the island’s temperate climate.
    Just after passing the Guernsey Academy for Girls, the distaff equivalent of Elizabeth College, the Triumph swung left into a narrow lane between two sizeable houses, finally coming to a halt outside a high stone wall. Moretti slowly negotiated his way between the stone pillars of what had once been a gateway and was now merely a gap in the wall.
    Facing him was the cottage left to him by his father — a two-storey dwelling built of rough-hewn granite that had once been the stable and coachman’s quarters for the grand home through whose gateway he had just passed. A solid wooden doorway of faded grey, set in the traditional curved stone archway of the Guernsey cottage, a window on each side and three above, were all of them framed by a deep-pink climbing rose, long ago left to its own devices. On each side of the property, fuchsia, honeysuckle, and ivy covered the old walls with a tapestry of crimson, cream, and dark green that, in the island’s mild climate, lasted most of the year round. What had been the stables to one side of the structure served as his garage. But the manor house was long gone, and all that remained of the fine estate was Ed Moretti’s inheritance.
    He loved the place. One of the disadvantages of leaving the island, as he had done earlier in his career, was that the property laws were so strict that inheritance was not always enough to hold on to such a possession. But Moretti had been lucky, because he had returned to the island to work and thus qualified for the house when his father died. It was the source of much ill feeling among expatriate islanders that the rich might buy their way in to avoid supertax, but a poor native might sometimes not be able to return to his, or her, roots.
    He had made few changes to the decor and furnishings of the house, and it had taken a while to get over the feeling of waking in the morning and expecting to find his parents downstairs. The most significant addition was the sound system he had installed, to carry the music that was so important to his sense of well-being — a vintage quad system that drove a set of ESL speakers. The large speaker panel gave an incredibly smooth, sweet sound that had not, in Moretti’s opinion, been bettered in over forty years.
    He had not had to add a piano. His own love of music came from his mother, and one of his earliest memories was of listening to her playing “Roses of Picardy,” singing the words in her soft, crooning voice. A very early memory. She had been gone a long time.
    â€œGoing back to the womb, you are.” That was one of Valerie’s cuts, just before he walked out the door. “Grow up, Ed, and face the music,” she admonished him in one of their final fights. An unfortunate image in the circumstances, since she was of the opinion that it was the musician who was “a bloody Peter Pan,” and the policeman who was the grown-up. Not so simple. Having watched his father dwindle and diminish after his mother’s death, he wondered if he’d ever risk an emotional involvement that brought so much pain.
    You’re terrified of commitment, shit-scared of it, aren’t you?
    The first thing he did when he went into the cottage was put a disk on the record player. Oscar Peterson.
    How did the man do it? The marvellous internal rhythm that could sing without benefit of percussion or bass, creating melody and miracles of harmony, fireworks