Dead Reckoning Read Online Free PDF Page A

knowing that might be only too true.
    She left him watching television and went into the bedroom to tidy up. She had been more deeply moved than she had allowed Thackeray to realise by his decision to process his divorce at last. The marriage had effectively ended more than twelve years before when Aileen had been brain-damaged by an overdose but she knew that Thackeray’s sense of responsibility for the shell of a woman who had lived on in an institution ever since was profound. He blamed himself for her condition and for the death of their baby son which had preceded and provoked her suicide attempt. She knew that breaking the agonising link between them would be as hard now as it had ever been. As she brushed her deep copper curls and tied them back with a deep green ribbon which matched the silk of her shirt, she wondered whether this was something he could do without tearing himself apart all over again. He had promised to marry her, but maybe she was wrong to force the issue. And even if she eventually got him
to the registry office, she wondered if he could ever satisfy what she felt as an increasingly urgent yearning to have children. Might that, even now, be a step too far?
    Life was never simple, she thought with a sigh, and hers seemed to become even more complicated as she got older. She turned out the light in the bedroom, went into the kitchen, put on a butcher’s apron and began to slice onions for their evening meal, though not all the tears which sprang to her eyes were caused by the fumes. Half an hour later, with a slow-cooking casserole in the oven filling the flat with its aroma, and a Billie Holiday CD on the player, and her head on Thackeray’s shoulder, she was irritated when her phone rang and surprised when she recognised her father’s voice at the other end.
    â€œDad? Is Mum all right?” she asked sharply. Her parents had retired to a villa on the Portuguese coast near Lisbon when her father had sold out his business for more millions than he was ever prepared to admit, and relations between father and daughter had passed from chilly to almost frozen over the years.
    â€œI’m at Heathrow, love,” Jack Ackroyd said. “I’m stopping at the Dorchester tonight but I’ll be up in Bradfield lunchtime tomorrow. Couldn’t get a flight any sooner. Booked up, they were. Things looking up in Bradfield at last, are they?”
    â€œYou must be joking. Leeds maybe, but not here. Do you want to stay with us?” Laura said, feeling stupid as her brain refused to assimilate this unexpected information. “Is Mum with you?”
    â€œDon’t be daft,” her father said. “You know how she hates flying. No this is just a business trip. I’ve a project locally that I want to check out myself, that’s all.” Laura knew that her father still had business connections in Yorkshire although
he played his cards so close to his chest that she had no idea what they were.
    â€œI’ve booked into the Clarendon,” Ackroyd said. “Come and have tea with me tomorrow about four. I should have finished my first round of meetings by then. And get your gran down, an’all. She’s still in that poky little place up on the Heights, is she? She’ll never learn.”
    â€œI’ll have to go and fetch her. Her hip’s not getting any better,” Laura said. “Better make it five o’clock, not four.”
    â€œAye, right you are,” Jack Ackroyd said. “I’ve offered to pay for a new hip if the bloody NHS can’t do anything for her but you know what she’s like. You’d think I’d suggested robbing a bloody starving child the way she carried on. So I’ll see you both tomorrow then. I’ll not be stopping long if I can avoid it.”
    â€œRight,” Laura said, slightly bemused, as the line went dead.
    â€œA visitor?” Thackeray asked wryly as she hung up.
    â€œNot here,