Down Cemetery Road Read Online Free PDF

Too old, too slow, too fat . Only thirty-three. Never what you’d call fast. She could stand to lose some pounds, it was true. The Other Sarah Tucker would have done just fine. But I don’t know about you . It was the judgement of a superior creature, she felt; a creature that never suffered a dinner party for its mate’s awful client, or squandered its emotions keeping house.
    But for all that, Sarah Trafford, née Tucker, thought, it was only a cat.
    II
    South Oxford had its compensations. North Oxford had the parks, the houses, and one or two minor colleges; East Oxford had Tesco’s and an energetic police presence. West Oxford had the railway station. South Oxford had the river.
    Not all of it, true, but as much as fitted into a long stretch beween two locks: Old Lag River. Between Osney and Iffley it meandered, with the pedestrian bridge at Friars Wharf marking the midway line: a harmless if unattractive structure, its metal frame daubed with uninspired graffiti. Twice a day this saw heavy traffic as infants from the estate were ferried across it to school. Sarah used it habitually as a shortcut into town, and from it could make out the exploded house next morning, an end of terrace whose exposed side stood on the footpath that ran by the river. Or had stood, rather, since now the house had folded in on itself like a used-up cardboard carton, all that remained of the wall being a faint outline the eye drew on the air, as if bricks and mortar had been reduced to an architect’s plan. The front door stood upright; a bright cheeky red which could have illustrated the spirit of the Blitz. But everything to its left had collapsed, laying the interior bare to the gaze of onlookers like Sarah, and the gaggle of women still returning home two hours after dropping their kids at school: they huddled nearby, smoking, telling lies about seeing it happen, while on the riverbank groups of policemen did much the same, except kitted out in dayglo overalls. The footpath had been cordoned off, along with the top of the road giving out on the river; little strings of yellow bunting flapped in the wind. The second storey of the house was gone, and the ground floor a mess of smashed furniture and broken walls, as if a whole collection of worldly goods had been dropped from a great height. The wallpaper on the inside upright was scorched and shriven, and on it Sarah saw the shadow of a chair which no longer existed, one the blast had reduced to matchwood. What was left of the roof sagged, still shedding tiles at irregular intervals. To all intents and purposes, the house next door was now nearest the river. South Oxford had grown smaller by one address.
    There was a sealsplash as a wetsuited policeman dropped into the water. One of the women detached from her group and came over. ‘They carried three out. I saw the stretchers.’
    Sarah didn’t know what to say. She had never spoken to this woman, and didn’t know three was a significant number. ‘Well . . .’
    ‘And she lived alone. Just her and the kid.’
    ‘Who was –’
    ‘Nobody knows.’
    There was a shout from below. The frogman surfaced, holding what looked like an intact teapot.
    ‘I don’t even know who she was.’
    ‘Maddie. Maddie Singleton.’
    The name meant nothing. ‘And the child?’
    ‘Just a bairn. Could have been one of us, couldn’t it?’
    ‘What could?’
    ‘Something like that. The mains it was, they reckon. See our block?’ She waved a hand at the flats behind them. ‘It happens over there, Boom! Goodnight, Vienna.’ She was much the same age as Sarah, but her smoker’s features added years. ‘Goodnight fuckin’ Vienna.’
    ‘Were they killed?’
    ‘Course they were killed. It was an explosion.’
    A policeman had taken the teapot and was trying to fit it into a polythene bag. The frogman dived once more, his flippers breaking the surface briefly, then disappearing with hardly a ripple. The women on the bridge murmured, as if giving