Dry Bones Read Online Free PDF

still standing in the doorway, like a dog on guard. He wished she’d go off and do the lunch so that he could get in a quick one before they ate. It always helped the old digestion which wasn’t what it used to be. Marjorie’s cooking didn’t help, of course. Not her fault. They’d always had servants to do it abroad. He turned a page of the newspaper and shook it.
    â€˜Was there anything else?’
    â€˜I ran into the Colonel this morning. I told him how pleased we were that he was going to be giving Ruth away.’
    â€˜Oh, yes.’
    â€˜He’s the best man for the job.’
    He turned another page. ‘I’m sure he is.’
    A pause. She said quite kindly, for her. ‘You didn’t think she’d ask
you
, did you, Roger?’
    â€˜Never crossed my mind.’
    â€˜A newcomer was a much better idea. Then nobody from the village could be offended, you see.’
    She stumped off to the kitchen and the Major sat for a moment, seeing slowly.
    The old girl was probably quite right. Clever of Ruth to do that. Pick a complete outsider, like the Colonel. Considerate of her. She wasn’t anything like her late mother, thank God.
    Marjorie was crashing around with pots and pans in the kitchen. Just time for a quick one, if he was sharp about it. He tiptoed over to the cocktail cabinet, given by the regiment when he’d retired. Damned decent of them, except for the fact that it played
Drink to me only with thine eyes
when you opened the lid and the old girl had ears like a bat. He’d learned to get the lid open, bottle out, lid shut, tot poured, bottle back, lid shut again with only a few tinkling notes played. Mark you, he’d had plenty of practice.
    He was faster than ever this time; reactions like a man half his age, he thought, pleased. He sat down in his chair again and took a gulp from the glass. Things looked a bit rosier now.

THREE
    T he Colonel drove over to Wiltshire in his old black Riley. He had bought the car in the Fifties and had kept it in a rented garage whenever he and Laura had been stationed abroad. He had never been tempted to exchange it for a newer and more up-to-date model. True, he had to wind the windows up and down by hand, there was no power steering, no convenient central locking system or air conditioning, and the heating was tricky, but the rest of it was perfectly satisfactory. He liked the car and he enjoyed driving it. What more could one ask?
    He had seen from the road map that King’s Mowbray lay in the middle of a large and sparsely populated area to the south of Salisbury Plain. The few scattered villages were linked by a maze of lanes that frequently petered out into dead ends.
    It was not a part of England that he knew and it was very different from neighbouring Dorset. Wide open skies, switchback land rolling away into the distance, wind-bowed trees, flint-choked soil. Man had lived there for many thousands of years, back to prehistoric times. Ancient earth barrows remained where the dead had been buried, together with mysterious formations of standing stones, and evidence of inhabitation – axe heads, arrows, utensils, coins, jewellery.
    He turned the Riley into a narrow lane that, with luck, would take him in the right direction. At the top of a rise, he stopped the car and got out. A dull, overcast sky, not a house in sight, no farm buildings, only the tumbledown remains of a flint stone wall. A group of gnarled and misshapen trees, the dark glint of water in a pond, ditches fenced with strands of wire, long feathery grasses flattened in the wind. A bleak landscape. Chunks of flint lay at his feet and he stooped to pick up one. Its outer casing was chalky white, the flint inside glassy grey. It weighed heavily in his palm, fitting snugly within his fingers. He rubbed his thumb along a razor-sharp edge: a grisly weapon.
    For some reason, the place gave him a sense of unease, even of menace. He was not usually