Dying to Know Read Online Free PDF

perhaps it was because I knew he was tired, perhaps because I was tired, perhaps – conceivably – it was because I was afraid he was right.
    In an effort to escape thinking too much more about all this, I asked, ‘So, you were entertaining Ada Clarke, then.’
    â€˜I was. And it was going very well, too. I’d cooked her a nice bit of braised steak with mushrooms, and we’d had a drop of wine, and I thought that, in view of the occasion, I’d finish the evening off with some fireworks. Ada likes fireworks. Who knows what might have happened if things had turned out differently?’
    I broke all the rules of road safety and closed my eyes, partly in horror at what he was implying, partly in exasperation as I thought about what might have happened for me if things had turned out differently. I had to grit my teeth as I said tightly, ‘Don’t you think you’re a bit old to be playing with fire?’
    He was indignant. ‘I wasn’t playing. I was entertaining a lady, nothing more.’
    â€˜It was bloody irresponsible to stick a rocket in a milk bottle without burying it; of course it might have toppled over at the wrong moment.’
    He did not reply for a long while and it was not until we were almost at my house that he murmured, ‘It didn’t happen exactly like that . . .’
    A sense of horror that I knew well began to creep up on me. ‘What does that mean?’
    His head bobbed from side to side as he stared straight ahead while he admitted the awful truth. ‘It was completely accidental that I burned down his shed . . .’
    There was a ‘but’ at the end of that sentence, and it was a bloody big one. His voice dropped quite noticeably as he supplied it. ‘But that’s because I was aiming at his conservatory.’
    â€˜What?’ My eyes came off the road and he reacted at once because the car veered dangerously close to the parked vehicles on his side. I jerked the steering wheel and we just avoided a collision. He had to comment, of course.
    â€˜Be careful, Lance. How many times do I have to tell you to keep your eyes on the road at all times?’
    â€˜You really were trying to fire rockets at Lightoller?’
    â€˜It was just a bit of fun. Ada thought it was most amusing. She doesn’t like them either. They were most rude about the bell-ringing. Said it was an awful din that should be banned.’
    â€˜Dad . . .’
    â€˜Don’t worry. She won’t say anything. They can’t prove a thing.’
    He didn’t seem to have grasped the point and I hastened to put him right. ‘You set fire to his shed! Supposing you had done the same to his house? You might have killed both of them.’
    â€˜Oh, don’t be melodramatic, Lance. That’s always been your trouble – over-egging the recipe. Your mother was the same; she always saw disaster when it wasn’t there. I remember once—’
    â€˜Dad, it was the height of irresponsibility.’
    â€˜Oh, tosh. Anyway, Masson confirmed my suspicions about the Lightollers.’
    â€˜What suspicions?’
    â€˜That there’s something shady about them.’
    It didn’t sound like the kind of thing that the Inspector Masson I loved and adored would say. ‘In what way shady?’
    â€˜Well, he didn’t say, exactly . . .’
    â€˜So what did he say? Exactly, I mean.’
    But Dad, as he so often did, retreated into vagaries. ‘He intimated that Lightoller isn’t quite the upstanding citizen he makes himself out to be.’
    In other words, Dad had heard what he wanted to hear and seen what he wanted to see.
    We had reached my house and I turned right off the road and on to the hardstanding in front of the attached garage. As I turned the engine off, I said, ‘Dad, whether Oliver Lightoller is an archbishop or the greatest criminal mastermind since Fu Man Chu