Fate Worse Than Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

bit o’gnome comfort, did you, Chris boy?’
    The hot stale air of the bar thickened with the laughter of the three regulars. Christopher Thorold stood among them like a baited bullock, swinging his head, shifting his feet, and blinking in bewildered alarm.
    Pitying him, but thankful that she herself was for once not their victim, Lois slipped away from the bar for a few minutes. She took with her Beryl Websdell’s Willum, and put him under the scullery tap.
    The dirt came off easily enough. But whether, clean, he was in a fit state to be returned to his owner was a different matter. If Lois herself were in Beryl’s position, the mother of a daughter who had disappeared, she felt that she would rather not have her missing garden gnome returned to her with the lower half of its body smashed out of recognition.

Chapter Six
    For half an hour after they landed, Martin Tait and Alison Quantrill were still flying.
    Exhilarated, happily aware that they were on the way to being seriously in love, they hardly touched the ground as they went from the Cessna to the flying club headquarters. Tait relinquished Alison’s hand for long enough to buy cold drinks from the bar, and then carried the glasses out to where she sat in the sun. He lowered himself on to the grass beside her, close enough to touch but not touching. Gradually they fell silent.
    Mechanics were at work on aircraft in the hangar some distance away but, apart from a student pilot being debriefed by his instructor in the clubroom, and another instructor on duty in the control tower, the hutted premises were deserted. So were the acres of grass airfield. Hot air shimmered above the empty tarmac of the perimeter track. There was aerial activity at various heights – a jet aircraft leaving its silent contrail at 30,000 feet, a club Cessna climbing to 2,000, another puttering round the circuit at 800, a lark singing as it hovered at 20 – but Martin and Alison were conscious only of their immediate surroundings. Their view had contracted to the patch of clover-filled grass where they sat, their hearing was attuned to nothing but each other’s breathing.
    He gazed at her from behind his sun-glasses, planning an approach that would secure her as a possible future wife without at this stage going to the extent of proposing marriage. Alison didn’t look at him at all. She had taken the opportunity to do that while he was preoccupied with the aeroplane, and she knew well enough the sharply intelligent contours of his face and the good shape of his fair head. She had also taken stock of what he was wearing, and she approved of it.
    When she first met him, Martin Tait had been a trendy dresser. She recalled with amusement Cuban heels, a pink summer suit with flared trousers, perpetually open-necked shirts, a silver neck chain. He had liked himself so much, in those days, that she had found it difficult to like anything about him.
    But promotion to inspector eighteen months ago had encouraged him to alter his appearance and wear formal, well-cut suits and good shoes. His casual clothes, too, had acquired an expensive air. Today he stayed cool in the heat in a blue shirt, white trousers, and shoes that looked like Guccis even if they were not. He had told Alison that he expected promotion to her father’s rank by the end of the year, and it was clear that he intended to be the best dressed as well as the youngest detective chief inspector in the county force.
    Alison welcomed the improvement in his wardrobe as a sign of maturity. It certainly made him a great deal more attractive. He was, too, far less brash. She liked him, now … was excited by his confidence, his abilities … found him really rather amazing.
    But she was cautious. Her father had once said scathingly that Martin Tait seemed to think he was irresistible to women. She had found no difficulty in resisting him two years ago, partly because of instinctive antipathy and partly