Guns in the Gallery Read Online Free PDF

met at school, then she’d become a hairdresser and they’d married when they were both nineteen. The wedding had been quickly followed by the birth of two daughters and at that stage the family had lived in a modest rented flat. Ned had worked as a sales assistant in a gentleman’s outfitters.
    His success, he always maintained when asked about it, arose completely from ‘being in the right place at the right time’. And that was true. A colleague at the shop where he worked had proposed to him the then novel idea of selling online, getting members of the public to order clothes through their computers. At the time Ned knew virtually nothing about IT, but his friend did, and that was what mattered. What Ned brought to the party was a very good buyer’s eye for sourcing cheap garments from the Indian subcontinent.
    The business had been a success right from the start. Within three years profits had increased a hundredfold. Ned and his partner didn’t have a conscious strategy for the development of their company; it was just that whatever decisions they made seemed to generate more income. It was as if they could not help themselves from making money.
    And in that heady time bigger rivals looked with a degree of envy at the newcomers’ success. Some of the major High Street names had been slow off the mark developing their online businesses and saw the advantages of buying off the shelf a company that was already up and running. A bidding war developed. As the figures offered became more and more astronomical, Ned Whittaker had been against selling out. He didn’t think they had yet reached their own full potential. But his partner, who had always been the commercial brains behind the company, said it was time to move on, and Ned graciously gave his consent.
    Early in 2000 the takeover deal was made, leaving Ned Whittaker and his partner with more millions than they would ever have time to spend. Within weeks the dot-com bubble burst and one large High Street chain was left with a very expensive white elephant and thousands of angry shareholders.
    The Whittakers than started spending their legitimately gotten gains. Butterwyke House was one of their first purchases. Once they were established there, they were recognized by local charities as potential sponsors and quickly joined the ranks of the Great and Good of West Sussex. They became generous benefactors to the arts and medicine. As a result, they were invited to all kinds of local events, where they met a lot of other people whose main – and in some case only – point of interest was their wealth.
    Sheena, who had developed a woolly attraction towards ecological concerns, encouraged her husband to invest in a variety of worthy green projects. And Ned devoted much of his time to filling in what he regarded as the deficiencies in his education. He read widely, and if his assimilation of all he read was not always very deep, he did not let that prevent him from filling his conversation with frequently inapposite quotations and references.
    Jude, who had encountered the couple a few times, knew that they could occasionally court ridicule with their unworldly innocence, but had no doubt that their hearts were in the right place.
    Carole was reserving judgement. In spite of her earlier demurral, as the week had progressed there had been less and less doubt that her curiosity would prevail and she would join her neighbour on the visit to Butterwyke House.
    They were in the sitting room that Saturday morning waiting for Chervil Whittaker. Ned had said that his younger daughter was really taking over the new glamping part of their activities and it would make more sense if she were to show them round the site. ‘Obviously Sheena and I could do it, but it’s really Chervil’s baby. I think she’s just out shopping or something.’
    At that moment he and his wife had exchanged a look, which told Carole and Jude that,