Holloway Falls Read Online Free PDF

evenings.’
    She said: ‘How are you doing? In yourself?’
    I am coming apart at the seams.
    ‘Not so bad.’
    ‘Work?’
    He shrugged.
    ‘What can I say?’
    They had met to discuss the twenty-first birthday of their daughter. Caroline Holloway was in the second year of a media studies degree at Leeds Metropolitan University. She was at an age, he knew, by which she’d have taken many legally proscribed drugs: cannabis certainly, probably ecstasy or a derivative. Amphetamines, some cheap cocaine, maybe ketamine. Possibly LSD. Not heroin.
    She was doing well. She’d met a boy.
    He pinched his nostrils. Took a long breath. ‘She didn’t tell me.’
    Kate shrugged. ‘She probably didn’t think to. It’s probably nothing.’
    ‘It’s probably nothing, nothing. She doesn’t want the third degree about the long-haired lover from fucking Liverpool.’
    At the corner of his wife’s mouth and eyes were lines that were new to him, who mentally had mapped, and physically had kissed every line, every crease and fold of her body.
    He filled her glass. She had to leave in half an hour. Meeting Adrian. They were going on to the theatre.
    That evening, Jack Shepherd arrived in north London.
    For three months, he’d worked his way along the south coast of England. He stopped in Brighton for three days.
    That week there were thunderstorms across Britain. Shepherd sat on the sea wall between the two piers, watching the rain drive into the sea. While traffic hissed behind him, he planned his future.
    He walked to the station, head bowed, and caught the next train to London Victoria. He was still damp when he arrived. The Adidas bag slung over his shoulder, he walked along the dirty, wet station concourse, past the diminutive Our Price and large W. H. Smith, to the tube station.
    On the Victoria line northbound, he chose Finsbury Park at random and stepped off into the London night. Finsbury Park did not smell like Bristol. It smelled rich with warm rain and exhaust fumes and half-rotten fruit.
    Within the first two or three minutes, he believed himself to have seen at least one representative of each ethnic group and major religion represented in Britain. This made him smile as at a grand adventure.
    He passed a Kwik Save, no less than three Sunrise Food Stops, the Happening Bagel Bakery, a dilapidated post office, a KFC Express, a Shell garage. It seemed perfect. On Seven Sisters Road, alongside a tower block called Park House, he found a small bed-and-breakfast hotel.
    He stopped here and booked himself in. Paid cash. One week in advance.
    Bone tired, he fell asleep, fully clothed and steaming gently, on the candlewick bedspread.
    He awoke, refreshed, at 8 a.m. and did not remember that he had dreamed.
    He set about finding a place to live.

3
    Apparently, Rex Dryden wasn’t Rex Dryden’s real name, but that didn’t much bother anybody, least of all Rex Dryden himself. Still less did it vex those five, seven or nine hundred individuals (exactly how many varies according to which newspaper you read) who joined him in the Temple of Light, Illuminus , in Excelsis .
    ‘All good churches need at least two names,’ said Rex Dryden.
    Nor was the question uppermost in the mind of the one, three or five hundred (again, reports vary) who, beguiled by his recognition of their spiritual awareness, took into their mouths and swallowed the soft drink laced with lethal poison he supplied them with shortly before Christmas 1999 in order to speed them into the emancipation of bodily death.
    Rex Dryden was built like a bouncer; not tall, all shoulder and chest and forearm. His legs had bowed beneath the prodigious heft of torso. Yet his movements had about them an unhurried grace whose quality belied the brute fact of his construction. His head was meatily spherical as a watermelon: balding, shaved to stubble. His beard was coarse and close-cropped, silver and black. It extended towards his eyes and into the vigorous snarl of grey hair