In the Absence of Iles Read Online Free PDF Page A

infiltrations. Naturally, she wouldn’t be mentioning tricky and ultimately disastrous infiltrations.
    Esther’s mind went back, went back to all that while ago, when first half thinking about an attempt to smuggle someone into the Turton Guild – yes, Esther had wondered then, in fact, whether there might be rivalry, and therefore useful hatred, affecting Ambrose Tutte Turton and Nathan Garnet Ivan Palliative Crabtree. One tale around said that during the sudden rolling warfare spat between the Guild and other firms on 17 November 2004 Palliative had deliberately left Ambrose exposed in the Preston Park battle sector, apparently hoping to simplify the succession for himself to Cornelius Max Turton’s supremo post, eventually. Deliberately? This might be the kind of charge difficult for Ambrose or anyone else definitely to prove. And the rumour of a savage enmity looked very dubious, because he and Palliative seemed to have worked all right together since Cornelius went more and more emeritus, as he aged. For instance, Ambrose and Crabtree had almost certainly put together the campaign against Claud Seraph Bayfield as joint commanders. This would have been no pushover. It suggested very effective collaboration. Maybe, if differences had once existed between them, they’d been ditched now, both recognizing that their combined strengths kept the Guild up there, paramount in the city, and acknowledged nationwide, perhaps even beyond.
    Or . . . or, it could be that the comradeliness amounted to nothing more than a truce, and the old loathings still lurked, still waited. Esther had realized that, if this were so, her undercover plant might create an alliance with one of them and provoke him into an attack on the other, or at least on the other’s woman/women and/or children. That, on its own, could increase splits and damage the Guild. Any prosecutions would be extra. She had never reached a point in her planning, her half-planning, where she decided which of them – Ambrose or Palliative – would be the most promising to fix on. Some said a general, suppressed hostility had always existed between the Turton and Crabtree sides of the family, anyway, and that this was notably sharpened by the
Times
obituary of Brent, because Cornelius could not be sure he, also, would get one, even down the page.
    Cornelius apparently put it about that Brent would never have qualified for that kind of post-mortem treatment if it hadn’t been for the showy, horrifying way he got himself killed; and Cornelius would undoubtedly not want to go like that. They said Cornelius had heard of the obituary on the morning of publication and sent people to every newsagent within a couple of miles’ radius to buy all copies of
The Times
and secretly burn them. Several of Cornelius’s men wanted to break up the shops as penalty for even putting
The Times
on sale that day. Cornelius forbade this, perhaps afraid
The Times
would hold it against him and then certainly refuse him an obit. Apparently, Cornelius liked the way
The Times
did obituaries: just the name in full across the top and then, possibly, a single head and shoulders shot, unless it was an obit of a goalkeeper, when there might be a picture of him crouched in front of the woodwork and netting; or a famous gardener with some kind of decent hedge behind him. People said Cornelius understood the principle that, if you had done genuine great work in life, all you needed as memorial would be an unadorned statement of that work, not some glaring projection of it. Cornelius’s hatred of gaudiness was famous. Of course, he would probably have recognized that some sensationalism in the obituary of Brent Holywell Crabtree had been necessary because of the terrible death, and that filthy or comical episode in Morocco, depending on where you were coming from.
    B finished describing her examples and said: ‘As we see, then, to slip into a family firm via a disaffected member can be one way to reach the