Just a Dead Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

Please not to worry. I spoke to Mike as well, but neither of them seemed unduly bothered by the idea of a corpse on their regular dog walk.
    By now it was after six, and a large whisky was beckoning. I’m not much of a spirits drinker; beer or white wine are more in my line, but today I felt a whisky might dilute, or at least dull, the strains of the afternoon. I poured myself a generous tot, added ice and water and headed back into the studio, flopping down on the sofa with a sigh. I had hardly taken a sip when the phone rang again. I groaned loudly enough for Grumpy to flex an ear.
    â€œHello?”
    â€œLaura. It’s Bob here. My dear, are you all right? I just phoned Rory and he told us what happened. What a terrible thing for you. Are you alone?”
    Bob is my ex-father-in-law. I often think that if I could have married him and left Simon to his mother, we might all have been a lot happier. Bob is charming, kind and sensible and there have been moments when the thought has crossed my mind that he may well have been the reason I married Simon in the first place. Maybe I thought Simon would turn out like his father. Instead, he is all too similar to Joan, his mother. Mean-minded, carping,insensitive and crass. Both of them.
    â€œI’m fine, Bob. Really. It was horrible, but worse for poor Daniel. He was walking the dog, and they found the body. He ran back here, and we called the police. They’ve been around all afternoon, but they’ve gone now.”
    â€œIs Daniel still with you?”
    â€œNo, no. But it’s really okay.”
    â€œI don’t like to think of you there alone. I wish the boys were home.”
    â€œI could go to Mum and Dad if I wanted, but really, there’s no problem.”
    Bob talked for a bit and while we were chatting – mainly about how Rory was doing at university, and what Mike was likely to do next year – my cellphone rang. I just left it. I could have a look and see who it was after Bob had rung off, and after I had some more of my whisky. This was all getting to be a bit much.
    Bob said he had got the feeling Mike didn’t want to go to the University of Cape Town. He thought perhaps he didn’t want to be in Rory’s shadow – as he had been, to some extent anyway, at school. I felt the same, though my view was that part of the problem was that he didn’t want to be in the same town as Simon and Ms Tits. Mike’s relationship with his father was still a little tense. Obviously I didn’t say that to Bob, merely agreed and said I wasn’t putting on too much pressure at the moment, and had suggested Mike might like some kind of gap year. Eventually, after reiterating his shock, asking again if there was anything he could do, and saying, presumably mendaciously, that Joan sent her love, he rang off.
    I picked up the cellphone. Oh my God. Simon. I supposed I had better phone him back. Otherwise he’d call at some other totally inconvenient moment. And he was the father of my children, so he was probably entitledto be concerned if their home was being overrun by corpses and, by extension, murderers.
    Of course, Simon’s first remark, delivered in the accusatory mood, was to say that he had tried to phone the landline but it had been engaged. I pointed out that it had been his father. Then he went off into a riff about how the house, which I had insisted upon, was in an unsafe area, too near the plantations where all kinds of undesirables and criminals lurked. So, ran Simon’s subtext, it had been my inconsiderate and stupid behaviour that had put the lives of his sons at risk.
    Inevitably, I lost my temper. That’s the effect Simon has on me these days. “Hang on, hang on. You were the one who insisted, for example, that we had to have a fucking swimming pool. The boys were used to one, you said, so they must continue to have one. So we have this bloody pool, which is the biggest bone of contention