Killing a Unicorn Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the airport and he was terrified of them starting up again, for whatever reason. He’d never seen her cry before, and had he thought about it, he might seriously have doubted if she ever could. She was so self-contained she could go all day without even speaking unless she was spoken to — not sulking, a condition unknown to Jilly, or miserable, the occasional smile in his direction indicating she was happy enough. Not that she was always so quiet, far from it! When the occasion demanded, Jilly could talk for England. And never had he had need to question her loyalty. Remembering that instantly dispersed his irritation with her. But … Bibi! Why had that casual mention of her set her off? He was still baffled by her outburst.
    The taxi driver went round to the boot and Jonathan took care of his cello, shrouded in canvas over its case, and deposited it on the front steps. By the time he’d finished, the driver and Jilly had dealt with the rest of the luggage. He gave the man a large tip and slammed the taxi door decisively, sketching a salute to send him on his way and to discourage any more speculative glances towards the police car.
    Jilly bent to breathe in the waves of violet-scented heliotrope coming from the giant lead urns either side of the front door, great masses of dark purple blossoms standing above a trailing froth of pink verbena. Jonathan raised his
hand to the iron knocker, shaped like a Celtic cross, but Alyssa was in the hall by then and had flung open the door. She stood, framed in the aperture, her arms stretched wide, before enveloping him in a vast hug. ‘Jonathan, my darling boy, how late you are! In all this, it had almost slipped my mind we were still waiting for you, it’s all so dreadful! But thank God you are here, at last!’ At once deflating him and wrapping him in her warm love. His mother, ever the same, wearing black, as she invariably did in the evenings. She was heavily made up and a lot of gold jewellery decorated her person. Over the top, as usual, but he was so used to this that it barely registered.
    With slightly less enthusiasm, she planted an air kiss in the region of Jilly’s pale cheek. ‘Jilly!’
    â€˜Sorry we’re so late,’ Jilly said politely. ‘We’ve had the most appalling things happen.’
    â€˜You, too?’
    They had stepped directly into the huge hall that was carried up two storeys. Despite the long window, stretching upwards and disappearing into the darkness above, and several more horizontal ones, oddly placed and too small to be of much use other than as decorative elements, it was a dim place, even in daylight, with a great deal of stonework and wooden panelling, unpredictable corners and a huge, inglenooked fireplace at its far end. Seen from the outside, the house had presence, and inside it was replete with the fine, aesthetic ideals fashionable at the time of its building, when medieval simplicity was being extolled above the excesses of the Victorians. Untouched by ill-conceived restoration as the house and its interior were, it was sometimes visited by architectural historians.
    Mementoes of Judge Calvert were everywhere, notably in a dark and forbidding portrait dominating the wall above the fireplace, with below it a Biblical quotation, writ large in Gothic lettering across the width of the wide chimney breast: ‘GOD IS A RIGHTEOUS JUDGE, STRONG AND PATIENT.’ God in this case, presumably,
being His Honour, the family had long ago decided. His robes and wig were displayed in a glass case set into an alcove next to a passage that led eventually to a downstairs cloakroom, but since Conrad’s death Alyssa had had the alcove screened by a heavy tapestry curtain. She said she could manage to ignore the portrait from her chair by the fire, since it was placed so high, but she didn’t want to be reminded of the old tyrant every time she went to the loo. The judge’s unforgiving