Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain Read Online Free PDF Page B

like he couldn’t believe the way death had come racing at him out of the wind and the night.
    ‘Where’s the brother?’
    ‘In the house. Waiting for you.’
    ‘He see anything?’
    Terry Stagg shook his head.
    ‘All right.’ Bliss hunched his shoulders against the wind. ‘So where we up to, Tezza?’
    ‘Covering the lanes, pubs, for what that’s worth now. They’ll be well away.’
    ‘They?’
    ‘Mr Sollers Bull thinks a gang. He’ll explain.’
    ‘Where’s Karen?’
    ‘House-to-house. Well… farm-to-farm. In the four-by-four. With a couple of uniforms, just in case.’
    ‘Good, good.’
    Karen was connected: farming family. Where Bliss came from, a farmer was a bloke with a shared allotment and a chicken.
    ‘Obviously you’ve searched the buildings.’
    ‘With Mr Sollers Bull. And the house. Did I…?’ Terry Stagg coughed. ‘Did I say Mr Sollers Bull was not very happy?’
    ‘
No
. You amaze me, Terence.’
    Terry said, ‘In the sense that… he reckons he and his brother both reported intruders.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Two occasions in the past month. He says we laughed.’
    ‘
We
laughed?’
    ‘The police.’
    ‘The police laughed. Fuck me. Excellent.’
    ‘I mean, that’s what he says.’
    ‘Might this explain the DCI’s generosity in letting the underling take charge, d’you think?’
    Thinking,
nice one, well-timed, Francis
, as a vehicle came coughing and grumbling up the tarmac drive. Dr Grace’s Land Rover Defender.
    ‘Also,’ Terry Stagg said, ‘when I told him you’d be in to talk to him later on, Mr Sollers Bull said… He seems to know who you are.’
    The vehicle’s engine had been switched off but was clinging to life. In the instant of its last shudder, the wind died and it was like they were standing in the vacuum of quiet at the eye of the storm.
    ‘Fame at last. I’m made up.’ Bliss’s own voice came bouncing back at him from across the yard. He lowered it. ‘What are you saying?’
    ‘He knows your father-in-law.’
    ‘Oh.’
    Billy Grace was hauling his kit up the drive. Bliss went to meet him.
    Shit
. The downside of having a complicated private life in a small county.
    Every other Saturday, work permitting, he’d collect his kids from the in-laws’ farm. Trying to time it so he’d be bringing them back just before Kirsty got in from shopping or wherever. In the hope that he could leave them with his mother-in-law, a woman he could handle, more or less.
    Unfortunately, he’d pulled this one too many times. Last Saturday, the door had been ajar at the farm holiday cottage where Kirsty was living, and the kids had gone running inside. He’d considered just buggering off, but in the end he’d gone in to find the stove lit, all very cosy, smell of quality coffee – sour reminders of his own kitchen with all its comforts now plundered.
    And here was the plunderer in person: Mrs Bliss. Only, this was the Mrs Bliss of ten years ago – the
future
Mrs Bliss reborn. All made up, short black skirt well up the thigh.
See what you threw away
.
    ‘You had another hour, at least,’ Kirsty said, when the kids were out of the room. ‘But then you always did get bored with them quite rapidly… what with an eight-year-old’s lack of interest in the vagaries of the Crown Prosecution Service.’
    Vagaries?
She’d been rehearsing, evidently.
    ‘Kairs—’
    ‘Or do you have a
date
tonight?’
    Date
. Not a word they’d ever used between themselves. That little tweak of petty triumph on Kirsty’s lovely pulpy lips.
    She knew something. She bloody
knew something
.
    ‘Gorra be off, Kairsty,’ Bliss said. ‘Be the Easter holidays next time I come, so we can make it a different day if you want. I could maybe take them over to Aberystwyth or somewhere.’
    ‘You never did put yourself out much, did you, Frank?’
    Finding his arms folded – classic defence stance – Bliss let them drop.
    ‘It’s not
that
frigging convenient. Couple of hours each way, and with