Midnight Murders Read Online Free PDF

moustache. He was quiet, softly spoken, and dressed casually in jeans or black slacks with sweaters – and his sweaters were the first thing that people noticed about him.
    They were wild, colourful affairs, some mirrored abstract modern art; others illustrated with animals and scenery. The one he’d chosen to wear that Monday morning depicted ferocious-looking black and white rabbits gambolling over a background of bright-red grass, sprinkled with green and purple daisies. And the most amazing thing about Spencer Jordan’s sweaters was he knitted them him himself, between art classes.
    â€˜Good sketch, Trevor.’ Spencer glanced over Trevor’s shoulder as he stood silently rubbing pastels on to an easel propped in the darkest corner of the room. ‘I like the background colours. I take it that’s the same lady we’ve seen before, long dark hair, grey eyes. Am I allowed to know who she is?’
    â€˜A figment of my imagination.’ Trevor picked up a grey pastel to darken the clouds above her head.
    â€˜Pity. She looks like the kind of person I’d like to get to know.’ Spencer stood behind Trevor for a few moments, inviting further conversation. When none came, he moved on to the next easel, where his youngest male patient, Michael Carpenter, was working on a chocolate-box picture of a country cottage. Straw-thatched roof, roses climbing around a peaked wooden porch, small leaded-glass windows and, sitting dead centre of the picture, an auburn-haired girl clutching a bunch of bluebells on her Laura Ashley clad lap.
    Just as Trevor Joseph always sketched dark-haired women, so Michael Carpenter always painted girls with short auburn curls. Spencer knew Trevor was a police officer suffering from depression after receiving life-threatening injuries. He had no idea where the dark-haired lady fitted into his past, if indeed she did, but he knew about Michael’s lady.
    Michael’s sole topic of conversation was Angela and Angela was the reason he was in Compton Castle. Michael had been a bank clerk with no interests other than work, his girlfriend Angela, and building his model railway. When Angela told him there was someone else in her life and she wanted out of their relationship, he couldn’t take it. He began to stalk her and her new boyfriend. He took to camping out at night in her parents’ garden whenever she stayed in. Threats and warnings from her family and the police, the supportive concern of his own family – none of it had any effect.
    One night, an hour after the last light had been switched off in Angela’s house, Michael had cut a hole in the dining room window, set fire to rolls of newspaper he had brought for the purpose, and pushed them through the hole so they’d land on the carpet close to the drapes. The room had been ablaze in a matter of minutes and, if it hadn’t been for the timely intervention of a retired police officer neighbour who had seen the flames through his living room window, the family would have burned to death in their beds.
    Michael had arrived at Compton Castle, via the courts, prison, and an order that he undergo therapy. But Spencer was beginning to doubt whether the treatment Michael was receiving offered a solution to his problem. Michael had been attending his art class for six months, and he was still drawing idyllic cottages with his ex-girlfriend sitting in the garden. Sooner or later Michael had to accept that Angela was no longer part of his life – and wouldn’t be, ever again. While he continued to reject that concept, he may as well resign himself to living out the rest of his life in an institution.
    â€˜Spencer, look at my work please.’ Alison Bevan, a professional mother suffering postnatal depression after the birth of her ninth child, the result of her fourteenth “serious” relationship in as many years, fluttered her sparse eyelashes at him. Spencer walked over to her