North Sea Requiem Read Online Free PDF

freezing, I can’t stand the smell o’ death. He was a gravedigger because his father had had the job before him, and after the war you took what work you could get.
    The policeman nodded, the lid was replaced, the coffin secured. The men returned to the mortuary van and drove away. The policeman followed with no thanks, no explanation, no information offered to the gravediggers—not that they expected any from a policeman.
    â€œSo what did they find do you think?”
    â€œSearch me,” Double Donald replied to. They began to fill in the hole, making it as neat as possible; they took pride in their profession.
    No one saw Hector. He was a little up the steep side of the volcanic plug around which the cemetery spread, hiding behind a cyprus. He had a lens that looked like an admiral’s telescope. And a roll of fine though gruesome shots.
    An exhumation being highly unusual, the story and the speculation ran for a third week. Then the leg was reburied alongside the body of the retired clerk. Double Donald and his assistant were not happy about digging the grave for a third time. Donald helped with the spadework but made his assistant open the coffin lid whilst he went for a cigarette some distance away. The smell reached him all the same.
    The police, the shinty community, the readers of the Gazette, the general population, and Rob McLean and Frankie Urquhart continued to be curious. The event was fast becoming one of the tales shinty lovers and players shared during the after-game drinking sessions and fund-raising events. Some even cut out and framed the front pages of the Highland Gazette and hung them in the clubhouse.
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    March soon came around. Once more there was a lack of good stories to fill the pages, but there was an abundance of advertising. The whole team was around the table discussing the next edition, particularly the ratios.
    â€œWe can’t continue like this,” Don complained. “Soon we’ll have more advertising than editorial.”
    Mal Forbes overheard the remark and said, “What’s wrong with that?”
    Joanne rolled her eyes and said, “We are a reputable newspaper, here to tell the news—not just sell newspapers.”
    â€œAnd here’s me thinking we’re a commercial enterprise that delivers information—and that is what advertising is, information,” Mal said. “Besides, it’s the advertising that pays the wages.”
    As always, he was right, and as always she found him irritating in his rightness. The conversation continued around her, washing over her like the distant sound of children in the playground. She was looking up through the rain-streaked window. She saw clouds—phantasmagorical creatures, sometimes threatening, sometimes playful, always interesting.
    For her, March was cloud-racing season, and these North Sea clouds were superb at the hundred-yard dash. From east to west they would run, down the glens, following the fault line of Loch Ness, Loch Lochie, Loch Oich, to Ben Nevis, where, colliding with the mountain, they dissolved, weeing on the town and surrounding hills. The remnants—the victors—would tear off across the Western Isles to join the big bullyboys of the Atlantic.
    â€œSo we’re agreed then?” McAllister asked.
    â€œAye,” the others replied.
    â€œFine,” Joanne said. But she had no idea what she was agreeing to and assumed that nothing could be worse than more recipes and no one was interested in a story about clouds.
    It was only after the meeting was over and everyone gone that she realized nothing had been said about her article on Mae Bell.
    That means it must be boring, she told herself.
    When the Gazette came out, she saw that Don had put the article on a right-hand page, separate from the Women’s Page and with a picture of the missing aircraft culled from the archives. Her first reaction was pleasure; her