Orchestrated Death Read Online Free PDF

never went anywhere together any more, and that was
     more or less true, not only because of his job, but because they no longer liked doing the same kind of things. He liked eating
     out, which she thought was just a waste of money. And she liked playing bridge, for God ’s sake!
    Actually, he was pretty sure she didn’t like bridge, that she had only learned it as the entrée to the sort of society to
     which she thought they ought to belong. The Commissioner and his wife played bridge. He didn’t say that to her of course,
     when she badgered him to learn. He just said he didn’t like card games and she said he didn’t like anything, and he had found
     that hard to refute just for the moment. His concerns seemed to have been whittled down to work, and slumping in front of
     the telly for ten minutes before passing out. It was years since he had stayed awake all the way through a film. He was becoming
     a boring old fart.
    Of course, that wasn’t congenital. He had lots of interests really: good food and wine and vintage cars and gardening and
     walking in the country and visiting old houses – architecture had always been a passion of his, and he used to sketch rather
     well in a painstaking way – but there just didn’t seem to be room in his life any more. Not time, somehow, but room, as if
     his wife and his children and his mortgage and his job swelled like wet rice year by year – bland, damp and weighty – and
     squeezed everything else out of him.
    No Brownie points tonight, then. No peace either – the living-room was occupied by the babysitter, who was watching a gameshow
     on television. A ten-second glance at the screen suggested that the rules of the game comprised the contestants having to
     guess which of the Christian names on the illuminated board was their own in order to win a microwave oven or a cut-glass
     decanter and glasses. The applause following a right answer was as impassioned as an ovation for a Nobel-prize winner.
    The babysitter was fifteen and, for some reason Slider hadnever discovered, her name was Chantal. Slider regarded her as marginally less competent to deal with an emergency than a
     goldfish, and this was not only because, short of actual self-mutilation, she had done everything possible to make herself
     appear as ugly and degenerate as possible. Her clothes hung sadly on her in uneven layers of conflictingly ugly colours, her
     shoes looked like surgical boots, and her hair was died coke-black, while the roots were growing out blonde: a mind-numbing
     reversal of the normal order of things which made Slider feel as if he were seeing in negative.
    To add to this, her eyelids were painted red and her fingernails black, she chewed constantly like a ruminant, and she wore
     both earrings in the same ear, though Slider assumed that this was fashion and not absent-mindedness. She was actually quite
     harmless, apart from her villainous appearance, and her parents were decent, pleasant people with a comfortable income.
    She looked up at him now with the intensely unreliable expression of an Old English sheepdog.
    ‘Oh, hullo, Mr Slider. I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said, and a surprising hot blush ran up from under her collar. She fingered
     her Phurnacite hair nervously. She was in fact desperately in love with him, though Slider hadn’t twigged it. He had replaced
     Dennis Waterman in her heart the instant she discovered that Dennis Waterman was married to Rula Lenska. ‘Shall I turn this
     off?’
    ‘No, it’s all right. I won’t disturb you. Where are the children?’
    ‘Matthew’s round his friend Simon’s, and Kate’s in her room reading.’ They eyed each other for a moment, trapped by politeness.
     ‘Shall I fix you a drink?’ Chantal asked suddenly. It was like a scene from
Dynasty.
Slider glanced around nervously for the television cameras.
    ‘Oh – er – no, thanks. You watch your programme. Don’t mind me. I’ve got things to do.’
    He backed