Pain of Death Read Online Free PDF

her.’
    ‘Then who loved her?’ says Staffe. ‘You can love someone too much, can’t you, Sean? What about family?’
    Sean looks at his feet, looks cagey. ‘You want me to do your job for you?’
    ‘You want us to find who did that to Kerry, don’t you?’
    ‘And you’ll release me – if I help?’
    ‘He should be with his wife,’ says Buchanan.
    ‘Tell us,’ says Staffe.
    ‘She has a sister, Bridget,’ says Sean.
    ‘Maybe Kerry went to stay with her, when she left you.’
    ‘They don’t get on.’
    ‘Where does she live?’ Staffe hands him a piece of paper and a pen. ‘And what about any friends Kerry has? Special friends.’
    Sean shakes his head. ‘I’d be the last to know. I always was.’
    ‘Why did you stay with her?’
    ‘Because I can’t leave her. I tried once, but I can’t be without her.’
    ‘My client has co-operated fully,’ says Buchanan. ‘His wife is in hospital and there is no evidence that he has had any contact with her since he reported her missing nearly three months ago. He hasn’t had a proper meal …’
    ‘So take him, Stanley,’ says Staffe. ‘Take him for a pub breakfast in Smithfield Market. Jom will sign him out.’
    *
    Staffe looks at the address for Kerry Degg’s sister, Bridget Lamb: 16 The Green, Thames Ditton. ‘Shit,’ he says. He knows the house, less than half a mile from where he grew up. It is a smart place. A different world from Flower and Dean.
    As he drives to Degg’s house, he rings Josie. Her voice sounds gluey and he can tell she has been crying. ‘How is the baby?’ he asks.
    ‘They’ve put her on life support. They say they can’t increase the dosage for the infection. She can’t take it.’
    ‘Try and get some sleep, Josie.’
    ‘Good night, sir.’
    It is a bright spring morning.
    Staffe flips through his notebook, runs his finger down to the name of Paul Asquith of the Underground Victorians. He calls the number, apologises for the hour, but needn’t have worried. When he asks if Asquith would mind terribly helping him with a further investigation of the Smithfield tunnel, the amateur historian actually gasps with uncontained pleasure.
    *

    The deeper Staffe scratches at Sean’s house, the more he realises that he isn’t close to understanding Kerry Degg, née Kilbride. Apart from her book collection, which includes first editions of Philip K. Dick and Angela Carter, he soon uncovered notebooks full of poems and sketches; untravelled charts of life-affirming journeys, by foot, across the continents of Africa, Asia and South America. There were self-scrawled vocab books for Spanish and French, and he flicked through the Spanish one, gleaned from the familiar shapes of the foreign words that she was of an intermediate standard.
    He sits cross-legged by her desk in the bedroom and reads her poems, soon gathers that they follow two themes: the futility of the search for a perfect love; and the loneliness of her childhood.
    Staffe doesn’t know how long he has been here, reaching into this dying stranger’s life, but when he hears a creak in the hall, he looks at his watch, realises he will be late for Asquith. Without looking up, he says, ‘You done, Pulford?’
    The springs on the bed behind him heave and when he looks up, he sees not Pulford’s long legs or trendily sculpted hair, but the hunched and emaciated frame of Sean Degg, who talks to the floor: ‘She never let me into her notebooks. And I never looked. I could have, but I didn’t. Nobody knows her like I do. Does she write me in a bad light?’
    Staffe closes the book. He can’t work Sean Degg out. To look at him, you might think he is a low-life loafer, scruffily dressed and unkempt. But the things he says suggest someone else. ‘In this job, it sometimes pays to think ill of people. It’s an instinct.’
    ‘So she did write ill of me?’
    ‘She writes ill of herself and of love and her childhood. If it is her wish that you don’t read them, you