Resurrectionists Read Online Free PDF

Lester had spent in prison for various minor misdemeanours. But Reverend Fowler found it difficult to trust someone who could so blithely drive from one end of the country to the other with a body in the boot of his car.
    Lester was on his feet now, looking around the office, picking up framed photographs and inspecting them. He always did this, and it always made Reverend Fowler nervous. The big man was just so confident, as if nothing frightened him. In contrast, the Reverend was painfully aware of his own physical weakness – he had ever been a small man – and of his own inability to be calm. He felt like a bird, tiny delicate heart beating frantically just in the business of living, while Lester was a deep-sea turtle. Which meant that in ordinary circumstances the crook would outlive him a hundredfold. But ordinary circumstances did not apply in Solgreve.
    “You mind me asking something, Rev?”
    He did mind. Lester always asked the same
    question. “What is it?”
    “Why is it a nice bloke like you . . . I mean, you’re a priest, yeah?”
    Reverend Fowler shrugged, turned his palms
    upwards.
    Lester came back to his chair, leaned forward on the ugly desk and asked earnestly, “What do you do with the bodies?”
    “Lester, you know I can’t tell you.”
    “But you seem like such a nice geezer.”
    “I am a nice . . . geezer. I’ve made a study of being so. It’s my job.”
    “The two don’t go together – you being so soft and then paying me to snatch bodies from morgues.”
    Even though nobody could hear them, Reverend Fowler felt the urge to shush him. If he had his way, they wouldn’t discuss the hows and whys of this project. Lester would come to him, take his money, then return in a week or two weeks with the necessary goods. But Lester was chatty, and the Reverend was too intimidated by him to try to shut him up. Another man might be able to be aloof, professionally cold, even arrogant. But Reverend Fowler was not that man.
    “I serve a power greater than myself,” he said simply. “That is all I can say.”
    Lester ran immense hands over his stubbly head.
    “I’ll never understand you, Rev. Still, I like working for you.” He pulled his massive body up to its full height and yawned immodestly. “I’ll have something for you in a week or two, yeah?”
    “Thank you, Lester. And I can count on your discretion?” One of his greatest fears was that Lester would gossip among his friends about the business here in Solgreve, about the kindly priest who ordered the occasional corpse.
    Lester nodded. “Of course you can,” he said, patting his jacket pocket. “You’ve paid for it.”
    Maisie was discovering the delights of attempting to shower under an alternately freezing gush or scalding trickle when the telephone rang the next morning. She quickly twisted off the taps, grabbed a towel, and dashed to answer it.
    “Hello?”
    “Good morning. It’s Perry Daniels.”
    “Oh, hi.” She heard the nasal twang of her accent for the first time in comparison with Perry Daniels’s perfect English pronunciation.
    “How was your trip?”
    “Traumatic.”
    “Yes, it’s a long way. But the phone is connected now, which is good. I tried to call once or twice last
K I M W I L K I N S
    night without much luck. I do apologise. I had organised for it to be working when you arrived but these things can be unreliable.”
    “It’s fine.” There it was again. Foine. How had she managed to get through her life so far talking like this?
    She had to work on her vowel sounds.
    “Now, do you know how long you’ll be staying?”
    Maisie turned and looked around the untidy room. It could take years. “That depends on how homesick I get. I intend to sort out my grandmother’s stuff at least. My return flight is booked for the fourteenth of February, but I don’t know if I’ll make it that far.”
    “If you stay that long, you’ll probably see some snow.”
    Snow. Her mind filled with fairytale