Skydancer Read Online Free PDF Page B

arguments regularly at the dinner table when they had guests round, much to Janet’s annoyance. She hated to think of the horror that would be unleashed if such weapons were ever used, and preferred to shut her mind to the whole issue. To her there were innumerable more pleasant topics of conversation, and secretly she rather regretted that Alec had gained his last promotion.
    Nevertheless Janet adored her husband, devoting all her energies to him, their home, and their two girls aged seven and nine. She had never been academic by nature; much of her education had been directed towards learning the social graces. She knew she was in no way an ‘intellectual’ companion for Alec, and she loathed ‘women’s-libbers’, because they made her feel guilty at being so satisfied with the life she had chosen.
    Although content to have an adoring wife – and to anextent his ego demanded that his female companion should be his intellectual inferior – Anderson occasionally found that the mundane level of their conversation and her clinging lack of independence grated on his nerves. He longed secretly for the mental companionship he had experienced in his boarding-school, something he had never been able to recapture in his adult life. The closest he ever came to that now was his regular escape from domestic claustrophobia on Friday nights, when he would visit the local pub and relax with a group of male friends, drinking draught bitter and playing bar billiards.
    Suddenly, however, the world had become threatening. He was under suspicion. Friends were becoming enemies, and the bright future he had envisaged was now clouded by uncertainty. As he stared absently at his father’s old gold-plated pen-stand, and fiddled nervously with a bottle of ink, he realised how important to him were those three members of his family splashing the bathwater upstairs. Whatever their inadequacies, they were devoted to him, and he needed that devotion more than anything else.
    â€˜I’m sorry, darling. I had to see to the children,’ Janet bustled into the room, her sleeves rolled up and her arms still red from their immersion in the hot water. ‘Can I get you a drink or something? And how awful that you have to work this evening . . .’
    She stopped in mid-flow when she saw his face so drained of colour, and the haunted look in his eyes.
    â€˜Alec, you look dreadful,’ she exclaimed. ‘What on earth’s happened?’
    For a few seconds he stared at her without answering.
    â€˜Oh, it’s nothing much,’ he answered eventually, trying to smile confidently. ‘Just some papers that havegone missing from the office, and I’ve got to try to figure out how it happened.’
    Peter Joyce turned the car gently into the driveway to his house, anxious for the wheels not to scatter gravel on to the lawn, where it would blunt the blades of his mower. Built in the previous century, his home had originally been a small farm, but when Peter had bought the property it had been left with just over an acre of ground. During the years of their occupancy the Joyces had developed the land lovingly.
    At the side of the house he had built a double garage, one half of it occupied by a small sailing boat on a trailer, which Peter raced at a nearby lake during the summer months. The other garage space was empty. The Citroën was not there, so Belinda would not be at home to greet him. He parked his own car next to the boat, swung the jacket of his grey herring-bone tweed suit over his shoulder, and walked through the back door of the garage into the large rear garden. In the flower bed to the left, under the partial shade of an oak tree, the buds on the azaleas were setting well, ready for the following spring. He looked beyond them to the half-completed greenhouse at the far end of the lawn, and wondered when he would next find time to continue with its construction.
    â€˜Daddy!’ A yell