Stop Me Read Online Free PDF

commitment tussle. ‘Molly and Greg haven’t seen you in ages.’
    ‘I know. I did call in for their birthdays.’ He recalled how they’d both clung to his legs as he’d left.
    ‘That was August.’ Matty jigged his foot between the bottom of the railing.
    ‘Let me have a look at the rota.’
    ‘Look, everyone’s concerned about you, OK?’ Matty turned and made significant eye contact with him. ‘Everyone.’
    It was a good performance but Leo knew it was just Matty acting in a way he knew he was supposed to. He was learning and it was well intentioned, but Leo just couldn’t take it coming from him.
    ‘Let me have a look at the rota when I go in tonight.’
    ‘OK, but phone us tomorrow. I’m telling them you’re coming, OK?’
    Leo was relieved that it was once again down to the vagaries of telephones and missed calls. He waved Matty off soon after.
    If he doesn’t beep the horn then she’s not in pain.
    Matty did.

C HAPTER 6
    Cleaves watched Matty pull away from the house and Leo closing the front door. He’d seen Matty visit him before but registered that it had been some time since his last social call. Now Leo was inside again he put the fan on to clear the condensation from the windscreen.
    Leo’s existence seemed to follow the same pattern. Work, sleep, clean the house, interspersed with sporadic visits to the supermarket and the barber’s. It looked like another carbon-copy surveillance day. And as Cleaves tore off half a stick of breakfast gum and chewed it in the side of his jaw that didn’t ache, he didn’t suspect that the next twenty-four hours would compromise the position and identity he’d carefully maintained for all the months he’d been watching Leo.
    * * *
    Leo glanced around the seventies décor of the living room. It was now fifteen months since Laura had vanished and nothing had changed. The Christmas streamers were still up and the pea-green walls still sported blotches of test pot paint, the winning colour’s re-enforcements purchased and waiting unopened in tins under the stairs. Everything was now more pristine and polished than it had ever been when Laura had lived here but it wasn’t right that he should finish their colour scheme alone.
    The house was nothing more than a routinely maintained showroom but it reminded him that Laura was still unmistakably present. Not just in the photos of them together that hung from walls and stood on the cupboard and TV unit. Everything echoed her, from the layout of the room to the empty, handmade fruit bowl in the middle of the dining table that had her name kiln-fired into the bottom.
    He felt a heaviness in his head and realised that his breathing had got louder. The prescription sleeping pills had waited patiently for his brother to leave but now the adrenaline had ebbed they were demanding his full attention.
    He lingered though; feeling like he’d broken into someone else’s house, and Laura observed him from all angles. She wasn’t the most successful photographer’s subject; her dark brown eyes were slightly narrowed by a stagy, lopsided smile in all the pictures. However thegentle mischief that played above the band of freckles that extended in a strip across the bridge of her nose was present in all of them. And when he looked at her laughing he could hear her peculiar way of not laughing, the sound trapping in her throat and her shoulders silently quaking.
    He headed for bed but when he got there he swung the laptop onto this knees.
    Password: howdy doody
    * * *
    Doctor Mutatkar sat with his family at dinner but heard none of what was being said. It was a common state of affairs and he’d long learnt how to disguise it. It used to be easier. With such a workload his wife was quick to blame his preoccupation on the pressures of his job but lately she sat opposite and waited for him to emerge from his reveries with a look that probably mirrored his.
    His mind was still in the other place, the place he’d much rather be