That Gallagher Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘the world’s your oyster’ was more of a curse than a compliment. Upon forwarding the email, Río had received a typically sanguine response. Adair was like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump , she decided, fixated on his Bubba Gump Shrimp Company . . . except farming oysters on the wild West coast of Ireland had to be a hell of a lot more challenging than shrimp fishing in the southern United States.
    What the hell. Mr Bolger was a grown man – he could do as he pleased and suffer the consequences. Río stuffed her phone back in her pocket, and resumed her inspection of the canvas nailed over the window.
    It was a naughty little siren of a painting. It had a naïve, dreamlike quality that reminded her of one of Rousseau’s jungle fantasies – especially when the eye wandered to that small, unexpected feral creature in the bottom left-hand corner. A ray of sun filtering through the glass set it aglow suddenly, lending it the jewel-like appearance of a mosaic. Río wanted it. Picking up a shard of slate from the floor, she used it to prise away the nails fixing the painting to the window frame. Then she rolled up the canvas and tucked it inside her jacket. She wasn’t stealing, she told herself. She was safeguarding the painting for Adair. If she left it where it was, it would soon be destroyed by the damp sea air that seeped in through the bockety casement.
    The damp was infiltrating her bones, now – she wanted to get back outside to where the sun was pushing its way through raggedy cloud, dispersing rainbows. She made a last, quick tour of the house upstairs and down, snapping a dozen or so photographs that she could attach to an email and send to Adair as evidence of his idiocy. In the kitchen, she even took a couple of shots of the empty whiskey bottles littering the room – proof of how old Madser had been driven to drink, and a premonition of the fate that might befall the new owner. But as she went to leave by the back door, she looked over her shoulder at the picture window beyond which the light bounced straight off the sea into the living space, and she knew that Adair Bolger – whose glass was always half-full – would somehow find a way to be happy in this house.

Chapter Two
    Cat was lying in a sun trap on the flat roof of the house. She’d soaked every single item of clothing she possessed in the oversized bath, she’d soaped herself from head to toe in the blue marble wet room before towelling herself dry with her scrap of microfibre towel, and now – damp hair spread out around her like a nimbus – she was allowing the midday sun to do the rest of the work. Above her, gulls were wheeling in a hypnotic spiral, reminding her of the whirligig seeds that used to drop from the branches of the sycamore tree her mother had planted in the garden of the Crooked House, her childhood home. How different two houses could be! This house was all steel and glass and acute angles: the Crooked House was all ramshackle and bockety and – well – crooked.
    Slap-bang in the middle of a forest, overlooking a lake, the Crooked House could have been a magical place for a child to grow up. Cat remembered children coming to visit, the sons and daughters of her parents’ friends all bubbling with excitement as they explored the secret rooms and winding passageways within its walls, the bosky tunnels and hidey-holes without. The jewel in the crown – the treat that Cat liked to delay showing off to new friends until the very end of her guided tour – was the treehouse.
    Cat’s mum Paloma had built the house in an ancient cypress tree, when Cat was seven. It had been a surprise for her birthday that year, and Cat had never had a better birthday present, before or since. The flat-pack playhouses and designer dens of other children seemed mundane in comparison.
    The floor of Cat’s eyrie was a wooden platform, the walls constructed from something her