The Blood That Stains Your Hands Read Online Free PDF

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    There have been one or two others since then, although no one from the station. Don't think there's anyone left that there'd be any point in even trying. Mrs Lownes possibly. She's pretty fit, and actually older than me. But I believe there's a Mr Lownes, and she seems to have one of those comfortable, normal lives that some people have. The kind of lives where you have a house and a couple of kids and regular jobs, and life passes by without ever having casual sex with a fucked-up dickhead at the office.
    Despite my total paucity of spirit, every now and again something edges through. The occasional strong feeling pushes its way to the surface. Of course, it's never joy, never excitement, and by God it's never expectation.
    Anger. That's it. Always at other people, always at moments of total insignificance. Walking to the shops. Sitting in a queue of traffic. Overhearing people on the street, thinking, 'Jesus, you sound like such a dick. Shut up!' In supermarkets. I get angry in supermarkets. You're walking around with your little list in your head, you make for the frozen onions or the pasta or the grapes or the shower gel or the whatever the fuck, and fifty per cent of the time there's someone standing right in front of the pasta or the frozen onions or the grapes, studying them, trying to decide precisely which packet to buy, and you stand there, and you know that if the person is over eighty, chances are you'll be standing like that for quarter of an hour, waiting for them to choose between linguine and cannavaro.
    But the thing is, of course, it's not as though you're ever standing there that long. It's not fifteen minutes, is it? Tops it'll be thirty seconds, and more than likely it'll be less than five. Yet, less than five seconds is all it takes. Such a minor inconvenience, such a base annoyance at others.
    The thought flashes through my brain, an instant image, of stepping forward, planting my fist in the back of their head, shouting, 'Get out the fucking way, you stupid fuck!' Comes out of nowhere. The image. The feeling. Like a snap of the fingers.
    So far, on the plus side of this malign affliction of my character, I haven't actually done it. And I hope, if I ever finally snap and lash out at someone, it's for something far more fundamentally deserving than taking a while to choose between blue or green milk.
    *
    T here's a peculiar feeling about searching through the things in the house of a pensioner. Nowadays so much searching and background checking is done on computers, and endless trawling through Twitter and Facebook and the rest of them. Suddenly, when you have to investigate the personal effects of an old person, it's like going back to the 1950s.
    All right, keep your toupee on old man, yes I know there are plenty of old geezers who use the internet. But line up a hundred teenagers and ask them how many have never used the internet, and you'll come away with a big fat zero. The over-70s? You're looking at thirty to forty per cent, and Maureen Henderson was one of them.
    Wednesday morning. Woke with a start, woke with the awareness of having been talking to someone, but the memory of it was gone in an instant.
    In to work, and then back out with Morrow. We spend a morning at Maureen's home, rooting through her things. There's still been nothing definite to indicate that she might have had her suicide thrust unwillingly upon her, the words of the minister aside, but going through the dusty old sideboards and the small desk, and the kitchen drawers crammed full of stuff, it's evident she was no stranger to a protest letter. There are, at any rate, a lot of defensive replies.
    Between us, Morrow and I have so far accumulated about fifteen names of people who'd had to write to her defending their position. Some of them were blunt, and some of them quite wonderfully offensive, but you get the feeling that was in response to the tone of Maureen's original.
    This is confirmed when Morrow finds an