The Crack Read Online Free PDF Page A

ran towards it. A needle-thin shaft of sunlight danced over the acres of broken fuselage.
    Crashed spacecraft? Waters’s hand flew to his face in self-protection. Fall-out? A new interstellar virus escaping invisibly from the tortured cockpit? He walked cautiously towards it.
    â€˜A Jumbo,’ Waters’s third stepson announced in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘T.W.A.’ Adolf trotted up into the wreck and sniffed about in the remains of the galley, returning with a chunk of tournedos steak in his mouth. A smell of airline food accompanied him.
    â€˜I’m hungry!’ all the children shouted in unison. ‘Can we go up there, Daddy? Can we?’
    Before Waters had time to answer, they were scrambling into the stomach of the crashed plane. Adolf snapped ferociously as the first-class passengers’ larder was discovered, and its contents taken away from him.
    â€˜It’s not organic food,’ Greta cried. ‘Darling, stop them if you can!’
    But Waters was puzzling on the same problem that had confronted him all the way from Marble Arch. No people. No passengers on the plane. No one anywhere. He thought once again of the red circle. Had it come to suck all humanity from the planet, and missed out, by some extraordinary chance, the Waters?
    â€˜Matter and energy,’ he muttered to himself. Then he decided to tell his secret to his wife.
    â€˜That big red O.’ He paused solemnly. ‘You saw it? It is my belief –’
    â€˜That was the Odeon Marble Arch under there,’ Tommy pointed out. He turned up his transistor and prised open a tin of Persian caviar.
    â€˜O for Odeon,’ the youngest daughter trilled. ‘Ben’s buried in a cinema.’
    She gave a high laugh and Waters turned away, his heel scraping the edge of the Jumbo’s nose. A wave of sadness and despair filled him.
    The Nash terraces along Regent’s Park had been thrown several hundred feet in the air, so that they resembled a series of slides of the Acropolis in Athens.
    With a low murmur of appreciation, Greta got out her camera and started snapping. Waters wandered dejectedly away, skirting the fallen chestnuts in the big avenue.
    In the distance, like the sound of tons of water being released from a pent-up dam, something was rushing closer.
    At the foot of the splendid pillars of the ruin of Chester Terrace, Waters fell to the ground in fear.
    Another crashing Jumbo Jet? A real spacecraft this time?
    He closed his eyes and waited.

6 Baba Goes to Church
    By the time Baba reached the river, her head and her feet were aching so much that she had completely forgotten the strange death of Simon Mangrove. Following Medea seemed the obvious, natural thing to do.
    None of the women, who walked, Baba noticed, with an odd determination, as if their destination had been set for them centuries before and they had only just been permitted to reach it, paid any attention to the two robed analysts in their wake. Only one – a girl of about nineteen who told Baba she was called Noreen and worked as a waitress in the Hilton – burst out laughing when Thirsk and Harcourt subsided on to the ground at the corner of Flood Street and what had once been the Embankment.
    â€˜No place for them where we’re going,’ she said with another giggle.
    â€˜Why?’ Baba asked eagerly. ‘Where
are
we going anyway? I don’t think I can walk much longer,’ she added, close to tears.
    â€˜Can’t you
feel
where we’re going?’ Noreen said. She hugged her arms to her body in enthusiasm. ‘No more washing up. No more frilly aprons,’ she ran on in the quick trilling voice Baba found so attractive. ‘Same for you, Baba. No more serving drinks dressed as a rabbit. What do you think?’
    Baba reached behind and felt for her furry tail. It was hard to understand Noreen when she talked like this.
    â€˜What about the other women?’ she said.