The Dead Hour Read Online Free PDF

The blue matched her woolen Chanel suit, her earrings and watch. Lovely to be surrounded by lovely things.
    The Loch Lomond Road was quiet this morning. It was too cold for tourists, too rainy even for Germans. The summer crowds were hardly even a memory now. As she drove through the little settlements dotted along the bare road all the bed-and-breakfast signs had NO VACANCIES notices attached at the bottom. Kate came here every summer when she was young and knew the rota of visitors to the Loch, from the pasty-faced city dwellers who came on the bus for a day in a tea shop during the drizzly, midge-infested summer to the other old established families who, like hers, came to their holiday homes for Christmas and Hogmanay, trooping from one house to another bringing season’s greetings and good bottles of malt with them.
    He would probably suspect she’d come to the Balmaha cottage, and look for her there. She didn’t have keys for the front door but could easily break in around the back. She imagined herself in bra and stockings and garters, sitting on a chair in the hall, seductively smoking a cigarette as he opened the door. He’d love that, she smirked to herself, he’d go mad for that. She imagined the scene again, lowering the lights, making it at night, pulling her curly blond hair up but letting tendrils tumble about her shoulders and putting her glasses on. Sexy secretary. He loved that look. Unfortunately she didn’t have any of that sort of underwear with her.
    She was overtaking the lorry, a third of the way up the side, flicking the wipers on to smear away the spray from the tall tires, when she saw the red car coming straight toward her, twenty feet away and closing.
    “Shit!” Eyes wide, suddenly awake, she took her foot off the accelerator, slammed the brake, and managed to pull in behind the lorry so neatly that the red car narrowly missed clipping her near corner of the bonnet.
    “Shit!” She shouldn’t be driving, suddenly doubted her perception of space and time and safety. The lorry pulled ahead of her and Kate let the car slow to a stop, pulling into the side, not even waiting to find a resting place, just letting the car roll to a stop, the bonnet dipping into the ditch, crunching into a bank of shingle.
    Ahead of her the windscreen view was filled with sheer black rock, jagged and wet, covered in netting to stop loose boulders tumbling onto the road and making it any more treacherous than it already was.
    She had been awake for two days, driving around for a lot of that, and now realized that it was a wonder that she hadn’t killed herself. She needed to sleep. She hadn’t eaten either, now she thought about it. She would get to the cottage and have a bath. There were always some tins of ham in the cupboard. Some dried milk too, she could make up a jug and have some tea. She took deep breaths, well practiced at bringing her heart rate down. She was trembling. Her fingers were actually trembling with fright.
    Reaching over to the well of the passenger seat, she pulled up her navy blue handbag and sat it on the seat, feeling blind for the packet of cigarettes. She lit one. It wasn’t what she really wanted but she needed to slow down, calm down, keep steady. Get it together and drive to the cottage, have a bath. Eat some ham. Make milk from the powder in the cupboard. The police might pass her here and come to talk to her because the car was parked strangely. They’d recognize her, maybe, check the car, go into the boot.
    Kate took a drag on her cigarette and reminded herself that those things hadn’t happened. She had just imagined that they had. They hadn’t happened. Realizing that she didn’t know if she had been parked for a second or an hour, she turned the radio on to give herself a measure of the passage of time. Duran Duran. She liked them. Lovely suits. Tans, nice suntans. Princess Diana liked them too. She took another draw on her cigarette and imagined herself at a smart