The dead of Jericho Read Online Free PDF Page B

sharp. 'Perhaps you'd like to tell me, would you, Walters, exactly what this sudden interest in Morse is all about?'
    As well as he could remember them, Walters repeated the questions that Morse had asked him; and Bell listened in silence, his face showing no outward sign of interest or surprise. The fact of the front door being open was certainly a bit unusual, he realised that; and there was, of course, the question of who it was who'd rang the police and how it was that he (or she?) had come to find the grim little tragedy enacted in the kitchen behind him. Still, these were early hours yet, and many things would soon be clear. And what if they weren't? It could hardly matter very much either way, for everything was so pathetically simple. She'd made a neatly womanish job of fashioning a noose from strands of household twine, fastened the end to a ceiling-hook, fixed deep into the joist above to support a clothes-rack; then stood on a cheap-looking plastic-covered stool — and hanged herself, immediately behind the kitchen door. It wasn't all that uncommon. Bell had read the reports some dozens of times: 'Death due to asphyxia caused by hanging. Verdict: suicide.' And he was an experienced enough officer — a good enough one, too — to know exactly what had happened here. No note, this time; but sometimes there was, and sometimes there wasn't. Anyway, he'd not yet had the opportunity of searching the other rooms at all thoroughly; and there was every chance, especially in that back bedroom, that he'd find something tohelp explain it all. Just the one thing that was really worrying — just the one thing; and he was going to keep that to himself for the present. He'd said nothing to Walters about it, nothing to the police surgeon, nothing to the ambulance men — and, for the last hour, as things were slowly straightened out inside the kitchen, nothing much to himself, either. But it was very strange: how in heaven's name does a woman stand on a flimsy kitchen stool and then, at that terrible, irrevocable second of decision, kick it away from under her so that it lands, still standing four-square and upright, about two yards (well, 1.72 metres, according to his own careful measurement) from the suspended woman's left foot, itself dangling no more than a few inches above the white and orange floor-tiles? And that's where it had been, for it was Bell himself who had exerted his bulk against the sticking door, and there had been no stool immediately behind it: only a body, swaying slightly under the glaring light of the neon strip that stretched across the ceiling. A fluke, perhaps? Not that it affected matters unduly, though, since Bell was utterly convinced in his own mind (and the post mortem held the next morning was to corroborate his conviction) that Ms Anne Scott had died of asphyxiation caused by hanging. 'The police', as the Oxford Mail was soon to report, 'do not suspect foul play.'
    'C'mon,' said Bell, as he walked over to the narrow, carpeted stairs. 'Don't touch anything until I tell you, right? Let's just hope we find a note or something in one of the rooms. It'd pull the threads together all nice and tidy like, wouldn't it?'
    Bell himself, however, was to find no suicide note in the house that evening, nor any other note in any other place on any other evening. Yet there was at least one note which Anne Scott had written on the night before she died — a note which had been duly delivered and received...
     
    From number 10 Canal Reach, George Jackson continued to watch the house opposite. He was now 66 years old, a sparely built man, short in stature, with a sharp-featured face, and rheumy, faded-blue eyes. For forty-two years he had worked at Lucy's iron foundry in neighbouring Juxon Street and then, three years since, with the foundry's order books half-empty and with little prospect of any boom in the general economy, he had accepted a moderately generous redundancy settlement, and come to live in the