The Dead Travel Fast Read Online Free PDF

some type of dark woollen cloak like the older island goat herders. His face was partly obscured by leaves so that he resembled a creature of the ancient forest, like the carving of a Green Man Steve had once unearthed on an excavation in Cornwall.
    This freezing of time was shattered by the sound of a siren. Steve daren’t turn his head to look, for fear that any movement would loosen his fingers’ precarious grip and the blood would begin to pump again. He couldn’t feel his fingers now and sweat was pouring down his forehead into his eyes making them sting; he felt like he once had in an assembly at school in the moment before he fainted, having stood for twenty minutes listening to the head teacher droning on. But he was aware how pale the young man was and how his breathing was faint and irregular, so the gentle touch on his shoulder took him by surprise. A paramedic moved next to him, looked carefully at the dying young man almost drained of blood then turned back to another medic behind him. The second man moved to the car and steadily placed two clips where Steve’s hands were and the first man gently steered Steve away.
    He leaned against a tree and tried to light a cigarette with shaking hands, saw two police cars arrive and their occupants run tothe accident; he saw his own car being moved to the side of the road. He heard, as if in a dream, one of the cops shouting and frenzied activity. Then there was someone beside him taking the unlit smoke out of his mouth. He looked down and saw that it was filthy with the blood from his hands. A fresh one was placed between his lips and lit for him.
    As he took a deep drag, the figure spoke one sentence then moved off to disappear into the wood, and Steve saw it was the Green Man who’d silently watched him. By the time the smoke was finished the medics, augmented by several others he’d not noticed arrive, wheeled the young man on a trolley, with a drip suspended over him, to the road and into the ambulance. A policeman came over to Steve and began to lead him.
    “You go with him to hospital.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you must.”
    By now he was at the step leading into the ambulance. He climbed in, the door shut behind him, the siren started and they moved off. He sat in shock as they gathered speed, his brain trying to make sense of what had happened to his day, and the things he could make least sense of were the words the Green Man had spoken before he merged into the trees.
    “You meddled with what you don’t know, for us and for you it would have been better to let him die.”

Chapter 3:
A Walk in the River
    Whilst Steve was entering the ambulance, the black police car he’d watched reached its destination. Theodrakis climbed out, feeling sweat sticking the fine silk shirt to his back. A local cop was trying to pacify a small crowd gathered in front of the police station. Pushing through them, he climbed the three steps and shoved the re-enforced glass plate doors which slid apart with a swish.
    This was a new building, concrete with tile cladding, built just before the economic crash and designed with an eco-friendly system of temperature control which had either broken down or been turned off as an efficiency saving. So the interior was no cooler than outside in the sun’s glare. He noticed, strictly against European regulation, each desk carried a whirring electric fan with a spider’s web of leads to the few accessible plug sockets that the vast open plan office provided. The desk’s occupants sat sweltering, shirts open, sipping at iced coffee or water, the only difference from a municipal police office of the past was that nobody smoked: that law apparently did apply here.
    Theodrakis guessed the number of empty seats indicated that smoking was happening elsewhere. He picked his way through the maze of desks, aware of all the eyes in the room following him as he passed through a set of double doors at the back. Behind the door was a corridor with a