The Devil I Know Read Online Free PDF Page A

avenue opened out onto a familiar expanse of gravel. The pebbles formed a pale moonlit square at the foot of the castle steps. It was a long stretch to cross, a long and exposed stretch past all those looming windows.
    I doubled back down the avenue and ducked around the old tower to Mrs Reid’s apartments. Through the gap in her curtains I saw her sitting at her kitchen table with a magazine, feeding chocolate digestives into the slot of her mouth like documents into a shredder. Larney had claimed her as a distant cousin, an allegation she denied, although everyone from the village was related to everyone else. You weren’t a real local unless your mother was from your father’s side of the family.
    I tapped on the windowpane. Mrs Reid spilled her tea in fright. ‘It’s only me, Mrs Reid,’ I called to reassure her. A pause as she processed my voice.
    The porch light came on and she opened the door a fraction, the safety chain tautened above her top lip like a brass moustache.
    ‘Hello, Mrs Reid.’
    She blinked in astonishment then shut the door in my face. I took an affronted step back. Then I heard the chain sliding across. Mrs Reid flung open the door and gathered me to her, just like in the old days. She was a good woman, a kind one, and most certainly a forgiving one. I am sorry to have dragged her name into this.
    ‘My poor pet,’ she crooned, ‘your hands are freezing.’
    ‘You didn’t think I was dead, did you?’
    ‘Tristram! What a question.’
    ‘But you didn’t, Mrs Reid, did you?’
    ‘No, of course not. Your mother told us before she passed away that it was another Tristram St Lawrence.’
    ‘Nobody told me she was dying.’
    Mrs Reid wasn’t willing to drag that whole ugly business up again, so she ushered me in to the warmth of her kitchen and set about producing dishes of food, trying as she had always tried to fill some hole she perceived in me, but I wasn’t hungry. The red door loured beside us, connecting her quarters to the castle proper. She glanced at it from time to time, wary of rousing the big bad ogre who lived on the other side. Surely the old bastard was deaf by now? What was he, after all – ninety?
    When the teapot was empty and our cups drained, Mrs Reid nodded at the clock over the stove. ‘You really should go in before he retires for the night,’ she advised me, standing up to clear away the plates. ‘He heads upstairs around midnight. I’d show my face before then if I were you. If he hears you stealing around in the night, he’ll take you for an intruder and shoot you on sight. You know what he’s like.’
    I did. I knew what he was like. Both of us knew what Father was like.
    *
    The connecting stone passage was littered with cigarette butts. He was still rolling his own. Mrs Reid was no longer able to bend down to pick them up, or perhaps she was no longer willing to bend down to pick them up, in the hope that Father might get the message and stop generating extra work, for he was a man who had never had to clean up after himself, being the last in a long line of patriarchs. He had sired me, his only child, at an advanced age with a considerably younger wife. His initial joy at fathering a son was short-lived. His disappointment in me, on the other hand, knew no limits.
    I knocked before entering the dining hall, and pushed open the door when I received no reply. The hall was dark and empty. I crossed over to warm myself by the fire. Even with it burning, even in May, that room was cold. I ran my fingers over the engraving on the architrave of the mantelpiece. Qui Panse ; ‘Which Heals’. The family motto.
    A commotion broke out as two setters exploded through the far door. They skidded to an aghast halt at the sight of me, then crouched and growled.
    ‘Get out of that!’ I commanded them, and although they were young dogs and had never laid eyes on me before, instinctively they understood that they should submit, and they flattened their long bellies