The Devil's Moon Read Online Free PDF

skirt and black tights. Facing away from him she bent over to rearrange some cards. Very nice. Very nice indeed. If she’d only turn round and bend over again so he could get the other view. As if there was a God and he had heard Hornby, she started to turn. That’s it, Rachel. That’s it. Thank you very much.
    It’s definitely true we have a sixth sense, Hornby reminded himself a moment later. For how many times when you’re staring at somebody – all right, ogling somebody – do they sense it and turn to look at you? So now Rachel suddenly raised her head and stared straight at him as he was enjoying the sight of her breasts scarcely constrained by that tiny black bra.
    He looked away, flustered, as she straightened. Then there was a crash of breaking glass somewhere in the downstairs gallery and the alarm went off.
    Afterwards, he rationalized his slow response by the confusion the unusual conjunction of events caused in him. He was focusing on what Rachel would think of him. He was, after all, some twenty years older than her. So, although he heard the glass shatter it wasn’t that loud and it didn’t immediately impinge. When the alarm went off at pretty much the same time, it jolted him – it made a horrible racket just above his head – but he didn’t associate it with the crash in the gallery.
    For one thing, that bloody alarm went off at random about twice a month. Usually it was someone opening the door between the gallery and the corridor separating it from the adjacent Dome concert hall.
    Hornby risked a look back at Rachel. She was standing with her hands to her ears, her face pained. ‘Probably a false alarm,’ he shouted, feeling like a man in command.
    â€˜Then can’t you shut it off?’ she shouted back.
    He reached behind him, fiddled with the key in the alarm control panel and reset a switch. The silence was immediate and almost shocking.
    Rachel lowered her hands, gave him a look he couldn’t read and retreated behind her till.
    Blake set his shoulders and hurried into the gallery. As he strode through he saw some people were standing around near the leather chair that was in the shape of a baseball mitt. Others, further down the long gallery, were looking at the exhibits as if nothing had happened.
    â€˜No need for alarm,’ he said to people as he walked by, brushing off a couple of women who tried to waylay him. At the far end of the gallery he turned left and, sure enough, the fire door was open. Before the Dome had been done up in the late nineties the museum had been linked by this door across a corridor to what was then the central library and was now the concert-hall bar.
    He walked into the corridor and through the next doorway into the crowded room. There was some sort of pre-festival event going on. He scanned the room but didn’t actually have a clue what he was looking for.
    He came back into the museum and closed the fire door by its bar. On his way back through the gallery some of the visitors seemed to be giving him odd looks. As he neared the claw-footed table a prissy-looking woman he’d ignored en route to dealing with the problem of the door shook her head and pointed at the large glass case behind the table.
    Inside the glass case was a tableau. Another stupid chair – this one in the shape of a purple flower of some sort – the Mae West sofa and an odd-shaped coffee table bearing silver coffee pots and paraphernalia and ceramic stuff.
    It all seemed to be there. With something extra, in fact. A brick lying wedged between Mae’s lips. And a big hole in the centre of the glass with jagged cracks radiating from it.
    Jack Lawrence, the public relations director for the Southern police force, was coming out of the chief constable’s office as Sarah Gilchrist walked into the outer room, her raincoat folded inside out over her arm. She was feeling self-conscious in a new trouser suit. Her usual