The Excalibur Codex Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing of exquisite beauty that could be dangerous if not handled with care. She had enjoyed that. He dropped them on top of the coffin. One rose for a life extinguished on the very threshold of fulfilment. One for a tiny life that would never be lived. When he turned away the world was a blur.
    As he walked towards the cemetery gates he felt apresence at his side and an immaculately dressed man in his mid-forties took step beside him.
    Jamie acknowledged Adam Steele with a polite nod. ‘I didn’t see you in the crowd, but thanks for coming along.’ He wished the tone matched the sentiments, but the other man would understand. A friend since the Cambridge days when Steele had been one of his tutors – though friend was perhaps too strong a word for it – they’d had similar interests; art and languages. Jamie had eventually graduated with a First in Fine Arts, fluency in German and Spanish, and a working knowledge of Russian that was getting a little rusty. At first he’d found the antics of the public school set a bit overwhelming, but Steele gradually eased him into a group of acquaintances who’d been helpful since he’d set up his own art dealership and recovery business in a fourth-floor Old Bond Street office the size of a shoebox. Their paths diverged when the older man had inherited the better part of a substantial merchant bank and exchanged the leafy groves of academia for the dogfight of the City, but recently a shared hobby had brought them closer again.
    Steele pushed his hands deeper into the pockets of his cashmere overcoat and hunched his neck against the raindrops dripping from the cherry trees lining the path. ‘The notice said friends and family, so I thought I’d keep a low profile,’ he said. ‘She was a very special girl, and …’ He shrugged. Yes, Jamie thought, since the massacre there had always been an ‘and …’ Two weeksafter the horror on the M25 they still hadn’t finalized the number of dead. At least Abbie’s parents had been able to identify their daughter’s body and the police were sufficiently satisfied with the cause of death to release Abbie for burial. They were the fortunate ones, if you could call it that. There had been whole coachloads of bodies, all mixed together in a great carbonized mass as they died fleeing the bombs and the bullets. Some of the people closest to the exploding petrol tanker had been more or less atomized. Burnt-out cars might contain the remains of one cremated body or four, only forensics would ever tell, and that would take time. Meanwhile, the families waited. He’d heard that just one body in four had been formally identified, leaving hundreds praying that their missing father, son or daughter was one of the still anonymous burns victims lying in a coma, or taken to a hospital so overwhelmed by the number of casualties that they couldn’t keep up with the paperwork.
    He stopped abruptly as they approached the gate, frozen by the flicker of dozens of camera flashes that had Abbie’s distraught family trapped in their bright embrace. As he watched, Michael hustled his mother and father away from the pack of press photographers into the car that had carried Jamie to the funeral and it drove off.
    ‘Vultures,’ Steele muttered. Sensing Jamie’s anger, he took him by the arm and steered him away. ‘Why don’t we take a walk? I like cemeteries. People are at peace here.’The gravel path led them to the older part of the graveyard, where the moss-covered stones didn’t hold the same threat to mortality as the gleaming marble they’d passed. Here there were no carefully tended plots, or mini gardens with plastic flowers and gnomes, no children’s toys or gold embossed epitaphs, only time-worn inscriptions to men and women long gone, and well on the way to being forgotten.
    ‘She liked to take me dancing.’ Jamie gave a short, bitter laugh when he saw the startled look on Adam Steele’s well-fed features at the unlikely suggestion.