The Girl Next Door Read Online Free PDF Page B

life.”
    “Well, I don’t think so. I’d have said we’ve had a happy life, not very adventurous, but those sort of lives are full of trouble. We haven’t committed adultery or gone in for domestic violence or anything like that. We’ve brought up our children decently. What’s wrong with that?”
    “Nothing,” he said, but he thought, Everything.
    He took a pack of smoked salmon out of the fridge and made scrambled eggs to go with it while Rosemary pinned and then tacked up the sleeves of the dress she had been making for Freya that morning.

    G EORGE B ATCHELOR COULD manage an invoice or a receipt, but when it came to a letter, he got Maureen to do it for him. She took the photograph of George and Stanley and Norman and Moira and the possible Bill Johnson to the instant-print place in the High Road and had it photocopied. She addressed her letter with enclosure to “The Chief Investigating Officer, the Metropolitan Police,” and took it to the police station in Forest Road herself. Once she was there, she might as well pay the monthly or sometimes weekly visit to Clara Moss, who lived higher up the road. It was a call of duty, not pleasure, and George usually did it. He didn’t mind it, enjoyed it, Maureen thought. But he wouldn’t be able to do it until his leg was better, so she had taken over. He said it was the least he could do for poor Clara, but Maureen knew it made him feel quite young or at least middle-aged. Though he was old, Clara was even older, must be getting on for ninety.
    Maureen pounded on the knocker because Clara was deaf. She came to the door without her stick because she could hold on to the furniture. She said, “Hallo, Mrs. Batchelor,” and Maureen said, “How are you, Clara,” and stepped over the threshold into the small, dark living-room.

    N ORMAN WAS STILL staying with his brother and sister-in-law at Carisbrooke, York Hill, and running his bulbs-and-seedlings mail-order company on his smartphone while in constant communication with Eliane, whom he spoke of as his “lady partner.” George continued to sit on the sofa with his bad leg up, except when the physiotherapist came and put him through his paces. In the privacy of their bedroom he told Maureen that he was sure Norman stayed and stayed in order to have someone to complain to about the state of this country.
    “He hasn’t got a woman here, has he?” Maureen asked.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised. He always liked two strings to his bow. Better ask Stan. Stan always knows things like that.”
    “I forgot to tell you. Stan’s got a new dog. And after him saying he wouldn’t have another in case he passed away and it pined. It’s a puppy, this one, coal black. Not a bit of white on it but it’s calledSpot. All the rest have been Nipper. I reckon Spot was the only other doggy name Stan could think of.”

    I NITIALLY QUITE KEEN on the job of finding out the provenance of the Warlock hands, as they were starting to be called, Detective Inspector Colin Quell lost interest when forensics discovered their age. If they had been two or three years in the ground, some challenging investigation would have had to be done, but they turned out to be sixty or seventy years old. This man and this woman had, fairly obviously, been killed. No one, not even a crazy person—a crazy undertaker?—removes the hands from the bodies of those who have died naturally. No one buries those hands away from their mutilated bodies. Still, he had been assigned the case and he had to do it, no matter that the perpetrator—the killer and dissector—must have been long dead himself.
    Quell had received a number of phone calls from people he defined as nuts, psychopaths, and lunatics, describing the find under Warlock as the result of witchcraft, a butcher practising his craft, and the remains of two visitants from outer space. He had received only one letter because few people wrote letters anymore. It was nearly as crazy as the phone call about