The Jonah Read Online Free PDF Page B

policeman, PC Sherman, knelt over the squirming boy, shrieks from inside the house distracted him. By then, several neighbours had joined him in the garden and, giving orders for someone
to call an ambulance, the constable approached the house, two of the neighbours going with him. They had to get in through the back door and they found the boy’s mother crouching beneath the
kitchen table, her hands covering her eyes as though she were afraid to see. They tried, gently at first, to pull her out, but she resisted with a vigour that frightened all three men. She screamed
every time they tried to take her hands away from her face. The policeman left the two men with her and went in search of her husband. He found him in the sitting-room, in an armchair, smiling,
staring. The man pointed at the wall and the policeman turned to look; all he could see was a flower-patterned wallpaper. The man nodded enthusiastically, although his movements were slow,
dreamlike. The constable tried to speak to him, but only a soft crooning noise came from the man. When PC Sherman noticed the dilated pupils and Preece’s apparent serenity, he began to
understand what was happening. The boy, the mother, the father, were all in a state of trance. They had been either hypnotized or . . . Or drugged. That was it; they were tripped out. A bad trip
for the boy and his mother and, it seemed, a good one for the father.
    Shouts from the kitchen sent PC Sherman tearing back down the hallway. One of the neighbours was on the floor, a bewildered look on his face; the other was just disappearing through the open
doorway. The woman who had crouched under the table was gone.
    The policeman rushed to the back door and was just in time to see Mrs Preece running through the allotments behind the row of houses. He knew a footbridge crossed the narrow waterway that
separated the houses on the edge of the town from the open marshlands and guessed the woman was making towards it. She wasn’t. She plunged into the stream.
    Fortunately, the water was only a few feet deep, but the woman seemed determined to stay beneath the surface. It took the constable and another two neighbours at least five minutes to drag her
screaming from the water.
    The Preece family were swiftly taken to hospital where the constable’s guess was proved correct. The couple and their son were hallucinating and urine analysis showed traces of lysergic
acid in their systems. The effects gradually wore off some hours later, suggesting that the intake had not been too great or that the LSD had been diluted in some way. But the mother had suffered a
mental breakdown and, although she had been released from hospital two weeks later, her local GP was keeping a close watch on her.
    So how had it happened? How had a quiet family who had lived in the town all their lives without causing any bother, any scandal, any controversy, suddenly become involved with drugs?
Particularly with LSD, the more dangerous kind. The husband, who worked in the town’s boatyard, was known to enjoy a drink in the evening, but that was the extent of his high living. The rest
of his free time was usually spent on his allotment tending his vegetables. The mother was a timid sort of woman who worked part-time in the high street bakery and whose idea of a good night was to
watch the telly with a hot pot of tea by the fireside grate and a box of Milk Tray on her lap. The son was no problem, inconspicuous at school, helpful to his father on the allotment. After
interviewing them all – it had been several days before they could get any sense out of the woman – the CID from Leiston came to the conclusion that it was a freak incident, that there
was no way that the Preece family could be taking drugs. It had been a normal Tuesday evening for them: the boy had gone to meet his father from the boatyard, they had returned to the house, had
dinner, then settled down to watch television. Within the hour, the boy was