The Pure in Heart Read Online Free PDF

player was fitted. The park might be deserted now but places like this were easy targets for thieves whatever the season.
    An hour and ahalf later, he sat alone on the rock slab at the summit of the Peak. The March sun chased shadows like hares across the landscape below him. The air was clear and filled with the melancholy bleating of hundreds of the native long-fleeced sheep scattered over the hills.
    He felt idle. He had been up here times without number and drawn the peaks and the cloudscapes over them as well as the sheepin every season, every weather until, at least for now, there was nothing left for him to put his pencil to.
    Brooding, Cat had said. But now that he was up here he felt light-headed in the cool spring air and he did not brood. The sun was on his face. He rolled on to his back and crossed his hands behind his head. A single lark spiralled up into the blue sky and higher, to the whiteness beyond.

    Its trail of song was sliced into and drowned by the judder of a helicopter and its shadow fell across Simon’s face, blotting out the sun. He sat up, shocked. The thing was skimming the peaks in a whirl of metal blades. He saw its undercarriage, so close he might have reached up his hand to touch it and as he watched it cross the valley, going east, he could make out the outline of two of thefigures inside. It was neither the air ambulance nor a police helicopter but, so far as he could tell, a private one.
    As it moved across the landscape the terrified sheep fled up and down the slopes in all directions, trying to get away from the noise and the slipping shadow. The machine itself was well out of sight before the silence came down again.
    The lark’s song was severed.
    Simon pulledhimself to his feet and slung the canvas bag across his back. The intrusion of ugly sound and sight had fractured his peace and sense ofease as it had unsettled the sheep and silenced the bird.
    He took the path that led steeply down the Peak, following the fingerposts to Gardale.

Seven
    The bed was stripped, the mattress bare, the sheets and blankets piled by the door. There were pale shapes on the walls where his posters and calendar and photographs had been. His bag was by his feet, packed, zipped. Ready.
    He was ready.
    He’d been ready since six.
    Only he wasn’t ready, Andy realised. He was panicking. His stomach had dropped into his bowels twice and he’d had to makefast for the bog.
    He thought of the days and nights spent imagining this morning, planning for it, dreaming about it, counting the hours to it. And it had come and he was shit-scared of it.
    He understood why so many of them went out and chucked a brick through a shop window or grabbed a woman’s handbag. Anything to get back to safety, like racing back to touch ‘home’ in the playground when youwere a kid.
    It was different when you had people waiting for you, kids to rush up to you, a wife desperate foryou, you wouldn’t be able to see the back of this place fast enough then.
    He shook himself, got up and did thirty press-ups. He was fit; working out in the kitchen gardens and playing so much soccer and basketball had seen to that. Sweating, he lay back on the thin mattress. Right,he said, OK, you’re fit, and you’ve got a future out there.
    You hope.
    He rolled over on to his side and went back to sleep.
    The streets were awash and the gale was blowing so hard he could scarcely stand against it on the station platform. He went back inside the steamy buffet. The train was announced as running forty-five minutes late. Flooding on the line.
    People were talking about it. Hegot another mug of tea and a doughnut.
    An hour ago, he’d walked out of the prison gate carrying his bag, him and two of the others, but he’d got away from them fast; besides, they had people waiting for them. Families. He hadn’t expected ceremony but still he was shocked how quickly it had all been over. The things they’d been holding for him were spread out on the