The Rage Read Online Free PDF

as he did several times a week. The need to fight a rearguard action against household disaster was a regular thing with Phil. ‘If the vent gets blocked, you’re asking for trouble. Lord knows what kinds of mould starts growing under the floorboards and next thing you know you’re smelling dry rot.’
    Phil and his wife Jacinta were even older than Maura, cresting eighty. They looked after the little house as though they were newly-weds tending a first love nest. ‘When the Tolka burst its banks – it was a long time ago, but the houses, you can still see the waterline in places. Boats, they had – they came down this street in little boats, it was so bad. Things like that, they leave their mark, even decades later.’
    Phil went into his house now, and came out a moment later with a yellow duster and a tin of something. He began to work patiently on the brass knocker, bringing up the shine.
    What happened was the oddest thing ever. The gloves, then the driver locking the car, his friend going to the front of the car, the driver to the back, and they both hunkered down and began working on something. She could see only the one at the back, and just the top of the other man’s head. Within seconds they stood up and walked away, down the street, past the Spar shop, then across onto the main road. And a day later the car was still sitting there outside Maura’s house.
    This wasn’t right.
    Ought to do something.
    And maybe make a fuss over nothing. The old woman making a commotion over something that ordinary people – real people with real lives – would take for granted.
    Two men park a car – maybe they didn’t know the area, they weren’t sure where the place was they were visiting, so they park somewhere, go off on foot to find the place they’re looking for. And there’s a reason, some reason, why they’re too busy to come back. Perhaps they drove away when she was asleep, came back before she got up, parked in the same spot.
    Much as she wanted to believe that, it didn’t seem likely.
    But it was wrong to simply presume they were up to something sinful.
    No good comes of jumping to conclusions.
    It was like the newspaper story she read about people who saw a Muslim man praying before he got on an airplane and they created a commotion, got the flight delayed and the Muslim taken off, so he missed his flight while they made sure he wasn’t a hijacker. Thirty years back, people in England heard an Irish accent, the first thing they thought of was maybe this is a bomber. She knew a priest – this was half a lifetime ago – who was pulled in by the police when he got off the boat at Holyhead, held for two days. No good comes of thinking the worst of people.
    Why couldn’t two men arriving in the same car have some reason that required them both to wear plastic gloves?
    Maura Coady had been standing at the window for the best part of an hour this morning, hoping the men would come back, drive away. She shouldn’t let another day pass without doing something. If the men had stolen the car, they could come back at any time, drive it away, maybe paint it, sell it – whoever owned it would never see it again.
    She forced herself to move away from the window. She stood at the kitchen sink for ten minutes, washing up. Then she made a cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table and opened her book. When she finished the tea she washed the cup and left it on the drainer. She went back to the front room. The dark green car was still there.
    The jury was removed from the courtroom while the defence put forward a motion to have the assault case thrown out. As the babble continued, Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey wanted to let his mind drift, but professional habits are demanding. Stay on top of the facts even through the boring bits and you’re ready for anything. He found himself parsing the defence lawyer’s argument, anticipating the prosecution’s responses. The conventions of the courtroom insisted on such jousts, in