The Runaway Read Online Free PDF

massive television.’ Stella gave a sigh. Then she surprised herself: ‘I don’t want to go.’
    â€˜Don’t then.’ This time the lady crushed out her cigarette on the wall behind them. It made a smudge on the brick, dark against green slime. She wiped it off with the tip of her finger as Stella would have done. Then she threw it on to the mud at her feet, which Stella would never do. It lay a few centimetres from the first cigarette.
    â€˜My advice: don’t do anything you don’t want to,’ the lady said.
    This was the opposite of any advice Stella had ever been given.
    â€˜Although fancy dress sounds good.’ The lady walked round in a circle. ‘Bloody funny, you all going as police. I’d enjoy seeing that!’
    â€˜It’s not fancy dress.’ Stella was puzzled.
    â€˜You said it was a police party.’
    â€˜It’s real police. My daddy is a detective.’ Stella winced; she didn’t say ‘daddy’ any more; it was babyish. She added, ‘He solves things, which is why my mum says he’s never at home.’
    The lady stepped into the middle of her circle of footprints. ‘A detective? What’s his name?’
    â€˜Detective Inspector Terry Darnell. He’s just been promoted,’ Stella said without thinking. She was not supposed to tell a stranger her name.
    â€˜Is that your name too?’
    â€˜Terry?’
    â€˜Darnell.’ The lady was looking at her.
    â€˜Yes, I’m called Stella.’
    â€˜Never think that all the bad people are men; women can be bad too.’
    â€˜Isabel Ramsay is my name.’ She shrugged inside her coat as if Stella had asked her and she didn’t want to say. ‘I do hope your dad doesn’t ask you questions that make you feel guilty when you’re not?’
    â€˜No, he doesn’t.’ Stella was prompt.
    â€˜Most people have secrets, Stell. Secrets mean they lie even if they haven’t done the crime. Your job is to root out those secrets – like weeds – and get to the root of the matter.’
    â€˜He says to ask the right questions,’ Stella maintained stoutly. ‘So you get to the root of the matter. Like a weed.’
    â€˜What if you don’t want to get to the damned root? Sometimes it’s best to leave roots underground where they belong.’ Mrs Ramsay’s silver cigarette lighter flashed in the sunlight as she turned it over in her palm.
    â€˜My mum says Dad treats everyone as a suspect.’ Stella’s memory was jolted. ‘He brought a little girl back who had run away. I wasn’t born then,’ she added, for that was critical. The story of the Runaway Girl – another bedtime tale she frequently demanded – was unusual in that Suzanne Darnell also told it to her daughter. Intended as cautionary, the story of a girl lost in Hammersmith, far from those who cared about her, intrigued and unnerved Stella. The girl had told her dad that she had moved house and wanted to go back to the bedroom she had shared with her brother. Unlike the girl, Stella had lost Hector. She couldn’t go home.
    â€˜Did he treat her as a suspect?’ Mrs Ramsay – Stella considered her too grand to be ‘Isabel’ – was asking.
    â€˜No, he was kind to her.’
    â€˜My children’s father is a doctor. People say he’s kind.’ Isabel Ramsay pouted her lips. ‘He sees us all as his patients.’ She tilted her face to the sun and blew out another circle of smoke. ‘He’s a better bet than Mark Phillips.’
    â€˜My mum says he’s a “ladies’ man”,’ Stella remembered.
    â€˜Your mum is right. Horsey Anne had better canter close if she wants to keep him.’
    Stella looked at her boots. ‘I have run away.’
    In the silence that followed it was possible to pick out the distant drone of traffic on the main road, a horn, an aeroplane. The