The Taxidermist's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

sum we agreed.’
    ‘Best to be sure, sir. Saves any unpleasantness later.’
    Woolston was forced to watch as Joseph counted the coins, one by one, before slipping them into his pocket.
    ‘A couple of smokes to keep me going? Manage that?’
    Woolston hesitated, then handed over two cigarettes with barely concealed anger.
    ‘Your instructions are to stay here.’
    ‘It’s what you and your colleagues are paying me for, isn’t it?’
    Provoked beyond endurance, Woolston stepped forward. ‘Don’t make a mess of it, Joseph. This isn’t a game. If you do, I will break every bone in your body. Is that clear?’
    A slow, contemptuous smile appeared on his face.
    ‘Aren’t you forgetting something,’ he said, picking up the envelope and holding it in front of Woolston’s face. ‘Sir.’
     
    *
     
    Joseph listened to the doctor’s angry footsteps on the narrow wooden stairs. He waited until he heard the latch of the door at the bottom of the mill click shut, then made an obscene gesture with his fist.
    As if he’d be intimidated by so feeble a specimen as Woolston. Or even by the men behind him. Scared of his own shadow. He’d met plenty like him before, men who never got their hands dirty. Pillars of the community, so called. He’d had to bow his head to enough of them, up before the City Bench. Yet the instant there was trouble, they came knocking same as anyone else. Brothers under the skin.
    He cleared his throat, spitting the filaments of loose tobacco out of his mouth, then took one of Woolston’s cigarettes from behind his ear and lit it. Joseph didn’t care why he was being paid to spy on a wreck of a man and his daughter. Not his business. He turned the coins over in his pocket. He couldn’t deny the money was good.
    He smiled. It paid to listen.
    He blew a ring of smoke up into the air, pierced it with his finger, then blew another. Joseph made it his business to notice things. So he knew about the maid, Mary Christie, what time she arrived each day, what time she returned to the modest row of cottages nearby the pumping station where she lived with her widowed mother and kid sisters. That they were stalwart members of the congregation of St Peter & St Mary. He knew that Archie Lintott waited for the girl at the end of the lane every Saturday afternoon.
    He knew Gifford by sight from the Bull’s Head. He could have told Woolston where the man could be found most afternoons, between four and ten, slumped at the table in the corner. No need to set up surveillance on the house. But no one had asked him. And why do himself out of easy earnings?
    Joseph heard rumours about Blackthorn House, same as everyone. Stories of the stink of rotting flesh when the wind was in the wrong direction. How the workshop was filled floor to ceiling with stuffed birds and moth-eaten foxes, skeletons. Monstrosities. A two-headed kitten in a glass jar, stolen from some museum over Brighton way. An unborn lamb suspended in liquor. Then, last week, Reedman’s lad claimed he’d heard unnatural sounds coming from inside the house. Joseph grimaced. Everyone knew Davey Reedman would make up any kind of wild story to talk his way out of a hiding. Been out poaching likely as not.
    ‘And what of it?’ he muttered. God helps those who help themselves, wasn’t that what old Reverend Huxtable used to preach from the pulpit? Same sermon every Sunday, rain or shine. The new Rector had a bit more variety, or so they said.
    Joseph smoked his cigarette down to the end, sending a final ring of smoke into the air, then opened the window and flicked the stub out and down on to the exposed mudflats. He wondered if the tide would take it, then shrugged. Not his problem.
    He pulled the chair back into position at the window, propped his muddy boots up on the sill and raised the glasses to his face. No sign of Gifford, but the girl was still sitting out on the terrace.
    Motes of dust floated suspended in the lazy air; the warm afternoon sun