The Will To Live Read Online Free PDF

nose!”
    He looked. He saw. His face registered puzzlement then shocked recognition. “Heavens above! I do believe you’re right,” he said. “There’s an undeniable resemblance. I wonder who on earth the poor man is?”
    Graham hadn’t done his background research for nothing. “He’s the right age…” he said thoughtfully. “You know, this could very well be James.”
    “Who?” asked the vicar.
    “James. Lawrence Strudwick’s older brother.”
    Reverend Bristow looked mystified. “Didn’t he pass on years ago?”
    “No… He went missing.”
    “Really? Gosh, I didn’t know that. Do you think he came home to die?”
    “It looks like it,” said Graham.
    The vicar sighed. “A weak heart, I suppose, like Lawrence.”
    A heart attack? It certainly sounded possible. There wasn’t a mark on him as far as I could see – nothing to suggest he’d been attacked. And he’d seemed pretty ropey when Sally had almost run him over this morning. Living on the streets … well, it wasn’t exactly a healthy lifestyle, was it? The wind and the rain had probably been enough to finish him off.
    We all stood for a moment, contemplating the sad, lonely fate of the man on the floor.
    We drove to Coldean Manor in complete silence. The rising flood threatened to transform the vicar’s Skoda from car to boat with every second that passed and only when we finally pulled up at the front door did I breathe freely. When we were safely inside, I glanced at the portraits and realized I’d been so distracted by the sight of his Strudwick features that I hadn’t paid any attention to the really peculiar thing about James’s corpse.
    He’d been a tramp; a vagrant; a down-and-out. His face had been covered in mud; his clothes had been filthy; he’d stunk of alcohol.
    But that stiff, white hand – the one that had been raised, frozen, as if clawing the air…
    The fingernails had been perfectly clean.

TOAST
    SALLY was mega-stressed by the time we got back so we certainly weren’t going to mention the fact that we’d discovered a dead body. We didn’t even discuss it between ourselves. We dried ourselves off – making our tasteful nylon garments crackle with static – washed our hands, grabbed the trays of canapés and headed off to the drawing-room to offer them round.
    Reverend Bristow had decided not to mention the tramp or his suspected identity until he could catch Jennifer and Julian – James’s children – on their own. But with the party in full swing he was finding it impossible. We saw him circling around like a sheepdog, as if he was trying to herd Jennifer and Julian into another room, but it didn’t work. After a while Lydia spotted him and struck up a conversation, but we could see he wasn’t really listening.
    The elderly Lawrence was still parked in his comfy armchair in front of the roaring fire and was drifting in and out of sleep. Jennifer had placed the comatose Marmaduke in his arms and both old man and baby were snoozing happily together.
    My hunch about “staff” being virtually invisible proved right – once we had those trays in our hands nobody gave us a second glance. We could eavesdrop as much as we liked and no one batted an eyelid.
    Not that there was that much to eavesdrop on. A lone Canadian sat in the corner chatting to Julian about the merits of blueberry pancakes versus bacon and eggs for breakfast, but that was as exciting as studying the aristocracy got. Most of the conversations seemed to revolve around people I’d never heard of getting engaged or married or divorced. The fifty-or-so guests all seemed to know each other well, so the gossip they exchanged wasn’t even fresh news.
    “Did you hear about Jonty?”
    “And Jemima? Yah. Engaged. Wedding’s on the twenty-first, isn’t it?”
    “Yah. Winchester. You going?”
    “Yah. And they’re honeymooning in…”
    “The Maldives, yah, I’d heard.”
    “Be all kinds of fun and games at the reception, no