Trick of the Dark Read Online Free PDF

to her. The name Magdalene Carling had meant nothing. But the alternate identity jolted Charlie from academic enthusiasm to dismay. She was appalled that she had somehow failed to register that the woman at the heart of this tragedy was someone she had once known. Suddenly, things began to make sense.
    'Poor kid,' she said softly, pity in her voice. The realisation of Magda's place in the murder trial made one thing incontrovertible. Whoever had sent the mysterious package had almost certainly been part of college life all those years ago when Charlie had been an undergraduate, a pupil of Magda's mother Corinna and an occasional babysitter of her children. Was it Corinna Newsam herself, or had someone else sent the photocopies? And still the question remained: why?
    Methodical as ever, Charlie continued through the archive material. She had almost come to the end when a photograph downloaded to her screen, appearing one slice at a time from the top down. The woman it revealed had the kind of beauty that made people stare. Even a snatched newspaper shot left no room for doubt on that score. Dark blonde hair and apparently perfect skin, the regular features of a fashion model, a mouth whose fullness hinted at sensuality. 'Wow,' Charlie said, admiring the shapely figure and undeniably good legs that gradually appeared.
    The caption revealed that this stunning woman in the foreground of the photograph was Philip Carling's widow Magdalene. 'Look how you turned out, Maggot,' she said, amazed at this trick of the genes. But as she studied the wider picture, Charlie realised she needed no caption to recognise the woman at Magda's elbow. Age had not withered Jay Macallan Stewart's fine-boned beauty, nor custom staled her air of dashing danger.
    Although it created more questions than it answered, Charlie felt sure she had solved the basic problem of the source of the cuttings. 'If my daughter was hanging out with Jay Stewart, I'd be doing something about it,' she said. And with a few keystrokes, she was in her email program.
Subject: More Questions Than Answers
Date: 23 March 2010 15:35:26 GMT
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

I followed your advice. It was obvious I hadn't been sent all the press coverage, so I Googled news to see if I could figure out what was missing. Lo and behold, I discovered almost instantly that none of the versions I had been sent named the widow appropriately. Her real identity is not , it's . AKA Maggot, or at least it used to be when she was 10 and I was 21 and used to babysit her and her siblings. She's the eldest daughter of Corinna Newsam, the junior philosophy fellow at Schollie's who taught me and regularly used me as a babysitter until my final-year obsession with getting a decent degree and still managing to have some fun put a stop to it. Anyway, we've stayed in Christmas card touch since, though not so close that she mentioned Magda's involvement in this case.
Reading on, I came across a photo of Magda - who has grown into a drop-dead gorgeous beauty in the Princess Diana mould. And standing behind her was somebody else I recognised. She used to be plain Jay Stewart but now the world knows her as Jay Macallan Stewart. Dotcom millionaire and bestselling misery memoir author. Now she's the boss of 24/7, the web-based personalised travel guides. You might have seen her on White Knight , she appears sometimes in the guest investor slot. She was a couple of years behind me at Schollie's, but her notoriety was sufficient to overcome that handicap. Even among the dykes of Brighton, the stories about Jay Stewart galloped along the grapevine.
I remember her as ruthlessly ambitious, one of those working-class heroes who are determined to exploit every opportunity to the hilt and don't care whose faces they trample on in the scramble to the top of the heap. She was elected JCR president the year after I went down. Only after she'd secured the position did