Water Like a Stone Read Online Free PDF

spare wellies that stood lined up on a low shelf. Gemma, having struggled with boots that were a bit too small, was last out. She found that Lally had hung back, waiting for her, while the boys ran ahead. Jack dashed around them in circles, barking excitedly.
    “Oh.” Gemma drew a breath of delight as she looked about her. “How lovely.” The snow must have been falling heavily since they’d arrived, and now muffled the countryside in a thick blanket of white.
    “Did you know that it’s only officially a white Christmas if a snowflake falls on the roof of the BBC in London on Christmas Day?” asked Lally as they started after the boys, the snow squeaking as it compressed under their boots.
    “That’s hardly fair, is it?” Gemma thought of the occasional London snow, quickly marred by graffiti and turned to brown slush. This was different, a clean white silence stretching as far as she could see, and she was suddenly glad she had come.
    The dog stopped barking, and in unspoken accord, she and Lally halted so that not even the rhythmic squeak of their boots disturbed the peace. They stood together, their shoulders touching, and let the still-falling snowflakes settle on their faces and hair.
    Then, faint and far away, Gemma heard the wail of a siren, and her heart sank.
     
    He discovered the joy of possession when he was six. It had been the first day of term after the Christmas holiday, the class fractious with memories of their temporary freedom, confined indoors by the miserable weather, a cold, gunmetal sleet that crept inside coats and boots. Sodden jackets and mittens had steamed on the room’s radiators, filling the air with a fetid, woolly odor that seemed to permeate his sinuses and skin. Odd how smell provided such direct and concrete link to memory; the least scent ofdamp wool brought back that day instantaneously, and with the recollection came emotion, tantalizingly intense.
    Their teacher—stupid cow—had encouraged them to show off their favorite Christmas gift. He’d had the latest toy, but so did most of the others, so no one was suitably impressed. But a toady child called Colin Squires—fat, with oversize spectacles—had opened a leather pouch filled with agate and cat’s-eye marbles.
    Both boys and girls leaned closer, reaching to touch the swirling colors of the agates and the strange, three-dimensional eyes. Colin, perspiring with pleasure, hadn’t been able to resist clicking the marbles enticingly inside his pocket long after show-and-tell was over, and at break he had demonstrated marbles games to a group of admirers.
    He, however, had stood back at the edge of the circle, watching with feigned disinterest. Even then, he’d understood the necessity of planning .
    Three days later, when Colin’s fleeting charm had waned and the other children had gone back to their usual games, he brushed up against Colin on the playground and came away with the bag of marbles transferred to his own pocket.
    He kept his acquisition to himself, gloating over the marbles only in the privacy of his room, where he could fondle them without fear of interruption.
    He knew, of course, that he had done something taboo, and that secrecy was the safest policy. What he didn’t realize until he was a few years older was that he hadn’t felt, even then, the prescribed emotion, what other people called “guilt.” Not a smidgen.

CHAPTER THREE
    The unopened bottle of ten-year-old Aberlour stood on Ronnie Babcock’s kitchen table, its ready-made red bow still attached. Babcock regarded it sourly as he added the day’s post to the already toppling pile beside the bottle, then tossed his coat over a chair filled to overflowing with unopened newspapers.
    The scotch was a gift from his guv’nor, Superintendent Fogarty, and you could always trust the super to judge the appropriate level of gift giving to a T. Not a blended bottle of Bell’s, which might make it seem he undervalued his team, but nor could he be