Well-Schooled in Murder Read Online Free PDF

round Heathrow, its infinite stream of suburbs grimy with soot and the grey end of winter. And its additional blessing of extending the journey. That was the crucial part. She didn’t yet see how she could face the end of it. She didn’t yet see how she could face Simon.
    Ages ago when she had accepted this assignment to photograph a selection of the literary landmarks of the country, she had planned it so that Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray composed “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” would fall directly after Tintagel and Glastonbury, and thus bring her month of work to a conclusion only a few miles from her doorstep. But Tintagel and Glastonbury, rich with ineluctable reminders of King Arthur and Guinevere, of their ill-fated and ultimately barren love, had only given teeth to the despondency with which she had begun the trip. Those teeth bit; today on this final afternoon, they tore, working upon her heart, laying bare its worst wound….
    She wouldn’t think of it. She opened the car door, took up her camera case and tripod, and walked across the car park to the lych gate. Beyond it she could see that the graveyard was divided into two sections and that midway down a curved concrete path, a second lych gate and second graveyard stood.
    The air was cold for late March, as if deliberately withholding the promise of spring. Birds tittered sporadically in the trees, but other than the occasional muffled roar of a jet from Heathrow, the graveyard itself was quiet. It seemed a suitable spot for Thomas Gray to have created his poem, to have chosen as his own resting place.
    Closing the first lych gate behind her, Deborah walked along the path between two lines of tree roses. New growth sprouted from them—tight buds, slim branches, tender young leaves—but this springtime regeneration contrasted sharply with the area in which the trees themselves grew. This outer graveyard was not maintained. The grass was uncut, the stones left to lurch at odd angles with haphazard disregard.
    Deborah went under the second lych gate. It was more ornate than the first and, perhaps in the hope of keeping vandals away from the delicate oak fretwork along the line of its roof—or perhaps from the graveyard and the church itself—a floodlight was secured to a beam. But this was a useless safeguard, for the light was shattered and shards of glass lay here and there on the ground.
    Once inside the interior churchyard, Deborah looked for Thomas Gray’s tomb, her final photographic responsibility. Almost immediately, however, as she made a fleeting survey of the monuments and markers, she saw instead a trail of feathers.
    They lay like the result of an augur’s handiwork, a rebarbative collection of ash-coloured down. Against the manicured lawn, they looked like small puffs of smoke that had taken on substance rather than drifting off to be absorbed into the sky. But the number of feathers and the unmistakably violent way in which they were strewn about suggested a vicious battle for life, and Deborah followed them the short distance to where the defeated party lay.
    The bird’s body was about two feet from the yew hedge that separated inner and outer graveyards. Deborah stiffened at the sight of it. Even though she had known what she would find, the brutality of the poor creature’s death evoked in her an answering rush of pity so intense—so utterly absurd, she told herself—that she found her vision momentarily obscured by tears. All that remained of the bird was a frail blood-imbued rib cage covered by an insubstantial and inadequate cuirass of stained down. There was no head. Frail legs and claws had been torn off. The creature could have once been a pigeon or a dove, but now it was a shell in which life had once existed, all too briefly.
    How fleeting it was. How quickly it could be extinguished.
    “No!” Deborah felt the anguish well within her and knew she lacked the will to defeat it. She forced herself to think of