Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then Read Online Free PDF Page A

was called Chiltern Avenue and access to it was by a footpath which ran along the side of Mrs. Mitchell’s house between her garden and the field. Burden went down Chiltern Avenue, calling at every house. The McDowell family lived at number 38 and the twins, Stewart and Ian, were still up.
       Stewart had never seen the man, for during most of August he had been confined indoors with tonsillitis and today he had been with his mother to the dentist. But Ian had seen him and had even discussed him with Gary Dean, his special friend.
       “He kept right under the trees all the time,” said Ian. “Gary said he was a spy. Gary went to talk to him one day but he ran into Mill Lane.”
       Burden asked the boy to describe him, but Ian lacked Mrs. Mitchell’s powers of observation.
       “Just a man,” he said, “About as big as my brother.” The brother in question was fifteen. Burden asked about the limp.
       “What’s limp?”
       Burden explained. “Dunno,” said Ian.
       Further down, in a house of the same vintage as Mrs. Lawrence’s, he encountered the Rushworth family. Rushworth, it appeared, was an estate agent in Kingsmarkham, and he had gone off with the search parties, but his wife was at home with her four unruly children, all of whom were still up. Why hadn’t she come to the police when Mrs. Mitchell had first warned her back in August?
       A little blonde woman whose stilt heels and long fingernails combined with a bouncing crest of hair gave her the look of a delicate game bird, Mrs. Rushworth burst into tears.
       “I meant to.” She choked. “I had every intention. I work so hard. I work in my husband’s office, you know. There’s never a moment to do anything!”
       It was almost eight and John Lawrence had been missing for four and a half hours. Burden shivered a little less from the frosty chill of the night than from the sense of impending tragedy, of coming events casting a long cold shadow before them. He went over to the car and got in beside Wexford.

    The chief inspector’s driver had left him alone and he sat in the back of the black official car, not making notes, no longer studying his map, but pondering deeply. There was very little light - he hadn’t switched on the interior light - and in the shadows he might have been a figure of stone. From head to foot he was grey - grey sparse hair, old grey raincoat, shoes that were always a little dusty. His face was deeply lined and in the half-dark it too looked grey. He turned slightly as Burden came in and fixed on him a pair of grey eyes which were the only brilliant sharp thing about him. Burden said nothing and for a few moments the two men were silent. Then Wexford said:
       “A penny for them, Mike.”
       “I was thinking of Stella Rivers.”
       “Of course you were. Aren’t we all?”
       “It was her half-term holiday too,” Burden said. “She was an only child of divorced parents. She also disappeared in Mill Lane. There are a good many similarities.”
       “And a good many dissimilarities too For one thing, she was a girl and older You don’t know much about the Stella Rivers case You were off sick when it happened”
       They had thought he was going to have a break down. Back in February it had been when the first shock of Jean’s death had abated, leaving grief and panic and the horror of his situation to pour in. He had lain in bed, sleeping when Dr. Crocker drugged him, shouting out when he was conscious that it was only the flu he had, that he must get up and go back to work. But he had been off work for three weeks and when at last he was better he had lost nearly two stone. Still, he had been alive, while Stella Rivers was dead or vanished from the face of her small earth.
       “She also lived with her mother,” said Wexford, “and her stepfather. On Thursday, February the twenty-fifth, she had a riding lesson at Equita, the riding school in Mill Lane near Forby. She