Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Gerald Seymour - A Line in the Sand» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Триллер, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

A Line in the Sand: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «A Line in the Sand»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

A Line in the Sand — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «A Line in the Sand», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

"How can I help?"

"It's Meryl I came to see Wildlife Group business."

"Sorry, you'll have to make do with me. Meryl's still upstairs."

The unmarked car cruised behind her and Davies gave it a small wave as if to indicate that the woman in the dream coat was not a threat. There were two more cars in the village that morning. Perry was unshaven, half dressed, and he had left Meryl upstairs in bed. She had been crying through half the night, and only now had slipped into a beaten, exhausted sleep.

Peggy blurted her message, "I was asked to come, the Wildlife Group asked me. Meryl was doing typing for us. I've come for it. I've been asked-' "Sorry, you're confusing me." But he was not confused, just wasn't going to make it easy for her.

"Your next meeting's not till Tuesday. She'll have it done by then, she'll bring it with her."

"I've been asked to take it from her."

"By whom?"

"By everybody chairman, treasurer, secretary. We want it back." He was determined to make her spell it out, word by bloody word.

"But it's not finished."

"We'll finish it ourselves."

He said evenly, "She'll bring it herself to the meeting on Tuesday."

"She's not wanted there. We don't want her at our meeting."

The day after he, Meryl and Stephen had moved in, Peggy had brought a fresh-baked apple pie to the house. Of course, she'd wanted to look over the new arrivals, but she had brought the pie and talked about infant schools for Stephen with Meryl, the better shops and the reliable tradesmen, and introduced her to the Institute. She had made Meryl feel wanted… He didn't curse, as he wanted to. He saw that the grin had chilled off the detective's face.

Perry said quietly, "I'll get them. Would you like to take the stuff for the Red Cross? Have they decided that Meryl is a security risk too? It'll save you two visits."

"Yes," she said loudly.

"That would be best."

He went inside. Meryl called down to him to find out who was at the door. He said he would be up in a moment. He went into the kitchen. Last night's supper plates were still in the sink, with the whisky glass.

He took the folders from the cupboard where Meryl kept her typing and flipped through them. There was the scrawled handwriting of minutes and deliberations by the group and the committee members, the chaotic mess that had been dumped on his Meryl. Her typed pages were clean, neat, because trouble was taken over them, because care was important to her. As he turned the pristine, ordered pages of her work, his resolve began to founder. Because of him, his past, his betrayal and his damned God-given obstinacy, she suffered. He turned the pages of her typing prize lists, outings, letters of thanks to guest speakers all so bloody mundane and ordinary, but they were the necessities of her life… Like an outcast, he felt the touch of plague.

There was a church, St. James's, outside the next village down the coast, which had been built on the site of a lepers' hospital. Dominic had told him that when the church was built, a hundred and fifty years back, the labourers digging the foundations had found many skeletons, not laid out as in Christian burial, but in rejected disarray. When the first sore appeared, suppurating, and the first bleeding, and a man was sent to the lepers' place, had his friends still known him? Or, had they turned their backs?

He gathered Meryl's pages back into the folders and took them to the front door, reaching past the detective to hand them to Peggy.

She dropped the folders into her bag.

So much he could have said, but Meryl wouldn't have wanted it said.

"There you are, Peggy, everything you asked for."

He knew that by not cursing, not swearing, he destroyed her. Her chin shook, and her tongue wriggled and spread the lipstick on her teeth.

"I was sent. It wasn't my idea.

"You're with us or you're against us," that's what they said. If I'm against them I'm shut out. Doesn't matter to you, Frank, you can move on. I've nowhere else to go. It's not my fault, I'm not to blame. If I don't bring those papers back, I'm out. I'm a victim, too. It's not personal, Frank."

She ran to her bicycle.

He let Davies shut the door on her, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. There was never a good time for telling a bad story. She was wiping the sleep out of her eyes.

"I don't want to tell you this, but I have to. Peggy came to take away your typing for the Wildlife Group and the Red Cross. She's going to do it herself. We are not wanted… I could have thrown it all at her face and made her grovel down in the road to pick it up. I didn't. I know what I'm doing to you." He paused and drew a breath.

"They say he's still out there. He may be hurt but, if the injury isn't severe, he'll come again. They say the dogs found a scent, then lost it… Peggy's going to do the typing herself." She screamed.

The shrill staccato burst of her scream filled the room. She convulsed in the bed.

The scream died and her eyes stared up at him, wide and frightened.

Still in his pyjamas. Stephen was in the doorway, holding a toy lorry and gazing at him.

He told Stephen that his mother was unwell. He tried to hold him but the boy recoiled. He left the bedroom, where there were no lights, no pictures, where the glass of the mirror on the dressing-table was scarred with adhesive tape. He walked slowly down the dark stairs, as if descending into the lower reaches of the bunker.

He stopped at the dining-room door.

"How much worse does it have to get?"

"Does what "have to get", Mr. Perry?"

"How much worse does it have to get before I'm told the Al Haig story?"

"A bit worse, Mr. Perry."

He hung his head.

"And how much worse does it have to get before I say I'm at the end of the road, before I'm ready to run, quit?"

The detective, sitting at the table, the machine-gun beside his hand, looked up keenly.

"That door was open once, but not any more. I think it was on offer a bit ago, but it's not an option, Mr. Perry, not now."

Cathy Parker had used one of the sleeping hutches at the top of the building to catch four hours' rest. She came down to the floor. Fenton was there with Cox. She riffled through her papers for the address in Somerset. It would be a good drive; she'd enjoy the blessing of being clear of Thames House.

She might have time to call in for tea or a sherry with her parents afterwards. Fenton was talking, convincing.

"You worry too much, Barney, you'll go to your grave worrying. You heard what the American told young Geoff, this man is essentially a civilian. He is not military, doesn't have the mindset of manuals. He will think like a civilian and move like one. You don't put the military in against him, you put another civilian there. If it had been the military then you've lost control and that's some thing to worry about. God, the day I side with a politician is a day to remember."

She walked past the grinning Fenton, and Cox whose face was an enigmatic mask, and paused at the closed, locked door. She took a pen from her handbag and made a decisive line through the writing on the sheet of paper fastened there. She wrote boldly, DAY FOUR, and moved off down the dull-lit corridor.

The Iranian crude was offloaded. The tanker was buoyed up, monstrously high above the waves rippling against its hull, riding to its anchor. The radio message had still not been received.

Perplexed, the master called the terminal authority, reported a turbine problem and requested that a barge come alongside to take his crew ashore. He did not understand why the order to make the rendezvous had not reached him.

All day Peggy had anticipated the opportunity to call on the new people who had moved into the cottage on the opposite side of the road to the church. It was a dingy little place, only three bedrooms. Old Mrs. Wilson, now in a nursing home, had always said the damp in the walls of Rose Cottage had wrecked her hips. The ride home had settled her after the confrontation with Frank Perry, and she'd collected the pie, wrapped it in tinfoil and balanced it under the clip on the rack over the back wheel of her bicycle.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «A Line in the Sand»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «A Line in the Sand» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Gerald Seymour - The Glory Boys
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Contract
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Unknown Soldier
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - Home Run
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - Holding the Zero
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning
Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour - The Waiting Time
Gerald Seymour
Sarah Lean - The Sand Dog
Sarah Lean
Отзывы о книге «A Line in the Sand»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «A Line in the Sand» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x