A Hovering of Vultures Read Free Page B

was what she had been told to do, and that was what she did.
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    Detective Constable Dexter (“Charlie”) Peace was getting a trifle bored with The Black Byre. He had fetched it down when he did because he had been listening in to the conversation of the young couple some seats down from him, and it suited his sense of drama to do it just at that moment. In any case he had to get as many as possible of the Sneddons’ works read. He had moderately enjoyed The Barren Fields, had been slightly less enthusiastic about Orchard’s End, and was now becoming bored with The Black Byre. He was finding the absence of irony or any other sort of humour rather oppressive. Life with Susannah can hardly have been a bundle of laughs. He imagined her as so whole-hearted, so breathlessly committed, so devoted in her relationships that he himself would have run a mile from her. To be loved by such a woman would be sheer hell.
    Mind you, he’d been interested in the Introduction to The Black Byre, which had given details of the murder-suicide that he had not come across before. Now if he had been investigating that business he’d have known exactly what to do: what steps he’d have to take to check that what seemed to have happened was what actually happened; what weight to give to the various experts’ reports; how to present his own report.
    He would have been able, too, to make his own judgments on the people involved, and that would be the most interestingpart. The fact that Joshua Sneddon, after murdering his sister, had drunk a cup of tea, smoked a cigarette and (according to the Introduction he had just read) stubbed out the cigarette on his dead sister’s bare arm seemed to him immensely significant: this was not just an intense fit of jealousy but a hideous subterranean rage that had been boiling and seething in him for years. A rage that persisted even after murder had to be a terrible thing indeed. No, the deaths of the Sneddons he could have coped with, taken completely in his stride.
    Whereas the Sneddon-related matter he was now sent on and which he had just been to London to discuss at Scotland Yard was so vague and nebulous as to approach the invisible, and the instructions were hardly more than that he maintain a watching brief. What he would do when he arrived at Batley Bridge, what he would hope to find in Micklewike and what he should do if he found it—about all these things he was uncertain.
    Still, one thing he did know: the girl from two rows down would be there. He studied the pair. The man was gangling, carefree, perhaps a little pleased with himself. The girl on the other hand had in her eyes something—what was it?— something predatory, something at any rate very determined, very insistent on getting her own way. He didn’t feel they made a couple. Much more, they made a contrast.
    One other thing was certain: he would have to be able to talk knowledgeably, if not intelligently, about the works of Susannah Sneddon. (The works of her brother, he gathered, were in the nature of optional extras, and from the accounts he had read of them he was profoundly glad they were.) So, reverie over, he settled down once again to The Black Byre. The heroine had just heard heavy breathing from the hay loft.
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    Mrs Letitia Farraday, widow of the late Howard C. Farraday III, sat firmly ensconced in an almost empty first class compartment, her luggage around and above her. The porter had been friendly and respectful, scenting American money. He had not been disappointed.
    The first class of British Rail was its usual somnolent, antechamber-to-death self, though at the far end a besuited young man was holding forth in chain-saw tones to a look-alike about financial matters. From the fragments of conversation that penetrated down to her Mrs Farraday gathered that he had been a teenage millionaire, and had lost much of it in the Wall