A Nice Place to Die Read Free Page A

feet because he knew from the old days at school how his tears inflamed bullies. He could make out Kevin’s voice, deeper than the rest. ‘You trying to run out on us, Rev?’
    â€˜No, please, we can talk this through,’ Tim was trying to say, and as he heard his own words in his head, he was mortified at the absurdity of what he was saying even though he could not make himself heard.
    â€˜You’re not going anywhere till we’ve shown you what we think of people like you,’ Kevin said. ‘You want to talk? Here’s what I’ve got to say.’
    He kicked Tim hard in the crotch. Then the others joined in. Someone hit him at the base of the spine with something metal, and then there was a flash of iridescent white as one of the teenagers pulled a knife and sliced through his sleeve and forearm to reveal the bone and a silvery tendon. Then it disappeared under the dark flow of blood.
    In Tim’s last conscious moment, he remembered something he’d heard recently about a gang of girls seen playing football with a live rat. Somewhere in Yorkshire. Who’d told him about that? Had it been on television? It was no good, he couldn’t think. Please, God, what is the world coming to?
    He was unconscious by the time a car turned into Forester Close and the teenagers scattered.
    In the car Donna Miller had seen her sons Kevin and Nate among the group gathered around something lying on the pavement. She saw them look up and then take flight like a crowd of crows rising from a dead rabbit in the road.
    She telephoned for an ambulance.
    â€˜Do you know who he is?’ one of the paramedics asked her.
    Donna shook her head.
    The police asked, ‘Did you see who did this to him?’
    â€˜No,’ she said. ‘I found him lying in the road like this when I came home.’
    A policewoman in plainclothes seemed to be in charge. She gave Donna her card. ‘If you think of anything that could help,’ she said, ‘ring me. In confidence,’ she added.
    â€˜It could’ve been a hit and run, couldn’t it?’ Donna said.
    There was something about Donna’s face that caught the policewoman’s attention. Shock, of course, but more than that an expression where primitive fear struggled with an unexpected defensiveness.
    â€˜No, it couldn’t,’ she said. ‘This was a vicious attack and whoever did it will be on a murder charge.’
    â€˜I didn’t see anything,’ Donna said.

TWO
    H idden behind the curtain at the window of her front room Alice Bates watched the murder of the young vicar.
    The position of her house at the top of the cul-de-sac facing down the street gave Alice a clear view of what went on in Forester Close. She spent a great deal of her time watching everything that happened there. Nor was she a mere casual observer of her neighbours’ doings. She had never even spoken to most of them, but she felt nonetheless intimately connected to them. Watching the secret lives of others from the safety of her front room provided Alice with a kind of virtual life of her own. That, and the television, were the emotional and spiritual touchstones that connected her to other people. They offered her an illusion of being involved in society but at the same time distanced from it. She did not distinguish between the real lives she watched unfold and the fictional ‘realities’ of television drama. Thus she protected herself from the brutal actuality of life by refusing to believe that it was really happening.
    So, for Alice, Number Three Forester Close contained the entire outside world. She was still the same person who would once have written on her prized possessions: Alice Bates, Three Forester Close, Catcombe Mead, Catcombe, near Haverton, Somerset, Wessex, England, United Kingdom, British Isles, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the World, the Universe, the Mind of God.
    She watched the young vicar cycle up the