A Nice Place to Die Read Free Page B

street. She was afraid he was going to come up to her house and knock on the door. Alice didn’t like visitors. She had no friends to come and see her, and strangers only called if they wanted something.
    So, without losing her vantage point, she moved behind the sideboard so as not to be seen. She saw the young man’s pale, anxious, holy face outside her house, looking as though he was searching for something or someone. She saw that his dog collar was too big for his thin throat.
    He must be mad, Alice thought, coming on his own to a place like Forester Close dressed like that.
    She knew that something bad was about to happen.
    Alice had noticed the gang of teenagers hanging about in front of the Millers’ house before the vicar turned into the Close. They were there most afternoons when Donna and her partner Alan were out. They spent their time drinking and smoking, and jeering at anyone who passed by. Very few people did pass by because there was something savage about these youngsters; they were intimidating and no one wanted to run the gauntlet of their foul language and abuse.
    Alice’s heart was in her mouth as she watched the young vicar get off his bright blue bike and approach the teenagers.
    The older Miller boy, Kevin, said something to him, and suddenly they were no longer a group of kids, they were a pack on the hunt, predatory and menacing. Alice thought, that poor little man, what’s he going to do now?
    She herself had often known what it felt like to be afraid of other people. It was what happened to shy, scared spinsters like herself who never learned to assert themselves. For her, fear was a way of life. Alice was aware – and then ashamed as she watched what was happening to another vulnerable human being beaten – that she felt a thrill of primitive excitement that had nothing to do with concern for the young vicar. The man was weak and helpless and he was a born victim. Some instinct of self-preservation compelled Alice, herself habitually a victim, to be glad to see someone else suffer for once. There but for the grace of God, she thought. But, she said, he’s one of the Lord’s own, how can God let this happen?
    The vicar was knocked down and the youths set on him.
    It never occurred to Alice that she could or should do something to stop the teenagers kicking the poor man to death.
    Because she felt helpless to act, she saw herself somehow exonerated from responsibility for what those thugs were doing. She didn’t even go to the telephone to dial 999. If she moved, those kids might see her and know that she was there, watching. They could turn on her.
    Then Donna Miller drove up and the teenagers fled. The poor young vicar was taken away in an ambulance, like a prop no longer needed on set. Alice thought, he looks badly hurt; he could be dead.
    The policewoman who seemed to be in charge was so smart and well-dressed that Alice thought she could be a television presenter. She looked quite out of place in the Millers’ rundown front garden. She doesn’t look to me like any kind of a serious detective, Alice said to herself.
    This police officer gave Donna Miller her card.
    Much good that’ll do her, Alice thought. Donna will cover for her boys whatever they do. She’s their mother, she won’t get them into trouble; mothers never do.
    There was no point in hoping that Alan, Donna’s present partner, would play the heavy father either. He wouldn’t dare. All three of the Miller children were Donna’s, but by different fathers.
    Nor would anyone else in Forester Close get Donna’s boys into trouble. The Millers terrorized all the residents in the street. The entire family recognized no laws or social restraint as applying to them. Donna and Alan, a slob who spent most of his waking hours watching pornographic DVDs from the sitting room couch, had abandoned any effort to control Kevin, who was nineteen, or his younger brother,