Dark Side Read Free Page B

church authorities were about to put it on the market and move Patrick’s parents John and Elspeth – John is the incumbent of St Michael’s Church – to a small bungalow on a cheap and ugly new development at the lower end of the village, the site of one-time railway sidings. After a lot of building work had taken place at the rectory – including an old stable, harness room and garage turned into living accommodation which serves as an annexe for Elspeth and John, and an extension to the first floor above it – we moved in.
    We have three children of our own, Justin, Victoria and baby Mark, and two adopted, Matthew and Katherine, known as Katie, Patrick’s late brother Laurence’s children. Their mother is under seemingly permanent treatment for alcoholism and/or drug abuse and wants nothing further to do with them. Our three youngest are looked after mainly by the nanny, Carrie, and we could not manage without further help from the children’s grandparents. My dear father died at a tragically early age of a ghastly creeping illness, my mother is another basket case and again, has no interest in her family, so the children have just the one set of grandparents.
    â€˜Can I count you in for the choir on Sunday?’ John asked his son, putting his head out of the annexe’s front door as we entered the back way, through the conservatory. ‘We’re very thin.’
    â€˜Counter tenor or bass?’ Patrick said with a grin.
    â€˜Whatever you like as long as you
sing
.’ John’s fuse as far as Patrick’s sense of humour goes is sometimes very short.
    â€˜I’m a thin alto,’ I offered, but inwardly quaking as I had never done anything like this before.
    â€˜Delighted, my dear! Thank you. Elspeth’ll find a robe that fits you.’
    Seated in the choir stalls for the first time on that Sunday morning with a full view of the congregation, I noticed a man I had not seen before. When Joanna had told me about Benny Cooper she had quoted a woman who lived in the same square as Paul Mallory who had described him as being ‘sort of smarmy with dark hair and shades’.
    So who was this man sitting almost at the back of the church who looked sort of smarmy with dark hair and shades? After the service I asked John if he knew him.
    â€˜Oh, that’s Jeff Bates. He and his girlfriend have recently moved into the one-time forge. He’s a landscape painter but the poor chap’s been having treatment for some kind of eye trouble. Everyone’s hoping it won’t affect his career.’
    It appeared that the odious Cooper was preying on my mind.

TWO
    T here had been a suspected murder overnight and Manvers Street police station was in organized turmoil. Carrick, with his assistant Lynn Outhwaite hurrying just behind him, was descending the stairs from the top floor. As we approached a third person caught up with them, the new Detective Inspector, David Campbell, whom we had not previously met. After quite a long time without one a new DI had finally been appointed to Bath CID and it was his second week in the job. He had come from HQ in Portishead and everyone had assumed that another Scot would meld very nicely with the boss. Everyone, that is, except Derek Woods, the custody sergeant who, having read the history books, had warned darkly against making such presumptions. For the MacDonalds still hated the Campbells after the massacre of Glencoe, didn’t they? Perhaps others did, too.
    We had already gathered that Carrick, who had undertaken to mentor Campbell for a couple of weeks to show him, in his words, ‘how Bath ticked’, was not particularly impressed. Apparently this was nothing to do with anyone being put to the sword but merely an apparent lingering prejudice on Campbell’s part that everything in England was vastly inferior to the land of his birth. I thought there was every chance that James had merely disliked the