Hell Is Always Today Read Free Page B

made other arrangements.”
    She took a single step forward and he grabbed her arm. “What’s the bloody game?”
    Faulkner pulled him away with ease. “Hands off, sonny.”
    Harold turned in blind rage and swung one wild punch that might have done some damage had it ever landed. Faulkner blocked the arm, then grabbed the young man’s hand in an aikido grip and forced him to the ground, his face remaining perfectly calm.
    “Down you go, there’s a good dog.”
    Grace started to laugh and Harry Meadows came round the bar fast. “That’s enough, Mr. Faulkner. That’s enough.”
    Faulkner released him and Harold scrambled to his feet, face twisted with pain, something close to tears in his eyes.
    “Go on then, you cow,” he shouted. “Get out of it. I never want to see you again.”
    Grace shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
    Faulkner took her by the arm and they went out laughing. Morgan turned to Meadows, his face grave. “I’m sorry about that.”
    Meadows shook his head. “He doesn’t change, does he, Mr. Morgan? I don’t want to see him in here again—okay?”
    Morgan sighed helplessly, turned and went after the others and Meadows gave some attention to Harold who stood nursing his hand, face twisted with pain and hate.
    “You know you did ask for it, lad, but he’s a nasty piece of work that one when he gets started. You’re well out of it. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink on the house.”
    “Oh, stuff your drink, you stupid old bastard,” Harold said viciously and the door swung behind him as he plunged wildly into the night.

2
    Detective Sergeant Nicholas Miller was tired and it showed in his face as he went down the steps to the tiled entrance hall of the Marsden Wing of the General Infirmary. He paused to light a cigarette and the night sister watched him for a moment before emerging from her glass office. Like many middle-aged women she had a weakness for handsome young men. Miller intrigued her particularly for the dark blue Swedish trenchcoat and continental raincap that gave him a strange foreign air which was hardly in keeping with his profession. Certainly anything less like the conventional idea of a policeman would have been hard to imagine.
    “How did you find Mr. Grant tonight?” she asked as she came out of her office.
    “Decidedly restless.” Miller’s face was momentarily illuminated by a smile of great natural charm. “And full of questions.”
    Detective Superintendent Bruce Grant, head of the city’s Central C.I.D., had been involved in a car accident earlier in the week and now languished in a hospital bed with a dislocated hip. Misfortune enough considering that Grant had been up to his ears in the most important case of his career. Doubly unfortunate in that it now left in sole charge of the case Detective Chief Superintendent George Mallory of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, the expert his superiors had insisted on calling in, in response to the growing public alarm as the Rainlover still continued at large.
    “I’ll tell you something about policemen, Sister,” Miller said. “They don’t like other people being brought in to handle things that have happened on their patch. To an old hand like Bruce Grant, the introduction of Scotland Yard men to a case he’s been handling himself is a personal insult. Has Mallory been in today, by the way?”
    “Oh yes, but just to see Inspector Craig. I don’t think he called in on Superintendent Grant.”
    “He wouldn’t,” Miller said. “There’s no love lost there at all. Grant’s one satisfaction is that Craig was in the car with him when the accident happened which leaves Mallory on his own in the midst of the heathen. How is Craig?”
    “Poorly,” she said. “A badly fractured skull.”
    “Serves him right for coming North.”
    “Now then, Sergeant, I was a Londoner myself twenty years ago.”
    “And I bet you thought that north of High Barnet we rolled boulders on to travellers as they passed by.”
    He grinned