Soul Seeker Read Free Page B

to do any thinking about them. Fisher continued, ‘I ordered it to be put in the boot of one of the cars.’
    She could hear by the way that he said ‘ordered’, that he liked reliving the event. She waited for him to suggest that it would be good idea to go and get it so that she might gain some purpose from her visit, but nothing was forthcoming.
    It was Lancefield who suggested, ‘Perhaps you could go and get it so that we could examine it, sergeant.’
    Fisher nodded, oblivious to the undercurrent, and trotted off. Had Beverley and Lancefield been better acquainted, they might have exchanged knowing glances – the secret messages of the initiated – but neither wanted to lower their defences just yet. Instead, Beverley said to Lancefield, ‘I think it’s about time that lot started to earn their wages, don’t you?’ She meant the crowd around the slurry pit. ‘First I want three of them inside searching the farmhouse – make sure there isn’t a cellar – and remind them to go into the lofts. The rest can go over the farmyard; not fingertip, but I want every nook and cranny investigated; if I discover that one of them has missed something, they’ll be sent to the dog-training school as live bait.’
    â€˜What about further afield? This is a three-hundred acre farm.’
    â€˜First things first, inspector.’
    And Lancefield merely nodded, accepting the mild rebuke. She strode off to the assembled police officers, leaving Beverley looking at her back, her expression neutral, her thoughts anything but.
    Fisher came trotting back, a human retriever not with a ball in his mouth but a human head in a clear plastic bag in his hand. He proffered it and she could see from the way that he did so that it was heavy; when she indicated that he should put it down on the bonnet of a nearby, apparently derelict tractor, it landed with a dull thud. The weather, until then gusty and only threatening rain, finally made up its mind and began to let forth a fine drizzle upon the just – and, she had a shrewd idea, upon the unjust, equally.
    The head was difficult to see, even though the plastic was perfectly transparent, because it was covered in green and brown cow faeces that had smeared the inside of the bag. She could make little out other than it had been seriously chewed, and she was loathe to unseal it. Let the pathologist have that little treat.
    Speaking of which . . .
    â€˜Who’s the duty pathologist?’ she asked Fisher. God, she hoped it wasn’t Sydenham. Sydenham, who seemed to go on forever, rather like an inferior Wagnerian opera, or a scabetic itch.
    But Fisher, for once not because of his incompetence, managed to surprise her.
    â€˜Dr Eisenmenger, I think.’

THREE
    a box of small treasures
    A ntonia watched Andrew trudging up the hill, pale-blue shirt open at the collar, showing sweat stains under the arms and, she knew, between his shoulder blades, a damp towel over his left shoulder. Ahead of him ran Josh and Harriet, their liveliness providing stark contrast with his lassitude; their shouts only emphasizing his breathlessness. Not that Andrew was old , she thought automatically, but at the back of her head was the realization that she had been saying that to herself for quite a few decades now. He was definitely showing tiredness, though; how could he not be? Thrust into a second bout of parenthood at the age of sixty, destined to miss out on the comparative ease of grandparenthood, all the while grieving for his son and daughter-in-law, bearing the curse of outliving his own offspring. The children burst into the kitchen giggling. They knew better than to let the door slam, but even so it was opened with a degree of energy that neither she nor Andrew would ever be able to match. Josh was eight years old, two months from being nine; he had dark, slightly curled hair and a rather asymmetrical face that somehow