A Few Words for the Dead Read Online Free

A Few Words for the Dead
Book: A Few Words for the Dead Read Online Free
Author: Guy Adams
Tags: Fantasy, Mystery, SF
Pages:
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find something else to rail at. Haven’t you got any godawful manuscripts you should be publishing?’
    She was referring to Section 37’s cover as Dark Spectre, a small publishing house of horror novels that didn’t sell. In actuality, Shining left all of the work to a young man in Milton Keynes who brushed up submissions and slapped questionable covers on them. Occasionally the young man became irritated by his boss’s lax attitude towards the business but never so much so that the power and minimal freelance wage didn’t compensate.
    The telephone rang, saving August the need to argue. The caller did nothing to improve his mood.
    ‘Shining?’ said a voice that seemed to resent being there, despite the fact that it was making the call.
    Shining recognised the voice and his mood slumped even further. Sir Robin, a particularly vocal opponent of Section 37. The man filled the hours he avoided his Whitehall desk by breaking the springs of an armchair at the Cornwell’s Club. Shining suspected that would be where the pompous old sod was dialling from, that dusty old graveyard of colonials and kings. The call would be a chaser to another large brandy.
    ‘I’m sorry?’ Shining replied. ‘I think you may have the wrong number. This is Dark Spectre publishing, can I help you?’
    ‘Oh piss off, Shining, you know damn well who I am.’
    He did, but knowing the pleasure Sir Robin would take should he ever catch Shining breaking security protocol, he was damned if he was going to turn a blind eye.
    ‘Actually the line is rather bad, could you hang up and try again?’ Shining put the phone down and enjoyed his very first smile of the day. Its brevity made it no less enjoyable.
    The phone rang again.
    ‘Dark Spectre?’ asked Shining, keeping his voice perfectly civil.
    ‘It’s a secure line, you hateful old bastard!’ shouted Sir Robin. ‘There’s a car coming for you in half an hour.’ Sir Robin hung up first this time.
    ‘Problem?’ April asked.
    ‘Yes,’ admitted Shining, ‘I think there must be. Sir Robin is sending a car for me.’
    Shining made a point of being early, not because he wanted to seem eager but rather because he wanted to keep the buggers out of his office. There was no particular reason, nothing specific he wished to hide, he just didn’t like the idea of unknown officers poking around in his private space.
    As always, the main road was busy, shoppers weaving between one another as they made their angry way from one shop to another.
    Oman, the owner of the mobile phone shop beneath the Section 37 office (and occasional technical adviser, cash paid, questions asked but answers never given) was stood in his doorway, attempting to stuff a limp kebab into his mouth.
    ‘Didn’t have time for lunch,’ Oman explained through a swamp of meat and yoghurt.
    Shining might reasonably have pointed out that the man had found time for it now but he wasn’t going to take his irritations out on a friend.
    ‘Off somewhere nice?’ Oman asked.
    ‘I doubt it,’ Shining admitted. ‘A mystery tour. They’re never good news.’
    ‘My old mum went on one of those once, ended up trapped in a bus just outside Eastbourne. Twenty pensioners fogging up the glass and staring at the rain while waiting for the AA.’
    ‘Sounds charming.’
    Shining was distracted by a figure across the road. A man staring at him from behind the window of a sandwich takeaway shop. The reflection on the glass distorted his features but Shining was quite sure that man was watching him. Perhaps aware that he had been spotted, the other man looked away, turning his back on the window and retreating inside the shop. Shining, still feeling combative, had half a mind to walk over there and take a look but then the car arrived and he had more immediate irritations to contend with,
    It was a suitably innocuous hatchback in metallic grey. Four men were inside, all wearing nondescript business suits from high-street stores, people designed
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