Almost Love Read Online Free Page B

would apply absolute integrity to whatever counter-arguments they might come up with. Otherwise it would just be the usual academic tit-for-tat refined slanging match, of no practical use to anyone. Thank God he had turned his back on all of that and chosen to become a policeman.
    The thought cheered him. His mood was lightened further when his mobile phone chirruped its ‘text message waiting’ ditty and, pulling over into a lay-by, he saw that the message was from Katrin. It read simply: ‘Sorry. XXX.’ He texted her back. ‘My fault. XXX’. The day was already beginning to look a great deal brighter.
    The last leg of his journey took him deep into the country lanes beyond Helpston. He made a few wrong turns, cursing equally the inadequate map which he had printed from the Internet and the local council’s failure to signpost the maze of tiny lanes in which he found himself. Claudia McRae’s cottage, when eventually he reached it, stood at the end of a narrow unmetalled farm track which gradually petered out altogether, so that for the last two hundred yards or so he was just driving on hard mud.
    The house itself was a confection, almost too picture-book pretty with its thatched roof and rose-coloured walls. Its walls were bowed with age and seemed to grow up out of the grass – there was evidently no proper garden, nor even a boundary fence – and it bore more than a fleeting resemblance to the picture of the cottage into which Hansel and Gretel had been lured in the edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from which his grandmother had read to him as a child. Taking the analogy further would turn Claudia McRae into a witch. If the cap fits, thought Tim.
    There was a police car and a battered Citroen parked in front of the house. Tim parked his own car – a BMW and also battered – at some distance from them and walked up the slight slope to the house. The front door was wide open. A police cordon had been looped through stakes set in a box shape around the entrance. Wary of contaminating evidence, Tim shouted out ‘Hello?’, feeling faintly foolish as he did so.
    A uniformed policeman appeared from somewhere behind the house. He was carrying a plastic bag and was followed by a slightly-built man of about fifty who held up his head with an almost aristocratic bearing, although he was dressed in very shabby, dirty clothes. Tim recognised the policeman.
    “PC Cooper?” he said. “Have they sent you out here as well? Don’t City of Peterborough Police have any coppers of their own, for God’s sake?”
    Gary Cooper grinned. “It was Superintendent Thornton’s idea, sir,” he said. “He thought you would appreciate working with one of your own team, so to speak.”
    Tim rolled his eyes. “Heaven preserve me if the Superintendent has started getting in touch with his feminine side. What next?”
    “When you’ve finished your banter,” said the slightly-built man quietly, but with unmistakable, if contained, hostility, “my aunt has disappeared and I think that you should lose no time in setting about finding her. If you are able to, that is. It is already several hours since I first called for help and nothing at all constructive appears to have happened yet.”
    Tim took an instant dislike to the man, but he knew he must guard against showing it. Both Katrin and Juliet Armstrong had told him that his opinions of other people could often be read only too clearly in his face. Not a good trait in a policeman.
    “Mr Maichment?” he said, extending his hand. “Detective Inspector Tim Yates, South Lincolnshire Police.”
    Guy Maichment placed his slight and none-too-clean hand in Tim’s and let it linger there limply for a moment before withdrawing it.
    “Delighted,” he said. “Now, if you will come into the house, I’ll show you what I found when I arrived here during the night.”
    “About what time was that, Mr Maichment?” Tim asked.
    “Just before 1 a.m. Why do you ask?”
    “Rather late to be