Cold in the Earth Read Online Free

glasses meticulously on coasters protecting the French-polished furniture and began to drift away, still murmuring their gentle lamentations to one another as they went down the path in the grey drizzle.
    The woman who still lingered had a sharper face; her long nose quivered slightly as she spoke and behind gold-rimmed glasses her eyes were bright with intrusive curiosity. She indicated a photograph on the grand piano, an informal shot of a laughing young woman, her profile with its chisel-tipped nose and her blonde hair very like Laura’s own.
    ‘ Such a pity your sister never came back – well, your half-sister, I suppose I should say, only I expect it was much the same thing really, wasn’t it?’ Her gums showed when she smiled.
    ‘Yes,’ said Laura.
    ‘It would have meant so much to poor Jane. You never hear from her, I suppose?’
    ‘No.’ Laura felt the eyes scan her face with a sweep like a searchlight, registering the dark circles, no doubt, and the puffiness of recent tears about her grey-blue eyes. In a calculated gesture, she held out her hand decisively. ‘So good of you to come, Mrs Martin.’
    That left the woman with no alternative but to accept the hand and her dismissal; being a psychologist did have some practical uses. Mrs Martin set down her sherry glass reluctantly, directly on the rosewood surface of the piano, and then she too was gone.
    With a tension headache pounding, Laura closed the door behind her, thankful to have the ordeal of the funeral formalities over, yet when she returned to the empty sitting-room it seemed oppressively quiet without the hum of hushed voices. She could hear the wheezy tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, the whisper of flames from the fire in the basket grate which she’d lit in a vain attempt to lift the gloom of the weather and the occasion. Listlessly she cleared away the sherry glasses, her own untouched; she’d never so much as taken a sip of the stuff since she was eight years old when Dizzy, having smuggled a bottle out of the drinks cabinet, gave her a couple of glasses. Laura had been so sick that her mother had sent for the doctor, but even then she didn’t tell. She’d always kept Dizzy’s secrets.
    The kitchen was neat, orderly, just as her mother had left it. She washed the delicate cut-crystal glasses carefully, polished them with a glass-cloth, then carried them back to the sitting-room and put them away in their allotted space in the cupboard, just as if the next person to handle them wasn’t going to be a dealer, clearing the house.
    Tick, tock, tick, tock. Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Years. Wasted years. As Laura sat in her mother’s favourite Victorian tub-chair, looking round the sitting-room with its evidence of a pleasant, tranquil life filled with friendships and hobbies – the piano, the tapestry frame, the invitation cards still tucked into the mirror above the fireplace – she knew it for a sham. Her cultured, elegant mother had lived with a hell of inner despair as agonising as that of any of the desperate women Laura had counselled in New York.
    Not knowing for all these years, that was the awful thing. She could see herself now, a leggy, skinny eleven-year-old, sitting miserably on the stairs, her arms wrapped round her bony knees, eavesdropping as best she could because her parents were in the sitting-room talking to a strange man about trying to find Dizzy. It hurt badly that her sister hadn’t told her where she’d gone; she knew she could have trusted Laura not to give her away.
    She’d adored Dizzy. Dizzy – Diana – was nine years older than Laura, beautiful and zany and casually affectionate to her little half-sister. Her father had abandoned his wife and child for a career as a professional hell-raiser, drinking himself to death not long after; Dizzy was sufficiently his daughter to want to raise a bit of hell on her own account, doing wild things which drove their mother and Laura’s solicitor father into