Hunting for Crows Read Online Free

did in person, but only yesterday I received a call from a nice young lady at his office in London who said they would be sending someone down in a few day’s time to clear the place.’
    ‘They don’t hang about, do they?’
    ‘I thought so too, but I suppose his brother wants to sell the house, although I suspect he doesn’t need the money.’
    This dovetailed into a request to take a look inside Barry’s house, but far from responding in the negative as he expected, Mrs Partridge offered him the keys and apologised for not taking him there herself, but she suffered from arthritis and found it difficult moving around.
    His suspicions that Barry’s house was a mirror image of Mrs Partridge’s appeared well-founded, but with less furniture and fewer personal items. It looked as though he didn’t stay there often, or he was a man of few needs. If the ground and first floors were much as he expected to see in a small terraced house, the basement wasn’t.
    ‘Welcome to Kennedy Space Centre’ declared a photograph of Barry in front of a gigantic space rocket. The rocket was long and sleek but Barry was fat and dumpy, and gripped in his hand, his own brand of rocket fuel, a large drum of popcorn. The ‘space centre’ description might well be used to describe the room as it was kitted out with all manner of computer gear: giant screens along one wall, printers, keyboards, scanners, little encryption pads and a Spaghetti Junction of cables.
    Henderson drove back to Brighton in a reflective mood. Barry’s basement was surprising and intriguing but indicative of what? He was a switched-on investor who used technology to monitor stock markets and track investments? Or did he manage the personal affairs of his rich big brother and use the apparent modest lifestyle to shield it from nosey buggers like journalists and the Inland Revenue?
    It was clearer in his mind now why he came to Arundel. He had been deluding himself into thinking something suspicious was going on, and that he could become involved in something that interested him for a change, but having seen the winking lights of Barry Crow’s computer set-up, it was obvious he’d intended coming back and this wasn’t some elaborate cover-up.
    It was foolish of Barry to enter a river as fast-flowing and menacing as he’d seen today, but the more he thought about Barry Crow and added it to the information given to him by Mrs Partridge, the more he realised such an act of unselfish bravery was in his nature. He was always the quiet one, ready to follow the lead carved out by his brother without drama or fuss, but willing and able to step up when circumstances demanded it.
    It would always be a mystery why he did what he did, but if the words of the local paper were anything to go by, the headline of which he saw as he walked past a newsagent, the people around here were calling him a hero.
     
     

FIVE
     
     
     
     
    Peter Grant edged the big BMW into a parking space and sat there for a few minutes with his eyes closed. He was enjoying a song by Bruce Springsteen on Planet Rock, coming through a twelve-speaker Bose system, while held in the sumptuous grip of a body-moulded seat clad in soft Napa leather. All the time, trying to decide if the car was a good omen or bad.
    It was less than three months old, but in that time, his company’s first out-of-town superstore had opened here, in Redburn Retail Park in Croydon, the turnover of the whole business had passed the thirty-million mark, and one of their products had been voted muscle-builder of the year. On the negative side of the equation, he’d lost one his best friends, Barry Crow, in a drowning accident, and the divorce from his wife of over twenty-six years had just come through.
    Until the opening of this superstore, Grant's Fitness Emporium had consisted of twelve city-centre shops stocking their own brand of fitness and weight-gain powders, food supplements and various items of sports clothing, backed