Put on by Cunning Read Online Free Page A

Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Founded 1964 at Wellridge, Sussex, the Kathleen Camargue School of Music in memory of his wife, and in 1968 the Kathleen Camargue Youth Orchestra. Recreations apart from music: walking, reading, dogs. Address: Sterries, Ploughman’s Lane, Kingsmarkham, Sussex.’
    ‘They say it’s a dream of a house,’ said Sheila. ‘I wonder if she’ll sell, that one daughter? Because if she does Andrew and I might really consider . . . Wouldn’t you like me living just up the road, Pop?’
    ‘He may have left it to your friend,’ said Wexford.
    ‘So he may. Well, I do hope so. Poor Dinah, losing her first husband that she adored and then her second that never was. She deserves some compensation. I shall write her a letter of sympathy. No, I won’t. I’ll go and see her. I’ll phone her first thing in the morning and I’ll . . .’
    ‘I’d leave it a day or two if I were you,’ said her father. ‘First thing in the morning is going to be the inquest.’
    ‘ Inquest? ’ Sheila uttered the word in the loaded, aghast tone of Lady Bracknell. ‘Inquest? But surely he died a perfectly natural death?’
    Dora, conjuring intricately with three different shades of wool, looked up from her pattern. ‘Of course he didn’t. Drowning, or whatever happened to him, freezing to death, you can’t call that natural.’
    ‘I mean, he didn’t do it on purpose and no one did it to him.’
    It was impossible for Wexford to keep from laughing at these ingenuous definitions of suicide and homicide. ‘In most cases of sudden death,’ he said, ‘and in all cases of violent death there must be an inquest. It goes without saying the verdict is going to be that it was an accident.’
    Misadventure.
    This verdict, which can sound so grotesque when applied to the death of a baby in a cot or a patient under anaesthetic, appropriately described Camargue’s fate. An old man, ankle-deep in snow, had lost his foothold in the dark, slipping over, sliding into water to be trapped under a lid of ice. If he had not drowned he would within minutes have been dead from hypothermia. The snow had continued to fall, obliterating his footprints. And the frost, ten degrees of it, had silently sealed up the space into which the body had slipped. Only a glove – it was of thick black leather and it had fallen from his left hand – remained to point to where he lay, one curled finger rising up out of the drifts. Misadventure.
    Wexford attended the inquest for no better reason than to keep warm, the police station central heating having unaccountably broken down the night before. The venue of the inquest (Kingsmarkham Magistrates’ Court, Court Two, Upstairs) enjoyed a reputation for being kept in winter at a temperature of eighty degrees. To this it lived up. Having left his rubber boots just inside the door downstairs, he sat at the back of the court, basking in warmth, surreptitiously peeling off various disreputable layers, a khaki green plastic mac of muddy translucency, an aged black-and-grey herringbone-tweed overcoat, a stole-sized scarf of matted fawnish wool.
    Apart from the Kingsmarkham Courier girl in one of the press seats, there were only two women present, and these two sat so far apart as to give the impression of choosing each to ostracize the other. One would be the daughter, he supposed, one the bride. Both were dressed darkly, shabbily and without distinction. But the woman in the front row had the eyes and profile of a Callas, her glossy black hair piled in the fashion of a Floating World geisha, while the other, seated a yard or two from him, was a little mouse, headscarfed, huddled, hands folded. Neither, as far as he could see, bore the remotest resemblance to the face on the record sleeve with its awareness and its spirituality. But when, as the verdict came, the geisha woman turned her head and her eyes, dark and brilliant, for a moment met his, he saw that she was far