The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Read Online Free

see it—can’t miss it. Stanbury’s only got one street.”
    â€œAnd you saw him there when?”
    â€œOver t’summer sometime. Mebbe July, mebbe August—don’t rightly remember.”
    Charlie was curious.
    â€œWhy do you remember seeing him then? You get thousands of tourists around here in summer.”
    â€œNot so many in Stanbury, and not of an evening. But he wasn’t just a tourist. I remember seeing him because he was wi’ the Ashworth lot.”
    â€œAh! Who exactly are you talking about?”
    â€œOh, Mrs. Birdsell, the Mates boy, Arnold Mellors . . . don’t remember exactly because they’re often in the Grange, different ones of them.”
    â€œAnd you remembered him because he was with them?” Charlie persisted.
    â€œAye,” said the man, a glint in his sharp little eyes. “I thought, Poor, bloody lad, getting involved wi’ that crowd. Because he were a nice-enough-looking chap.”
    â€œAnd the Ashworth crowd?”
    â€œDon’t like ’em. Don’t trust ’em. Outsiders, every one of them. Wouldn’t give them the price of a loaf of bread and expect them to come back wi’ one.”
    â€œCreepy too,” volunteered his wife.
    â€œThat’s right—creepy. Unnatural, like.”
    â€œI see.” Charlie stored this information away, adding the mental proviso that he mustn’t be biased before he even met the Ashworth people. The problem could just be that they were artistic, and therefore different. “And was that the only time that you saw him?”
    â€œâ€™Appen I saw him driving past in their old car. Or mebbe waiting for a bus. That were it, at a bus stop. But in the pub were the only time I saw him close to, for any length o’ time.”
    â€œDid you get the impression that he was working at Ashworth?”
    The man thought.
    â€œAye, I did. It were like he were part o’ the group, or getting to be that way, poor bloody lad.”
    It was said in the same tone as earlier, not as if he knew that the boy was dead. Still, it must be suspected soon, Charlie realized, that his investigation signaled something more important than a mere missing young person. Charlie gave them his thanks, said he hoped he wouldn’t have to trouble them again (while realizing that they very much hoped he would), and then began his walk up the hill toward Stanbury.
    Stanbury, he already knew from driving through it, was a street and not much more. It was what Haworth was in people’s imagination but had not in fact been for centuries—a small Yorkshire village. It was sleepy, inward-looking, and liked basking in the twilight sun. The doorway of the Old Co-op stood open, and a woman who had the air of a sprightly bird sighting a particularly attractive worm watched his approach.
    â€œJust past the little church and off to your right, where it says ‘Public Footpath,’” she informed him. She felt no need to explain how she knew where he was going, so he accepted it as a matter of course as well, merely raising his hand in acknowledgment and proceeding on.
    A little community where everyone knows everyone else, where every tiny item of news is transmitted by a constantly humming bush telegraph, and yet this boy could disappear and cause not a ripple of comment or query. It was eerie.
    And yet when he thought about it, it was not so remarkable. The people of Ashworth, the boy’s employers, presumably, had only to say “He’s taken off” for thatto be an end of it. Young people did take off these days. They had casual not regular jobs; they were at the expendable end of the labor market. Say that, for reasons unknown, this boy had come to seem expendable on a permanent basis in somebody’s eye. The story could be put around that he’d just moved on, slung his hook, sought pastures new—whatever phrase was most convincing to the