The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read Online Free Page B

Whitby Mission and Seafarer’s Centre, a gusty breeze flapped the yellowing squares of paper pinned to the notice-board near the door. ‘ Don’t leave Fido out in the cold ,’ said one fluttering page. ‘ We have a separate coffee lounge where pets are always welcome .’ Siân left the ruins of her jacket potato consolidating on her plate and walked over to the opposite lounge to have a peek inside. Her nose nudged through a veil of cigarette smoke. Strange dogs with strange owners looked up at the newcomer.
    On her way out of the Mission, Siân paused at the book-case offering books for 50p each, and rummaged through the thrillers, romances and anthologies of local writers’ circles. There was a cheap, mass-produced New Testament there, too. What a come-down since the days when a Bible was a unique and priceless object, inscribed on vellum from an entire flock of sheep! Siân closed her eyes, imagined a cloister honeycombed in sunlight, with a long rank of desks and tonsured heads, perfect silence except for the faint scratching of pen-nibs.
    â€˜Now here’s a blast from the past!’ brayed the disc jockey on the radio. ‘Hands up anyone who bopped along to Culture Club when they had this hit – come on,’ fess up!’
    Siân fled.
    Early on Sunday morning, not long after getting her throat slit, Siân was out and about again, her hastily-washed hair steaming. She couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it, and besides, now was when she ought to be going – at exactly the same time as she’d set off for work on Friday. If Magnus and Hadrian were creatures of habit, this would send them running after her any minute now.
    She walked along Church Street, quite slowly, from the hotel façade to the foot of the hundred and ninety-nine steps and back again – twice – but no chance meeting occurred.
    Tantalised by the thought of the man and his dog running high up on the East Cliff, in the wild grasses flanking the abbey ramparts, she climbed Caedmon’s Trod until she could see the Donkey Field. No chance meeting occurred here, either, at least not with Magnus and Hadrian. Instead, she met a bored-looking boy and his somewhat frazzled dad, returning from what had clearly been a less than inspirational visit to the abbey.
    â€˜Another really interesting thing that monasteries used to do,’ the father was saying, in a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to get the child excited, ‘was give sanctuary to murderers.’
    Siân saw a flicker of interest in the kid’s eyes as she squeezed past him on the narrow monks’ trod.
    â€˜Has Whitby got McDonalds,’ he asked his dad, ‘or only fish and chips?’
    It was Monday afternoon before Siân saw Magnus again. In the morning, she loitered around the town centre before work, in an irritable, shaky state. Her nightmare hadn’t yet receded, and her throat was sore where, in a befuddled attempt to deflect the knife, she had hit herself with her own hand. The lump in her thigh throbbed like hell.
    In the town’s deserted market square, on a bench, someone had discarded a copy of the current Whitby Gazette . With half an hour still to kill before 8 a.m., Siân settled down to read it. For some reason though, every single article in the Gazette struck her as monumentally depressing. Not just the sad stories, like the one about the much-loved local janitor dying of cancer (‘He never moaned about his illness and was always cheerful’, according to a colleague – a chip off Saint Hilda’s block, then). No, even the stories about a holidaymaker being struck by lightning and surviving, or a charity snail-eating contest, or the long-overdue restoration of Egton Bridge, brought Siân closer and closer to irrational tears. She flipped the pages faster, through the property section, until she was on the back page, staring at an advertisement for a beauty clinic on the