The Killing Season Read Online Free

crimson-streaked clouds and pale, watery blue sky. I love this time of year when it’s cold but bright and the skies stretch miles and miles into the distance, when there’s a crunch of frost under your feet and your cheeks glow. Maybe it’s the melancholic Irishman in me that makes me prefer late autumn and winter to spring. But I do hate the rain!
    I was on the coast road heading west. Out of Sheringham and through Weybourne, progressing around the bump of north Norfolk. The sea was to my right and on the left were the foothills of a ridge that soared several hundred feet or so and was dense with pine trees. Sheringham, as the sign on the shore front promenade proudly proclaims, lies ‘Twixt sea and pine’. The coast road is a twisting, narrow old-fashioned one that was not built for the size or the power of modern cars and I had to concentrate. It wasn’t my driving I was worried about, or the condition and road-handling capabilities of my old Saab. It was the condition of the brains of some of the other drivers on the roads. It was way out of season now so I couldn’t put it down to tourists not familiar with the dangers. But the behaviour of some of them made me think they had some kind of death wish. Seeing as some of them were octogenarians who could barely see over the tops of the steering wheels of their huge 4×4s, it was surprising that they seemed in such a hurry to meet your man upstairs, the fellow with the long white beard and the key to the Pearly Gates. But they certainly drove that way, overtaking on bends and blind hills with the kind of bravura usually seen at Silverstone. This was a long, bleak stretch of road in the dark days of October and luckily there were few other cars on it that day.
    The man I had been commissioned to ‘frighten’ was a builder called Bill Collier who was based in Thornage, a small village just outside Holt, though he covered, seemingly, a pretty wide area. He sounded a particularly nasty piece of work, and none too competent so I guess he had to spread himself further afield to find new custom. I had phoned and arranged to meet him a bit later but first I had set up a meeting with the woman he had, so to speak, diddled. In no way was that a euphemism.
    I was just outside Kelling heading towards Cley, by the salt marshes that spread in a rare bit of flatland out to the sea. The sea was darkening again and was flecked with white horses in the near distance as the wind started to pick up. I was keeping my eye on the sky – it didn’t look like rain just yet – and suddenly I had to hit the brakes hard and lean on my horn yet again. The old woman who was halfway across my side of the road before she straightened up coming out of the bend didn’t even register my presence.
    I turned left down a bumpy side road where there was some serious real estate lining both sides. Mostly old, but brick-built and ivy-clad. Definitely never been fishermen’s cottages. The Saab bucked and bounced on the rough road and its old shock absorbers creaked and groaned in complaint. I didn’t know why the road hadn’t been repaired and levelled – the people who lived here could afford a bit of upkeep. I guess they wanted to discourage visitors. No riff-raff welcome. I also reckoned their 4×4s at forty grand apiece, and more, didn’t feel the pain as much as my ancient Swedish vehicle did. Kate had been pestering me for weeks to change it, saying it wasn’t suitable for country living. She’d traded in her car for a fairly new Golf Estate, which we tended to use when we were out and about ‘en famille’, as she would say. But I liked my old Saab: we had been through a lot together. And the more Kate insisted, the more I dug my toes in. I had told her, paraphrasing a little from the Bible, that women are born to nag ‘just as sparks fly upwards’. She wasn’t amused. Maybe my roguish Irish charm was beginning to lose its effect on her. Nah. Never going to happen, I had had to license