Trick of the Mind Read Online Free Page B

could pinpoint from whence the sound had come, nor did they report hearing any other signs of conflict.
    “And that was a bit odd,” said Clarkson. “Usually, there’s some other disturbance connected with gunfire, like an argument, or at least the sound of a car speeding off. In any case, it didn’t give us much to go on.”
    Backup having arrived, they had proceeded to take a look around the area, but had found nothing amiss, and given the wide
divergence of opinion as to how many shots there had been, they had concluded that the noise might have been something else altogether. Clarkson had kept an eye out for the rest of his shift, but it had been an otherwise quiet evening and he had at last gone home, satisfied that nothing much was wrong in his district. He was more than chagrined to discover he had been quite wrong.
    It was raining heavily in Calais, just as the radio had predicted. Bethancourt had been on the road for close on three hours and was beginning to feel it; he had missed rue Chevreul and had had to backtrack, but he had still managed to get onto the 3:15 A.M. ferry to Dover, if only just. The seas were heavy, not unusual for the Channel during a storm, but Bethancourt luckily had a strong stomach. He stretched and then lit a cigarette, leaning on the deck railing as the ferry pushed out into the sea, leaving Calais behind.
    If Gibbons had not been shot, Bethancourt would likely still have been out at a nightclub at 3:15 A.M., thoroughly enjoying himself and in no way ready for bed. As it was, he felt dull and tired, and knew he was not thinking very clearly anymore. He had been going over in his mind all he knew of Gibbons’s personal life, trying to find anything that could explain the attack on his friend, but he had come up with nothing. Gibbons’s life was very much caught up in his work, the more so since he had had his heart broken last summer. He had not yet recovered sufficiently to be interested in dating, much less any kind of full-blown affair that might lead to jealousy and gunshots.
    Bethancourt did not know all of Gibbons’s other friends well, but he could not see any of the younger police detectives or, still less, Gibbons’s old friends from Oxford, resorting to firearms. The other detectives, he concluded, might at least be accused of jealousy, since Gibbons was well ahead of his peers on their chosen career path.
    With that absurd thought, he stubbed out his cigarette and abandoned the deck in favor of a comfortable chair inside. He had barely got himself settled, stretching out his legs and leaning his head back,
before he fell fast asleep, worn out with worry and the tedium of the road.
    Dotty Carmichael had come prepared for a long wait with a paperback romance novel, a pack of cards with which to play Patience if, as seemed likely, the book failed to hold her attention in the current circumstances, and a large thermos flask of tea. She had also brought a cushion from her sofa at home, an acknowledgment that at her age one could not sit for long on institutional chairs without becoming uncomfortable.
    She did not anticipate having any difficulty in staying awake, despite the fact that she had not been up much past eleven since the birth of her second grandchild some three years ago, and in fact she did not feel in the least sleepy. She was the more nettled, therefore, to find that Detective Constable Lemmy was fast asleep. Carmichael had left him behind with orders to “see to Mrs. Carmichael,” and Dotty could not help but feel Lemmy was not making much of a job of it. Over the last fortnight, she had heard any number of complaints from her husband about his new constable, and she had kept to herself the opinion that poor Detective Constable Lemmy’s worst fault was to have supplanted the brilliant Sergeant Gibbons as her husband’s assistant. As the night wore on, however, she was rapidly revising this estimation of the constable’s character.
    After about an hour, she