Wexford 6 - No More Dying Then Read Online Free

said the same, about the quarrel and John going off, Mrs Crantock got out her car and we drove along Mill Lane all the way to Forby and back, looking for John. We met a man with cows and we asked him, and a postman and someone delivering vegetables, but nobody had seen him. And then I phoned you.”
       “So John has been missing since about three thirty?”
       She nodded. “But why would he go there? Why? He’s afraid of the dark.”
       Her composure remained and yet Burden felt that the wrong word or gesture from him, perhaps even a sudden sound, would puncture it and release a scream of terror. He didn’t quite know what to make of her. She looked peculiar, the kind of woman who belonged to a world he knew of only through newspapers. He had seen pictures of her, or of women who closely resembled her, leaving London courts after being found guilty of possessing cannabis. Such as she were found dead in furnished rooms after an overdose of barbiturates and drink. Such as she? The face was the same, pinched and pale, and the wild hair and the repellent clothes. It was her control which puzzled him and the sweet soft voice which didn’t fit the image he had made of her of eccentric conduct and an unsound life.
       “Mrs. Lawrence,” he began, “we get dozens of cases of missing children in the course of our work and more than ninety percent of them are found safe and sound.” He wasn’t going to mention the girl who hadn’t been found at all. Someone else probably would, some interfering neighbour, but perhaps by then the boy would be back with his mother. “Do you know what happens to most of them? They wander away out of pique or bravado and get lost and exhausted, So they lie down in some, warm hole and - sleep.”
       Her eyes dismayed him. They were so large and staring and she hardly seemed to blink at all. Now he saw in them a faint gleam of hope. “You are very kind to me,” she said gravely. “I trust you.”
       Burden said awkwardly, “That’s good. You trust us and let us do the worrying, eh? Now what time does your husband get home?”
       “I’m divorced. I live alone.”
       “Yes, well, my chief will want to know about that, see your - er, ex-husband and so on.” She would be divorced, he thought. She couldn’t be more than twenty-eight and by the time she was thirty-eight she would probably have been married and divorced twice more. God knew what combination of circumstances had brought her to the depths of Sussex from London where she rightly belonged, to live in squalour and cause untold trouble to the police by her negligence.
       Her quiet voice, grown rather shaky, broke into his harsh and perhaps unjust reverie. “John’s all I’ve got. I’ve no one in the world but John.”
       And whose fault was that? “We’ll find him,” said Burden firmly. “I’ll find a woman to be with you, Perhaps this Mrs. Crantock?”
       “Would you? She’s very nice. Most of the people around here are nice, although they’re not . . .” She paused and considered. “They’re not quite like any people I’ve known before.”
       I’ll bet they’re not, thought Burden. He glanced at the patchwork dress. For what respectable social occasion would any woman choose to wear a thing like that?
       She didn’t come to the door with him. He left her staring into space, playing with the long chain of beads that hung round her neck. But when he was outside he looked back and saw her white face at the window, a smeared dirty window that those thin hands had never polished. Their eyes met for a moment and convention forced him to grin uneasily. She gave no answering smile but only stared, her face as pale and wan as the moon between clouds of heavy hair.
       
    Mrs. Crantock was a neat and cheerful woman who wore her greying black hair in crisp curls and a string of cultured pearls against her pink twinset. At Burden’s request she left immediately to keep Mrs. Lawrence