Holloway Falls Read Online Free

square. Elbows on knees, chin on knitted palms.
    Rachel returned from the kitchen carrying a tray on which balanced two long glasses of iced water, a slice of lime in each. Holloway took the glass, drank eagerly. She watched the violent bobbing of his Adam’s apple.
    He set the empty glass in a ceramic coaster placed near his ankle. Sucked air through cold-tenderized teeth.
    Rachel sat facing him, curled on an armchair. She wore faded 501s, a white blouse. Black loafers on bare feet.
    ‘I’m sorry to bother you again,’ he said. I’m just mopping up. If you see what I mean.’
    He blotted his brow with the edge of a cotton handkerchief.
    Rachel smiled readily enough and dismissed his apology. Holloway wouldn’t have guessed her age with any accuracy. He knew she belonged to a gymnasium. Drove a black Volkswagen Polo. She had about her a considered poise.
    Twenty-odd years of quiet, lovable Andrew, bemused by the mystery of his contentment.
    He wondered what had driven him to walk into the sea.
    He’d read the diary Rachel discovered stuffed beneath the seat of an armchair in the extension. It was a school jotter that Andrew had crammed with obsessive handwriting. Reading this diary, it was not necessary to be a policeman or a psychiatrist or a wife to know that Andrew Winston Taylor had descended into insanity, the nature of which it had been an act of quiet heroism to keep from his family.
    Andrew underwent a nervous breakdown (an inaccurate term, essentially meaningless. One Holloway nevertheless understood), or had suffered late-onset temporal lobe epilepsy, or a psychotic episode, after or during which he walked into the sea and took the cold, polluted ocean deep into his lungs. And now he was dead and eyeless, face down and ragged with nibbling. Possibly the tides would wash him up somewhere or other, and some dog out for an early morning walk would stumble across a jellified mass shrouded in kelp.
    Holloway had encountered such things before, and worse. But he didn’t think he would encounter it this time. He could not imagine why Andrew Taylor should take those 38,000 fraudulently acquired pounds into the great darkness with him.
    Perhaps it was merely testament to his peculiar madness, to his unique system of portents and symbols. Perhaps the money meant something. But Holloway didn’t believe that either.
    Ten thousand people went missing in Britain every year. Some were dead. Most were not. Most could be found, if there was a good enough reason to look.
    Rachel leaned towards him, passed a sheaf of photographs.
    He thanked her, shuffled through the prints. He looked at Andrew Winston Taylor and wondered at the madness that had driven him to walk from this house, these children, this wife.
    ‘Kelly Brookmyre,’ said Rachel.
    Kelly’s name had passed her lips innumerable times. Its use was tired with past exasperation. ‘In Wales. The Christmas just gone.’
    ‘I remember,’ he said, and he did. He had heard this from Rachel, and he had read it in Andrew’s diary and he had heard it from Llewellyn, who ran a pub in Cardiff now and was privy to the stuff that didn’t make the papers. Coppers’ talk.
    Rachel ran a hand through her hair. The glint of June light on wedding ring. Tucked a lock behind her ear.
    ‘It just seemed to push him over the edge,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, particularly.’
    ‘But you mentioned that he seemed to improve after the Brookmyre murder.’
    ‘He seemed to,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t. Not really.’
    ‘But you had no idea that …’
    ‘That he would catch a train to the seaside and drown himself?’
    ‘No.’ He looked down at the pad. Scratched out a spiral with blue nib. ‘Of course not. I’m sorry. But he seemed in control? He wasn’t short-tempered? Or violent?’
    ‘He never even raised his voice,’ she said. ‘To me or the children. Not once.’
    She twirled a stray lock of hair about her index finger. She’d told him all this before. This