Read Online The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Susan Hill
Ads: Link
onher teeth, about which her mother and several school friends said she was a bit embarrassed and self-conscious. She had signed up to take a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.
Simon had half a dozen photographs of Harriet Lowther on the table. Harriet as a six-year-old with missing front teeth. Harriet at eleven, proud in her new school uniform, a shot taken in the garden of the Old Mill. Harriet withthe tennis team, holding a trophy. Harriet playing with a friend’s puppy.
Harriet. Normal. Cheerful. Neither pretty nor plain but certainly growing into prettiness. Harriet Lowther. So much like a thousand other middle-class girls at middle-class schools. So entirely herself.
Harriet Lowther.
Simon looked into her face, at each photograph but most of all at the last, taken six months beforeshe disappeared, as if she might tell him something. Might? Could? No. Just a cheerful, bright-faced girl. No secrets. He was as sure as he could be that she hid no secrets.
He got up and stretched, lay on the floor and did a couple of dozen press-ups, then rolled over with his knees bent up to his chest several times. His back had always caused him problems, partly because of his height, butin the last few months it had become much worse. Cat had suggested he see an osteopath – ‘GPs are no good at backs’ – but he had not yet made the time.
‘Psychosomatic,’ his father had said, typically, without sympathy and without elaborating, which had annoyed his stepmother.
‘You have only to look at him to know he’d have back problems,’ Judith had said, ‘and even if they were psychosomatic,what difference would that make? His back still hurts.’
One more reason to be pleased that Judith was now in their lives. She had recommended an osteopath. Simon had the name and number. Somewhere.
He got up carefully, swung himself to and fro, then went to make coffee. His father and Judith had bought him a Nespresso machine for his birthday, streamlined, smart, efficient. He thought it mightbe the thing he would grab if the flat caught fire.
Harriet Lowther. One Friday afternoon sixteen years ago she had left a friend’s house for the bus stop less than a hundred yards away and, after turning round to wave at the corner, had walked out of sight for good. Now her skeleton had been found among earth washed down from the Moor in a storm.
In between, silence.
In between, sixteen yearsof inquiries, interviews, searches, notes, files, sixteen years of anguish and hopes raised and dashed, parental grief and then death and, now, terrible shock. Sixteen years of unanswered questions.
It made Serrailler feel as if he were ageing himself as he went through everything carefully, painstakingly, as if he were doing a fingertip search of the ground, but it also roused something in himwhich he recognised as the original passion he had felt for joining the force and moving to CID. It was difficult to pin down. Curiosity. Determination. The need for answers. The need to close ends. To make sense. To find not only solutions but explanations. The need to be ten steps ahead and several miles cleverer than those who committed appalling crimes. Day-to-day routine, too much desk time,meant that inevitably he lost sight of it but it was still there, and now he had it again, the focused passion to discover what had happened and put the whole puzzle together from a thousand small pieces. It was a cool and rational determination – if it had not been it would not have been of any use. But there was a spark too. His feelings had to be engaged in some way. The first spark had beenlit when he had seen Harriet Lowther’s pathetic skeleton in the mortuary; the second, even fiercer one, when he had broken the news to her father. And now the third. Harriet was alive to him, in these old photographs and newspaper reports.
She would have been thirty-one, an adult with her growing up behind her, possibly married with her own family.
He made more coffee and a ham
Simon had half a dozen photographs of Harriet Lowther on the table. Harriet as a six-year-old with missing front teeth. Harriet at eleven, proud in her new school uniform, a shot taken in the garden of the Old Mill. Harriet withthe tennis team, holding a trophy. Harriet playing with a friend’s puppy.
Harriet. Normal. Cheerful. Neither pretty nor plain but certainly growing into prettiness. Harriet Lowther. So much like a thousand other middle-class girls at middle-class schools. So entirely herself.
Harriet Lowther.
Simon looked into her face, at each photograph but most of all at the last, taken six months beforeshe disappeared, as if she might tell him something. Might? Could? No. Just a cheerful, bright-faced girl. No secrets. He was as sure as he could be that she hid no secrets.
He got up and stretched, lay on the floor and did a couple of dozen press-ups, then rolled over with his knees bent up to his chest several times. His back had always caused him problems, partly because of his height, butin the last few months it had become much worse. Cat had suggested he see an osteopath – ‘GPs are no good at backs’ – but he had not yet made the time.
‘Psychosomatic,’ his father had said, typically, without sympathy and without elaborating, which had annoyed his stepmother.
‘You have only to look at him to know he’d have back problems,’ Judith had said, ‘and even if they were psychosomatic,what difference would that make? His back still hurts.’
One more reason to be pleased that Judith was now in their lives. She had recommended an osteopath. Simon had the name and number. Somewhere.
He got up carefully, swung himself to and fro, then went to make coffee. His father and Judith had bought him a Nespresso machine for his birthday, streamlined, smart, efficient. He thought it mightbe the thing he would grab if the flat caught fire.
Harriet Lowther. One Friday afternoon sixteen years ago she had left a friend’s house for the bus stop less than a hundred yards away and, after turning round to wave at the corner, had walked out of sight for good. Now her skeleton had been found among earth washed down from the Moor in a storm.
In between, silence.
In between, sixteen yearsof inquiries, interviews, searches, notes, files, sixteen years of anguish and hopes raised and dashed, parental grief and then death and, now, terrible shock. Sixteen years of unanswered questions.
It made Serrailler feel as if he were ageing himself as he went through everything carefully, painstakingly, as if he were doing a fingertip search of the ground, but it also roused something in himwhich he recognised as the original passion he had felt for joining the force and moving to CID. It was difficult to pin down. Curiosity. Determination. The need for answers. The need to close ends. To make sense. To find not only solutions but explanations. The need to be ten steps ahead and several miles cleverer than those who committed appalling crimes. Day-to-day routine, too much desk time,meant that inevitably he lost sight of it but it was still there, and now he had it again, the focused passion to discover what had happened and put the whole puzzle together from a thousand small pieces. It was a cool and rational determination – if it had not been it would not have been of any use. But there was a spark too. His feelings had to be engaged in some way. The first spark had beenlit when he had seen Harriet Lowther’s pathetic skeleton in the mortuary; the second, even fiercer one, when he had broken the news to her father. And now the third. Harriet was alive to him, in these old photographs and newspaper reports.
She would have been thirty-one, an adult with her growing up behind her, possibly married with her own family.
He made more coffee and a ham
Similar Books
