Read Online A Nice Place to Die by Jane Mcloughlin - Free Book Online Page B

as they don’t tell me then it isn’t true.
    DCI Moody turned away from the door when she got no reply to her knocking.
    â€˜Funny,’ she said, ‘there’s a car in the garage, someone should be in.’
    Sergeant Reid tried to peer through the front window into the living-room.
    â€˜No sign of anyone,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they’re in bed.’
    â€˜In the middle of the afternoon?’ Rachel Moody said. ‘It’s not likely. Anyway, the child must be due home from school.’
    â€˜We’re wasting our time here,’ Jack Reid said. ‘It seems to me we’re not going to get anything useful out of anyone in this street. It’s inhabited by zombies.’
    â€˜I’d like to know what they’re all so damned scared of, and why?’ Rachel Moody said.
    â€˜Us, probably,’ Jack Reid said. ‘They think we’re going to find some way of blaming them.’
    â€˜That’s ridiculous,’ the DCI said, ‘we’re trying to help them.’
    â€˜That’s not the way they see it,’ Sergeant Reid said. ‘They’d rather we went away and let them go back to pretending nothing’s happened here since the Old Catcombe villagers burned Hester the witch in 1568.’
    â€˜That’s crazy,’ Rachel Moody said. ‘They can’t be that deluded.’
    The Sergeant shrugged and they turned away and walked back down the garden path to the road.

NINE
    N icky Byrne sat on the front wall of Number Five with her back to the road. She was waiting for Jess Miller to pass on her way home from school, but she didn’t want anyone to know that. The wall felt very cold and damp on the back of her legs through her school skirt, but she tried to ignore it. Jess’s law laid down that doing nothing sitting on a wall making dirty patterns with your heels on the pale blue painted pebble-dash was cool; standing there alone looking bored was pathetic.
    Nicky didn’t want Jess to think of her as pathetic. She wanted to be as much like Jess as she could make herself, given how different they were.
    They were unlikely friends. Big, noisy, uninhibited Jess with her purple hair and her revealing scraps of clothing and her decorative safety pins could never pass unnoticed; Nicky, a colourless little swot with pale sandy hair and red-rimmed milky eyes behind her spectacles, was totally effaced by her.
    But friends they were.
    Although Nicky was two years younger than Jess, they were in the same class at school. Nicky had jumped a year last term because she was much brighter than the other children her own age. At any rate, she worked a lot harder at her studies. Jess, meanwhile, had failed her end of term tests and been held back to retake the year.
    In spite of the age difference, a kind of conspiracy was developing between the two of them. It wasn’t obvious at first what drew them together. True, they both seemed freakish to the other children, but at opposite ends of the scale. No one told they were becoming friends would believe it. What, after all, had either to gain from the other?
    In fact they provided each other with something both needed. Associating with Nicky graced Jess with a gloss of intelligence, while Jess protected Nicky from the worst of the school bullies, and also gave the younger girl an insight into life on the street in Forester Close. At home Nicky’s mother Helen and her friend Terri kept the girl under a form of house arrest. Terri in particular insisted that Nicky was different from ordinary children; she was gifted, she had to be protected from associating with them. But in spite of her, or perhaps because of her, Nicky and Jess had become allies, each protecting the other where she was dangerously ignorant. Jess was the one who’d explained to Nicky that the main reason everyone persecuted her was not only her horrible cheap pink plastic spectacles, but because her parents were lesbians.