Read Online Candlenight by Phil Rickman - Free Book Online

and
flashed Claire a grin. "What   have
you got on under there?" He tossed the phone into an armchair, threw off
his jacket and plunged at the sofa.
        Claire let him pull the dressing
gown off her shoulders and suddenly quivered.
        Nothing to do with Giles.
Something her mother had said was replaying itself. She hadn't realised at the
time, hadn't seen the significance. . . left
his awful hovel to you. He only ever saw you once . . .
        When? Claire didn't remember
ever seeing her grandfather. She'd always understood there'd been no contact
whatsoever since the day. two years before she was born, when Judge Thomas Rhys
had gravely announced that he would be returning to the place of his birth, but
his family would not be accompanying him. So when?
        Excitement and dread combined
to make Claire shiver.
    Giles moaned, lips tracking down her
bare shoulder. "Darling . . ." he breathed.
     

 

    Chapter IX
     
    Look," Miranda said. "I just don't see it. Why don't you come
back to bed?"
        The sun had emerged, and
Miranda looked rosy and warm and inviting.
        "I didn't expect you would."
Berry said, standing by the window, turning to look into the street three
storeys down.
    "What counts is how I see
it." He gazed out towards the Thames. This building did not itself
overlook the Thames but you could see some other buildings which did.
        "Well it certainly isn't
my idea of a dying wish or a last request or whatever," Miranda said. "To
make a last request you have to know you're dying. And from what you say. he
didn't."
        At the hospital, the tired-eyed
young doctor on night-duty, jeans under the white coat, had said it looked like
a small stroke followed by a second, massive stroke. Happened like an
earthquake, or maybe an earthquake in reverse, a mild foreshock and then the
big one. Bip. bam! Good a way to go as any, better than most. And he'd had a minor
one before, had he? Say no more. Later, the cops had gone through the motions,
because of the way it happened.
        "I'm gonna call
Giles," Berry said. "Maybe we can organise lunch."
        . .
. Look, you put the arm on young Giles. Persuade him to get the bloody place
sold. Soon as he can.
        "You were going to have lunch
with me, remember, if you were in town." Miranda pulled the duvet over her
breasts and went into a pout.
        Shit, how was he supposed to
get this across?
        "See, it's just . . . when
I first came over here I didn't know England from a hole in the ocean and ole
Winstone, he kind of initiated me."
        "Is England so
complicated?"
        "Minefield." Berry said.
He'd taken the job with the agency, American Newsnet, without thinking, in his
haste to get out. Mario Morelli's son guilty of unAmerican behaviour.
        "The English National
Press, they were a club I didn't know how to join." he said. "I walked
in this bar one night and sat down and all these guys stared at me like I'd thrown
up on the table. After a while one leaned over and said out of the corner of
his mouth, "You do know you're sitting in Winstone's chair.'"
        "I think I've seen that
film," Miranda said.
    "So I apologised to
Winstone."
    "As you would."
        "And he became the first one
of them I really talked to, you know? I asked him a whole bunch of those
questions I didn't dare ask anyone else. By closing time he'd explained how
Parliament worked and all those British niceties. Why it isn't done to talk to
the Queen without she talks to you first, or label a guy a killer after he's
charged and like that. No big deal, but he saved my ass a few times, while
certain people stood around waiting for me to fall on it. He was always there,
anything I needed to know. He drank like prohibition was starting tomorrow, but
it didn't matter to him that I didn't join him."
        "So long as you paid for his
I shouldn't imagine it would bother him in the slightest," said Miranda.
"You're endearingly naive