Read Online Death in a Far Country by Patricia Hall - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Patricia Hall
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longer locked, picking her way up the littered and evil-smelling concrete stairs again to her eyrie to eat something at last.
Pale sunlight began to warm her slightly as the morning wore on and, with food inside her, her mind began to distinguish between the reality of her position and the garbled images that had tormented her fitful sleep. Occasionally she crouched against the parapet and glanced down the dizzying side of the block to see what was happening below. Soon after daylight men had begun to arrive to continue work on the neighbouring block, which had been reduced to little more than a mound of rubble that was being gradually loaded onto huge trucks and taken away. She guessed that the block she was hiding in was due for the same fate. The flats below her had been trashed and vandalised, whether by their last residents or by others who had moved in later, she did not know. The entrances and ground floor windows had been ineffectually boarded up, the stairwells left open to rain and wildlife and whatever human flotsam chose to take refuge there, the lifts vandalised and the shafts gaping open. She did not think she was always alone in Priestley House but had so far avoided any contact with other people who were undoubtedly there as illicitly as she was herself.
She gazed across the busy building site below to take in a view of the whole of the town whose name she did not even know and the blue-grey hills beyond. They were gentle hills here, she thought, not like the craggy mountainsides at home where the village she had left what seemed like a lifetime ago had crouched underneath the peaks as if trying to concealitself, as more than once in its history it had needed to. Here she could see roads climbing up the hillsides, and cars, like ants, crawling up and over the rounded summits to whatever lay beyond.
Closer at hand, there were busy urban streets with red buses and people moving about their business in ever-changing groups, cars swirling round circular intersections, an occasional small train trundling down rails that shone in the damp air and slid into what she recognised as a station even from this distance. There were the spires of churches and, to her surprise, the minarets of a couple of mosques, and an occasional tall chimney whose purpose she could only guess at. And then rows and rows of houses, snaking up the hills and down the valleys, until they gave way to the green fields and woods of open countryside. There was normality down there, she thought, hundreds, even thousands of people living safe lives without the fear that paralysed her and kept her chained to her cold and windy vantage point, choking with panic if she saw anyone approach the doors to the flats.
When she had crept back to the canal-side path two nights earlier she had found no trace of her friend. At first she had hidden for more than an hour in some bushes in a tiny area of open land not far away, hardly daring to breathe in case their pursuers heard her. She had listened for footsteps, but heard nothing she could identify, no sounds of struggle, no car, no audible hint that the dark water had been disturbed, only her own heart thudding behind her ribs and her teeth chattering eventually as the cold air threatened to freeze her blood. Then, when she had summoned up the tattered remnants of her courage and crept back to where she had left her friendthere was nothing at all, the black water was still and silent, the towpath deserted, the houseboats moored a little farther up the cut in total darkness. The only movement in the bleak silent landscape came from a few bright stars in the black sky, which were twinkling a million, million miles away as if to mock her bitter isolation.
She did not know how long she had sat beside the water, crying silently, before faint streaks of grey in the sky to the east told her that she had to move before the town woke to a new dawn. She had pulled her thin cardigan around her then and slipped away,
Pale sunlight began to warm her slightly as the morning wore on and, with food inside her, her mind began to distinguish between the reality of her position and the garbled images that had tormented her fitful sleep. Occasionally she crouched against the parapet and glanced down the dizzying side of the block to see what was happening below. Soon after daylight men had begun to arrive to continue work on the neighbouring block, which had been reduced to little more than a mound of rubble that was being gradually loaded onto huge trucks and taken away. She guessed that the block she was hiding in was due for the same fate. The flats below her had been trashed and vandalised, whether by their last residents or by others who had moved in later, she did not know. The entrances and ground floor windows had been ineffectually boarded up, the stairwells left open to rain and wildlife and whatever human flotsam chose to take refuge there, the lifts vandalised and the shafts gaping open. She did not think she was always alone in Priestley House but had so far avoided any contact with other people who were undoubtedly there as illicitly as she was herself.
She gazed across the busy building site below to take in a view of the whole of the town whose name she did not even know and the blue-grey hills beyond. They were gentle hills here, she thought, not like the craggy mountainsides at home where the village she had left what seemed like a lifetime ago had crouched underneath the peaks as if trying to concealitself, as more than once in its history it had needed to. Here she could see roads climbing up the hillsides, and cars, like ants, crawling up and over the rounded summits to whatever lay beyond.
Closer at hand, there were busy urban streets with red buses and people moving about their business in ever-changing groups, cars swirling round circular intersections, an occasional small train trundling down rails that shone in the damp air and slid into what she recognised as a station even from this distance. There were the spires of churches and, to her surprise, the minarets of a couple of mosques, and an occasional tall chimney whose purpose she could only guess at. And then rows and rows of houses, snaking up the hills and down the valleys, until they gave way to the green fields and woods of open countryside. There was normality down there, she thought, hundreds, even thousands of people living safe lives without the fear that paralysed her and kept her chained to her cold and windy vantage point, choking with panic if she saw anyone approach the doors to the flats.
When she had crept back to the canal-side path two nights earlier she had found no trace of her friend. At first she had hidden for more than an hour in some bushes in a tiny area of open land not far away, hardly daring to breathe in case their pursuers heard her. She had listened for footsteps, but heard nothing she could identify, no sounds of struggle, no car, no audible hint that the dark water had been disturbed, only her own heart thudding behind her ribs and her teeth chattering eventually as the cold air threatened to freeze her blood. Then, when she had summoned up the tattered remnants of her courage and crept back to where she had left her friendthere was nothing at all, the black water was still and silent, the towpath deserted, the houseboats moored a little farther up the cut in total darkness. The only movement in the bleak silent landscape came from a few bright stars in the black sky, which were twinkling a million, million miles away as if to mock her bitter isolation.
She did not know how long she had sat beside the water, crying silently, before faint streaks of grey in the sky to the east told her that she had to move before the town woke to a new dawn. She had pulled her thin cardigan around her then and slipped away,
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