Read Online For The Death Of Me by Quintin Jardine - Free Book Online Page A

have you?’
    â€˜Now it’s my turn not to understand,’ she shot back. ‘What do you mean?’
    I gazed at her, rather coldly, I suspect. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We’re both tired and under great stress, saying things we’d never normally say. Let’s strike everything that’s just been said from the record, okay?’
    â€˜What did you mean, back in the car, about things I should have handled better?’
    â€˜Mary,’ I murmured, ‘I really don’t want to get into this.’
    â€˜What did you mean?’ she hissed.
    I took my wallet from my pocket and opened it. I showed her the photo that’s on display there, of Susie and the three kids; the light was good enough for her to see it clearly. Then I slid a finger into the space behind the credit-card slots and drew out another image, of Tom. I’d taken it myself a year earlier, on the day that I’d found him in California, to mark it, but for another reason too.
    Before I go any further let me take you back to something I told you in my last confession to you, about the moment in which I saw him for the first time: ‘In an instant, I knew everything: there was no thought process involved, I just knew everything.’ That’s what I said to you then. I’ll bet you thought you knew what I meant; but I’ll bet you also, any odds you like, that you didn’t.
    I showed Mary that photograph, and then I showed her another, a snap of another child, taken thirty-five years earlier. The likeness was incredible: they could have been twins.
    Her cheeks seemed to collapse into her face as she sucked in her breath; the gasp was so loud I was afraid she’d waken Ellie, but it would take an earthquake to do that.
    â€˜I warned you against this,’ I growled quietly, ‘but you had to insist. So maybe you’ll explain to me why my son, conceived with Primavera and borne by her, should be the living image of my late first wife . . . your daughter. How can that be?’
    She shook her head, her mouth set in a tight line.
    â€˜It’s out of the box now, Mary,’ I told her grimly. ‘You can’t put it back.’ I glanced at Ellie, and I feared that there might just be an earthquake in that room if we stayed there. ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
    Conrad was sitting in a chair outside the door; he was wide awake. I said we were going for some fresh air, and asked him to sit with Ellie, in case she wakened and our absence made her think the worst.
    We couldn’t actually go outside, in case we bumped into the press, so I simply turned left at the end of the corridor and tried the first door I saw. It was locked, but the second wasn’t, so we stepped inside. When I found the light switch I saw we were in a private office, probably belonging to one of the senior staff.
    I took the two photos from my wallet once more, and held them in front of my step-mother until eventually she looked at them again.
    â€˜I’m not kidding myself, am I? Those children are almost mirror images. One of them is Tom, and the other’s Jan at the same age. We’re agreed on that, yes?’ I ground the last word out, brutally. She nodded. ‘So where does that take us, Mary?’
    She tried to turn away, but I grabbed her shoulders and held her, so that she had to look at me. ‘Where?’ I asked her again, but she stayed silent. I began to wonder whether she had kept her secret for so long that she was unable to give it voice.
    So I did it for her. ‘Unless there’s an ancestral link between the Blackstone and the More family, or the Mores and the Phillipses, that none of us knows about, there are only two possibilities. Either Alex More is my father, or Mac Blackstone is Jan’s.’ Actually, the first of those had never entered my head until then, the moment when I confronted the truth that had been doing my