Read Online In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson - Free Book Online

light and switched on the reading lamp by his armchair. He picked up the book he had been reading over the past week, an anthology of twentieth-century poetry,but he couldn’t concentrate. The blue walls distracted him, and the smell of paint in the deep silence of the countryside made him feel lonely and restless. He turned on the radio. Someone was playing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto .
    Banks glanced around the room. The walls did look good; they harmonized well with the ceiling, which he had painted the colour of ripe Brie. Maybe they were just a little too cold, he thought, though he needed all the air-conditioning he could get in this weather. He could always repaint them orange or red in winter, when the ice and snow came, and that would give the illusion of warmth.
    He lit the last cigarette of the day and took his drink outside. The cottage stood on a narrow, unpaved laneway about fifty yards west of Gratly. Opposite Banks’s front door was a sort of bulge in the low wall that ran between the lane and Gratly Beck. In the daytime, it was an ideal spot for ramblers to stop for a moment and admire the falls, but at night there was never anyone there. The lane wasn’t a through road, and there was plenty of room for Banks to park his car there. Just beyond the cottage, it dwindled to a public footpath, which ran between the woods and the side of Gratly Beck.
    Banks had come to see this area as his personal balcony, and he liked to stand out there or sit on the low wall dangling his legs over the edge late in the evening, when it was quiet. It helped him think, get things sorted.
    Tonight, the stone was still warm; the smoke on his tongue tasted sweet as fresh-mown hay. A sheep bleated high on the daleside, where the silhouetted fells were only a shade or two blacker than the night itself. Sharp starlight pricked the satin sky, along with the lights of a distantfarmhouse; a gibbous moon hung over Helmthorpe, in the valley bottom, and the square church tower, with its ancient weather-vane, stood solid against the night. This must have been what the blackout was like, Banks thought, remembering his mother’s stories of getting around London during the Blitz.
    As Banks sat by the dried-up waterfalls, he thought again about the odd way he had come to live in this isolated limestone cottage. It was as a “dream cottage” in more than one way: though he had never told anyone this, he had actually bought it because of a dream.
    Over his last few months alone in the Eastvale semi, Banks had drifted so far from himself that he hadn’t even cleaned or tidied the place since Christmas. Why bother? He spent most of his evenings out in pubs or driving the countryside alone, anyway, and his nights falling asleep half-drunk on the sofa, listening to Mozart or Bob Dylan, fish-and-chip wrappers and take-away cartons piling up in an ever-widening circle around him.
    In April he seemed to reach his lowest ebb. Tracy, who had been to visit her mother in London that Easter weekend, let it slip over the telephone that there was a new man in Sandra’s life, a photo-journalist called Sean, and that they seemed serious. He looked young , Tracy said. Which was a hell of a compliment coming from a nineteen-year-old. Banks immediately began to wonder just how long this affair had been going on before he and Sandra separated last November. He asked Tracy, but she said she didn’t know. She also seemed upset that Banks would even suggest it, so he backed off.
    As a result, Banks was more full of anger and self-pity than usual that night. Whenever he thought of Sean, whichwas far more often than he would have liked, he wanted to kill him. He even considered phoning an old mate on the Met and asking if they couldn’t put the bastard away for something. There were plenty of coppers on the Met who would jump at the chance to put someone called Sean away. But while he had certainly bent the