Read Online Murder on the Short List by Peter Lovesey - Free Book Online

– if I think you’re good enough – and no one will notice you, no one. When the game is in play you’ll be as still as the net-post, and as uninteresting. For Rule Two of the Laws of Tennis states that the court has certain permanent fixtures like the net and the net posts and the umpire’s chair. And the list of permanent fixtures includes you, the ball boys, in your respective places. So you can tell your mothers and fathers and your favourite aunties not to bother to watch. If you’re doing your job they won’t even notice you.”
    To think we’d volunteered for this. By a happy accident of geography ours was one of the schools chosen to provide the ball boys and ball girls for the Championships. “It’s a huge honour,” our headmaster had told us. “You do it for the prestige of the school. You’re on television. You meet the stars, hand them their towels, supply them with the balls, pour their drinks. You can be proud.”
    The Brigadier disabused us of all that. “If any of you are looking for glory, leave at once. Go back to your stuffy class-rooms. I don’t want your sort in my squad. The people I want are functionaries, not glory-seekers. Do you understand? You will do your job, brilliantly, the way I show you. It’s all about timing, self-control and, above all, being invisible.”
    T he victim was poisoned. Once the poison was in his system there was no antidote. Death was inevitable, and lingering.
    S o in the next three months we learned to be invisible. And it was damned hard work, I can tell you. I had no idea what it would lead to. You’re thinking we murdered the Brigadier? No, he’s a survivor. So far as I know, he’s still alive and terrifying the staff in a retirement home.
    I’m going to tell it as it happened, and we start on the November afternoon in nineteen-eighty when my best friend Eddie Pringle and I were on an hour’s detention for writing something obscene on Blind Pugh’s blackboard. Mr Pugh, poor soul, was our chemistry master. He wasn’t really blind, but his sight wasn’t the best. He wore thick glasses with prism lenses, and we little monsters took full advantage. Sometimes Nemesis arrived, in the shape of our headmaster, Mr Neames, breezing into the lab, supposedly for a word with Blind Pugh, but in reality to catch us red-handed playing poker behind bits of apparatus or rolling mercury along the bench-tops. Those who escaped with a detention were the lucky ones.
    â€œI’ve had enough of this crap,” Eddie told me in the detention room. “I’m up for a job as ball boy.”
    â€œWhat do you mean – Wimbledon?” I said. “That’s not till next June.”
    â€œThey train you. It’s every afternoon off school for six months – and legal. No more detentions. All you do is trot around the court picking up balls and chucking them to the players and you get to meet McEnroe and Connors and all those guys. Want to join me?”
    It seemed the ideal escape plan, but of course we had to get permission from Nemesis to do it. Eddie and I turned ourselves into model pupils for the rest of term. No messing about. No detentions. Every homework task completed.
    â€œIn view of this improvement,” Nemesis informed us, “I have decided to let you go on the training course.”
    But when we met the Brigadier we found we’d tunneled out of one prison into another. He terrified us. The regime was pitiless, the orders unrelenting.
    â€œFirst you must learn how to be a permanent fixture. Stand straight, chest out, shoulders back, thumbs linked behind your back. Now hold it for five minutes. If anyone moves, I put the stopwatch back to zero again.”
    Suddenly he threw a ball hard at Eddie and of course he ducked.
    â€œRight,” the Brigadier announced, “Pringle moved. The hand goes back to zero. You have to learn to be still,