Read Online Singled Out by Simon Brett - Free Book Online Page B

abilities. I know how many ideas I contribute to the programme, and I know you’d get a lot fewer good ones if I wasn’t there.’
    â€˜Huh. There are other people around with good ideas.’ But he didn’t pursue it. Tacitly he had accepted her point. He chuckled. ‘Must say it’s a bit of a turn-up. Didn’t think Michael had it in him. I’d assumed he’d been firing blanks all these years.’
    Laura was surprised Dennis didn’t know she was living apart from her husband. They were both members of the same continuation-of-public-school gentlemen’s club and she knew they met there from time to time. On reflection, though, she realized how characteristic it would be of such masculine encounters for nothing personal to be discussed, and also how typical of Michael it would be to maintain the front that nothing was wrong with his marriage.
    Dennis’s words reminded her, though. Michael would have to be told about her condition. And she didn’t particularly look forward to his reaction.

Eight
    After their father was arrested for murdering their mother, the Fisher children were put into care. For a few weeks, while the authorities still reeled from the shock of what had happened, the two were in separate establishments, but Kent’s behaviour was so disruptive that, on the advice of the psychologist monitoring their case, they were quickly reunited. Kent was then fifteen, and Laura fourteen.
    A series of short-term fostering experiments led to the children finally being placed with a Mr and Mrs Hull. The couple had tried to persuade Kent and Laura to call them something less formal, but without success. In both children’s minds they always remained ‘Mr and Mrs Hull’.
    They were a well-meaning childless couple, whose attempts to break through their charges’ reserve never stood a chance. Kent and Laura were too traumatized to begin to trust anyone, and the style of Mr and Mrs Hull’s earnest overtures to them could not have been less calculated to appeal. The foster parents had been carefully matched to the social background of the children, but Kent and Laura knew only too well what could be hidden behind a façade of middle-class gentility and did not give the Hulls the smallest comfort of their confidence.
    After they had left their foster home, neither child attempted to make further contact. Mr and Mrs Hull valiantly phoned and wrote encouraging letters for a couple of years, but then gave up the hopelessly one-sided desire for communication. They consigned their relationship with the two children to the catalogue of other disappointments that had been their lives, and comforted themselves with the thought that they had at least given Kent and Laura practical help during ‘a very difficult period’. All things considered, the two young people had ‘turned out pretty well’.
    This had also been the view of the psychologist a few months after the children had started living with the Hulls. Once reunited with his sister, Kent’s behaviour had improved instantly. He had buckled down to work at his new private school and, to everyone’s surprise, performed creditably at ‘A’-Level. He did not say a great deal, but then he had never been a communicative child. And not even his sister knew much about what went on behind his dull, ungiving eyes.
    Kent’s decision to go into the police force had first been formulated soon after his mother’s murder. Whether the investigation of her death had stimulated the boy’s interest in police work, or whether its injustice had prompted him to devote his life to the battle against crime, was impossible to know. Such confidences were among the many that Kent never released.
    On his nineteenth birthday he started at Hendon Police College, and during the basic course showed himself to be a doggedly efficient if unspectacular student. From the moment he began training, he