Read Online Sky High by Michael Gilbert - Free Book Online

bathroom had been.
    A few steps further and he sensed he was in the bedroom.
    He got his lamp out again and flashed it around.
    The explosion had played its usual tricks. Three of the walls were more or less intact. A picture, its glass unbroken, hung above the fireplace, whilst the heavy iron bed had been picked up bodily and flung across the room.
    Pillows and bedclothes had been spewed about the floor.
    There was one long, brightly coloured bolster lying against the wainscoting under the window. Tim looked at it twice before he realised that he had discovered Major MacMorris.
    Forcing himself to hold the torch steady he made a quick examination. There was nothing that he could usefully do. The body presented that general appearance of a rag doll with all the stuffing out that high explosive produces where it lays its hands too intimately on a human being.
    Lying beside MacMorris, on the floor, was an envelope. The flap was stuck down and the envelope itself was old, and crumpled, as if with much handling. Impossible to guess where it had come from. Off the table, out of the eviscerated cupboard or the ripped-up chest of drawers? Had it fluttered down from behind some picture? Or had it been by chance in MacMorris’ hand at the moment of the explosion? He pushed it into his pocket for later inspection.
    Tim had no real recollection of going back. The next thing he clearly remembered was sitting on the edge of the broken staircase. Sergeant Gattie was peering up at him.
    ‘You found him, did you?’ he said.
    ‘He’s in the bedroom,’said Tim. ‘He’s wearing pyjamas – I think.’
    ‘Was he in bed, when it went off?’
    Tim forced himself to think.
    ‘He might have been sitting on the bed,’ he said, at last. ‘I don’t think he was in it or he’d have been lying by the mattress and the bedclothes. They were the other side of the room. They might have protected him a bit.’
    ‘And he’s—’
    ‘Yes,’ said Tim. ‘Yes. Very definitely. I’ve hardly ever in my life seen anyone more so.’
    Sergeant Gattie peered up at him again. His face and head were white with plaster. It was so caked into his hair and smothered over his forehead that it was difficult to see where the handkerchief over his nose and mouth began. Only his black eyes were alive.
    Tim felt an urgent desire to laugh at him, but he had a feeling that once he started he might not be able to stop.
    ‘I should come down if I were you, sir,’ said Sergeant Gattie. That sounds like the fire brigade arriving. We’d better give them a clear run.’

 
II
     
    The following evening, after supper, Liz Artside put down her book and said, ‘How much did I ever tell you about your father’s death?’
    ‘Never very much,’ said Tim, looking up with a frown from a black covered exercise book in which he was working out something in pencil.
    ‘I wasn’t sure,’ said Liz.
    It looked for a moment as if that was the end of the conversation. Tim picked up his pencil again.
    ‘I meant to explain about last night,’ said Liz. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I expect it was the coincidence that set me off.’
    ‘I knew that Dad got blown up,’ said Tim slowly, ‘and that it was an accident, and that it happened in Cologne, a little time before I was born. That’s really all anyone’s ever told me about it.’
    Liz said slowly, ‘It was an autumn evening, like yesterday, only rather darker and more overcast. I was sitting, looking out of the window. We had a flat in the Onkeldam suburb, overlooking the Rhine, just south of the city. From where I sat I could see Bill’s headquarter building. It was a big house – an old school – further up, on the South Bank. He was working late that night. He didn’t often work late. He usually got it all done in the day and he liked to sit at home in the evenings and plan what we were going to do when we got back to England.’
    Tim looked up quickly. But there was no feeling there, suppressed or other.