Read Online Take My Breath Away by Martin Edwards - Free Book Online Page A

sometimes he thought she loved the whole place more than she could love any man. The ex had been architect of his own downfall.
    The phone trilled. His agent had called the hospital only to learn that Nic was no longer a patient. He didn’t bother with words of sympathy, cutting to the chase with an an offer – ‘kid, the money will make your eyes water,’ – for a two-thousand word piece for
The Mail on Sunday
. Nic didn’t need to think it over before saying no.
    Mel was a loud New Yorker who had missed his true vocation as a yellow cab driver. ‘Fuck me, Nic. You’re Johnny on the spot when a legendary headhunter is brutally slain and you don’t race straight off to your keyboard? Bad fucking attitude, you’ll never make a proper writer.’
    ‘Yeah, you’re right, but I’m still not doing it. Too much like dancing on his grave.’
    ‘Think of it as therapy.’
    ‘Even if I did, the piece would never see the light of day.’
    Mel never wasted time banging his head against brick walls. ‘Okay, okay, so what about
Son of Crippen
?Plenty of scope for serialisation with true crime, that’s the way to make a few bucks.’
    ‘Don’t you start.’
    ‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ Mel demanded. ‘Afraid you’re just a one-trick pony. Afraid the next book won’t be as good as the last. So you’d rather not risk writing it.’
    Nic said lazily, ‘When I want to be psychoanalysed, I’ll let you know. It’s not fear, Mel. You know that. It’s just – I need a story to seduce me. Take over my life. If I’m not obsessed, it won’t work.’
    ‘Okay, okay. So what’s bugging you right now? Apart from the fact that your royalty cheques ain’t been so handsome for a while?’
    ‘When something comes along, I’ll tell you, all right?’
    He put the phone down, aware that he hadn’t told Mel the whole truth. Something had begun to obsess him. It was more, even more, than the need to understand how Ella had come back from the dead. He wanted to learn about the dead lawyers and find if the answer to Dylan’s final question meant anything at all.
    Without thinking, he put on a CD. Noel Gallagher, being contemptuous about something.
    ‘For God’s sake,’ Phil called down. ‘Are you doing this deliberately? You know I need quiet if I’m going to concentrate.’
    He cut off Noel in mid-sneer. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’
    He sprawled across the red and yellow sofa, an artistically brilliant contrast to the plain birch plywood wall cupboards and as comfortable as a ledge of rock. Thinking about Dylan, not Phil. Later, after she’d finished work, she was in a better humour and came to sit on his knee.
    ‘I had an idea,’ she said, as he stroked her thighs. ‘How about writing up what happened to your family all those years ago?’
    He stopped stroking. ‘You can’t be serious.’
    ‘Sure I am, why not? You could do it.’ She paused. ‘Maybe it would help.’
    ‘Help who?’
    ‘You.’
    ‘So I need help?’
    ‘You became a lawyer, so you could discover how to weigh up evidence. You wrote about how a man under suspicion deals with his wife’s death so that you could make sense of crimes of passion. Maybe prove that black is white.’
    ‘He didn’t kill her, Phil.’
    ‘You’re talking about Crippen?’
    ‘You know I’m not.’
    She pulled a face. ‘Everyone else thinks he did it.’
    ‘I can’t write about it – the whole thing’s too close. But there’s no way he could have killed her.’
    ‘It’s the truth. Must be. Why can’t you get used to it?’
    He bundled her off his knee. ‘Because I don’t believe it. I knew him. He would never do a thing like that, you hear? I’ll never accept he was guilty, understand? One day I’ll prove it to you.’
    ‘Prove what, exactly?’
    ‘That my father was no murderer.’
     
    Bryn Gabriel had been a Welshman and a teller of tales. Nic’s first memories were of his father recounting legends of King Arthur and his knights of the