Read Online The Bell Ringers by Henry Porter - Free Book Online Page B

nothing as too private for your eyes. I am opening myself to you, Sis, and though it is too late to say it, I send my love – the most tender and heartfelt of my life – and I kiss your clever eyes for good fortune and the happiness that has not been ours.
    Some of what I have left you will have been handed to you with this letter, but there is more to find because I could not risk placing all my eggs in one basket. What you have is a primer. The full legacy to you and others will reveal itself in due course. I cannot go into details here.
    The evening I speak of at the start of this note is perfect. I write on a patch of gravel garden in front of the cottage resting on an old metal table, which I inherited when I bought the place. I have a glass of Puligny Montrachet at my side; a neighbour’s dog is making eyes at a bowl of cheese sticks. It has been a very hot day. The sun has set and the sky is bruising a gentle purple in the west. It is just past eight o’clock, and the cuckoos call from the other side of the valley. There are hawks hunting in the dusk above me. As ever, the Dove is their prey. The birds sing butmostly they listen and watch at this time of the day. You will find it all very much behind the times, but I have been happy here.
    If you are reading this it means I’m gone. The evening is yours now with all its grandeur and its flaws: you are more than equal to both. Good luck, and look after my books, my beloved Bristol and my garden – especially my vegetable patch.
    With my love, David.
    Dove Cottage, August 20th
    She read it again while the lawyer looked on.
    â€˜Do you want some coffee? Have a drink?’ she said absently.
    â€˜I won’t, thanks.’ He cleared his throat again. ‘Is there something wrong?’
    â€˜The letter: it doesn’t sound like him at all. I mean the pretentious stuff at the beginning is very much Eyam, but the rest of it sounds like he’s on drugs.’
    â€˜Perhaps he was conscious that you would read this after his death. Maybe it was hard for him to write.’
    She thought for a moment. ‘You’re probably right. What time do you want me to come in?’
    â€˜Any time up to eight.’ He got up and gave her a card. ‘These days we country lawyers have to keep our heads down to make ends meet. You can give me your contact details when you come.’
    â€˜Of course,’ she said, returning the letter and the will to their envelopes. ‘I’ll see you later then.’
    â€˜If it’s past six and my secretary has gone home, just ring the bell.’
    He left and a few moments later she watched him hurrying across the square, nodding to people as he went, one hand on top of his head as though at risk of losing his hair in the wind. From where she sat she could almost see the whole square, and if Hugh Russell had not gone at quite such a gallop, she would probably not have noticed. But what she saw now was the discreet choreography of a close surveillance operation. The moves were all there: the man swivelling from the market stall and walking ahead of the target; the woman with a plastic bag tracking him in the left field, pausing to window shop and watch the target in the reflection; the builder’s labourer folding a tabloid andkeeping pace behind him as the main ‘eyeball’, the ordinary silver saloon containing two men whose heads did not look up from their newspapers as Russell and then their colleagues passed.
    Russell reached Mortimer Street, a wide thoroughfare with unbroken terraces of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century merchants’ houses that ran down to a medieval gate. He crossed the road with a forearm pressed against his jacket to stop it flying up and entered a large cream-coloured townhouse, which the card on the table told her must be number six, Mortimer Street – the offices of Russell, Spring & Co. At this point the energy of the pursuit suddenly gave out and