Read Online The Colour of Death by Michael Cordy - Free Book Online Page B

screaming.  All hope of sleep banished, she lay awake until the light came, waiting for Nathan Fox to help reassemble the pieces of her shattered identity and make sense of the madness that threatened to engulf her.
     
     
    The mawashi geri hit the man cleanly and he fell to the mat with a satisfying grunt.  After delivering the roundhouse kick, Nathan Fox instantly opened his eyes, regained his balance and stood over the fallen man.
    “ Yame ,” shouted the sensei from the side of the mat, ordering the fight to stop.  Fox was panting hard with exertion, his pounding heart pumping blood through his veins.  His karate giri was saturated with sweat but he felt exhilarated.  After leaving Tranquil Waters he had gone straight to the karate dojo for his weekly bout of jiyu kumite , advanced free sparring.  Karate enabled him not only to vent his aggression and express his passion but also to relieve the stresses of the job.  This evening, however, no amount of karate could take his mind off what the orderly had told him about Jane Doe’s hallucinations.  Fox bowed and helped his opponent to his feet.
    “You OK, Leo?”
    The man smiled.  “Only a little hurt pride.  I swear, Nathan, I’m going to get you one of these days.”
    As they left the mat, the aged but still formidable Sensei Daichi tapped Fox on the shoulder.  “Nathan san , you want to enter competition next month?”
    “You know I haven’t competed in years, Sensei.  Anyway, I haven’t practiced enough.”
    Daichi shook his head.  “I don’t agree.  I think you better now you don’t train so hard.  More relaxed.  More natural.”  He shrugged.  “Perhaps next time.”
    Fox smiled at his mentor.  “Perhaps.”
    “Hey, Nathan, some of the guys are grabbing a beer at Scooters,” Leo said.  “You coming?”
    “Not tonight, Leo.  Next week.”
    “Leo laughed.  “Hope she’s worth it, my friend.”
    After a hot shower Fox returned to his apartment in north-west Portland.  The neighborhood boasted many period houses and apartments but his open-plan home on the top floor of a brand new circular tower block was not one of them.  He had always preferred the space and light of modern buildings to the draughts, rattling windows, cracked walls and overrated ‘character’ of older homes.  He opened a cold bottle of Deschutes Cascade ale from the kitchen and cooked himself a steak — medium rare with a just a blush of red in the middle.
    As he sipped his beer and prepared a Caesar salad he checked his voicemail.  There was a message from his uncle Frank in England inviting him to come to Cornwall to spend Christmas with his relations of his father’s side.  Christmas was half a year away.  Fox smiled affectionately at the thought of his uncle Frank, who was not an organized man, planning so far ahead .  He checked his watch.  The time difference meant he’d have to wait to call his uncle back.  Next was a bland message from Kate in New York and he felt a stab of guilty relief that he’d been out when she’d called.  They had been casually dating for three months and Kate had been hinting at moving into his apartment when, thankfully, her company had offered her a promotion to New York.  At first she had called him every day, now she only called him a couple of times a week, usually when he was out.  The thought that she might also be avoiding him didn’t upset Fox.
    Sitting down to eat at the dining table, he ignored the plasma television on the wall above the fireplace and the panoramic views of Portland through the curved windows of the circular tower.  Instead he found himself reaching for the typescript document his aunt had given him that morning.  As he tried to concentrate on the words his mind kept wandering back to his encounter with Jane Doe and the orderly’s revelations about her hallucinations.  The same questions kept looping in his mind:  how had a woman with total memory loss known what had happened