Read Online The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel by Steve Mosby - Free Book Online Page A

she was Charlotte Matheson, how was she going to react to the knowledge that her former husband was now not only engaged to someone else, but also expecting a child with her?
    Not very well, I imagined.
    Carlisle emerged a minute later, pulling his dressing gown around him and holding a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a piece of paper.
    ‘She just gets upset about all that, you know? My past life.’
    ‘I understand.’
    He handed me the paper. I looked at it for a long time. It was a straightforward head-and-shoulders shot: a passport photo, I guessed, that had been blown up in size and printed out. He wouldn’t have had time to do that just now, which meant this was something he’d kept, despite all the more obvious ways he’d moved on. People are complicated.
    In life, Charlotte Matheson had had an appealing face, with freckles across her nose and cheeks. She wasn’t wearing any make-up for the photograph, but she was smiling slightly, andthere was a trace of fire in her eyes. Just looking at her, you could imagine her taking no nonsense from anyone. She stared out of the photograph with an expression that said: I’ve got your measure, and you know what? I’m not impressed .
    It was hard to be sure, what with the scarring. But it looked a lot like the woman in the hospital. The eyes especially.
    Maybe too much like her.
    ‘Any help?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘But thank you anyway. May I take this? I’ll return it, obviously.’
    ‘Of course.’
    As I walked down the path, I heard the click of a lighter behind me, and then he said:
    ‘There’s something else too.’
    ‘Oh?’
    I turned back and saw him blow smoke out of one corner of his mouth.
    ‘You said she gave her name as Charlotte Matheson. The woman in the hospital? So that’s definitely a lie.’
    ‘A lie?’
    He nodded.
    ‘She would never have done that. With her, it was always Charlie . Even on our wedding day in the vows.’
    He tapped some ash off the cigarette, and sounded sad and faraway.
    ‘Even then.’

Groves
    A little boy and his Bear
    By the end of the day, they’d attached a name to the man they’d found in the burned house.
    The property had been rented to an Edward Leland a month or so previously. He had a file – minor drugs offences mostly – and the last address they had for him was one he’d shared with his partner, Angela Morris. Former partner, presumably. The coroner had sent through a cursory note – a question mark – about the cuts Groves had seen in the body’s cheekbones, but pending the results of an overnight post-mortem, that was that. The end of Edward Leland, and the end of their involvement.
    After work, Groves went to pick up Caroline.
    His ex-wife didn’t live in the most salubrious area of the city: most of it was rows of red-brick terraced houses running down a steep hill. As he drove there, Groves was still thinking about Leland. About how it must have been for him not just to die the way he had, but to live that way. An endless, jobless cycle of television and alcohol and sleep, all of it soundtracked by the percussion of kids banging a football against the side of your house. It wasn’t how he’d have wanted to live.
    Looking around him as he turned in to Caroline’s dilapidated street, Groves wondered how far his ex-wife was slipping in that direction herself. Even as she came down the path to meethim, he could tell she’d been drinking already. Trying to dull the painful reality of Jamie’s absence.
    But then, just as Sean had said earlier, there were a lot of things that people didn’t get to choose.
    One summer day – several years ago now – an eight-year-old girl called Laila Buckingham was playing outside her house in the back garden. It was warm and sunny, and Laila’s mother, Amanda, was working in the kitchen, a pan of potatoes bubbling away on the hob. There was background music playing quietly on the stereo, but the patio doors were open, and Amanda was