Read Online This Way Out by Sheila Radley - Free Book Online

half-sobbing with the pity and the horror of it, he had jammed on his shoes, and he and Mike had jumped on their bicycles and fled.
    Now, leaning over another river in the unsought company of this man whose smile would widen from amiable to unpleasant, Derek fancied that he could catch again that same rotten-sweet smell. This time, a whiff of contagion.
    He stood up abruptly. ‘If you’re trying to put a proposition to me,’ he said, tight-voiced with anger, ‘the answer is most emphatically no .’
    Packer looked reproachful. ‘Not even to help a man in poor old Sidney’s condition?’
    â€˜You’re not talking about help, you’re talking about murder. And I am having nothing to do with it – or with you. If you feel so strongly about ending your father-in-law’s life, do it yourself. But don’t try to involve me .’
    Derek elbowed the smaller man aside and began to stride back through the darkening gardens, where narcissi gleamed white beside the stone-paved paths. The lights were on in the hotel; bank managers and stockbrokers and solicitors and accountants would be assembling for tomorrow’s conference, and he had never before felt so eager for their company.
    He thought he had shaken Packer off. But the man had simply dodged round a yellow forsythia and was now blocking the way again.
    â€˜I can’t risk doing it myself, Derek,’ he protested, low-voiced. ‘You know that. The police would suspect me straight away. Just as they’d suspect you if you killed your mother-in-law.’
    â€˜I have no intention of killing her.’
    â€˜You’ve thought about it, though. You told me so.’
    Derek cursed himself for having been so unguarded. ‘I was joking,’ he said.
    â€˜Come off it!’ said Packer. ‘Of course you’ve thought about getting rid of your mother-in-law. Who hasn’t, at one time or another?’
    â€˜What if I have? I wouldn’t ever do anything about it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
    â€˜But that’s what makes this system so brilliant! Don’t you see? You don’t have to do anything to your mother-in-law. You just arrange to be somewhere else at a certain time, and then leave the job to me.’
    â€˜As simple as that?’ said Derek with heavy sarcasm. ‘Or would there be a little matter of my being expected to kill your father-in-law for you in return?’
    â€˜Well yes. Naturally.’ Packer seemed impervious to sarcasm. ‘But I’d fix it up for you, I’d make all the arrangements –’
    Derek turned away in disgust. ‘You’re mad ,’ he said.
    â€˜I’m not, you know. You’ll be the one who’s mad. Mad with yourself for not having jumped at this offer, if your poor wife dies young and leaves you lumbered with her old Ma for the next twenty-five years –’
    â€˜Damn you,’ said Derek, slowly and quietly, though rage was swelling inside him until he felt that his ribs would crack. ‘Get out of my way – get out and stay out, you little turd .’
    What happened next was entirely unpremeditated. Afterwards, as Derek held his throbbing right hand under the cold tap in his hotel bathroom, he acknowledged that effective action is much more difficult to take in real life than old films had led him to believe. What he had so instinctively launched had not been a clean, straight-to-the-jaw punch, but a hopelessly inexpert haymaker that felled Packer only because it caught him off balance. It had, he suspected, done more harm to his own hand than to the side of Packer’s head.
    Even so, Derek felt a considerable satisfaction. It was good, very good, to recall the man’s look of pained surprise as he sprawled on his back in a flowerbed. Well worth a badly bruised hand.
    Yes, he felt pleased with what he’d done. Greatly relieved, too, by the knowledge that the