Read Online Young Petrella by Michael Gilbert - Free Book Online

If anyone comes running, grab them.”
    The driver, a long, gloomy man, called Happy, said, “If you say so, Sergeant,” and Gwilliam and Petrella got quietly out. They took care not to bang the car doors. It was very dark but the rain had stopped.
    “Ginny lives in the end cottage,” said Gwilliam. “He’s alone now. Since Annie died.”
    That was the last thing said. After that, they felt their way. Down the stone-paved lane, across the litter that was part garden, part builders’ yard; round the side of the ramshackle brick building.
    The Sergeant gave a grunt of displeasure. The back door was ajar. Then they were standing in a small room, a kitchen by the stale smell of it. And a tap was dripping somewhere.
    Gwilliam’s big torch opened up like a searchlight. It was aimed at the ceiling. In the middle of the grey plaster was a darker mark, the size of a plate. In the middle of the plate something gathered; and another drop fell down to the stone floor with a soft splash.
    Upstairs, on the floor of his over-furnished bedroom, lay the empty carcass of Ginny Lewis. He had been neatly butchered and left to lie. There was no one else in the house.
    After that there was a lot to be done. For Petrella, pressed down by the double weight of the night and of a mortal weariness, things seemed to pass in slow motion. First the cars arrived, then the doctor, then the men with flashlights and cameras, and policemen, and more policemen, and a real, white-haired Superintendent who, although it was only five o’clock in the morning, had somehow found time to shave his pink chin before coming to Cadsand Cottages.
    Petrella, forgotten, propped up the jamb of the kitchen door. The bulk of Sergeant Gwilliam loomed down upon him. “Go to bed,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do here.”
    “Any sign of Cole?”
    “Not a sausage. But we’ve put the net out. Incidentally, it looks as if Ginny was carrying a gun. Only he didn’t reach it quick enough.”
    “Then Cole’s probably got the gun in his pocket now.”
    “Probably,” said Sergeant Gwilliam. “It won’t make any difference. We’ll pick him up as soon as it’s light.”
    Remembering that calm and masterful eye Petrella did not feel so sure. He cadged a lift in a returning car to the foot of Highside and walked off up the hill.
    The storm, which had been grumbling about in the background like a much-enduring woman, put out a last long venomous tongue of lightning, and showed Petrella Harry Cole.
    He was sitting on a flat gravestone in the cemetery, his head on his hands.
    Petrella’s first thought was, if they hadn’t all been half asleep, that was just exactly where the search should have started.
    Then he had jumped the railing, and was walking steadily along the grass verge.
    Cole was sitting up now. He had Ginny’s gun all right. It was in his hand, and his hand was resting on his knee, steady as the stone he was sitting on. There was enough light in the sky now to see by. Morning was not far away.
    “Sit down,” said Cole. “Don’t come any nearer.”
    Petrella hesitated for a moment, then his tired legs folded under him and he sat. They both sat, he on one forgotten moss-covered slab, Harry Cole on another, with the new white headstone shining between them.
    “She was my daughter,” said Cole at last. “You knew that?”
    “I found that out tonight,” said Petrella.
    “A cheap piece of stone. If you killed your wife, you’d give her something better than that, wouldn’t you?”
    “I’m not married,” said Petrella.
    “He didn’t even pay for it himself. First he let her die, then he let her rot, under a cheap white stone he never even paid for himself.”
    “I don’t—”
    “The doctor called it malnutrition. You’re educated. You know what that means, I suppose?”
    “I don’t—”
    “It means the bastard starved her to death. I know. I was in Parkhurst. They’ve got a good news service there. It isn’t printed. It comes to