A Dead Man Out of Mind by Kate Charles

Author:Kate Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

Part 2

CHAPTER 16

Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies: that thou mightest still the enemy, and the avenger.

Psalm 8.2

Few people in London truly mourned for Rachel Nightingale, but of those who did, Ruth Kingsley was inconsolable.

From the beginning – from the first shattering moment – she’d insisted that it had been no accident; nothing that anyone said could convince her to the contrary.

‘But darling,’ said Lucy in her most reasonable voice, one which she’d been called upon to employ consciously with increasing frequency since Ruth’s arrival. It was a raw March Sunday afternoon, the day after they’d learned about Rachel’s death; with no real will to do anything else, the three of them were in the sitting room of Lucy’s house, waiting for the day to end. ‘Darling, the police know about these things. They say that it was a hit-and-run driver who killed her. Another person was badly hurt in almost the same spot, just a few weeks earlier. By young kids, probably in a stolen car. It happens more often than you’d think in London.’ David had checked with a policeman he knew, and he’d been quite definite.

‘That’s what they say.’ Ruth’s tear-stained face had a mulish expression. ‘Maybe they believe that, or maybe they’re just saying it. But I know. I know that someone at that church – at St Margaret’s – did it, on purpose. They wanted to get rid of her, and they did. They ran her down in cold blood.’

‘Aren’t you being just a wee bit melodramatic?’ David’s patience with Ruth, always tenuous, had worn a bit thin of late.

The girl seemed even more gawky than usual, wrapping her thin arms around her body as she glared at him with undisguised hostility. ‘I don’t care what you say. I don’t care what the police say. I know that they did her in, one of them.’

They’d been through it all before, endlessly, but Lucy, who was keeping a firm lid on her own emotional reaction, hoped that there might be something cathartic for Ruth in the process, and that it was better for the girl to talk about it than to bottle it up inside. ‘But why, darling? They’re church people. Church people don’t go round murdering one another just because they don’t like them.’

‘Because she was a woman, of course. They were horrible to her. She told me so.’

Lucy lifted the lid of the teapot and peered inside. They’d been through a great deal of tea, but it looked like this pot might stretch to one more cup for someone, before she had to get up and boil the kettle again. Unselfishly she offered it to Ruth. ‘More tea, darling?’

The girl shook her head in a listless negative, but Lucy poured the remaining tea into her cup anyway, then took the empty pot to the kitchen. Not touching the tea, Ruth sat very still, tears trickling down her cheeks. After a moment, she gulped,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.