Dying Fall by Patricia Hall

Author:Patricia Hall [Hall, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780312134778
Goodreads: 1000868
Publisher: Little Brown (UK)
Published: 1994-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Laura was writing her report for Case Re-opened. She was sitting at her kitchen table with a portable computer in front of her, the window wide open and the sound of bird-song and laughing children wafting in from the long gardens outside. She had flung off her office suit when she had arrived home and was wearing nothing over her bra and pants except a voluminous white cotton top, half-way between a tee-shirt and a dress. She had loosened her hair from the clips which had barely restrained it by the end of a hectic day in the office, and it fell in a tangle of copper curls around her face. She looked like a rather serious flower-child as she frowned slightly at what she had written.

It was a perfect summer evening but her mood was sombre. It had been a long and stormy day at the Gazette, with Ted Grant in one of his most objectionably censorious moods. The editorial which had excoriated the police in a Force 10 tabloid gale of invective for not bringing peace and tranquility back to the troubled Heights had been mild compared to the venom Grant had poured privately onto the whole pantheon of villains he believed responsible for social collapse on the present scale. Architects, planners, rock musicians, parents and teachers, social workers and Labour politicians – which was stretching it more than a bit for a party out of office for more than a decade – plus a whole top ten of 1960s demons from Dr. Benjamin Spock to Mick Jagger, all came in for scorn and derision as he paced up and down the news-room in a pantomime fury which Laura guessed he had modelled on some high profile London editor of his vague acquaintance. In the end, as he heaped blame for some misdemeanour on Jane Archer, a diffident young trainee who often bore the brunt of his rages, Laura's own less than certain temper had snapped.

"Come on Ted, she's here to learn," she had said, standing behind Jane with a protective hand on her shoulder and trying to see which particular sentence on her computer screen had sparked Ted's wrath.

"She's been here almost a year and seems to have learned nowt," Grant snapped back. "I'm sick and tired of arty-farty young graduates off some student paper who think they know it all."

"It's an easy enough mistake," Laura had said. The remark may have been reasonable but it was certainly not circumspect. If it served its purpose in deflecting Grant's attention from the bowed head of the unfortunate Jane, who was singularly ill-equipped to deal with his aggression, it did little for Laura's own future prospects. Turning an even deeper shade of purple, Grant had waved her into his office and proceeded to attack her qualifications, her competence, and her ancestry, being an old antagonist of her grandmother's in her post-war political hey-day.

"It's a bloody shame you didn't stay in Portugal with your father when you broke your bloody

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