Gideon's Art by John Creasey

Author:John Creasey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gideon’s Art
ISBN: 9780755125708
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2013-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Entwhistle was out on the moor, breaking rocks.

When he had been leading his ordinary life, he had not seriously believed that prisoners still broke rocks with sledge hammers, but he had discovered that they did. The rocks could be used for road building and wall building; there was a kind of rhythm to the actual work and once one was used to it, it was no great strain. Entwhistle, tall and gaunt, had always been a strong man.

Now, lifting the long-handled sledgehammer ready for the downward swing, he saw the great expanse of the moor on this lovely autumn day, and the never-ending rocks themselves, more rocks than ten thousand convicts could break in a hundred years. He saw the rugged beauty and the green of distant trees and grass, the other men working, some naked to the waist, browned skin exposed to the sun and glistening from sweat. It was like a symphony of movement and a symphony of harsh and cacophonous sound. Chips of granite flew, big rocks split; now and again a man swore with desultory indifference or in sharp pain where a rock had cut him. Entwhistle, used to the heat of the tropics, an engineer who had helped build huge bridges across untamed rivers and great valleys, felt an awful sense of helplessness, of frustration. It was madness that he should be doing this, and it was driving him mad.

This was one of his bad days.

It was a day when he could not get his children out of his mind - the children he had not seen since he had been imprisoned, over three years before.

Three years for a crime he had not committed.

Three years in Dartmoor - for quarrelling with his wife, going home, and finding her dead.

Three years, while her killer was free, living life to the full, not conscience-stricken or he would have confessed or at least made some attempt to help him, Geoffrey Entwhistle.

Three years.

One for Carol, who was now seven, fair, and pretty.

One for Clive, who was now fourteen, tall, and eager.

One for Jennifer, who was now eleven and, so they told him, clever.

He could picture them not as they were but as they had been, so young and vital and overjoyed to see him on his return home, because he had been away for so much of their lives.

He could see their faces in the rocks.

Sometimes, when he brought that sledgehammer crashing down, it was as if he were crushing one of his beloved children; and in an awful way, by his very existence in this place, he was in fact crushing them. Prison, the law, the policeman who had sent him here, the judge and every bloody juror, the man who had actually killed his wife - each one had been a blow against his children’s happiness; his children condemned to live under the brand of Cain, staying with relations, snubbed and sneered at and derided because of a crime their father had not committed.

Now and again, he glimpsed a kind of hope.

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