River of Darkness by Rennie Airth

Author:Rennie Airth [Airth, Rennie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Fiction, Historical, Traditional British, General, War & Military, Crime, Police Procedural, Police, Serial murders, Surrey (England), Psychopaths, World War; 1914-1918, War Neuroses
ISBN: 9780786223343
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1999-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Crouched on his haunches in the dugout, Pike began to lay out his things. From the capacious leather bag he drew his uniform - shirt, breeches, tunic - and placed them on the broad step cut into the rear of the excavation. His neatly rolled puttees were added to the pile. Next came the gas mask. His movements, measured and unhurried, gave no clue to his mental state, which for many hours had been battered by doubt and indecision. His normally stony emotional structure was fractured by extremes of feeling that produced at almost the same instant a hot flush of impulse towards action and an icy realization of the dangers that hung over him. Travelling on his motorcycle from Rudd's Cross the day before, he had several times been on the point of turning back and returning to the hamlet. To the garden shed and Mrs Troy's cottage where a situation now existed that required his urgent attention. But his need drew him on, and in the dark recesses of his soul this seemed to have its own logic. He had no other business than the one he was engaged on. It was the sole aim of his wasted life and, seen from that perspective, even the need to protect himself paled into unimportance. Nevertheless, his agitation had already produced small but significant changes in his behaviour. He had begun his journey from Rudd's Cross in the usual manner, following a complicated route of back roads and country lanes, avoiding major thoroughfares. But after an hour he had lost patience and, with a recklessness foreign to his nature, had joined the main road, taking the coastal highway to Hastings, then swinging north towards Tunbridge Wells. Bent over the handlebars, and with his cap pulled low over his eyes, he had ridden at a steady thirty miles an hour without incident until he reached a turn-off that took him westwards into Ashdown Forest. It was late afternoon when he arrived -- still daylight -- but he strode uncaring through the woods to the site of the dugout, his bag hoisted on his shoulder. His thoughts were fixed on the hours that lay ahead. Above all, on the following evening. Everything else was shunted to the back of his mind, to be dealt with later. On reaching the dense thicket he found the brushwood he had used to camouflage the digging undisturbed except in one corner where some of the branches had fallen into the pit. He examined the spot carefully. Although it seemed likely that wind and rain had shifted them, he spent the next twenty minutes searching the area for any signs of a human intrusion. A footprint. A cigarette stub. He found nothing to arouse his suspicion. His sleep that night was troubled. For the first time in years an old nightmare returned and he had woken drenched in sweat. The air inside the dugout seemed stifling and he had climbed out and stood motionless in the thick brush listening to the night sounds: the stirring of leaf and branch, the distant cry of an owl.

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.