Smoke & Whispers by Mick Herron

Author:Mick Herron [Herron, Mick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Suspense, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780753184745
Google: urrLQAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0753184745
Publisher: Isis Large Print Books
Published: 2009-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

She took the Metro back into town; spent the journey staring out of the window, weighing up the morning. She’d learned something about John M. Wright, in whom she was not interested, and nothing about Jack Gannon, in whom she was. And meanwhile, time was passing. She was no nearer finding out what had happened to Zoë, and had let Gerard, who might have had answers, slip through her fingers. And she remained miles from home, and Russ must be thinking she’d vanished down a rabbit hole. With that thought she fished out her mobile, but couldn’t get a signal. She wrote a quick text anyway, stored it for later, then resumed her window-watching. Heavy skies stretched into the distance. Well, she thought. Obviously the distance. Where else was the sky going to go?

It wasn’t raining when the train dipped underground on its way to the city centre, but it couldn’t be long in coming. Perhaps she should buy an umbrella. Accessorize before the event.

Emerging at the Haymarket, she paused at an ATM, feeling as she did so that little hint of validation – as if her PIN were giving her a good reference – along with an equally familiar resentment that life was now dependent on an ability to remember bloody numbers. And as she tucked the banknotes into her purse, she remembered Zoë’s wallet, fished out of the river, Zoë’s plastic still tucked in its pockets. All of whose numbers cried out that this was Zoë.

But before she could pursue that thought, she heard music coming to meet her; a distant whisper, but growing in volume. There was always music in city centres, most of it unwelcome. This was different. As she approached the cavernous entrance to the city’s monstrous mall she saw the musicians responsible: two young men and a woman, playing fiddles and a guitar. The males were twins by the look of them, and shared a joke as they played, while the woman, surely their sister, began a solo. The music, a reel of some sort, went swirling over the heads of the gathered crowd, and despite the February chill and the heavy grey sky, brought a touch of sunlight to the city street. The tune was as much the sound of an English summer as a lawn sprinkler, or Jonathan Agnew being more disappointed than angry.

Sarah stood there, drinking it in. One tune finished and another began: this one slower and haunting, conjuring a cold and windswarmed beach on a northern coast. She could have listened all day, but supposed she shouldn’t. At last she left, but not before finding out that they were called XYZ. It wasn’t a name she’d forget.

The rain was still holding off but she headed into the mall anyway, and looked at micro-umbrellas in the first clothing shop she came to. She’d scoffed, yesterday, at the idea that shopping could ease pain, but the guilty truth was that it could, a little. Force the mind to focus on making a choice, and it eased its grip on other subjects.

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