THE RIGHTEOUS MEN by Sam Bourne

Author:Sam Bourne
Language: eng
Format: epub

Will wanted to start flicking through it right away, but he

knew he had first to close the drawer, lock it, replace the key

and return to his own desk - all without being spotted.

Exactly what possibility he was guarding against, he was not

sure. He had already been caught by the editor; the damage

was done.

Even so, Will made sure he was hunched over his own

desk before he so much as opened the book. He devised a

method. First, a rapid-fire search for something alien: a note

stashed inside that he had failed to see, a scrawled message

in a hand other than his own. Perhaps, through some sorcery

that remained utterly opaque, Yosef Yitzhok had smuggled a

message onto these pages. Look to your work.

Will moved through it fast, scanning the lines in search

of the unfamiliar. There was nothing, just his own scrawl.

The newsroom was so quiet, CNN on Saturday evening

mute, he could hear the pages turn. He could hear his own

brain.

Briefly, he became excited by a couple of lines that leapt

out, clearly written by someone else, but they turned out to

be contact details for Rosa, the woman who had found

Macrae's body, scrawled onto the page in her own hand. Will

now remembered that he had promised to send her a copy

of the piece once it was published.

There was no mystery phone number, no smuggled message

- not that there could have been with this notebook stashed

in Walton's filing cabinet since who knew when.

Instead he would have to stare very hard at the one clue

he knew this book did contain, the thing that had brought

him here. There it was, on one of the last pages, boxed and

ringed with asterisks: the quote that had made the piece,

from Letitia, the devoted wife who had contemplated prostitution

rather than let her husband rot in jail. The man they killed last night may have sinned every day of his God-given life but

he was the most righteous man I have ever known.

In an instant, Will was back in Montana, talking to Beth

on the cell phone. It was, he realized, the last conversation

they had had before she was taken. He was telling her about

his day spent reporting the life and death of Pat Baxter. He

could hear his own voice, speaking animatedly, before realizing

that Beth was miles away.

'You know what's weird. It hit me straight away because

no one uses this word, or hardly ever: the surgeon who operated

on Baxter used the same word as that Letitia woman.

Righteous. They even used it the same way: "the most righteous

person,“ ”the most righteous act." Isn't that strange?'

He had not pursued the point. He had rapidly realized Beth

was elsewhere, preoccupied with the issue that should have

been preoccupying him: their failure to have a baby. He felt

his throat go dry: the thought that Beth might die never

having known motherhood.

He pushed the notion away, staring down at his own handwriting

on the page. The most righteous man I have ever known.

He had flirted with pointing out this uncanny echo when

he wrote up the Baxter story but had ruled it out almost

immediately. It would seem

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.