The Amateur Historian by Julian Cole

Author:Julian Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429921671
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Malcolm brushed away the insults, trying to understand what he was being told.

“There’s a girl, Frank. You’ve been trying to tell me about her, haven’t you?”

“Ho-bloody-ray! You’ve got it…”

“Who is she, where is she?”

The curtain was pulled back, heralding the return of the nurse. “The porter’s here for you, Mr Helmsley. Let’s get you upstairs.”

“Can’t this wait a minute, he’s trying to tell me something important…”

“Nothing is more important than getting this patient into surgery.”

As the porter stepped forward, Frank said: “I’ll be ready for you in a second. I have something to tell my friend here.”

Malcolm’s wrist was beginning to hurt. He leaned forward, putting his ear close to Frank’s pale, stubble-pricked face.

“Unburden your load, Frank.”

Two pairs of eyes locked in unlovely gaze. Neither man liked the other but circumstance, fate, call it what you will, had thrown them into this moment of finality.

“I took the girl. She’s all right, like. I’ve not harmed her, like. Just kept her somewhere, somewhere fitting, somewhere with a parallel. When you think of Esme Percy there was only one place I could keep her, really. And that’s what I did.”

Frank started to gabble.

“I’m running away, chasing. The blackness is after me. This is my time.”

He sat upright, animated by a final surge of life, his hand still clamped round Malcolm’s wrist.

“You’re the historian so you can work it out for the police. If they want to find Polly Markham, they need to follow a trail from their history books. Find Esme Percy and you’ll find…”

Helmsley collapsed into the hospital trolley, leaving Malcolm to touch his chafed wrist. Frantic activity swept in. Doctors and nurses ran to help the history lover and kidnapper of an innocent girl, but he was beyond the intervention of medical science. He died on that hospital trolley at the age of fifty-six. His early death could have had many contributing factors, from poor diet – salt with everything, hardly anything fresh to eat, only the cheapest convenience food from the cheapest supermarket – to lousy genetics: his father’s arterial plumbing had given out at the age of fifty.

Malcolm Hunt left the hospital wanting desperately to find Wendy and to take her to bed, to restore blood and life to his body, to embrace the quick and the living (and Wendy was both of those.) Instead, he started to research the most important history lesson of his life.

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