The Art of Standing Still by Penny Culliford

Author:Penny Culliford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Scene Two

JEMMA GENTLY PLACED THE HEADPHONES ON RICHARD AND TURNED UP THE volume. Motorhead wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea; she wasn’t even convinced Richard actually liked heavy metal, but he had seen the band once in concert, and he wore their T-shirt. Her personal brand of physical therapy would either kill or cure.

As usual, his eyes flickered as the opening chords of ‘Ace of Spades’ ripped through his eardrums. Jemma took his hand and started the rough massage therapy, as she had been shown, to try to stimulate him out of the coma. He really was getting better, squeezing her hand when she spoke, smiling while Josh prayed for him. She longed for the day when he would recover fully. If that day ever came.

Mohan was devastated when he found out Richard had been injured and was anxious to splash it all over the front page of the Monksford Gazette.

‘Let’s catch the low-life scum that did this despicable thing!’

It was Jemma, prompted by Josh, who had persuaded him not to. She had promised Josh he wouldn’t get the hero treatment again, and it would be impossible to run the story without details of Josh’s rescue. It had ended up as a one-paragraph insert on page two.

‘Passers-by rescued a man from the river at Monksford on Thursday evening. The man, Richard Sutton, 32, remains unconscious in Monksford General Hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses to what appears to be an attempted mugging.’

The police had asked lots of questions at the time, interviewing both Josh and Jemma, who could tell them very little, and eventually reached the conclusion that it really was a mugging gone wrong. Jemma was not convinced.

‘So, Miss Durham. Tell me again exactly what you saw.’

‘I didn’t see anything. It’s what I heard.’

‘And what was that?’

‘Splashes.’

‘Splashes.’

‘Yes. On a number of occasions, usually in the middle of the night.’

‘And do you have any idea of the reason for these splashes?’

‘No. But they were strange.’

‘In what way strange?’

‘Mysterious, peculiar. And I’m sure there’s been someone fishing around in the river.’

The constable looked down his nose at her.

Jemma felt confused. It all sounded so stupid when she tried to explain it.

‘Oh, I don’t know!’

‘Now Miss Durham. If we could get back to a description of the car you saw driving away from the scene.’

‘It had headlights.’

‘Headlights. Well that narrows it down, considerably.’ The young constable’s tone was heavy with sarcasm.

In the days after they discovered him, Jemma returned to the place where they had pulled Richard from the river to search for clues. The police hadn’t found anything, so she didn’t expect to either. The river’s residents saw to it that rubbish left on the bank side or thrown in the river itself was quickly cleared. It was cleaner than most of Monksford itself. A cola can barely touched the ground before Skye Wortham whisked it away and recycled it.

Jemma tried looking for footprints, but there were so many that she didn’t know where to start. She examined the flattened-down reeds, but nothing indicated what had happened.

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