Coincidence by David Ambrose

Author:David Ambrose [Ambrose, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 0446527971
Publisher: Warner
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

“LARRY“

Chapter 24

Clifford was heavier than he’d looked, a difficulty compounded by the fact that he was now a deadweight. He had started to regain consciousness before I got him to the edge, so I’d hit him again with the same stone, this time finishing the job.

My breath was coming in short, increasingly ragged gasps. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could do this. Part of it was nerves, of course, as well as physical effort. It was only the second time I had taken a human life with my own hands, so the experience was still an unfamiliar one. I hoped, on the whole, that it would remain so.

Nonetheless, a barrier had been crossed, a taboo broken. Such a flouting of convention meant a certain new freedom gained. A demon had been at once both celebrated and defied.

The last few yards were the hardest because the land rose to a kind of lip over the howling, windblown emptiness beneath. From far below came the sound of waves smashing against the rocks. It was a perfect place to miss one’s footing in the dark—especially with the amount of alcohol they would find in his body—and die without a whisper of suspicion being raised.

I managed to line him up, feet and shoulders propped between thick clumps of coarse grass to stop him rolling back. Then, with one final effort, I pushed him over the edge. His fall made no sound, and whether his body hit the rocks or disappeared in the boiling waves I had no idea. He would be found no doubt the following day or soon after, by which time I would be back in the States, with no evidence that I had ever been away.

By “I,” of course, I meant George Daly. The man who had flown into Heathrow the previous day, and would fly out the following afternoon, was Larry Hart—the same Larry Hart who had made a brief trip back to Manhattan in the middle of George Daly’s recent stay in London, a trip that had coincided with the death of Nadia Shelley and the arrest of Steve Coleman.

I picked up the stone with which I’d beaten out Cliffs brains and threw it after him: It wouldn’t do to have it found up on top with traces of his blood on it. That done, I started the long hike back to the rented car I’d parked almost a mile away. I looked at my watch and saw it was just after eleven. I would be back in London by one-thirty, tucked up in bed in my anonymous hotel. I would be tired and would sleep soundly.

As I walked, I couldn’t suppress a smile when I thought of the irony in what had just happened. His surname had been Edge, and his parents had chosen to christen him Clifford. His name had been the first thing he’d made a joke about when I’d met him in a pub near my hotel in London’s Bayswater a few weeks earlier.

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