In Spite of All Terror by V M Knox

Author:V M Knox [Knox, V M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785549182
Publisher: The Book Reality Experience
Published: 2019-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Thursday 19th September

Four o’clock. The coldest hour of the night. Clement wanted to see the men before going to London. He also wanted to check the contents of Stanley’s pack. Rising, he hurriedly dressed in a clean Home Guard uniform and let himself out of the vicarage.

It had rained at some time during the night and the ground was damp. Clouds scudded across the moon, the strong light coming and going in uneven flashes. Clement pulled the collar up on his jacket. Nothing stirred. Not that he expected there to be anyone around at that hour. The blackish-blue moonlight lengthened the shadows and heightened the nerves. Standing at the front gate of his home he looked up and down Church Lane before hurrying away through the churchyard.

His men had only been at the Operational Base for forty hours, but it seemed like a week. Half a lifetime. He opened the church, the last of the corpses from the raid on the village now gone. The door creaked closed behind him and he went straight to the church office. In the pre-dawn hours, everything seemed silent and alien. Shadows concealed imagined beings, and what sounds could be heard were intensified, juxtaposed with crisp silence.

Unlocking the filing cabinet drawer, Clement took out his knife and strapped it to his inner left calf. It was becoming second nature to him. He pulled his trouser leg over the weapon and glanced at the neat piles of paperwork Reverend Battersby had left on the table in the vestry. He thought of Mary, who was still asleep in their bed. With her return another anxiety had arisen. If Stanley was innocent, as Clement believed, then a murderer was on the loose in Fearnley Maughton. The neat hole in the skirting board flashed into his mind. He understood why the murderer would not want to leave the bullet, but whoever this killer was, the person was cool-headed enough to remove it. They also had the time to do it. Those two facts ricocheted around his brain.

Calm, rational thinking was dictating the murderer’s act-ions. Were they following a plan, a well-constructed and thought-out strategy? Clement felt the unemotional, detachment of a ruthless killer where personal issues played no part. Yet, the murder of David Russell confused the personal with the impersonal. Was that the murderer’s intent? What was the motive? Whichever way Clement thought about it, he felt confused. He thought of Elsie Wainwright. There was little he could do there. Finding Stanley and Elsie was in the hands of the police now, and while Clement had his reservations about the girl, he was almost sure that Stanley had been framed.

What had precipitated the murder of David Russell? Clement thought of John Knowles’s threat the day the child was born. But Clement couldn’t imagine John calmly killing David Russell. John’s threat had been made in the heat of the moment, and as Clement already knew, the killing of Inspector Russell and Constable Newson had not been frenzied.

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.