"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

"There was more," Rendcome said, "before the judge silenced him. A biblical quotation about not extending him any mercy - or favouring his fatherless children. An overt threat to his son, wouldn't you say?"
Superintendent Claxby, less emotional than his superior, pointed out that Hixon was safely locked up and couldn't be a threat to anyone. "At least, not for a long time. In the good old days of hanging he wouldn't be a threat at all." This last remark was addressed with malice aforethought to Maybridge and his po-faced sergeant in the hope of annoying them.
Maybridge, too bothered about Simon to respond, decided a word or two - a carefully edited word or two - to the boy might not come amiss, after all. He would see him in the morning and point out as gently as possible that his father had made enemies, and that generally enemies could be ignored, but it didn't do any harm to know that they existed. Behind bars, of course.

3.

Rhoda, roaming free in a territory she hadn't explored before, spent some while orientating. The village was dominated, quite gently and prettily, by the church, and over on the other side of the valley where the ground climbed up to the main road, by The Mount, which wasn't pretty but grey and rather grand like a carefully preserved monastery. A tributary of the Avon, hardly more than a brown sluggish stream, spanned by a bridge, neatly divided the village. On one side was a network of roads that seemed to meander without any serious intention of arriving anywhere and then turned corners into narrow streets of old and charming cottages. On the other side was a cluster of shops. The butcher's was approached by a path across a vegetable garden where thin little cabbage plants grew in carefully weeded umber soil. Later, they would flourish, plump and coarse leaved, in the summer sun. A general store sold groceries and farming equipment and had a sandy smell like rain on a beach. A hairdresser's next door to it displayed a faded cardboard cut-out of a blonde model in the window. Rhoda touched her long dark hair and remembered Peter's fingers touching it. A sensual man, Simon's father. This was his village, though it was hard to imagine him here. It was too silent. Too still. Like being buried in gauze.
She walked on. He had trodden these pavements, too. Called in at the local, the Avon Arms, for a pint, perhaps. She had had a ploughman's lunch there earlier, mainly to kill time, and it hadn't been bad. The barman had expected more trade after the Bradshaws' funeral, he'd told her. A crass remark. Trade at the garage on the corner didn't seem to be doing any better. There was only one car on the forecourt, a dark blue Mercedes which the owner was filling up with petrol. Some of it spilt and the air was pungent with fumes. He replaced the hose and then glanced in her direction. She recognised him as one of the coffin bearers, the tall, bony, grey-haired one who had been carrying Lisa's. Fearing another Kester-Evans type lecture, Rhoda turned her back on him and walked briskly down one of the side roads.
Doctor Steven Donaldson watched her for a moment or two, but with little interest. She had been one of the many strangers at the funeral. The one who had dropped the camera. Just another intruder who had come to watch the show. A woman of no consequence.
No one was of any consequence, now that Lisa was dead.
Except, perhaps, Lisa's son.

"Fairy stories," Lisa had told Donaldson, all those years ago, "are not for children. They are for the old, the ugly, the wise, and the unwise." She had spoken a lot of nonsense, under sedation, and he had sat by her bedside and smiled and stroked her hand. Later, less sedated and obviously irritated, she had scratched him. Tiny globules of blood lay like red beads on his wrist. Professionally trained not to show anger or dismay, he had regarded them blandly. "Lick them," she had urged. "Let's play vampires. Let's pretend I'm really and truly mad." And then she had turned her face into the pillow and wept.
Tears are cathartic. He let her get on with her weeping and went to the adjoining bathroom to wash his wrist before the blood could stain his shirt cuff.
Treating a young mother for post-natal depression was one of his less onerous chores - usually. You prescribed pills. You counselled. In The Mount, where the therapy was costly, you sat on beds and smiled. The Mount catered for a multiplicity of nervous disorders. Some serious. Lisa, he believed, would get better. Given time.
The first stage was to persuade her to leave her bed. In the first few days she had clung to it as if afraid someone would tip her out of it. Her husband, Donaldson guessed, might have been tempted, but a nursing home bed is sacrosanct, not like the marital bed. Marital beds, he mused, were the source of much trauma.
The second stage was to get her to mingle with the other patients. To discover that someone is a lot madder than you - and everyone thinks that about everyone else - restores one's equilibrium to some extent. She had ceased to cower.
The third stage was for her to see the child again. Her son, now two months old. Donaldson had warned her husband not to thrust the baby at her. "If she wants to hold him, well and good. If she doesn't, don't make a fuss. Above all, don't get angry."
Bradshaw had got angry, but not with her, with him. He hadn't displayed his anger, of course, but Donaldson had sensed it. Two professionals from different medical fields meeting on common ground and locking horns like a couple of combative bulls. A push here, a thrust there, a little ground given, a little ground lost.
The psychiatrist lectured the pathologist - oh, so carefully - on how he should treat his wife and child. The pathologist listened politely and wished the psychiatrist dead. Well - not dead. But silent. Meanwhile the baby cried in his pram. And Lisa watched him cry, quite without emotion.
It was a step in the right direction, Donaldson told Bradshaw. Not caring might be a negative emotion, but at least it waslsafe. "I don't believe she'll hurt the baby." He didn't add "again".
Bradshaw hadn't told him in so many words that she had tried to smother the child, but he had been in the job long enough to pick up the nuances, to read between the lines, to recognise and evaluate anxiety. He had heard it all before; in some cases after the mothers had been put on the 'at risk' list by social workers.
"You understand," Bradshaw said, "that it has been serious?"
"Yes."
"I have employed a nanny and I'll keep her on as long as necessary."
"That might be for quite a long time."
"What are you trying to tell me?"
"The child needs to be loved. I don't think Lisa is capable of it yet. You will know when she is."
Bradshaw, husband and father, hoped that he would know, but at least both roles had been handed back to him. "Then I can take her home?"
"That's up to her. It depends on whether or not she feels ready to go."
Lisa, when asked, had chosen to stay another week. A few hundred pounds wouldn't hurt Bradshaw's pocket, Donaldson had guessed, and he had accepted his wife's decision with barely concealed relief.
What, Donaldson had wondered fleetingly, was the nanny like? Lisa, ill, wasn't prepossessing.

Simon hadn't intended getting drunk on the evening of his parents' funeral. He hadn't deliberately sat down with a bottle of scotch and one of his father's beer tankards and sloshed it in. The drinks cupboard held a neat assortment of appropriate glasses for various wines and spirits, but the tankard was large and handy and held a squirt or two of soda without getting overfull. Later he ignored the soda.
The trouble, he told himself, was the house. It was viciously, tauntingly bright. It shone in the evening sunlight, which seemed to enter it in low sparkling swoops as the clouds came and went and the wind blew merrily. He tried playing music on the tape recorder to diminish the sound of the wind, but all the tapes were his mother's and his mother's taste wasn't his. She had liked Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas - thin tinkling sounds that did him no good at all. Haydn was better, but not much. His father, a self-confessed moron when it came to music, had taken him to concerts from time to time and been patently bored stiff by them. His father's sense of duty when it came to family life had been erratic. A series of father and son outings, some of which they'd both enjoyed, followed by his father's absence on a case - well, probably on a case. A lonely period spent avoiding his mother; difficult because she was avoiding him too and they tended to meet in places where they didn't expect to.
But they never met in her studio at the top of the house.
Clutching his tankard and bottle of scotch, he made his way there now. She had called it her den when he was little and had made growling noises at him which were supposed to be a joke, but weren't. Not that he had needed to be scared away from it. A couple of visits when he knew she was out in the garden had been enough.
She painted here. And she wrote here. Sometimes she slept here. The heavily patterned Welsh quilt in shades of mustard and fawn was draped neatly over the green velvet studio couch. Her easel was folded and the paints stacked on a low shelf by the washbasin. Her typewriter and reference books had been put away in the white wall cupboard. Obviously she had tidied the room before going on holiday. Or someone else had - afterwards.
The large dormer window, painted a pale blue inside, looked across the orchard. The topmost branches of the almond tree were just visible from here and looked like the tip of a white frilly parasol. The blossom wouldn't last long in the wind. Soon it would lie like snow out of season.
The room felt cold.
Simon drew the quilt over his shoulders and sat on the couch. The wall opposite was covered with a mural of fairy tale characters. Some malignant. Some delicately beautiful. None lovable. He knew nothing of Tenniel and wasn't aware that she had painted it in his style, or as near to his style as she could get. The mural didn't trouble him, but the bird with gaudy plumage sketched boldly in acrylic on a piece of stiff cardboard yellow with age, did. It was held by a couple of drawing pins pushed into the back of the door. He had seen it before. Once. And afterwards in nightmares/ evolving out of the darkness, taking form and colour and then slowly disappearing. Someone, a nanny or an au-pair, had read him the Grimms' fairy story when he was five or six, but it was his mother's voice he heard in the nightmare.
A voice heavy with melancholy. He heard echoes of it now:

My mother killed me;
My father grieved for me;
My sister, little Marline,
Wept under the almond-tree;
Kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!

In the nightmare the bird's wing had been across his face, making it hard to breathe. He took some deep breaths now and chided himself for being a fool. When you're eighteen a goddamned bird and a shitty verse from a shitty story don't frighten you. Not any more. And you don't give a damn because you're sitting here alone and don't know what the hell to do with yourself. You're free. As free as any goddamned bird that ever was. Everything is fine. Get it? Fine! Wonderful! Okay? So stop being so stupid.