"Gill, B.M. - Death Drop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

The answer perturbed him. "Who thumped him about the baseball?"

"A boy called Durrant."

"How old?"

"Fifteen."

"Three years older. Three years heavier. What did Hammond do about it?"

Some of her ash had fallen on her jeans. She brushed it off. "He dealt with him suitably -- whatever that means. He wouldn't allow Durrant to bully David."

"Wouldn't he? He doesn't impress me as being competent."

She spoke with some sharpness. "You're beginning to sound like a prosecuting barrister. It breaks my heart that David is dead and if I thought there was any fault anywhere then I'd say so. He fell. It was an accident. It can't possibly be anything else. You've got to believe that or you'll drive yourself crazy."

"Then you'd say he was happy in school ?"

"As happy as any of them. You know how it is."

Her words had consoled him a little and some of his own guilt went. It might have happened in any other school. It might have happened anywhere.

It was while they were eating the steak some while later that Jenny remembered the sketch. David had drawn it for her while he was convalescing from the mumps. He had been sitting near the window with the sketching block on his knees. It had taken him a.bout half an hour to do it. He had handed it to her without a word, watching her face for a reaction. She had quite spontaneously laughed and been surprised that he hadn't laughed with her. It had seemed to her a funny drawing. She had kept it in case he asked for it back. Boys -- especially the younger ones -- tended to test her loyalty by asking her if she still had whatever treasure they had bestowed on her. Treasures included conkers, a rat's tail, a magnet, love poems. They all went into a duffel bag and remained there for a safe period. The duffel bag was in the kitchen drawer. She fetched it. The drawing was creased and grubby and she touched it for a moment with tenderness before handing it over. "Something David drew for me when he had mumps."

Fleming took the folded drawing from her, opened it up, and put it on the table.

"Good Christ Almighty!" He sat rigid, fighting nausea.

She was astonished by his reaction, alarmed at his pallor. "It's a joke drawing. He gave it to me dead-pan. Just fun."

He didn't hear her. He was six years back in time. Ruth and he returning at one-thirty in the morning after the car had broken down on a deserted country road. The holiday cottage in darkness. David screaming. The babysitter had left at midnight. He had woken in the dark alone. The tiger moth caterpillar had dropped on his pillow from a bowl of flowers near the bed. He had wakened to feel its slow furry crawl across his cheek. A strange inimical room -- silence -- and an appalling creature on which to vent his terror.

There had followed two years of nightmares in which the caterpillar, man-sized, was the beast. On each day that followed a disturbed night he drew the caterpillar and then hid the drawing, but in obvious places where it could be found. He and Ruth had made a point of finding the drawings and tearing them up. It had become a ritual. He watched whilst appearing not to watch. In time the drawings and the nightmares stopped. There hadn't been a nightmare or a drawing for four years.

Until this drawing now.

A crude, immature, thickly shaded, heavily furred caterpillar, hugely out of proportion, sprawling over a small bed. At the bottom of the picture in big uncontrolled six-year-old letters: WOLLY BEAR ON D'S BED.

Woolly Bear had been Ruth's name for it when she had picked it off his face. Woolly Bear. Wolly as the six-year-old David had spelt it. Wolly as the twelve-year-old David had spelt it now.




Two


"MAY i HAVE permission to go into Marristone Port, sir?"

Brannigan looked in some irritation at Durrant who had knocked at his study door and been told brusquely to enter. He didn't like the boy and tended to over-react in his favour in an effort to appease his conscience. Any other boy he would have told sharply to take his request to the appropriate quarter and not presume to waste his time. He said much the same thing to Durrant but with more restraint.