Read Murder in the Afternoon for Free Online

lying here, with his head turned away from me. His cap had come off. Look – there it is!’
    She pounced, forgetting her reluctance to step into the shed. From under the bench, she reached for an old tweed flat cap that once upon a time had boasted a check pattern.
    She clutched the cap. ‘I know Mam hopes I’m mistaken and I wish I was, because I don’t want Dad to be dead. Sergeant Sharp believes I’m a little liar. I’m not.’
    We left the hut. I picked up a large piece of slate with a smooth edge. Looking at the slate gave me something to do while thoughts raced through my brain. The way Harriet told her story, it had to be true.
    A delicate straight line had been etched into the piece of slate. A wavy design decorated the edge.
    ‘It wasn’t smashed when we came.’ She stood as still as the stone that surrounded us on the quarry slopes.
    What anger and hatred lay behind the smashing of thesundial, I wondered, and had that same anger and hatred been directed at Ethan? His craftsmanship was impeccable. I could see that from the fragment of blue slate with its smoothed edge. Why would he disappear? If we were to believe the worst, and imagine him to be dead when the children found him, what had happened to his body?
    She followed me round the back of the hut. There were footprints there, and why should there not be? But one of the footsteps was no bigger than my own. Treading lightly, I measured the footstep against mine. I took out my camera. The light behind the hut was not very good, but I adjusted the setting and got as close as I could without distorting the footprint.
    Now I regretted the child being here. Should I pretend I wanted a guided tour, just to give me an excuse to search? And what would I find? Any footprints, any clues, would be covered in dust, trampled by Saturday’s search party, washed by last night’s rain.
    All the same, I took a look around. The place gave me goose bumps. This might be what the other side of the moon looks like. In the distance was a grey mountain of rubble, as if there had been a landslide.
    What was I searching for? A scrap of cloth caught on a stone, a stain that might be blood, a clutch of hair? Most of our lives we do not look down, nor up either, but straight ahead. I stared at the ground. Sandy, stony, and giving away nothing.
    Harriet stood ramrod straight, watching me. I should take her home. She had been through enough.
    Her eyes met mine. ‘I want you to look at summat.’
    ‘What?’
    She held out her hand. Led by her, I walked across the quarry, up and down the hilly ground, along a straightpatch, by the crane, all the way to the other side where the hill sloped and a stubborn ash tree, white with dust, clung to the rock face.
    The ground became soft. A jolt like an electric shock went through me as I saw what looked like a heel mark, and smoothness on the ground, as though it had been scraped flat. And again, another heel mark. It would not be enough to simply photograph these marks on the ground. I must measure the heel mark. It was too small to belong to a quarryman, unless there was a young boy here. Of course there could be some entirely rational explanation.
    ‘Just a minute, Harriet. I want to take a photograph, to remind me of what the quarry looks like.’
    I sat on a boulder to prepare the camera. This boulder would be my landmark. I would take a picture of my find, and the boulder, and of the straight line that led from here.
    If I were right, and I wanted so much to be wrong, someone had dragged a body in this direction. That would explain why, by the time the man from the farm came back with Harriet, the body was gone.
    Harriet watched as I took a photograph of this patch of ground, feeling uncertain even as I did so that this really did mark the spot where a body had been dragged. More likely it marked a spot where my sense of foreboding gathered in dry dust.
    When I had taken the photograph, Harriet grasped my hand, tugging me to come with