Read A SONG IN THE MORNING for Free Online Page B

discussed by the executive council last night, but it might be next week - they're more preoccupied with the unrest - three weeks, a month maximum."
    Jack stood. He looked at the table, he looked at his hands.
    "So what am I supposed to do?"
    Furneaux looked to the window. "Baldly put, Mr Curwen, there's nothing you can do."
    "So you're just going to stand back while they hang my father?" Jack spat the question. He saw his spittle on Furneaux's tie, and on his chin.
    Furneaux looped his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped himself. "Mr Curwen, your father travelled quite voluntarily to South Africa. He chose to involve himself with a terrorist gang, and it is, and from the very beginning was, more or less inevitable that he will pay a high price for his actions."
    the file was gathered against Furneaux's chest.
    "I'm sorry for wasting your valuable time . . ." Jack said.
    "Mr Sandham, would you show Mr Curwen to the front hull."
    Jack heard Furneaux's heavy tread clatter away down the corridor.
    He said, "I don't understand. My father is a British citizen living in South Africa for years, suddenly turns up in a murder trial, but your man has a pretty ancient looking file on him an inch thick. How's that?"
    "Don't know." Sandham bounced his eyebrows.
    Sandham took Jack to the front hall, asked him for a card so that he could contact him if there were developments.

    * • *
He saw the young fellow walk away, threading between the official cars. He noted the athleticism that couldn't be hidden by the disappointed droop of his shoulders. He went back up the three floors to the South Africa desk. Smoking too damned much, and his chest was heaving when he made it to the open plan area where he worked.
    He thought he knew the answer to the question that Curwen didn't understand. He was old enough, and passed over often enough not to care too much what he said and to whom he said it. He knocked at Furneaux's door, put his head round the corner.
    "That chap they're going to hang, Mr Furneaux, is he a bit complicated?"
    "Too deep water for you, Jimmy."

    * * *
"I really don't want to talk about him."
    "I have to know about him, Mum, everything about him."

    "You should be at work, Jack."
    "He was your husband, he's my father."
    "Sam's right. It's nothing to do with us."
    "Mum, it's killing us, just thinking about him. Talking about him can't hurt worse."
    Hilda Perry couldn't remember the last time that Jack had come home in the middle of a working day. He hadn't told her of his visit to the Foreign Office, nor about the embassy, nor about the visit to the newspaper's library.
    They were in the kitchen with mugs of instant.
    "Mum, he's in a death cell. Can you think of anywhere more alone than that. He's sitting out the last days of his life in a gaol where he's going to hang."
    She said distantly, "I've hated him for more than twenty years, and since I had his letter I can only think of the good times."
    "There were good times?"
    "Don't make me cry, Jack."
    "Tell me."
    He brought her a drink. Two fingers of gin, three cubes of ice, four fingers of tonic. She normally had her first of the day when Sam came back from the office.
    She drank deep.
    "Your grandfather was stationed in Paderborn, that's in West Germany. He was a sergeant major. I was seventeen, just finished school. I used to nanny for the officers' wives.
    Jeez was on national service. He was a cut above the rest, not classy, not like an officer, but Jeez was always correct.
    Treated me like a lady. He always stood in a cinema for the national anthem, stood properly. We didn't go out much, a lot of evenings I was tied with the officers' kids and Jeez was a sort of batman and driver to the colonel. He was well in with the colonel. After we were married we used to get a card from the colonel each Christmas, not after Jeez went.
    Jeez went back to the UK, demobbed, we used to write a bit, and then Mum and Dad were killed in the car accident, it was in the papers. Jeez wrote by