Read Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) for Free Online

pointe , balanced, poised, her hand barely touching the barre.
     
    The tide was going out, and the daylight was fading into evening. Chad walked back towards the town.
    Above him, the canopy of sky, pricked with the first faint stars. He felt the book in his pocket. He wondered how that odd woman in the tiny cottage had come to possess it. He wondered why she was so keen to part with it. Pages of handwritten natural philosophy, quoting Newton. Some kind of debate or disagreement, from what Tobias had said, about the nature of matter and the existence of the vacuum. Written by a man called Johann van Mielen.
    To one side, the sea, as dark as the evening. At his feet, the pebbles, worn smooth by the waves’ to-and-fro, over years, over centuries.
    And all this exists, he thought. All this is here, when it could so easily not be. Determined by chance? Or by God, the God that doesn’t answer when you call, as Tobias so rightly pointed out. The fact that matter comes into being, and goes out of being, and yet, quite randomly, there is all this, the waves of the sea, the stones at my feet, the breeze against my face…
    It was odd, he thought, that Virginia’s husband, a physicist himself, should have treasured this book. Or perhaps it wasn’t odd at all – perhaps questions of gravity, of atoms, of nothingness, are the same whether they’re from the nineteenth century or from the twenty-first.
    In his mind he saw her, again, standing on her doorstep, raw with loss. How could I help her? What is there to say about the death of a child? A real, living child. All I know is the loss of the chance of a child. We have no howls of pain, Helen and I. Only the silence, filling the gaps between us.
    “…It is very unlikely, Mr and Mrs Meyrick, I would say, impossible, that you could ever conceive again…” The consultant’s words, again. “There are, of course, all sorts of treatment paths we could pursue… I leave it to you both to discuss it… my door is always open…”
    IVF. DI. ICSI…
    ‘But I’m only thirty-five,’ is all Helen would say, then thirty-six, thirty-seven… And somehow, the subject was closed.
    The lights of the town shone damp and yellow. He took the path away from the beach. The seafront was loud with cars and strolling boys, clusters of girls smoking and laughing by the derelict pier, its broken lines black against the charcoal sky.
     
    Helen poured herself a glass of red wine and sat down at the kitchen table. It seemed to be night outside, and she wondered when her husband would be back. She got up and crossed the room, hearing the echo of her steps in the empty house.
    The vicarage, she thought, not for the first time. I live in a vicarage. ‘A vicar’s wife?’ her friends had shrieked, when she’d told them she was engaged to Chadwick. ‘Helen, a vicar’s wife? Who’d have thought?’
    Oh, the merriment. She wandered into the lounge. The two sofas brooded in the darkened room, like slumbering giants. She switched on the lights, put down her glass. She looked at the pale gold walls, she’d chosen the paint herself, stripped out the heavy green-striped wallpaper which was there before. She looked at their Patrick Caulfield print, which seemed brighter and bolder than it ever had in their rather dingy Hackney sitting room. There was a bureau in the corner, one of their few bits of decent furniture, Georgian, handed down from an aunt.
    I give it two years, her friend Anton had said. ‘You’re a dancer, babe. Dancer into vicar’s wife, it just ain’t going to go.’
    Had she thought then he was right?
    But I love him, she must have said. I love Chad and I want to marry him.
    There was more I could have said. I could have said that the first time he put his arms around me, it felt like coming home. I could have talked about his shyness, his awkward tenderness, his concern for me that was almost paternal. I could have told them that after all the years I’d spent being a free spirit, Chad