Dead Reckoning Read Online Free Page A

eager to meet violence with violence. You say you don’t want to get involved in the politics but to some extent this is all about politics. It’s about whether immigrant communities can live here without being harassed when things get nasty in the old country.”
    â€œIt’s not new,” Laura said. “The Irish used to become very unpopular every time there was an outrage in Belfast or London.”
    â€œBut there weren’t many young Irishmen prepared to stand up publicly for the terrorists, were there?” Farida came back quickly. “We have these young idiots making martyrs out of murderers, growing their beards, ranting from the mosque. None of the rest of us believe that blowing people up solves anything but we get tarred with that brush. That’s why your passers-by wouldn’t help the old lady. They blame us all for New York, the Taliban, terrorism in Pakistan, and all the rest of it.”
    â€œMost of them hate us anyway,” Amina said quietly. “They don’t want us here. Never did. It’s just that much worse now.”
    â€œWell, they’ll have to put up with us,” Farida said. “I was born here. I went to school and college here. I don’t belong anywhere else.”
    â€œThere’s a lot of people who’d dispute that,” Amina said, her face closed and cold. “You try to dress and behave like an English girl but they laugh at you behind your back. You’re still a Paki and always will be.”
    In spite of her traditional dress it was clear that Amina was the more forceful of the two young women and Farida glanced away, evidently unwilling to argue with her any further in front of Laura.

    â€œWill you come on the programme and talk about some of these issues?” she asked Amina specifically. “Especially about how they affect women.”
    But Amina looked cautious.
    â€œI’ll talk to my father about it,” she said at last.
    â€œYou’re a grown woman. You should make your own decisions,” Farida said sharply, her dark eyes bright. “I’ll do it. No one ever bothers to ask the women what they think. I’d love to be on your radio show.”
    â€œGive me your mobile numbers and I’ll get back to you,” Laura said and, to her surprise, both Amina and Farida wrote them down for her.
    She walked back across the brightly lit town centre to the Gazette to pick up her car more aware than usual that the late shoppers did not include many Asian women and that the groups of men in traditional dress who chatted in the town hall square stared with more than usual suspicion at passersby from other ethnic groups. As she walked past the straggling bus queues, especially those for the services which made their way up Aysgarth Lane, the Asian community’s bustling, shabby heart, before heading to outlying suburbs, she thought she detected an electric tension in the air. She had occasionally wondered if it were true that animals could sense the approach of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption and was more inclined to believe it tonight. It felt as if the centre of Bradfield, enclosed between its seven encircling hills, was about to explode.
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    Laura drove home in a thoughtful mood and to her surprise she saw that the ground-floor lights of the large Victorian house of which she owned one floor were on, a sign that, unusually, Michael Thackeray had arrived home before her.
Dropping her coat in the hall of the flat and her shopping in the kitchen, she opened the door of the living room and found him watching the local television news. She stood for a moment with one hand on his shoulder as the presenter described the morning’s discovery of an unidentified body over shots of an unseasonable Broadley Moor, with the gorse in its brilliant summer glory.
    â€œStock pictures,” she said, with professional certainty. “There’s cars in the car-park too, look. We had