Trial by Fire Read Online Free Page B

anything out of place. A man of infinite patience which his children did not understand, so that he was forced to pretend occasional irritation foreign to a cultivator of plants and detector of metal objects on Essex riverbanks.
    Bowles enjoyed sifting lawn seed and grains of sand, also searching ground with his mole of a nose and brown long-sighted eyes, squatting and picking, sorting and choosing. A cursory search behind the carpark area had revealed cartons and Coke tins, hamburger wrappers, plastic bags, and several used contraceptives. Bowles was always amazed by the human habit of congregation even to deposit rubbish.
    The flocking habit was foreign to him, although his mating instinct was sound enough to let him recognize anything that might have been thrown from a handbag. Ignoring all distraction, Bowles would waste no time looking for the obvious —what had Vanguard said? Knife, blunt weapon. Dimmer eyes than his could find these if they were there to be found, which Bowles suspected they were not, while his own would look for nothing in particular. He hitched his trousers and straightened his jacket, impervious to growing heat. Ah, yes. A plodder himself, he would recognize signs of haste, for a start, even over a week old, and distinguish between adult spores and the symptoms of tag-playing children.

    He shivered, accustoming a cold, stiff body to thoughts of activity, thinking slowly, remembering the couple he had dismissed the night before. Picnic spot or no picnic spot, this was somehow not a wood for children.
    Bowles and the more conscientious of his companions knew they were looking for whatever they could find. Not an empirical search, simply a collecting exercise. Later, when they found the culprit — Bowles always said 'when,' not 'if' — some of their souvenirs might fill in a corner of the picture. 'You never know' was Bowles's most infamous and irritating cliché; the phrase alone had quite rightly blocked his promotion, indicative of his preference for any activity without apparent purpose. In the event, it was Bowles, of course, who found the cigarettes, the packet and the two stubs, one with lipstick and one without. He put the stubs in a matchbox, like a boy with pet spiders, and carried them safely home.
    Unlike Amanda Scott, with her preference for the wine bar in Branston High Street, Bailey had no objection to visiting The Crown Hotel, did not confess to his assistant his liking for the place, even though he imagined her discretion hid nerves of steel. Bailey had found the hotel attracting him from the start, a view shared by Helen to the extent that they had visited the place more frequently than any other local hostelry for reasons neither of them could fathom.
    Ìt isn't the food,' Helen had remarked, happily and thoroughly entertained by wrestling with the crust of a cheese roll, putting it down to search for the cheese, finding a huge but dried lump of it in the centre.
    Ìt isn't the beer, either,' Bailey had added, nursing a murky pint with some suspicion.
    `What is it, then?' said Helen.
    Ùnpredictability, unfashionability, and anonymity,' said Bailey promptly.
    Òh, my, long words for a Sunday. You've been reading the papers again. Do you mean you can hide here without knowing what will happen?' Teasing him, grinning in contentment, Sunday a holiday.
    No, I mean I like it because so few other people do.' He gestured towards the bar with more spaces than people. 'And because I never know from one visit to the next what it will be like or whether it will still be standing.'
    ‘I quite like it,' Helen said, 'because it has all the sod-the customer attitude of a London pub.
    You know, the what-do-you-want-a-drink-for-this-is-only-a-pub-for-God's-sake approach.
    Clean glass? Fussy, are we? What's wrong with a dirty one? You antisocial or something? I only work here. Why should I care? Et cetera.'
    `But they do care,' said Bailey. 'They care desperately, which is why it's so odd. ‘He