A Falconer short story in a more sombre mood. DI Falconer becomes involved in a gossip-fuelled hate crime, only to find himself questioning his own judgement when it comes to protecting Miriam Darling from her anonymous persecutors ?
Release date:
February 6, 2014
Publisher:
Accent Press
Print pages:
44
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Miriam Darling stood in her new sitting room, missing suddenly the hurly-burly of the removal men and their cheery banter as they had transferred all her worldly goods into her new home.
Since yesterday afternoon, her world had been filled with these energetic and talkative men. First, as they packed her precious breakables, and loaded most of her furniture into their large van, leaving her only a bed and the means of making them all a cup of tea in the morning, and again today, as they moved her two hundred miles to her new address.
At first, she had found their inconsequential chatter a nuisance, and had taken herself off to the garden to sit on an old stool on the patio, but, as the afternoon wore on, she had found herself going indoors more frequently, coming, little by little, to enjoy the sound of life in the home that she would be leaving the next day, for ever.
By mid-afternoon, she found herself in the kitchen, brewing a pot of tea, and scrabbling round in her almost bare cupboards for a packet of biscuits. Sugar for energy, she thought, as her searching hand fell upon a packet of chocolate digestives she didn’t realise she still had.
A tea-break meant a sit-down, and they settled themselves happily on the sitting room floor, now bare of its furniture and all its decorative trappings and pictures. She was just about to leave them to enjoy their tea and biscuits in peace when one of them called to her to join them if she wanted to, and, quite unexpectedly, she found that she did want to sit down with them, and engage in a normal conversation, for the first time in months.
They really were a jolly crew, who clearly enjoyed their work and their travels, and got on well with each other. As she sipped at her hot drink and nibbled on a biscuit, they regaled her with tales from their various trips together, exaggerating the mishaps and disasters to such an extent that she found herself laughing, and was grateful for their happy banter.
When they finished for the evening and took a taxi to a local public house to eat their evening meal, she threw the last of her left-over food together for a make-shift meal and contemplated the fact that, after today, this house would no longer be her home. That a new start was a good idea, she had no doubt, but she had lived at the same address for so long that not having the address any more would feel like an amputation – a new telephone number in her head, like a betrayal of who she was and how she had got to be this woman called Miriam Darling.
A new area would allow her to become someone new – someone whom nobody pitied and no one sought to comfort, or pointed out in the street, whispering to their companion about her history. Somewhere else, she would just be ‘that woman who’d just moved into the house on the corner’. She could be anonymous, and start life afresh, with a clean sheet, provided she could banish the memories and, somehow, suppress the nightmares.
Today had started in a whirl of activity, making sure that the old house was in a fit and presentable state to greet its new owners, and that nothing had been forgotten. At the last minute, she had grabbed the old kitchen clock from the wall, where it had been abandoned for no good reason, and carried it out to her car, to put it safely on the back seat where it would not be jostled around too much.
And then they were off, at six o’clock on a Friday morning, heading for pastures new; leaving everythin. . .
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