An Air That Kills

Table of Contents

Caroline Minuscule

Our Fathers' Lies

An Old School Tie

Freelance Death

Blood Relation

The Sleeping Policeman

Odd Man Out

An Air That Kills

The Mortal Sickness

The Lover of the Grave

The Suffocating Night

Where Roses Fade

Death's Own Door

Call the Dying

Naked to the Hangman

The Four Last Things

The Judgement of Strangers

The Office of the Dead

The Second Midnight

Blacklist

Toyshop

A Stain on the Silence

The Barred Window

The Raven on the Water

The American Boy

Bleeding Heart Square

The Anatomy of Ghosts

Copyright 1994 by Andrew Taylor

First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

The right of Andrew Taylor to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 444 71677 1

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

An Hachette UK Company

338 Euston Road

London
NW1 3BH

For Nick and Pippa

Part One

Wednesday

Chapter One

November is the month of the dead. Jill Francis acquired this scrap of information quite by chance and only minutes before she reached Lydmouth.

The train had rattled out of a tunnel and into the daylight. The wind drove the smoke from the engine at window level along the line of carriages. Jill coughed and put down her book. The window of the compartment was slightly open.

‘Allow me,' said the bearded man in the corner by the door.

‘Thank you.'

The compartment had been full when they left Paddington two and a half hours earlier. Now there were only the two of them. She thought that the beard gave the man an ostentatiously nautical air which did not fit with the rest of his appearance. Perhaps he had served in the Navy during the war and like so many men of his age was reluctant to leave the past behind.

He laid his own book on the seat between them and stood up. He was slightly built and wore a brown double-breasted pinstripe suit with a poppy in the buttonhole. The suit was badly cut and hung loosely on him. His beard was neatly trimmed and his complexion had the texture of candle wax.

The train swayed and he steadied himself by holding on to the luggage rack. When he closed the window he was careful not to brush against Jill's knees. He smelled powerfully of tobacco and eau de cologne.

‘Thank you,' she said again as he edged past her.

‘My pleasure entirely.' The man hesitated, which made Jill instantly wary. He waved towards the window and added, ‘It's a pretty sight, eh?'

She looked up again, first at him and then through the window. The train was running parallel to the river. On the farther bank was a rolling patchwork of fields which rose gradually towards a range of blue hills in the west. It was a grey day and mist blurred the outlines of the hills. The train was still in England, but the hills must be in Wales. She supposed that in normal circumstances it would strike her as a beautiful landscape. She wasn't quite sure what normal meant any longer.

‘Super, eh?' the man said in a flat, unemotional voice.

Jill nodded and allowed her eyes to stray back to her book; she turned a page. A moment later, the man slid back the door of their compartment and disappeared into the corridor.

She was alone for the first time since this morning when the taxi had arrived to take her from the flat to Paddington station. As if on cue, her eyes began to smart with tears.

‘Damn it,' Jill said aloud.

In an attempt to distract herself, she glanced towards the book which her fellow passenger had been reading. It lay face upwards on the seat. She could see the pages without moving her head. Probably a detective novel, she thought, or perhaps a textbook on a subject like accountancy or surveying.

The running title at the top of the left-hand page dispelled this idea. It said ‘Aspects of Common Culture'. Jill skimmed through the first few lines, gathering the sense even though the unshed tears made the lines of print buckle and blur.

A change in the light, a minute darkening of the page, alerted Jill to the fact that she was no longer alone. The door slid back. The bearded man came in and sat down. She wondered whether he had seen her prying. To her surprise she found that she didn't much care.

She couldn't concentrate on her own book. Since they left Paddington she had taken in hardly a word. Instead she stared out of the window. Now the train was running along the bottom of a wooded slope. The changing colours of the dying leaves brought a richness and a warmth to the dull landscape. The world seemed unreal, like a picture in a gallery or a film in a darkened cinema.

Jill looked at her watch. If the train were on time, they should be in Lydmouth within five minutes. She wished she were looking forward to getting there. It struck her, not for the first time, that perhaps she was making a mistake in coming. On the other hand, she could hardly have stayed at the flat in London. She had considered making her excuses to the Wemyss-Browns and going to a hotel by herself. But in that case there would have been no distractions, nothing to save her from her thoughts. Besides it would have forced her to make decisions. It was easier to drift.

In truth, whatever she did would feel wrong. Coming to Lydmouth could be no more of a mistake than any other course of action. The mistake had already been made – long before, when she had first allowed Oliver Yateley to take her out to dinner and feed her a heady mixture of compliments and inside information. Now there was nothing to be done except live through the consequences. She sat staring out of the window and seeing nothing. Instead, she remembered and wished with all her heart that she might forget.

The tears threatened again. She dug her nails into the palm of her hand and forced herself to concentrate on the view. The train rounded a bend. In front of her and to the right was a low hill covered with buildings. Near the highest point was a church with a spire. They had arrived.

The train began to slow. Turning towards the window so that the bearded man could not see her, Jill opened her handbag and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. She examined her face in the mirror inside the lid of her powder compact. It surprised and almost offended her that she should look so normal. There was no sign of the emotions churning so uncomfortably behind the mask of skin and bone. She put a dab of powder on the tip of her nose and shut the compact with a click.