The Rottweiler (v5)
Page 36
Inez was also there, with the the man who bought the Chelsea china clock whom she has married as her third husband. They sold the business and the shop in Star Street, Inez disliking the idea of staying in a place where a murderer had lived and died, and bought a house in Bourton-on-the-Water where the jaguar glares out from the living room window. If Inez is not ecstatically happy, she is quite content. You can’t expect to have what she had with Martin more than once in a lifetime. Her husband adores her and she likes him very much. She tells herself, in the words of the Merle Haggard song, ‘It’s not love but it’s not bad.’
In the cause of letting bygones be bygones, Ludmila and Freddy were invited but the invitation never reached them. They are no longer together. Ludmila had nothing against her husband, but marriage had never suited her for long and she formed a liaison with a Syrian she had met in the Al Dar restaurant, who took her back to Aleppo where she has a hard time of it. Freddy has moved in with a nice motherly woman who has a job as a cloakroom attendant in quite a good hotel. They rent a room in her daughter’s house in Shepherd’s Bush.
Since Zeinab has forgotten Will’s and Becky’s existence—and she is not alone in forgetting, so quiet and narrow has their life become—they weren’t included in the guest list. Will is still living with Becky in Gloucester Avenue. He gave up working for Keith Beatty and lives on the unemployment benefit and Jobseekers’ Allowance. Becky goes into the office two days a week and for the rest struggles to work from home, though she is now seeing ominous signs of being told the firm will ‘have to let her go’. She and Will really need a bigger place to live but she hasn’t the heart for moving and she is afraid she soon won’t have the money. Will is blissfully happy. He watches television all day long, demands that she cook for him twice a day when she is at home, and he is growing fat. Becky knows he will be with her and she with him until he dies or she does, whichever is the sooner.
Zeinab, Algy and Reem Sharif, gorgeous at the reception in the largest scarlet and gold salwar-kameez obtainable in the Edgware Road, have always avoided the police whenever possible. Orville Pereira, who gave the bride away, has a like aversion to the law. The presence of Finlay Zulueta would have dampened the celebrations. Dancing, for instance, might have been restrained and self-conscious under his dark, cold and disapproving eye. If they had invited him he would have refused. In any case, he is far too busy to go out.
He passed his exams with spectacular success and is now a Detective Inspector. He often thinks about Jeremy Quick or Alexander Gibbons and wonders what impelled him to garrotte those women (if it was really he who garrotted them), why he took those small objects off them and why he tried to strangle a boy instead of a girl. Perhaps because Zulueta is studying in his spare time for a postgraduate psychology degree, he dwells a lot on these things, motivation, compulsion, obsession. Something that disquiets him is remembering what a guilty thrill he had got out of seeing the man shot by that marksman’s rifle and how astonished he was to see Jeremy’s broad smile at the time of his death. These emotions, he feels, should not be felt by a mature and responsible police officer of increasingly high rank. Still, it was permissible, surely, to wonder what had caused that smile, as if the man had wanted to die.
Copyright © Kingsmarkham Enterprises, Ltd. 2003
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THE ROTTWEILER
Seal Books/published by arrangement with Doubleday Canada
Doubleday Canada edition published 2003
Seal Books edition published December 2004
eISBN: 978-0-385-67317-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Copyright