Free Dangerous Games by Sally Spencer Page A

Service.’
    His words clearly annoyed Albert Knox. ‘You weren’t in the army yourself, were you, Bob?’ he asked.
    â€˜Well, no,’ Smothers admitted, suddenly looking rather uncomfortable.
    â€˜Then you’ve no idea what you’re talkin’ about, have you?’ Albert Knox asked.
    â€˜I was perfectly willin’ to go,’ Smothers said defensively, ‘but I had flat feet, you see, so they wouldn’t take me.’
    â€˜You’re lucky you’re young enough to have just missed it,’ Knox said, ignoring Smothers and talking directly to Beresford. ‘It was a waste of two years of my life. They say it’ll make a man of you, but what it really tries to do is to turn you into an unthinkin’, unfeelin’ machine.’
    â€˜Hey, that’s a bit strong,’ Bob Smothers protested.
    â€˜Still, I shouldn’t complain,’ Knox said, continuing to ignore him. ‘It’s true that they made me paint stones white, an’ then, when I’d finished that to their satisfaction. paint ’em black. But I was never under fire, like some poor buggers were, forced to defend an empire we should have got shut of years ago.’
    â€˜The Empire was the envy of the world,’ Smothers said.
    â€˜You’re talkin’ through your arse, as usual, you big stupid bastard,’ Knox told him.
    â€˜Did Terry Pugh seem especially unhappy in the last couple of weeks?’ Beresford interjected, eager to get the conversation back on course before a fight broke out.
    â€˜Now you mention it, I think I’d have to say that he did,’ a man with a squint, who was sitting next to Albert Knox, chipped in. ‘It was probably the letter that did it.’
    â€˜What letter?’ Beresford asked.
    â€˜He had this letter in his boiler suit pocket. He’d take it out two or three times a day, an’ read it, though he must have known it by heart. An’ he always looked worried after he’d done that.’
    â€˜Any idea what the letter was about?’ Beresford asked.
    â€˜No. He didn’t show it to me, an’ I didn’t ask him about it. But I can tell you that it was all crumpled, like he’d balled it up to throw it away, then thought better of it – an’ I think it was typed, rather than written.’
    â€˜It’ll have been a solicitor’s letter, then,’ Bob Smothers said. ‘“Dear Mr Pugh, I must inform you that Miss Big Tits from the typin’ pool has a bun in the oven, an’ is claimin’ that you are the father”.’
    He checked around the table to see if his latest sally into humour was receiving the appreciation it deserved, but the other men seemed almost as fed up with him as Albert Knox was.
    â€˜If it had been a solicitor’s letter, it would have been on a big sheet of paper,’ the man with the squint said. ‘But this was just an ordinary size – the size you might use if you were writin’ a letter yourself.’
    â€˜So maybe it was from Miss Big Tits herself,’ Bob Smothers said, still trying to squeeze an acceptable joke out of his less-than-adequate material.
    â€˜Did anybody else here happen to see Terry Pugh reading this letter?’ Beresford asked.
    Several of the men admitted that they had – so it seemed likely that Pugh had read the letter more than the two or three times a day that the man with the squint had observed – but none of them could throw any light on what the letter might actually have said.
    Still, Beresford assured himself, he had made progress of a sort, and even if the letter didn’t mean anything to him, it just might mean something to Woodend.

Eight
    F rom her vantage point, in the bay window of the lounge in Bob Rutter’s new home, Elizabeth Driver watched Rutter walk around his car, checking that all the doors were properly locked.
    She smiled to herself. It was a smile that her