Free Shaping the Ripples by Paul Wallington Page B

Mr. ….?” He left the end of the sentence hanging in the air.
    “Bailey, Jack Bailey.” I reached our to grasp his hand but his eyes had suddenly clouded over and his arm fell as if lifeless to his side.
    “You’re the one who found my wife,” he said in a rather stunned voice.
    “Yes, I am.” I replied. “ I wanted to say how very sorry I am for your loss. Your wife was a very special person.”
    He seemed to have regained his composure. “She was.” He responded. “That’s why we’re so anxious to have whoever committed this horrendous crime caught as soon as possible.”
    “I am as well,” I agreed. “Whatever the police might have hinted to you, I had nothing to do with her murder. Jennifer was someone who I admired greatly, and who had been nothing but helpful to me. I don’t know why I was summoned to the house that day, but I had no reason to harm her at all.”
    “I hope that’s true,” he replied evenly. “Thank you again for coming to pay your respects to her.”
    He climbed into the open door of the funeral limousine, and it pulled away. I walked down the hill leading away from the cemetery. Just at that moment I couldn’t remember ever feeling so lonely.
    Chapter Nine
    I tried to ring Christopher Upton that evening, but only managed to get his answer phone.
    “This is St. Thomas’s Vicarage” it declared solemnly. “I can’t come to the phone right now but please leave your name and number after the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
    I hesitated, unsure whether to bother leaving a message, until the loud electronic beep decided it for me. “Hi Christopher.” I began, “It’s Jack Bailey. The vicar at the funeral today said you weren’t so good, so I was just ringing to see how you were and if you needed anything. Give me a call if you’re up to it.”
    The phone didn’t ring that evening, and when I got home from work on he next day, there were no messages. I tried to ring him again but hung up when I got the answer phone again.
    Most of Saturday was spent preparing my speech for the Charity Dinner, which was coming around much too quickly for my liking. I’d agreed with Katie that she would talk in general about the work we did at the centre, and that I’d try and give it some real flesh by talking specifically about one of the cases that I’d handled in my time there. I knew which one should have the most impact, but that didn’t make it easy to put into the right words. The hard part was finding a balance which gave them a real sense of the case, without breaching the confidentiality of the people involved in it.
    By teatime, I thought I’d just about cracked it and decided to go out for a walk into the city centre. I’d forgotten that the shops would now be open in the evenings to try and lure every possible bit of pre-Christmas spending, so the streets were thronged with determined looking people, clutching assorted brightly coloured plastic bags.
    The evening was crisp and cold, and bits of Christmas music drifted out of most of the shop doors. Despite that, the atmosphere felt more being in the middle of a military operation with each person trying to elbow their way through the crowds so that they could tick off the next objective on their lists as soon as possible.
    I found my way into a food hall and, surrounded by people who were mostly pushing trolleys laden with all sorts of food and drink, picked out a few ready made meals for one which would save me having to think about cooking during the next week or so.
    On my way out of the food hall, I was preparing to rejoin the battling crowds when I heard a voice from behind my left shoulder.
    “Well, look at who we have here!”
    I turned around to see Ryan Clarke smirking at me.
    “Ryan” I said without much enthusiasm.
    “I hear you’ve not been having such a good time of things recently. You can imagine how upset I was to hear that.” He sneered.
    One of the downside of the success of