The Broken Afternoon by Simon Mason EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Simon Mason
- Language: English
- Genre: Murder
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Poppy Clarke, four years old, standing in the sun-dazzled gateway of
Magpies. Giggling.
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Deep in the heart of rich Oxford, Garford Road glowed in the heat, a
moneyed hush of rustling copper beech, murmuring voices of girls from the
private schools, muted conversations of construction workers at the
Edwardian villas under renovation – and Poppy’s laughter ringing out
bright as summer birdsong as she danced on the spangles of sunshine on the
gravel driveway of her nursery school, waiting for her mother at four thirty
on a July afternoon.
It was a game, their usual game. She knew where he was, she could see
his shadow on the bright pavement. Pausing, she watched carefully as she
knew she was supposed to. Her eyes shone. She clapped her hands. She
jumped round in a circle, all dimples and ribbons in her red and black pirate
costume, the season’s craze. Still smiling, she shook her head sternly and
wagged her finger. Covered her eyes with her hands, snatched them away,
and burst out laughing again.
Briefly, she turned and looked at the nursery building behind her, where
her mother was talking to a friend, but there was nothing to see there except
a boring empty doorway, so she turned back to the street. She looked shyly,
but only pretend-shyly; really she was watching between her fingers in that
clever, sly way she had. And soon she was giggling and jumping up and
down, until, when beckoned, she skipped forward. And when her mother
came out a few moments later she had gone.
Ten hours later, five miles away, in a poky shed-like office smelling of
engine oil and instant coffee, night-watch security guard Ryan Wilkins
broke the long hours of his shift by catching the news on repeat. Two
o’clock in the morning, night rain creeping with tiny claws across the
plastic roof. He turned up the volume and leaned in.
On the screen: his former partner, Detective Inspector Raymond Wilkins,
flanked on one side by the new Superintendent and on the other by the
Thames Valley Police crest in gilded carpentry, fronting a presser. A little
girl gone missing. Her picture appeared, an irresistible advert for the human
race with her blonde curls and dimples, her bunched cheeks and shining
eyes, appropriately pleased with herself in pirate costume, eye-patch and
cutlass, ribbons and sash. Vanished from outside her Oxford nursery while
her mother talked for no more than two minutes to her teacher in the lobby.
A picture of the nursery appeared too, a snippet of sculpted beech hedge
and immaculate lawn – another advert, for parental serenity, priceless at
fifteen grand a year. From which, in broad daylight, a little girl had been
snatched. Upper-middle-class England was freaking out. In the echoey
conference room journalists shouted questions over each other.
DI Wilkins said they were following a lead but declined to give details,
and Ryan turned him off and sat there in the sudden quiet staring out of the
window at the rain-crackly darkness of the van compound beyond. He
could imagine the situation. A news shout so quick wasn’t ideal – things
were still too messy – but the timetable of sensational cases was driven by
the media. A lead? If real, probably the father;
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