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144 pages

English

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Description

Humility's a low-tech woman in a hi-tech world - but she's not going to give up until she knows who killed the guy everyone said was harmless. The mystery leads her to the cruellest parts of the city where people kill for the cost of a meal. It's a world where she's not sure anyone is who they claim to be, and where one death leads to another... and the next one could be hers! The first in Penny Deacon's futurecrime thriller series.

Informations

Publié par	Creative Content
Date de parution	29 avril 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781906790721
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Kind of Puritan
Penny Deacon
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Crème de la Crime Books Crème de la Crime Ltd, PO Box 445, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 6YQ
Copyright © 2004 Penny Deacon
The moral right of Penny Deacon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Typesetting by Yvette Warren Cover design by Yvette Warren Front cover photography by David Crausby. Alamy Images, www.alamy.com Printed and bound in England by Biddles Ltd, www.biddles.co.uk
ISBN 0-9547634-1-6
eBook ISBN 9781906790721
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
www.cremedelacrime.com
About the Author
Penny Deacon was born in Scotland, christened in Dorset and first went to school in Sri Lanka. Wandering has always been part of her life and, though she thinks she’s now settled in the West Country, she wouldn’t be surprised to find herself on the move again.
It may have been the long sea voyages to and from Sri Lanka which triggered her love of sailing and the sea – a love which led to spending ten years following her graduation from Oxford living aboard a yacht. During this time she and Sebastian The Cat sailed twice to the West Indies.
To earn a living Penny has taught sailing and English and dredged for oysters. More recently she has been a school librarian as well as a writer.
Penny has always written – journals and diaries, short stories and romantic novels, and even a couple of management workbooks – but A Kind of Puritan is her first venture into crime. She hopes to become involved with Humility’s adventures again very soon.
Contents
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
1
Beneath the oily scum of the water’s surface the jointed neck bent and stretched. The mouth gaped. Teeth closed on ooze and debris and decaying matter and tore it free from the clinging river bed. Messages from the weighted jaw told the neck to lift and swivel until it could spit its load on to the waste ground opposite the harbour.
Each mouthful brought up junk thrown or dropped into the water and too heavy for the tide to swirl away. Old oildrums and outdated machinery; a sunken raft not worth the salvage; something which might have been anything, long past identifying; and a cable, still new enough to be tough for the teeth to sever.
It took three bites before one end of the cable broke and the thing it held slithered free. It had almost slipped from between the jaws before it caught and hung, white and bloated and flaccid, half out of the teeth which lifted it from the water.
2
" Shit. "
No one except a one-legged gull took any notice but I hadn’t been speaking for anyone else’s benefit. It’s just that a stubbed toe inspires comment. I sat down clutching my foot and tried not to remember Jack’s voice telling me, yet again, how dumb it was to go barefoot on a boat.
"Where else? I’m not fool enough to try it on shore."
He’d shrug and grin and pretend to light the foul thing he called a pipe. Why he couldn’t chew or sniff or shoot his drugs like everyone else I never did find out. Never asked. But if I’d listened to him perhaps I wouldn’t have half-broken my toe on a cleat and wouldn’t have been sitting on a coil of wet rope staring down river at just that moment.
No one would have cared. Not the Net or Eurogov or the Corps, not even the God my mother still believes in. Certainly not Jack’s long-dead bones. You can’t change things. However hard you try.
I never learn. Jack said that, too.
The dredge was on a flat yellow barge between me and the sunset. Somewhere on shore an operator had long since been bored into stupor by mindless repetition, the surveillance of this and thirty other identical machine-beasts which needed no watching. It stopped when it had to, when proximity alarms told it of passing traffic, and then went obediently on with its work. On the whole, the machine’s job was more interesting than its operator’s.
I watched the monotonous programme: the precisely timed passes as it dipped beneath the water and rose again with the same weight of dripping silt to be dropped in neat alignment with the oozing heap from the previous pass. Two passes. Three. There was something hypnotic about the way the black silhouette moved against the low sun. It was only when it swung aside from that glare to dump each load that I could see any details. My head was swinging with the crane arm, the throbbing in my toe easing to dullness, as I watched the end of the fourth pass.
Then I was shouting at the phone. It heard the three numbers and dialled me into the Port alarm. Everything stopped: the crane gantries halted mid-swing, the grumble of the recyclers ceased, even the plodding thud of the pumps clearing mud and water from the newly dredged marina went silent. The phone squawked back at me as I watched the dredge’s contents dribble out from half-opened jaws. The last bit of rubbish caught briefly between the iron teeth before it flopped on to the wet muck beneath. It was too far off to hear but I knew what sound it made.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.
"Humility? That you?"
Daisy’s face was a bluish blur in the small screen but I didn’t need hi-definition to know about its expression.
"Me."
"What the fuck are you up to? Do you want to put the Port into penalty time?"
"Depends. What’s the penalty for dredging up dead bodies?"
Silence. Then, cautious, "Say again?"
I grinned. "You heard. The dredge downstream from me just snagged itself a corpse."
She swore again. Then I heard her muffled shout down another line: "Number seven dredge. Take it off-line then get the rest of the system back up." Daisy was always practical. "I’ll send someone out. You, " she added, back on my line, with an emphasis holding little friendship, "can transfer over here. Right now."
I’d need shoes after all. Even as I pulled them on, the bored operator in the room back in the grey Port building would have been startled alert – by alarm or light or minor shock – and I didn’t suppose he or she would be any more grateful for my interference than Daisy.
I’d only been back in the Midway Port a day. Once I’d persuaded the Harbour Master he had a cheap niche for The Flying Pig, there had only been a couple of reasons to go ashore. I hadn’t been into the city yet. It could wait. Cities are good at waiting.
3
There was a new tekkie on security at the main entry.
"ID?"
I let the scanner’s eye swing level with mine. Stared at it. Scanner communication is strictly one-way. It told me nothing about itself.
The tekkie was bored. Then he read his printer and looked at me, really looked, for the first time. I knew what was coming.
"New Puritan, eh?"
"No." My turn to be bored.
"With a name like that?"
"I didn’t choose my name. My parents christened me."
"Christened?" The heavy frown cleared. "You mean Named."
I didn’t. I meant christened. Children are Named when they get their IDs, within hours of birth these days when you’re still wet and helpless. That’s when they put in the chip that lets the state know you’re alive and will one day be able to pay their taxes. Where I come from, they reserve judgement on you as someone worth calling a person for at least six months. Then you’re christened. The non-Persons? Don’t ask.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to explain any of that to this tekkie who was labouring his way through the rest of my ID display, comparing my image with its reality. I slung my weight solidly on my left hip and returned the survey levelly enough to remind him that my 180 centimetres gave me a four centimetre advantage. I might not have been up to his weight – most of which he carried around the straining belt displaying his credit status as well as his paunch – but working a boat keeps you fit. And perhaps the red hair should have given him a warning about temperament. What the grey eyes and freckles did for him I didn’t want to know.
He looked up, small eyes saying he was willing to show a primitive the delights of civilisation
"Where’s Jon?" I asked before he had time to put in his bid.
"What Jon?"
"The one who was doing your job last time I was here."
The display would have told him when that was, even if it didn’t say Jon had been a lot better company. The tekkie shrugged, bored again.
"Who cares? Must’ve been another drifter."
Whose drifting had opened up a hole for this bonehead. Jon’s file had been cleared. Happens all the time.
"Are you going to spend all night out there?"
Daisy’s voice from the second screen, the one which gave her access to the entry, and this one did have hi-def. The irritation was more marked than ever. It worried the tekkie more than me, but at least he cleared me through with no more com