Lost and Never Found by Simon Mason EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Authors: Simon Mason
- Language: English
- Genre: Police Procedurals
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The illegal car wash on the southbound road out of Oxford is the
cheapest in the city, a makeshift compound of oily puddles and streams,
slick and black under dripping awnings. Here, hour after hour, cars shunt
slowly across the concrete, while dozens of men and women in waterproofs
and galoshes crowd round them with hoses and sponges, soaping, spraying,
wiping, rinsing.
Occasionally these people speak to each other, brief asides
in a language that might be Russian or perhaps Albanian. Mostly they are
quiet. They are tired, bending and reaching in unvarying routine as the cars
creep past: the saloons, the four-by-fours, the station wagons, hatchbacks,
minivans, coupés, sedans. They know them all, these cars, all the brands
and models; they have seen them all many times.
But they have never seen a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Here it comes now,
on this slush-coloured February morning, enormous and otherworldly,
gliding on to the splintered, streaming forecourt, one hundred per cent out
of place, a visitation from another dimension; and the men and women stop
to look. They have never seen anything so strange, that huge boat-like hull,
that unearthly colour – crystal over Salamanca blue – the whole flowing
technology uncannily natural, like the movement of blossom in a breeze or
waves on the surface of the sea.
They are seeing these things for the first
time, vividly, and will remember them later, when the police arrive to take
their statements, as they will remember the driver, a woman of complete
self-possession, who sits behind the wheel, ignoring everything, obliviously
performing neck exercises. Though they never look at her directly, the carwash men and women take in everything about her: her elfin face, raggedchic blond hair, distant blue eyes, small pointed chin. A young face, though
she is not young; she looks like a child left in charge of the family car.
They
watch her from the corners of their eyes when she gets out and walks
slowly over to the picnic tables set up at the edge of the compound to wait
while the interior cleaning is being done. She stands there in a pool of
greasy water, wearing elegantly tight-fitting olive-green slacks and an
expensively simple blue sweater, and a touch, here and there, of bespoke
jewellery, slim, modest, remote, her eyes strangely vacant, as if her mind
were fixed on something else entirely, as if she existed without any
connection to the current moment; until, at last, a man detaches himself
from a little group of workers and walks across the wet compound towards
her.
TWO
That evening, in the famous auditorium of Oxford’s town hall, the
Thames Valley Police gala dinner was taking place. At ten o’clock it had
been proceeding, in formal mode, for more than three hours, and now, in the
unstructured gap between meal and speeches, it was starting to lose its
shape.
While the stage was being prepared for the award-giving, the diners,
sitting twenty to a table under the intricately decorated ceiling, removed
their jackets, undid their waistcoats, discreetly adjusted their ballgowns and
gave rise to an impressive babble. People wandered about; some had to go
outside. Liqueurs were served; the room was warm and dimly lit and loud.
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