The Secret Hours by Mick Herron EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Mick Herron
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Thrillers
- Format: PDF/ePub
- Size: 1 MB
- Price: Free
The worst smell in the world is dead badger. He’d encountered it on his
morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odour without seeing
the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel.
Whether they all smelled that bad or whether this one had expired of
noxious causes he didn’t know. As it turned out, he couldn’t do anything
about it either—the creature had crawled into a tangled nest of roots to die,
and it would require heavy machinery and a strong stomach to recover it.
Lacking the former, and not wanting to put the latter to the test, Max opted
for a third way: he’d walk a different route for a while, and see if one of the
local farmers shifted it in the meantime. Which was why he wasn’t sure the
badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for
his life.
The first of the intruders entered through the kitchen window. Max
hadn’t been asleep, though anyone watching the cottage would have been
forgiven for thinking otherwise: the lights were out, the curtains drawn.
He’d been lying in bed, not so much struggling with insomnia as letting it
do its worst, when he’d heard the window latch being finessed open: a piece
of wire sliding through the draughty gap he’d been meaning to repair, lifting
the metal hook from its eye. Quieter than taking out the glass, but a long
way short of silent. He’d pulled on jogging pants and a sweatshirt, slipped
into a pair of trainers, then froze in place, caught between two lives, trying
to remember where he’d stashed his flight kit . . . You could worry you
were losing your mind. That they were coming too late, and you’d long ago
turned into whoever you were pretending to be.
(Max Janáček. Retired (early) academic; still footling around with a
history book, but mostly just passing the days—taking long walks, cooking
slow meals, losing himself in Dickens.)
The stairs were an out-of-tune orchestra of squeaks and whistles, every
tread announcing that Peter or the wolf were on their way, unless you’d
practised descending, and knew where to put your feet. So almost
noiselessly he reached the sitting room, whose doorway was catty-corner to
the kitchen, and plucked the poker from its stand by the wood-burning
stove. Not a great weapon, for all its iconic status in fiction.
You needed
high ceilings to accommodate your swing. Max Janáček understood a good
swing: he was the man you saw walking the lanes, beheading dandelions
with a stick. Who lived in a five-hundred-year-old cottage in North Devon,
and could be counted on to do the neighbourly thing: keep an eye out for
the old folk, whose company he was on the threshold of joining; litter-pick
after the bank holiday rush; sign the petition resisting the makeshift
industrial estate down the lane—numbering seventeen cabins now.
This and
more he’d been for more than twenty years, and whether the locals took
him at face value or gave less than a tuppenny damn had become irrelevant,
or had done until someone slipped the latch on his kitchen window and
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB