Silencing the Dead by Will Harker (ready to read books .TXT) 📗

Yes, what?” A customer had approached with two small kids, asking if the carousel was open yet. That forbidding stare soon sent them scuttling. Sal then marched straight over and prodded me in the shoulder. The very spot where Nick had landed his jab. I winced. If anyone possessed true psychic abilities, it was probably my oldest friend. “If you’re pulling your usual shit, I will end you,” she said. “And don’t even begin to say you don’t know what I’m talking about. Just because we haven’t all interrogated you about Bradbury End doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten. Not me, not your dad, and most of all not that doe-eyed puppy dog you’re lucky enough to call your boyfriend.”

She was right. Haz hadn’t asked about any of it. Not a single question since I’d found him waiting for me on Travellers Bridge the night Lenny Kerrigan had died. He knew Garris had blackmailed him for a purpose, he knew the historian Gerald Roebuck had mysteriously disappeared, and he knew I’d been investigating something tied to the tragedy of the Jericho freaks. And that was all he wanted to know. I wasn’t surprised. It had always been in Haz’s nature to shy away from upsetting truths. It was, in fact, the reason he had rejected me after he’d killed his father. But Harry Moorhouse was no fool.

I remembered him visiting the hospital following Kerrigan’s attack on me and saying, “How is this ever going to end? He could have killed you.” More unspoken truths. More secrets, growing like weeds between us.

But Haz wasn’t the only one avoiding questions. As Sal had said, no one on the fair had pried into those final days in Bradbury. Except that wasn’t quite true. After Kerrigan had been reported missing, my dad had come to find me. By then we’d accepted his offer of travelling with the fair and I’d been busy setting up the children’s carousel he’d rented us to make our living.

“I’ll ask you once,” he’d said, leaning on a merry-go-round horse, his expression neutral. “Did you do for him?”

I had told him, “No,” and that was the end of the matter.

“Nothing’s going on,” I now assured Sal. “Not like in Bradbury anyway.”

She searched my face for a moment before nodding. “Then tell me what’s wrong between you and Harry.”

“What do you mean?” I stared at her. “Has he said something?”

“He doesn’t need to,” she sighed. “That boy wears his pain in his eyes.”

I looked up into the smoky darkness. No stars there, no light of any kind, except the pulsing heartbeat of the fairground. Sal knuckled my chin.

“I’m worried about the pair of you. You’ve seemed so distant recently.” She had spoken softly but her old edge soon returned. “Bloody hell, Scott, why do you have to be so… You?” She swatted my shoulder and I grimaced again. “I’m here if you need to talk, all right?”

“Talk about what?”

We both turned around like a pair of guilty schoolkids.

Haz stood with his long, nervous fingers twining between the drawstring of his canary-yellow cagoule. At first, I thought he might have been crying, but then he wiped his eyes and said something about the smoke from the burger truck. Those gentle jade eyes, crinkling at their edges as he looked at me. Not quite a smile. We seemed stuck for a moment until eventually, he came over and I wrapped my arms around him, kissing that mop of mousey brown hair. It felt almost paternal, not the sort of embrace shared by lovers.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Choir practice,” he said, pulling away and showing me his music bag. “I told you this morning. We ran over a bit, I'm sorry.”

I nodded. Our circuit for the fair had been pretty limited lately and Haz had found a choir group in a nearby town. He’d even started composing again. In fact, his face only seemed to light up these days when he spoke about his music.

“Oh God,” he said, glancing at Sal’s grimy work dungarees and then at the spotless carousel. “I’m sorry, have you done all this? And I’m late for opening night as well. I really am the worst joskin-turned-traveller ever.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Knowing Sal, she’ll have already decided on how we can pay her back. Anyway, you head to the trailer and have a wash. I’ll open up and then—”

“Opening can wait,” my dad’s voice, the word of God itself on the fair, called out to us. We turned to find him and Big Sam Urnshaw steaming in our direction.

“I don’t like the look of this,” Sal murmured.

She was right. There was something stony and relentless in my father’s expression. A look that I had seen before and which never failed to remind me of his contained fury after my mother’s death. Others had seen it in different situations and it always signalled one thing—someone from outside had harmed one of his people. That look. It almost made me feel sorry for whoever had been so foolish.

CHAPTER SEVEN

My dad and Big Sam approached and together with Sal and Haz we formed a circle.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

Dad wiped a finger across his salt-and-pepper moustache while Sam ground his teeth. Like most large, loud men he was a sentimental soul and I could see the emotion shimmering in his eyes. But his cheeks were dry and so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. No one was dead, at least.

“It’s Aunt Tilda,” Dad said. “Something’s upset her.”

I almost laughed. Something upset Aunt Tilda on an almost daily basis: chavvies playing too boisterously around her trailer; Joskins and their ‘strange gorger smells’; the price of teabags was enough to launch her into fits. Dad must have seen my scepticism and shot me a baleful glare.

“It ain’t no moody bollocks,” he barked. “I find out who did this and they’ll be in their box and buried ahead of time, I swear. It’s a wicked trick to play on an old