скачать книгу бесплатно
Angels of Mourning
John Pritchard
Something appalling lurks under the streets of London. Something that has survived for centuries, thriving on pain and hatred and grief.And with another terrorist bombing campaign in the City, there's plenty to fuel such an appetite for evil.Rachel Young has moved to the capital to work in one of the major hospital's Intensive Care Units: it's a desperate job at the best of times, and now is not the best of times.Despite a happy marriage to Nick and a successful three-year recovery from past traumas, Rachel senses that the skin of normality over the abyss is about to erupt, and the glimpse of an old adversary lurking among the homeless people further increases her fears.Roxanne – Angel of Death, Angel of Mourning – has returned from the Void…
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_73bb9b3a-f7f0-55c5-a6d0-9bedc5f28588)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Copyright © John Pritchard 1995
John Pritchard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006480136
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219482
Version: 2016-10-26
Any similarity between characters in this story and real police officers or units is certainly not intended! Nor is Rachel’s workplace based on any one hospital.
DEDICATION (#ulink_dc7f455a-b0ba-53e6-acb0-047c492f16e9)
To
Veronique and Huw
For all their sense and humour
CONTENTS
Cover (#uf0e34e54-d2d4-51f4-aa8c-4f4d61627313)
Title Page (#u73b86b6d-bceb-5bb1-9417-9899c9008744)
Copyright (#ulink_0791a0ac-cabf-5a4b-97e4-e1293b4857d8)
Dedication (#ulink_87234d4e-2967-5249-9cde-6da5e66ade73)
Part 1: The Mercy of Angels (#ulink_ae5692ba-def5-5993-b5a1-9b2be944d2b7)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_79a76831-2214-5d62-85fd-b8f94d33c1b4)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_462b15db-cf45-55bb-aa14-96cd53ab28fa)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_1e1a958c-347f-5bee-bd5d-49c5cbab41d3)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_bf8e0c51-3bde-51b3-8175-0677d5d17492)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_16e3c502-d626-589c-9850-32d79e4219ce)
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part 2: The City of Crows
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part 3: Death is Sweet from the Soldier of God
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
Keep Reading (#ulink_b4fae7eb-6853-5ae0-8c0a-e21df1d4af85)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books By
About the Publisher
PART 1 (#ulink_2e52715a-8ca3-5903-820c-02417b42efcc)
The Mercy of Angels (#ulink_2e52715a-8ca3-5903-820c-02417b42efcc)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_dd4a4d1f-240d-5673-9f36-af67467601a1)
I remember waking up on that first, awful Friday, and thinking how good it felt to be alive.
I’d come to the surface in my own sweet time. No need to grope for my alarm clock through the darkness – nor meet my pasty-faced reflection in the bathroom mirror, the window beside it still black from the night outside. No call to venture out into the pre-dawn city chill.
No more Earlies for me this week. I wasn’t on until one.
So I just lay where I was, content and clear-headed from a full eight hours, and soaked up the duvet’s warmth. With bed and bedclothes all to myself, I’d snuggled deep into a cosy little nest: the hardest sort of all to quit. And maybe I’d started building it when I should have still been sharing – at least if Nick’s usual complaints were anything to go by.
But Nick was long gone now; out before six to catch his shift-change. His turn to tiptoe to the bathroom, and dress in the dimness, and let himself out into the darkest hour.
I hadn’t woken.
Sleep – at long, long last – was somewhere I felt safe.
The light through the curtains was pale and flat; they were going on about snow on the radio news. But it didn’t really register until I’d gone through, yawning, to open the front door – and couldn’t find the milk bottles.
The doorstep was a shapeless heap; our street was blanketed. I started delving – then stopped again to listen to the hush. It seemed unreal: like the sallow, sick-rose pink of the sky above the rooftops. For a moment I just knelt there, not feeling the chill that came gnawing through my nightshirt. Knelt, and stared in wide-eyed wonder, and couldn’t stop the grin spreading over my face. Because I’ve always loved the early-morning snow: loved the way it can turn a dreary winter city to another world. From back when I was a girl growing up in the Midlands, to now, in drab North London, the magic hadn’t changed. It still made me want to play snowballs.
Even the prospect of the chaos I’d face getting in to work didn’t dampen my mood.
A note on the cork board caught my eye as I came back in with the bottles. Raitch. I’ll get some more bread on the way home. Love, Nick. Which probably meant he’d finished the loaf; no wonder there were all those kisses at the end. I blew him one back, and carried the chilled milk through into the kitchen.
After breakfast, with a couple of hours left to kill, I wandered round the house for a while. Some stray bits of dirty washing to be rounded up (Nick!); a few fastidious flicks of the duster. But it had been a lived-in sort of place from day one, which was what I really liked about it. Overlooking Clissold Park: two bedrooms – one damp – and it had cost us. But it was ours now. A place of our own. A place we’d begun to call home.
Ours. Something special: something shared. Something to make the past seem very far away.
Sometimes.
And sometimes it seemed like yesterday. Three crowded years just fled away, and the dark was so close it made me catch my breath. But such moments were more fleeting now; much fewer. I might still dream the dreams, but I couldn’t recall them. And they didn’t wake me, sobbing, in the night.
Ready to go – bag packed, and travelcard ready in my purse – I wrapped up warm, and picked my way out into the silent street. The snow was slick and icy underfoot – I almost slipped – but there was a narrow, gritted gap down the middle, like the safe path through a minefield, and I followed it carefully towards the main road. This was busier, and already mostly slush. A queue of people were waiting by the bus-stop, and I’d joined them just long enough for my cheeks to start stinging when the number 73 came rumbling into view.
I rode the bus as far as King’s Cross, then changed to the tube for the rest of the journey; watching the snow melting off my boots as we banged and rattled southward, from tunnels into canyons open to the slaty sky.
Someone was waiting for me at the other end.
Coming up out of the station, I found him right in my path – huddling on the stairs like a survivor of Stalingrad. A beggar wrapped up in a hospital blanket, his stubbled face pinched tight with the cold. His grey eyes hungry.
And survivor he was, I thought numbly: straggling in retreat from an undeclared war. A man defeated. But I was the one who spread my mittened hands, as if in surrender.
‘Sorry, mate … No change …’
He’d asked as I said it; the appeal stayed frozen to his face. And all I could do was pass him by, my helpless hands still empty; giving him a small, regretful smile.
Big help, of course. But with shock still thumping dully in my chest, it was as much as I could manage. Hardly his fault, poor bloke – but some things still brought the worst of it back. And try as I might, I couldn’t keep my nerves from reacting.
After a moment I raised my face again – and the hospital was there before me, looming up like a tenement block; sombre as stone. But its windows leaked light and warmth from the world within: a place protected from this bitter day. A refuge in refugee city.
I waited for a gap and crossed the road: hunching my shoulders against the cold.
