Читать книгу The Devil's in the Detail - Matthew S Wilson - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

Gabriel never used an alarm. The heat usually woke him. He still hadn’t quite got used to the heat in Hell.

He got out of his bed, not even looking at the brunette whom he’d slept with last night, and walked naked across to an old gramophone on the antique table in the corner of the room. He switched it on and placed the needle down on the record with the gentle precision of a surgeon. A moment of crackled silence and then opera wafted throughout his apartment as he walked down the hallway to the bathroom.

He reached into the shower and turned the tap. As he stepped under the scalding water and closed his eyes, he took a moment to let the music and heat wash over him before turning to the job at hand of washing himself. Although his job afforded him many luxuries, laziness was not one of them.

Gabriel got out of the shower and stood in front of the mirror for a moment. His dark eyes studied his muscular physique and like most people that laid eyes on him, he liked what he saw. He splashed some cologne into his palms and rubbed them over his designer stubble, before slipping on a crimson, satin gown and walking down to the kitchen.

He made two espressos on a coffee machine that would have not looked out of place in a Parisian café and drank one immediately. He took the second with him to a glass dining table adjacent to the kitchen.

As always, the table was laden with newspapers from all over the planet, each in a different language. He scanned the headlines: Corruption in Brazil; A sex scandal in Canada; Freedom of expression in Sweden; A reality TV star in America who was suing a television network that produced and aired his television show, for invasion of privacy. With the opera drifting down the hallway toward him, he casually leafed through the newspapers and slowly sipped his second espresso. He largely ignored the political stories, as those types would rarely make it to trial. He did take particular notice of natural disaster stories though. You just never knew exactly who was going to die in one of those.

He checked the expensive silver watch on his wrist and sighed – there was just never enough time to read the paper in full nowadays. He picked up the Daily Mirror – a newspaper that had a special relationship with his employer - and leafed through to the obituaries, keen to see what the working day would bring for the prosecutor’s office and its team of capable lawyers.

A baker in Dunedin. A little girl in Reading. Some troops returning from a war somewhere. A London cab driver.

He sat up for a moment and read the last one again. Early forties, married for twenty years, one daughter. Shepherd. David James Shepherd. He read it again and again, like a sign next to a parking spot that is too good to be true. This was the obituary he had been waiting for.

He tore the page out of the paper and drained the remainder of the espresso. He needed to make a phone call. Baal, the rather promising but all too eager junior lawyer in Gabriel’s office would not be required in Court today.