Читать книгу Screaming Yellow - Rachel Green - Страница 5

Prologue

The rope went taut, followed by a frantic drumming of leather against the old oak banisters, a kicking and jerking of legs until one shoe, a sensible brown slip-on with a decorative buckle, slipped from a stockinged foot to drop twenty feet to the carpet below.

Above, the legs shuddered and were still. A line of urine ran down, soaked up by the coarse nylon but copious enough to drip onto the Persian runner on the ground floor. Fingers that once held a flute in the Wiltshire Women’s Symphony Orchestra before arthritis took its toll fell limp and lifeless, the wedding band that hadn’t budged in forty years slipping off and following the shoe, though it hit the floor on its edge, bouncing and rolling silently away.

Grace Peters would look better in her coffin. Hanging from a rope around an open beam in the loft was not how she’d have wanted to be remembered. Her tongue protruded from yellow teeth and her eyes were red from burst blood vessels. Hanging was an uncommon means of suicide for women, but was still in the top five.

She swayed slightly in the breeze from the open kitchen window. Grace had been a recluse for the three years since her husband’s death and there were few visitors to the three-story house on Wightwick Drive. At least in winter decomposition was slowed: there would be little change in her appearance before she was discovered.

Downstairs Mitsy, Grace’s tabby cat, sniffed at the fallen drops and looked up, just the tip of its tail twitching.