The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

window outside. He had evidently not seen Frank. The atmosphere in the restaurant was thick with cigarette smoke and the tenacious aroma of onions and gruel. The place had the unappetising feel of a soup kitchen for the starving homeless. But it was a safe haven for the time being and, although his head still span with the noise of drums and pipes, it gave him a chance to catch his thoughts. In a smoky corner far away from the door, where the air was almost too thick to breathe, he found a spare seat at a table and ordered a bowl of gruel in the hope that it might at least warm him up inside. But his mind was too embattled. Too preoccupied with that gaping hole where Patricia ought to be, with thoughts of their last moments together before they said goodbye. The sweet taste of commitment on her lips.

The sound of knives on the plates, the ostentatious roars of laughter and other desperate signals of enjoyment droned and echoed through his shelter. Scythed their way into his skull, splitting it in two. His head pulsated with the pain. And the vapours of gruel that wafted up from his bowl of soup brought a retching nausea to his throat. He pushed the bowl away from him. And found it instantly shoved back in his direction by an anonymous arm, which pushed a steak knife back in its wake. This disembodied limb was wearing a wristwatch so loud and garish it almost screamed the time at him. But the pain was too intense, the nausea too deep, and his eyes too blurred for it to register. He needed to get out. To find his way to the Kolping house. And then start his search for Patricia once the carnival was over.

Seizing the steak knife for protection, he manoeuvred his way out of the tavern and into the fresh air. On the street outside, the crowds had begun to thin out. Morning had arrived. It proved to be a warm and sunny day for early March. But a dark menace still hung in the air. A chill nipped at his face like hungry crows in search of winter food. And Silverstone still stood sentry across the street some fifty metres from the bridge. But he was not alone. In front of him, staring out over the bridge, stood a woman Frank sensed he knew.

‘Are the two of them together?’ Frank asked himself. And: ‘Who is she? Where have I seen her before?’

This oddly familiar woman had the look of a vulture, as she hovered on the pavement’s edge, her beak ready to tear into the carrion. Frank inched closer, his head throbbing so intensely he could barely focus his eyes. His hand was clammy on the handle of the knife in his pocket. He tightened his grip as he drew nearer to Silverstone and to this woman who was so strangely known to him.

Images of his mother forced themselves on him as his hand gripped the handle of the knife ever tighter: images of the way she had lain there before him, her face drained of colour, or of anything that could be associated with the woman he had known as his mother. All bones. Not even sufficient food for a vulture.

‘That’s it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘The old crow who called herself his mother’s nurse.’

That was the woman he saw before him now, their eyes close enough to meet. But where was Silverstone? He had disappeared. What was his game? In his place now, Frank saw the huge ungainly frame of Wolfgang some distance behind the woman. And could not escape the crazed, burning appetite for retribution in those ugly eyes. He briefly caught the glint of metal. A gun aimed directly at him. Frank pulled the knife from his pocket and lunged past the woman.

Too late. The searing pain that came with the crack of gunfire ripped through Frank’s chest and felled him instantly. Struggling for breath from the clear sky above as he lay where he fell, racked with pain, he saw the sky turn dark from the ugly frame of Wolfgang standing over him. Saw the gun aimed straight at his head. Felt the shot.

Frank lay motionless. A small dark crater between the eyes lay exposed to the elements. A hole quite unremarkable, except for the trickle of blood that ran a steady path down the neck and mingled with the colours of confetti on the pavement around him.

Chapter 26

Climbing the stairs to her Fulham flat after so many weeks away, Ellen was struck by just how alien everything appeared in all its familiarity. And the moment she opened the door to all the memories of life with Frank, she felt instantly engulfed by a deep sense of being totally alone. All the time she had been in the company of Marthe, she could convince herself that Frank would eventually be found. Now she was back in this place that had once been the home she shared with him, she was not so sure.

She put the suitcase down, loosened the silk scarf that Marthe had bought her and let it slip out of her hands onto the coffee table, where it curled around the words ‘Bank of England 1920–1944’. She ran her fingers over Frank’s spidery handwriting. Would he ever get to finish his article? Ellen wondered.

There was a part of her that wanted to look for somewhere else to live at the first opportunity – to put as much distance as possible between her present life and her memories. But there was another part of her that saw this as defeatism, if not betrayal. So, as she settled back into the routine of life in London, the idea that one day she would eventually hear from Frank began to take root again. It was an idea that accompanied her every day on her way to work and back. Across Putney Bridge, where she would stop