Susan Hill - The Pure In Heart

Contents

About the Book

It is spring in the quiet English cathedral town of Lafferton when a little boy is snatched as he stands with his satchel at the gate of his home, waiting for his lift to school. Meanwhile a severely handicapped young woman hovers between life and death and an ex-con finds it impossible to go straight...

Haunting and truthful, gripping and convincing, The Pure in Heart is neither a thriller nor a whodunnit, but a fascinating crime novel and an utterly absorbing read.

About the Author

Susan Hills novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is the author of over forty books, including the four Serrailler crime novels, The Various Haunts of Men , The Pure in Heart , The Risk of Darkness and The Vows of Silence . Her most recent novel is A Kind Man . The play adapted from her famous ghost story, The Woman in Black , has been running on the West End stage since 1989.

Susan Hill was born in Scarborough and educated at Kings College London. She is married to the Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, and they have two daughters. She lives in Gloucestershire, where she runs her own small publishing company, Long Barn Books.

Susan Hills website is www.susan-hill.com

ALSO BY SUSAN HILL

Featuring Simon Serrailler

The Various Haunts of Men

The Risk of Darkness

The Vows of Silence

Fiction

Gentleman and Ladies

A Change for the Better

Im the King of the Castle

The Albatross and Other Stories

Strange Meeting

The Bird of Night

A Bit of Singing and Dancing

In the Springtime of the Year

The Woman in Black

Mrs de Winter

The Mist in the Mirror

Air and Angels

The Service of Clouds

The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read

The Man in the Picture

The Beacon

The Small Hand

A Kind Man

Non-Fiction

The Magic Apple Tree

Family

Howards End is on the Landing

Childrens Books

One Night at a Time

Can it be True?

The Glass Angels

The Battle for Gullywith

FOR MY MOLES EVERYWHERE

SUSAN HILL

The Pure in Heart

A Simon Serrailler Crime Novel

Blessed are the pure in heart:

for they shall see God

The Gospel According to St Matthew

One

At first light the mist was soft and smoky over the lagoon and it was cold enough for Simon Serrailler to be glad of his heavy donkey jacket. He stood on the empty Fondamenta, collar turned up, waiting, cocooned in the muffled silence. Dawn on a Sunday morning in March was not a time for much activity on this side of Venice, where few tourists came; the working city was at rest and even the early churchgoers were not yet about.

He always stayed here, in the same couple of rooms he rented above an empty warehouse belonging to the friend, Ernesto, who would appear any moment to take him across the water. The rooms were comfortable and plain and filled with wonderful light from the sky and the water. They were quiet at night, and from the Fondamenta Simon could walk about among the hidden backwaters, looking out for things he wanted to draw. He had been here at least once, and usually twice a year for the last decade. It was a working place and a bolt-hole from his life as a Detective Chief Inspector, as were similar hideouts in Florence and Rome. But it was in Venice that he felt most at home, to Venice he always returned.

The putter of an engine came just ahead of the craft itself, emerging close beside him out of the silvery mist.

Ciao.

Ciao, Ernesto.

The boat was small and workmanlike, without any of the romance or trimmings of traditional Venetian craft. Simon put his canvas bag under the seat and then stood up beside the boatman as they swung round and headed across the open water. The mist settled like cobwebs on their faces and hands and for a while Ernesto slowed right down until, suddenly, they seemed to cut a channel through the whiteness and emerge into a hazy buttery light beyond which Simon could see the island ahead.

He had been to San Michele several times before to wander about, looking, recording in his minds eye he never used a camera and he knew that at this hour, with luck, he would find it deserted even of the elderly arthritic widows who came in their black to tend the family graves.

Ernesto did not chat. He was not a voluble Italian. He was a baker, still working out of the cavernous kitchen generations of his family had used, still delivering the fresh hot bread round the canals. But he would be the last, he said, every time Simon came; his sons were not interested, they were off at universities in Padua and Genoa, his daughter was married to the manager of a hotel near San Marco; when he stopped baking the ovens would go cold.

Venice was changing, Venetian trades were in decline, the young would not stay, were not interested in the hard life of daily work by boat. Venice would die soon. Simon found it impossible to believe, hard to take the prophecies of doom seriously when the ancient, magical city was still here, floating above the lagoon after thousands of years and in spite of all predictions. Somehow, somehow, it would survive, and the real Venice, too, not merely the overloaded and expensive tourist city. The people who lived and worked in the backwaters of the Zattere and the Fondamenta and the canals behind the railway station, and would still do so in a hundred years time, propping one another up, servicing the hotels and the tourist area.

But Venice she dying, Ernesto said again, waving his hand at San Michele, the island of the dead; soon this was all there would be, one great graveyard.

They swung up to the landing stage and Simon climbed out with his bag.

Lunchtime, Ernesto said. Noon.

Simon waved his hand and walked off towards the cemetery, with its well-tended paths and florid marble memorials.

The sound of the motor boat faded away almost at once, so that all he could hear were his own footsteps, some early-morning birdsong and, otherwise, the extraordinary quietness.

He had been right. No one else was here no bowed old women with black headscarves, no families with small boys in long shorts carrying bunches of bright flowers, no workmen hoeing the weeds out of the gravel.

It was still cool, but the mist had lifted and the sun was rising.

He had first come upon the memorial a couple of years before and made a mental note about it, but he had been spending most of his time that year at all hours of the day among the market stalls, drawing the piles of fruit and fish and vegetables, the crowds, the stall holders and had not had time or energy to take in the burial island in detail.

He reached it and stopped. On top of the stone plinth was an angel with folded wings, perhaps ten feet high and flanked by three cherubs, all with bent heads and expressions of grief, all gravely, impassively beautiful. Although they were idealised, Simon was sure they had originally been taken from life. The date on the grave was 1822, and the faces of the angels were characteristically Venetian, faces you still saw today, in elderly men on the vaporetto and young men and women promenading in their designer clothes on weekend evenings along the riva degli Schiavoni. You saw the face in the great paintings in the churches, and as cherubs and saints and virgins and prelates and humble citizens gazing upwards. Simon was fascinated by it.

He found a place to sit, on a ledge of one of the adjacent monuments, and took out his drawing pads and pencils. He had also made himself a flask of coffee and brought some fruit. The light was still hazy and it was not warm. But he would be absorbed here now for the next three hours or so, only breaking off to stretch his legs occasionally by walking up and down the paths. At twelve Ernesto would return for him. He would take his things back to the flat, then go for a Campari and lunch at the trattoria he used most of the time he was here. Later, he would sleep before going out to walk into the busier parts of the city, perhaps taking a vaporetto the length of the Grand Canal and back for the delight of riding on the water between the ancient, crumbling, gilded houses, seeing the lights come on.