REGINALD HILL
EXIT LINES
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1984
Copyright © Reginald Hill 1984
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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, downloaded, 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: 9780586072530
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007374007
Version: 2015-06-18
See how the world its veterans rewards!
Pope: Moral Essays, Epistle 2
Table of Contents
‘I am just going outside and I may be some time.’
On a cold and storm-racked November night, while Peter and Ellie Pascoe were still celebrating with wine and wassail the first birthday which their daughter Rose had greeted with huge indifference, three old men, who felt far from indifferent, died.
Thomas Arthur Parrinder, 71, was aroused for the last time by a warm wetness amid the freezing rain which had been lashing his face for almost four hours. He opened one eye and saw above him, silhouetted vaguely against the dark sky, a long animal head with pricking ears, and he glimpsed also the gleam of tooth and inquisitive eye as the beast stooped down to lick at him once more. His mouth gaped and a rattle that may have been a laugh spilled out with it a single word. ‘Polly!’ No other word passed his lips, and precious little breath either, before an overworked hospital doctor pronounced him (not without some guilty relief) dead on arrival.
At just about the same time, Robert Deeks, 73, was being hooked back from a long slide to oblivion