Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie #6)

by Kate Atkinson

He had an innate distrust of secret societies. Maybe because no one had ever invited him to join one.

Hero worship of Harold was a perverse kind of smokescreen.

Her brother didn’t catch the warning note in her voice. “Always writing little stories and—” He stopped short, and the rest of the sentence fell off a cliff. He shot a worried glance at his sister. Seemed like he was going off-script, improvising. “Mum was a wonderful woman,” he said, changing tack and grabbing the nearest sentence and hanging on for dear life.

“The guilty always masquerade as the innocent but it is rarely the other way round.”

That was what age did to you—you ran the gamut from spouting gobbets of Das Kapital in your green youth to embracing Thatcherism by the end (he wasn’t there yet, thank goodness). It was depressing. He supposed that anarchy, like sex, was best left to the young, as they were blissfully blind to the consequences of both.

His rural parishes were very small and very white, and when the last of their worshippers died he supposed there would be no more church attendees. He felt as if he were overseeing the final death throes of Christianity. Someone had to, it may as well be him.

He had developed a habit over the years of what he thought of as “vicar-speak,” filling in the spaces where the spirit should be with extenuated grammar and endless conditionals and negatives—a misdirection away from the emptiness at the heart of his words.

in Reggie’s case, “Wow, Mr. B, flash motor. That’s a lot of meals on wheels.” “It’s just a jeep,” he said, silently apologizing to the Defender. Defender of the faith. Of course it wasn’t just a jeep! It

Miltons didn’t go up in flames, they rotted slowly, giving themselves back to the earth in exchange for everything they had plundered from it over the centuries.

Anyone who genuinely had a sore throat would have avoided them, but Simon was ravenous and scoffed the lot on the trek back to the vicarage, throwing the crumbs to the rooks that trailed him everywhere knowing he always fed them at some point during the day. They had an astonishing collective memory and got quite aggressive with him if he didn’t provide for them. They had been exiled from the East Wing of Burton Makepeace when it was converted into a hotel and seemed to hold him personally responsible for their diaspora.

He could go to Burton Makepeace’s farm shop to see if they had anything he could make a meal from (doubtful). But then, on the other hand, maybe his foraging could wait until tomorrow. He excavated a Tesco ready meal (mushroom risotto) from a lost corner in the freezer. It would do. Was that Christian acceptance or just laziness? It was a fine line.

this man was a simmering volcano looking for an excuse to erupt and Alice Smithson would be the one caught by the boiling lava. His little grey cells high-fived. It wasn’t often they pulled off a metaphor.

he felt himself embarrassingly lacking in vices these days. Not that he had ever really had any to begin with. Perhaps that was where he had gone wrong in life. He had been too moral and upstanding. Although he had killed quite a few people in his time, he supposed that redressed the balance a bit.

The Murder Mysteries were set in some mythical pre-war England (yes, just like his proposed TV series) where vicars came to tea and jolly girls played tennis and the hierarchy of the class system was firmly in place. You could get away with a lot in this kind of fictional England without being blackballed. People hankered after it, they just didn’t like to admit it.

Why couldn’t they have a different ending? Perhaps one day someone else would be the murderer, but they were powerless to change anything. They were trapped in their own drama. There was no way out.