A Hint of Death (A Bob Skinner Short Story) (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF

carried for the rest of her short life … which you’ve now helped bring to an end, you cold-hearted, horrible bastard.’
    Christie’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I couldn’t have known what Josey would do, Mr Skinner.’
    ‘Yes, you could,’ the cop countered. ‘Sauce’s DI, Sammy Pye, checked her school records. He discovered that she’s been excluded twice for violence, once against a fellow pupil and once against a teacher. She should probably have been reported to the police for at least one of those, but her head teacher knew you and did you what he thought was a favour.’
    ‘Playground scraps happen all the time,’ Christie said. ‘Consider this before you accuse me of anything: I only did what Harold said I should; I told my daughter the truth about what happened to her mother’s jewellery, that it was sold to pay off a blackmailer.’
    ‘No!’ Something snapped in Sauce Haddock. The horror that he had managed to contain within him welled up and spilled over. He started for the man and would have reached him had Skinner’s arm not slammed across his chest, halting him in mid-stride.
    ‘You told her your version of the truth,’ the sergeant shouted, ‘the same carefully edited tale you spun to me, when my naive, unsuspecting questions backed you into a corner. You were afraid it would all come out, so you went on the attack and tried to use me as your foot soldier, to scare Tammy Jones out of coming back for more.
    ‘I nearly swallowed it; I had swallowed it, God help me. If I hadn’t talked to Audrey Shields …
    ‘You see, sir …’ He paused. ‘Why the fuck am I calling you “sir”? You see, Christie, I’d all but forgotten about you and Mrs Andries, until Audrey mentioned the girlie gossip that she’d heard at the school. But it was more than gossip to me. In our final year, Stewie Morrison saw the pair of you, parked in the woods up Corstorphine Hill. You never saw him but he had a right good look. What was it with you and that Volvo estate? Could you only get it up on a travelling rug?’
    ‘Easy, son,’ Skinner murmured, ‘or we’ll both wind up battering the shite out of this guy, and that would not do.’
    When he was sure that Haddock was calm once more he turned back to Christie.
    ‘Everything we’ve said, that’s what happened, I’m sure. Whether you admit it or not, that’s irrelevant: I don’t give a monkey’s, because I know. You controlled poor wee Hazel, and you controlled Mrs Andries as well. When one became a problem you got the other to fix it. And after all this time, when it reared its head again, threatening to destroy your life, you had someone else take care of it, someone else you could manipulate, someone even closer to you.’
    A phrase came back to Haddock. ‘There’s always a woman to blame,’ he murmured.
    ‘Guys like you really hate women inside, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Nothing’s ever your fault, it’s always theirs. A girl who was your victim is dead, and you don’t really give a shit. Your own daughter’s facing a life sentence thanks to you and still you’re shucking off the blame.’
    ‘I could not have predicted what my daughter would do,’ Christie insisted, calmly.
    ‘But she’d promised to do exactly that,’ the detective sergeant snapped. He took a sheet of paper from a pocket and unfolded it.
    ‘This is the statement that Jackie Wright, my colleague, took from Josey. I won’t read it all, just this bit: “Miss Christie said that the stolen jewellery was her last connection with her mother, and added, ‘If ever I find the person who did this I will kill him, I will fucking kill him.’ I had to pause the interview at this point until she controlled herself.” That’s Jackie’s record; if she said that to a cop, I’m damn sure she said it to her father.’
    The teacher turned his face away, mumbling inaudibly.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    He looked back at the detective. ‘I said, so what? Do you really think I took her