Appeal Denied: A Cliff Hardy Novel Read Online Free PDF

licence, I was going to give the investigation into who killed her everything I had.

5
    I got home late, tired and depressed. There were a few messages on the answering machine—one from the bank about my MasterCard, a couple of condolences. Hilde Stoner had rung to apologise for Frank and her not making it to the funeral. They liked Lily a lot and had wanted to be there, but there was some kind of crisis with their son Peter, who was aid-working in Asia with his wife and their infant twin girls. Hilde and Frank were waiting on a phone call. Understandable.
    I went upstairs, looked at the computer but couldn’t find the motivation to turn it on. Not now. I opened the wardrobe in the room that doubles as a study and guest bedroom and saw some of Lily’s clothes—a couple of pairs of pants, a blouse, a dress, a jacket. Her toothbrush and a few bits of makeup were in the upstairs bathroom. There’d be a few of her books lying around. I’d be willing to bet I’d find a pair of shoes kicked under a chair. Probably some knickers and tights in the dirty clothes basket.
    I was overseas in the army fighting for freedom when my mother died. My sister told me later how disposing of her clothes and other things had broken my father up, even though they’d been at odds with each other for decades. Different in every way. It’d be the work of a few minutes for me, but I had some idea now of how he must have felt. The emptiness was making me think back further than I cared to go. Filling in the spaces. It’d been a strange household to grow up in, requiring deception and negotiation between the parents every step of the way. Perhaps it had stood me in good stead for my profession.
    I drank some wine and didn’t taste it. I had no appetite. Lily had given me a book for my birthday— 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I sat with it on my lap, turning over the pages, looking at the pictures. It helped: I thought about some of the films— Casablanca , The Magnificent Seven , The Third Man , Rocco and His Brothers , Chariots of Fire , Manhattan— and the images took me away from where I was and what would never happen again with Lily and what I was going to do next.
    Eventually, the tiredness became terminal, but, after the day’s events, I was afraid of dreams and disturbances. My most recent injury—of many—had been a badly sprained ankle when I’d attempted a triple jump, something at which I’d once been a good performer, on the sand at Byron Bay. Showing off for Lily. The ligaments were damaged and the ankle hurt like hell for a couple of weeks. Ian Sangster had prescribed some sleeping pills, which I’d taken for as long as I’d needed to. Now I found a few left over in their foil in the bathroom cupboard and took one with a light scotch and soda. I tidied up a bit, erased the phone messages, put the movie book on the shelves and made it up the stairs to bed. Just.

    Hilde rang in the morning to say that the crisis for Peter and his family in Bangladesh was over.
    ‘Good news,’ I said.
    ‘How are you making out, Cliff?’
    ‘I’m okay. I need to speak to Frank. Is he around?’
    Frank came on the line. I said, ‘What can you tell me about Vincent Gregory?’
    ‘What do you need to know and why?’
    ‘I’m looking into Lily’s murder.’
    ‘You’ve got no standing, mate.’
    ‘You think I care about that? Anyway, I’m working with someone who has got standing.’
    That was stretching it, but at least it got past Frank’s first objection. He was silent for a while. Once a cop, always a cop. Frank hadn’t exactly been squeaky clean for the whole of his time in the force. Back in the seventies it was almost impossible to avoid a bit of this and a bit of that. Do a Nelson. Turn a blind eye, go with the flow, set a thief to catch a thief. Frank had never taken a dollar and he despised those who did, but there was still that thing called the police culture. In the past, Frank had given me information