Blood Line Read Online Free PDF Page B

move away from the door, Mr Rawlins. I do understand why you are distressed, but it can’t help the situation. Please let me leave.’
    He crumpled and covered his face with his hands.
    ‘I am so sorry, so very sorry. Please forgive me, I apologise. I’ll show you out.’
    Anna hurried down the dank hallway as Kathleen called out from upstairs, not her husband’s name, but Alan’s.
    Anna sat in her car, shaking. Her head was throbbing and she couldn’t wait to get home, away from the smells, the obsessive, dapper, desperate father, the vacant blue-eyed mother. She began to think that if she had been in their son’s shoes, she might have upped and gone. Their desperation clung to her and she even contemplated the idea that perhaps Alan had discovered Tinawas not the woman he wanted to marry, his parents suffocated him with their neediness, and he had just, as in numerous other cases, decided to disappear.
    On returning home Anna ran a bath and contemplated washing her hair with a colour enhancing shampoo that she had bought months ago but never used. She read the details on the bottle about how it would boost her natural hue but decided not to bother. Lying soaking in the hot water she wondered if her lack of interest in her appearance was down to her own apathy or the fact that she felt she no longer had anyone to glam herself up for.
    In her own fresh bed with a scented candle burning, Anna lay wide awake. Had Alan Rawlins planned his disappearance? If so, they would need to unearth some clue. He appeared to be above reproach—honest, hardworking, and caring—but had this shy, yet fit young man had a hidden agenda? Would he, being such a good person, be prepared to walk away from his hard-earned savings?
    Again Anna put herself in his place, in that dark house with two needy parents who seemed to have no one else in their lives but their beloved son. She then thought about the featureless rented flat he shared with Tina Brooks, a dominant woman. He’d paid for her salon and yet knew his parents didn’t like her—only two visits in all the time they had lived together.
    Anna recalled the many photographs in Kathleen Rawlins’s overheated bedroom of their perfect son, and she had to agree he was handsome, with his mother’s blue eyes and thick wondrous hair. Anna blew out the perfumed candle, certain that she was correct: Alan Rawlins had arranged his own disappearance, in order to be free of them all.
    ‘You must have been working late or come in very early,’ Anna said as Paul handed her a list before she could even take her coat off.
    ‘Early, but I couldn’t sleep. There’s something about this Alan Rawlins that doesn’t sit right. Maybe it’s his girlfriend Tina—she doesn’t ring true. Look, these are all the people I’ve arranged to interview. We now know that his mobile was pay-as-you-go, but the calls and texts don’t show anything suspicious and pretty much fit with what Tina told us.’
    Anna looked down the list, adding up how long it would take to interview everyone.
    ‘Listen, Paul, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is all a waste of time.’
    ‘But didn’t
you
think that something didn’t add up?’
    ‘If I queried everything that “didn’t add up”, we’d never get anything done, and quite honestly, I don’t think I’m prepared to spend much more time on this. We’ve not actually been allocated Rawlins’s disappearance as a murder investigation; Mispers are still handling it.’
    ‘Yeah, along with how many hundreds of other missing persons? He’s just going to be a number, Anna. That washed-out beige on beige in that flat gave me the creeps.’
    ‘Look, I’ll tell you what. We’ll sift through these people on the list, but as far as I am concerned, that is going to be that.’
    ‘I think you’ve changed your feelings since yesterday.’
    Anna sighed and gave him a brief rundown of her meeting with Alan’s parents. Paul