Blood Sinister Read Online Free PDF

matters, but I did hear the door downstairs bang. That’d be about sevenish. I was just pulling the curtains in here, ’cos I was going out. So that could of been him going. And now I come to think of it, when I went past her door just after, there was no music playing inside, in her flat. So he must of went.’
    ‘Didn’t you look down and see, when you heard the door bang? You were standing at the window.’
    ‘Well, no, ’cos I’d just pulled the curtains closed. And I wasn’t that interested, tell you the trufe.’
    Slider sighed inwardly. ‘And what time did you come back from the club?’
    ‘It was about – I dunno, going on ten o’clock.’
    ‘Alone?’
    She looked away. ‘Maybe, maybe not. What’s it matter?’
    ‘Of course it matters. Look, Lorraine,’ he explained carefully to her stubbornly averted profile, ‘we’re going to have to ask everyone if they saw anyone entering or leaving this house yesterday evening. We’ll get hundreds of reports, and we’ll have to go through them all. Now if we can cross out the ones we know came to see you, it’ll help us find the right one. Do you see?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Don’t you want to help find out who killed Phoebe?’
    She wavered, but said, ‘I ain’t gettin’ meself into trouble. I ain’t getting no-one into trouble.’
    ‘There’s no trouble in it, not for you or your visitors. I just want to eliminate them.’
    She looked sidelong at him. ‘What if I don’t remember their names?’
    ‘A description and the time they came and left will do, if that’s all you’ve got. You’ll have to write it all out for me.’ She still looked far from convinced, and he left the subject for now and went on, ‘Tell me what happened this morning.’
    ‘Well,’ she said cautiously, ‘I just come down this morning to bum a bit of coffee off of her, ’cos I’d run out. I rung her bell and, like, shouted out through the door, “It’s only me, Feeb,” but there was no answer.’
    ‘What time was that?’
    ‘’Bout quart’ to ten, ten to ten maybe.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Well,’ she said, and paused. ‘The thing is,’ she went on, and paused again.
    He thought he saw her difficulty. ‘If the door was closed, how did you get in? Have you got a key?’
    ‘Well, not
as such
,’ she said reluctantly, ‘although she has give me a key from time to time, when she wanted someone letting in, a workman or something, you know?’
    ‘But you didn’t, in fact, have a key this morning?’ Slider pressed.
    Now she looked defiant. ‘All right, if you must know, I slipped the lock. Well, I knew Feeb wouldn’t mind. She never minded me lending a bit o’ coffee or whatever. And it was me what pointed it out to her in the first place, how rotten that lock was and how anybody could get in. I told her she ought to make Sborski get a new one fixed, but she never got round to it. I don’t think she was that bothered. She trusted people too much, that was her problem.’
    Slider nodded patiently. ‘So you went in?’
    ‘I called out, “Are you there, Feeb?”, ’cos the front room door was open and I could see the curtains was still shut, so I thought she might be sleeping in.’
    By ‘the front room’ she meant, of course, the living room. Slider was accustomed to this Londonism and was not confused. ‘Was the light on or off?’ he asked.
    ‘Off. That’s what I mean, it was dark in there, so she might have been still in bed. Well, so I went up to the door and just stuck me head round, and I see her laying there. I could see right away something was wrong, the way she was laying. So I went and pulled the curtains back.’ Another pause. The chubby face was very pale now, and the hands gripping the handkerchief were shaking as she relived it. ‘Then I see her face and everything.’
    Slider prompted her gently. ‘So what did you do?’
    ‘I jus’ dialled 999.’
    ‘You used her phone? The one in the room?’
    She nodded. So that ruled out