Hidden Depths Read Online Free PDF

loved it. Julie had a picture in her mind of Luke, aged about eight, caught in mid-air just after leaping off one of the sand hills. Perhaps there was a photo and that was what she was remembering. She could see it quite clearly. The frayed cut-off denims, the red T-shirt, his mouth wide open, part fear, part delight.
    Despite the sunshine there weren’t many other cars parked there. Thursday morning and the kids still at school, it was only the active retired and their dogs who had the chance to enjoy the weather. Julie had a sudden thought.
    ‘I’m supposed to be at work. The nursing home. Mary’ll be expecting me.’
    ‘Sal phoned her first thing. Mary got someone else to cover your shift. She said she sends her love.’
    That made Julie stop in her tracks, caused a small landslide as the fine dry sand dribbled past her feet. Mary Lee, who owned the home, wasn’t a sentimental woman. It wasn’t like her to talk of love.
    ‘Have you told my mam and da?’
    ‘Last night as soon as I arrived. They wanted to come over. You said you’d rather be on your own for a bit.’
    ‘Did I?’ Julie tried to remember, but last night was all a blur. Like that time they’d gone on Bev’s hen party and she’d ended up in casualty with alcohol poisoning. That same nightmare sense of unreality, jagged images and flashing shadows.
    She walked on and they reached the highest point of the dunes, began to slide down towards the beach. She’d taken off her trainers and had them tied by the laces and slung over her shoulder. Vera was wearing sandals and hadn’t bothered to take them off. In the car she’d put on a huge white floppy hat and dark glasses. ‘The sun doesn’t agree with me,’ she’d said. She looked a bit mad. If Julie had bumped into her in St George’s on the way to visit Luke, she’d have put her down as one of the patients. No question.
    They were at the southern end of a long sweep of beach, about four miles long. At the northern end it swung into a narrow promontory where the lighthouse stood, almost lost to view in the haze.
    ‘It can’t have been easy, living with Luke,’ Vera said.
    Julie stopped again. There was that salt breeze that you only ever get by the sea. Three tiny figures right in the distance: two old gadges and a dog running after a ball, just silhouettes because the light was so bright.
    ‘You think I killed him,’ she said.
    ‘Did you?’ Because of the hat and the glasses, it was impossible to tell what the detective was thinking.
    ‘No.’ Then the words, all those words that had been spilling out of her since she’d found the body, dried up. She couldn’t explain that she would never ever have done anything to hurt Luke, that she’d spent the last sixteen years protecting him from the world. She opened her mouth, felt as if she were choking on dry sand. ‘No,’ she said again.
    ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Vera said. ‘If there was any chance you’d done it, I’d be talking to you in the police station, tape recorder on and your lawyer sitting in. Otherwise the court wouldn’t accept what you’d told me as evidence. But I had to ask. You could have killed him, you see. He’d not long died when you got home. Physically it was a possibility. And usually the murderer is a family member’ She paused and then repeated, ‘I had to ask.’
    ‘You believe me, then?’
    ‘I’ve told you I do. You could have killed him. If he’d wound you up and you couldn’t cope any more. But you’d have told us. Besides, you really believed he’d killed himself. When I arrived you thought he’d committed suicide and you were blaming yourself.’
    They were walking on the hard sand that the tide had just left behind. Julie rolled up her jeans a couple of turns and let the water cover her feet. The detective couldn’t follow her without getting her sandals wet. She looked out to sea so Vera couldn’t tell she was crying.
    ‘Someone killed him,’ Vera said. Julie could hardly hear